In this explosive sequel to Moonstorm , teen mecha pilot Hwa Young returns to her rebel roots to fight against the Imperial forces—but, as she grapples with her warring allegiances, who can she really trust? Perfect for fans of Iron Widow and the Skyward series! Hwa Young and her pilot comrades have betrayed the Empire to save it from its own destruction—but what comes next? It’s been just two months since the lancer squad stopped imperial forces from deploying a devastating singularity bomb and taken shelter with the rebel clanners, who have kept them busy with raids against their ex-leaders. Their mission have helped numb the shock of recent battles… for now. Meanwhile, Hwa Young’s best friend, technician Geum, has been left behind on the imperial fleet, imprisoned for aiding Hwa Young’s deceit against the Empire. Hwa Young is desperate to retrieve Geum—but Geum is slowly realizing that Hwa Young’s loyalties aren’t as clear cut as zie once believed. As Hwa Young delves deeper into the rebels’ inner circles, she soon realizes that the clanners are just as cutthroat as the imperials, leaving her to wonder who she can really trust… and at odds with Geum, the one person she thought she could count on. " Returning fans will enjoy this solid sequel , which continues the high-tech intrigue." — Kirkus Reviews "The busyness of the plot is well paced, and each portion receives adequate attention; Hwa Young’s identity struggles will resonate with readers who straddle cultures themselves ." — Booklist Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean American who was born in Texas, went to high school in South Korea, and received a B.A. in mathematics from Cornell University. Yoon's previous books include the Hugo Award nominated Machineries of Empire series and the New York Times bestseller Dragon Pearl . His hobbies are game design, composing, and destroying readers. He lives in Louisiana with his family and a flopsy catten, and has not yet been eaten by gators. 1 Hwa Young Hwa Young, pilot of the lancer Winter’s Axiom, hated navigating by the stars. She’d learned the techniques and calculations as an orphan in the Empire, a ward of the state—­and she’d excelled at them. But she’d been born a clanner on the border, one of the denizens of the unruly Moonstorm, and clanners grew up knowing that their territory featured wandering stars and itinerant moons. Stars are meant to wander free, Mother Aera whispered to Hwa Young in her earliest memories. Stars are meant to fly . Not stay chained like jewels in the collars the Empress provides her pets. As a clanner child on the world of Carnelian, Hwa Young had navigated by means other than the stars: familiar trees and boulders, land formations and the give of the ground underfoot, a subtle awareness of characteristic smells and air currents. How the clanners navigated in space, where there was a paucity of trees and boulders and land formations, she didn’t know. But the clanner fleet that she and her lancer squad had defected to, they knew the way. That had to be enough, she thought as they flew toward their current objective—­New Joseon’s Jasper Research Station, located on the largest outpost moon of the world Jasper. This mission—­this one mattered more than usual. If the intel she’d retrieved from her friend Geum proved reliable, and if they extracted a critical codebase on lancer-­pilot neural interfaces from Jasper Research Station, Commander Aera—­ Hwa Young’s long-­lost heart-­mother—­might finally allow her to enact her plan to retrieve Geum. Her best friend, a skilled technician, was stuck on the Imperial flagship, where they’d been forced to leave zir behind when Hwa Young and her lancer squad turned against the Empire—­a memory that still crushed Hwa Young. Even worse was the fact that Geum remained imprisoned after helping Hwa Young escape. Though they’d been covertly communicating ever since, Geum had proven reticent about giving the clanners a lead on real intel, as opposed to what Aera uncharitably termed “random distractions,” code for intel that didn’t advance the clanners’ military aims. Hwa Young told herself that Geum was trapped with the enemy and had good reason to exercise caution. Getting caught collaborating with the clanners was a sure death sentence. But even Aera ( commander, not heart-­mother; one of the many adjustments Hwa Young was still making) conceded that the promised codebase would represent a breakthrough in the clanners’ attempts to replicate Imperial lancer technology. It was the one thing they wanted above all else—­the very tech Hwa Young and her fellow lancer pilots possessed—­and the crucial missing piece was the intimate mental link that lancers shared with their pilots. This hunt has too many hunters, Winter’s Axiom remarked, right on cue. Its voice was drier than usual, like a cold night after the obliteration of ice. We have our orders, Hwa Young reminded it, trying not to be perturbed by the odd e