The Outer Realm (Nexus House)

Synopsis

A servant girl. A fallen empire. A secret worth starting a war over. A fragile armistice is collapsing. And on a mining world no one remembers, a servant girl has just picked up something she was never meant to touch. Seventeen-year-old Nola Nislei has lived her entire life on Lithos, a brutal mining world in the no-man's-land between two rival empires. Orphaned by war. Raised in servitude. Trained, quietly, to fight. Then an escape pod falls from the sky. Inside are two bodies, and a silvery medallion that seems to know her before she knows herself. Within days, an Imperial strike force is hunting her across the stars. The Empress has issued a direct order: capture the girl alive. And a shattered Nexus prescient who has not been seen in seventeen years has come to collect her first. As the Ore Belt burns, Nola is pulled into a conflict shaped by ancient bloodlines, hidden powers, and a secret she has carried her entire life without knowing it. —Raquel Byrnes, author of The Memory Bank