Every civilization is built on something. The Imperium is built on the assumption that only one person can move Imperial City through the Fold — and that without her, and without the Leaf she controls, the galaxy stops.

Kaiden Kentur has grown up at the edge of this assumption, in a minor House on a minor world, until the day his family is suddenly elevated to govern the Cendant system and he is kept on Imperial City as a ward among the heirs of the galaxy’s great families. He is there to be watched. He is there to be used. He is there, though no one tells him this, because three generations of careful arrangement have made him into something that the Imperium’s oldest secret institution has been trying to produce for a very long time.

What follows is an education in power: how it is actually structured versus how it presents itself, what it costs to hold it and what it costs to challenge it, and what a person does when they discover that the world was designed before they arrived and that they were designed alongside it.

Imperium Galactica is a novel for readers who believe that science fiction’s highest purpose is to think seriously about how civilization works — and what happens when someone finally tells the truth about it.