Prologue

Imagine that...

You live in a world where gravity doesn’t belong to everyone. Where the sky is stitched with floating cities like broken glass—each shard suspended above the ashes of the Earth. The rich live in the clouds, sipping solar wine and pretending the world never burned. The poor live in the smog-choked underbelly, fighting over tech scraps and memories. And in between?
The Midshaft. Neon-lit gutters where laws don't reach, and rebellions are whispered into wires.

Imagine you're born in the Below, where rain tastes like rust and the air hums with old war songs—ghosts echoing through abandoned megastructures. You learn to crawl over dead machines and sleep beside the bones of AI that once dreamed they were gods. The stars? You’ve never seen them. Just the glowing underbellies of the Spires above you, like heaven turned upside-down.

They say Earth died in fire.
They say the Ascendants—those perfect, gene-threaded elites who rule high on their glass egos—saved what they could.
But they didn’t save people. 

They saved power.

Now, the sky is a lie.

And the girl about to break it all?

She’s laughing in a stolen coat with pockets full of explosives, lipstick shaped like a knife, and a grin that says: “Try me, sweet thing.”

Her name is Nova Vexx

She’s the glitch in their code.
The spark in their cold machine.
The gravity they can’t control.

And tonight, at a masquerade in the highest of Spires, she’s going to steal the future—                 one kiss, one secret, one detonation at a time.