The galaxy runs on a lie.

For three hundred years, Imperial City has moved between the stars and Janna Chadrac has controlled it absolutely — because she alone commands the Fold, and the Fold requires Leaf, and she controls the Leaf. The Imperium is built on this fact. Every House, every Guild, every world depends on it.

It is not a fact.

Kaiden Kentur is the second child of a newly elevated House, sent to live among Imperial City’s hostage heirs while his family governs a system everyone else wants. He is nineteen, trained, and slowly becoming aware that the voices arriving in the back of his mind are not instinct. That the abilities he’s been explaining to himself as intuition are something older, rarer, and far more dangerous. That the conspiracy that shaped him has been running longer than he has been alive, and that the woman on the throne has been running her own conspiracy longer still.

A story of power, deception, and the cost of understanding how both actually work.