Eva Vera and the Sword of Attila

Yevgeniya Vera is fifteen, mostly ordinary, and increasingly certain that the wolf outside her window did not, in fact, wander over from the dog park. Six months later she's been claimed by the Dominion, a hidden empire built from the bones of ancient Rome, run on hyperloops and fax machines and the ever-watching gods who'd rather you not notice them at all. She's been sorted into Exordia, the cohort that survives what it shouldn't. She's made friends who'd die for her and one who might, eventually, have to. And she's been ordered south to retrieve a sword that has rejected every hand that's ever reached for it—except, apparently, hers. Everyone tells Eva she's simply strong-blooded. A rare and violent inheritance from a woman named Viarae, dead two thousand years, who founded an empire and paid for it with everything she had. Eva believes them. It's the only explanation that lets her sleep. But something in her keeps answering to a name that isn't her own. Something in her hands already knows how to hold a blade she's never touched. And somewhere, very far south, something old and furious is waking up, and it isn't looking for an ancestor. It's looking for her.