Afterword
Here's the truth: this book was never planned.
When I finished the first book, there was no outline with Riot and Cass's names on it.
There wasn't even an intention to write about one of the Berserkers from The Sterling Acquisition, let alone build a whole novel around an Elysian missionary.
What there was, instead, was a collection of loose ends I couldn't stop poking at.
Who were the Berserkers, really? What was Protocol Endeavor actually doing?
Why did Granny Lu—and Dante—have such a visceral, immediate reaction at the mere mention of Elysian?
That last one nagged at me the most. It's one thing for a corporation to be cruel.
It's another for people who have survived a great deal of cruelty already to flinch at a name.
So I started pulling. And the more I dug into what, exactly, made Elysian so sinister—the warmth of it, the spiritual language, the way it makes belonging itself into a trap—the more the thread refused to come loose cleanly.
It kept bringing more with it. What began as a curiosity about a side character became a much bigger story than I expected, and a longer one than The Sterling Acquisition.
That length surprised me at first. Then I understood it, and it was entirely Cass's doing.
Cass is not simply a cult member. He was born inside a cult, raised in it, shaped by it before he ever had a self to defend.
He knows even less of the world than Orion did—and on top of that, he was living through something that, even by the warped standards of his own community, would have been recognized as wrong.
A character carrying that much needs room.
He can't have a realization on page forty and be fine by page sixty.
He needed the extra chapters, the extra words, the slow accumulation of small wrongnesses, because that is genuinely how a person like Cass comes to understand his own life: not in a flash, but in the body first, and then—finally, devastatingly—all at once.
I should say something here, because readers will rightly notice it.
Cass reads as neurodivergent. He wasn't written to be—I didn't sit down with that intention—but it's simply how he arrived, fully himself, from the first page.
Concrete rather than abstract, literal, processing the world through feeling and instinct rather than analysis.
I made the choice to honor that instead of sanding it down, and giving him space to breathe on the page was part of honoring it.
Cass deserved to find himself at his own pace. I wasn't willing to rush him.
And Riot. We met Riot in The Sterling Acquisition the way most people in his world meet him: as something violent, something to survive.
That was the whole point of him then. But I always knew there was a person under the mask and the gold glow and the wreckage Gensyn made of him, and this book was my chance to prove it.
Watching Riot turn out to be someone gentle—someone who could become, for Cass, a safe place to set down a weapon—was one of the great joys of writing this.
He needed this story as much as Cass did.
I fell in love with two characters who weren't supposed to exist, and I couldn't leave them in the margins. I hope you fell a little in love with them too.
What's Next: The Gensyn Gambit
The third book takes us somewhere we've only glimpsed: inside Gensyn, and inside New St. Louis itself—all that chrome and sterile, smiling perfection.
And it finally answers a question I left deliberately hanging in The Sterling Acquisition: who told Dante "good luck."
We'll learn far more about Stave. We'll uncover the other projects Gensyn has kept quietly humming behind its perfect facade. It's going to be a different flavor of horror than Elysian's weaponized compassion—colder, more orderly, and in its own way just as monstrous.
It's going to be a ride. I'm so glad you're coming along.
Love,
Gale