The Story So Far
Convergence. In his mission to secure the takedown of a pleasure cruiser called the Paramour, which had smuggled a substantial number of humans to sell on the galactic sex market, Commander Thel Atarian acquired a human profiler named Olivia Loxley from Earth. With Olivia working on his team, they liberated all twelve hundred human souls on board. Burdam Endar, the man behind the trafficking ring, was hauled away to stand trial on Helion, the Intersolar Union’s capital space station, while Thel and Olivia came to terms with their feelings for each other.
Unable to return home, the human refugees were relocated to Yaspur, a tropical moon in orbit around the water planet Big Blue in the Mandaahl System. Ambassador Zufi, a diplomat from the nearby colony metropolis Samridve, assigned five delegates to the human colony to help them acclimate and provide them with training. From the get-go, however, trouble brews in the little colony, which has few defenses. An assassination attempt leaves Thel and Olivia both badly injured and lucky to recover.
Resilience. Once they did, they set out for Helion to meet Thel’s family, an influential clan on the Intersolar stage. A nefarious hacker corrupted the data on his ship and fed it to the media sharks in the capital, calling into question whether Olivia was a slave he’d purchased. Olivia fought back the wave of scandal but wasn’t successful in learning who was behind the cyber-attack, and her attempts to ask Burdam Endar in prison led to his murder. With the breach looming in her mind, she took on two biognostic guards in her newly appointed role as an ambassador for humanity.
Vigilance. Back on Yaspur, Dr Amelia Ahlberg and her colleague Ezraji Zarabi worked tirelessly to protect the colonists from the dangers of the jungle, while also studying the differences in their biology. In a fluke accident, Ezraji found himself in Amelia’s coil, a state in which his body prepares to sire children. Addicted to her flavor, he pushed himself away during a critical time. The sole caregiver to a colony of over a thousand people, the pressure of her work inflamed Amelia’s post-traumatic flashbacks of the Paramour. But that wasn’t the only thing warping her reality. The real threat, a stalker that sometimes came to her masquerading as Ezraji, used her symptoms against her in an attempt to harvest the data she carried from the Paramour’s lab. When the stalker finally made himself known, Ezraji put his freedom, and life, on the line to save her. Rousing the help of the other four shilpakaari delegates, they attempted to use her as bait and contain the assailant in her clinic. Despite their efforts, the mysterious man escaped.
Persistence.Having learned what happened to the humans on the Paramour, the shilpakaari delegates in the colony were shocked. Chief Pilot Aavar Medansh decided to step back from courting Bree Stewart, the hangar’s New Yorker mechanic, and though his intentions were noble, he couldn’t help but jump at the chance to take her on a date to the big city, Samridve. After she very publicly kissed Aavar in front of his long-time bully, they made a dash for their transpo and left the city in a rain of laser fire.
Just as their feelings for each other came to a head, their transpo was shot out of the air by smugglers looking to sell Bree on the black market to a buyer working for the Nephim Employment Agency, a corporation known for its insidious slave contracts and cloning branch called Rakta Corps. They’d planned to use Bree as a base for cloning humans into a product called a “doll” and enslaving Aavar in a lost soul contract, a slave contract most don’t survive. However, Bree wouldn’t go down without a fight. She rescued Aavar from his chains, and he brought the cavalry to destroy the buyer’s ship and saved the love of his life.
Now the lost souls Bree freed from their contracts are helping to defend the colony. Renata’s citizens are enjoying the peace and quiet in their little home at last.
Resistance.All but Imani James. She’s been keeping a dangerous secret, and sees the quiet for what it is: the eye of the storm. When she finds yet another doll crawling into the colony, she rightfully becomes suspicious of a security leak. Vindilus denies it, but her theories are airtight. He decides to check out a lead on his home moon Huajile, in large part because her stubborn and fiery attitude is making it difficult for him to hold back on converging.
But whatever security leak is in the colony has other plans. Imani is attacked and stuffed into Vindilus’s ship. He thinks it’s safe to blow off some steam, but ends up converging with her while she’s unconscious in his cargo. Now they not only have to navigate the dangers of tracking his lead, but also their new bond. A bond that Imani hates.
The lead eventually leads them to the Conrad, where a sex party featuring human dolls is underway. Imani poses as one of the sex androids and gets into a VIP area, where she finds out that Rosy and Lokurian aren’t lovers at all but business partners. And Rosy has just sold off her living code to Councilwoman Guei, a hjarna on the ISU council.
They destroy the nursery where human dolls are made, capture Lokurian, and Rosy dies in the crossfire before she can give them any answers.
But in the wreckage they leave behind, one doll has completed an upload of living code…