No Man's Land

(Author's Note: This story runs parallel to No Smoking in the Dark—either is a valid starting point for the series.) Prospera is one of humanity's last strongholds—a city-state carved into the mountains, surrounded on all sides by No Man's Land, an ever-evolving wilderness that works tirelessly to reclaim it. Rowan has spent his entire life falling behind. Sold into slavery by Prospera's prison system as a child and raised as the servant of a little girl named Vivian Restless—heiress to one of Prospera's most powerful families—he has devoted a decade to a girl who has just cut him loose without explanation. Now he's a freelancer, a criminal for hire, drifting through life without anyone or anything left to fight for beyond his next paycheck. But when Prospera's most powerful corporation comes to him with an offer—rescue the company president's daughter from No Man's Land, and they'll cure the degenerative memory disease on the verge of destroying Vivian—Rowan says yes. He would have said yes to anything. What follows is a suicide mission into No Man's Land alongside Nona—a relentlessly optimistic scientist with no stomach for violence—a reunion with the woman who exiled him, and a collision course with a man so dangerous that even Prospera's criminal underworld gives him a wide berth. Before it's over, Rowan will learn that House Restless intends to make him into something far grander and more tragic than a simple slave—and that the price he must pay to protect Vivian and Nona will cost him something he didn't even know he could lose. No Man's Land is the first volume in A Chronicle of Lost Causes, a morally complex science fiction series set in a world where humanity is no longer the top of the food chain—and where the line between a lost cause and a good one has never been thinner.