The Illuminated Ones: Battle of the Planets

For ten thousand years, Sidus kept the world in her garden. She ended every war, healed every wound, and let no one leave.

Her daughter killed her in a corridor, with a plain metal dagger, in four minutes.

Noor inherits a system that has no field for a dead sovereign - a machine that cannot record what happened because in ten thousand years it was never asked to. She tells the council her mother is dead and gives them nature for a reason. She does not tell them why, and she never will.

What she does instead is finish the work. Eight hundred and sixty-two ruined worlds her mother left open, forever, because she could not bear to put a thing down. Noor closes them. She builds the ships, the halls, the lines, the specified children who will never be sick. She gives a hundred thousand people a world of their own on Mars and asks them, one at a time, whether they are willing.

And across the dark, the sister she declared dead is building something else entirely.

The second volume of The Illuminated Ones is a novel about inheritance, about the cost of doing a thing well, and about what it takes to finally walk out of the garden.