Book excerpt: In 2140, Alice is a sixteen-year-old girl and genius. She became a weapon developer after her sister, Dawn, was killed in an Empyrean terrorist attack. Alice then rises up against the Empyreans, who are executed when their psychic abilities are identified. She creates the robot Neutralizers that perform and automate these “ethical cleansings.” But Alice soon meets a friend who changes her perspective on the attack. A benevolent, peaceful activist who was friends with Dawn, Lawrence advocates for the rights of Empyreans. As Lawrence is persecuted for his peaceful activism and Alice witnesses the oppression of her government firsthand, the fabric of everything she fought for is unravelled. Torn between the left and the right—somewhere in between—Alice’s coming-of-age story is about trying to find her place in a technocratic world where information and truth are distorted at every turn. Who she becomes in order to fight back against the altered truth is not the hero she expected.