Rachel gave up everything to learn to read.

In the Cascade borough, knowledge is the only thing standing between her people and the storms, and the Royals hoard all of it. So she took the council vow: no marriage, no children, no life beyond the scrolls. In return, she gets to stand in the crowd each season when a black ship drops out of the sky, hands over the weather maps, collects the tribute, and leaves.

This season, the Royal on the landing field is Duke Landon himself. Young. Brilliant. Hidden behind the dark Visor that lets his kind live inside a world rendered more beautiful than the real one. But he hasn’t come just for the harvest. He’s come to arrest a rebel, and someone has given him Rachel’s name.

Then his ship explodes.

Now the most powerful man in the borough is unconscious in her cave, his technology dead, presumed killed by enemies who will finish the job the moment they learn he survived. If she’s caught hiding him, her people pay. If she hands him over, they might be paid.

Rachel hides him.

What follows will take them from a tribal cave to a castle above the clouds, from a bridge held against ten thousand swords to the living towers of a capital where everyone eats gray paste and only the rich see a feast, and into a fight for the one thing the Royals have never given anyone: a voice.

Inside Technocracy

• A Duke who has never touched anything real, and a girl who has never seen anything else
• Visors that show the Royals a world more beautiful than the one they rule
• A virtual assistant who begins to wonder whether she needs a master at all
• A villain who manufactures storms and lets the sky take the blame
• Eight recovered episodes from the founding era, three centuries earlier, whose final message is still waiting to be found

For readers of The Hunger Games, Scythe, and Legend.

Third Edition, revised 2026.