The mountain fell. The Gilded Cage collapsed. And the girl with white hair was never found.
Two years have passed since Juno Arisaka walked into a room with a monster and didn't walk out. The empire calls it a victory. The people who knew her call it something they can't say out loud yet.
Yuriko refuses to believe she's gone. Mio mourns her from a beach that's too clean and too quiet. Natsuki drinks sake in a penthouse and watches the tower where the man who destroyed them all still sits untouched. And somewhere in the frozen north, in a cabin buried under ten feet of snow, Kaori keeps watch over a futon where a wolf has been sleeping for seven hundred and thirty days.
Juno isn't dead. But what crawls out of that mountain isn't quite the girl who went in. She has a new arm, iron, steam-powered, built from scavenged brilliance and two years of fury. She has white hair and a scar and a name that makes empire nervous.
And her father is waiting. High Commander Goda always knew she'd survive. He built her to. The hammer doesn't hate the steel, it just asks it to be harder.
The board has changed. The Shrike is fractured. The Canticles are watching. And everyone who thought the war was over is about to find out what Juno Arisaka looks like when she stops surviving and starts choosing.
The Sovereign Saga Book Two — for readers of The Poppy War and Nevernight.
