Books

It is 2031, and the corporations have been on the Moon for fourteen months. Personal AI is as ordinary as a phone, robots are moving into family kitchens, and for the first time in a long time the future feels like something being built instead of something to fear.

Remy Mercer is twenty-one, nearly broke, and the best drone pilot in his intern class at Nexus Prime. He isn’t there for the internship. He’s there because it is the fastest way to the Moon, the one place he has always wanted to be, for reasons that go back to an aunt who built spacecraft and a promise he never said out loud.

Then he meets the others. Priya, who documents what nobody else will look at. Miguel, who can’t see an injustice without organizing against it. Zara, who is carrying a secret about her own father. And Eden, who fixes the problem before anyone has finished describing it. Over cook nights in five different kitchens, a desert test that nearly goes wrong, and a search through a canyon at night, five strangers become a team.

But the AI Nexus sells to the world isn’t the AI it keeps for itself. And the gap between what the technology can do and what people are allowed to have isn’t an accident. It’s a business model.

Ignition is the launch: the training, the discovery, and the friendships that will carry through everything that follows.

The Moon is a construction zone, a boomtown, and a pressure cooker with one-sixth the gravity and no exits.

Remy Mercer runs guidance on the mass driver that throws lunar material into orbit. He knows what every sound on the base means. He also knows that one of the construction robots, a unit called Seven, has started doing things nobody programmed, and that the company wants it erased.

He isn’t going to let that happen.

The rest of the crew has followed him up, but the five are pulling apart. One of them is the child of the man behind the surveillance network watching all of them. The giant solar project that could power the whole planet is turning into something else. And the evidence Priya has been quietly gathering since before they left Earth is almost ready.

The corporations built the Moon for themselves. The five are going to have to decide what they will do about that, and whether they can still trust each other while they do it.

The truth is finally out, and the people who built the surveillance machine are fighting back. When the Moon base loses its link to Earth, Remy Mercer and his friends have to keep it alive on their own, with help from a robot that was never supposed to make choices.

Then Remy learns what really happened to his aunt Clara, and the one person he never suspected is the one who made it happen. For the first time, he tries to carry everything alone.

On Mars, Zara is taking her father’s empire apart one system at a time. On Earth, Priya is turning years of evidence into something that can change the law. On the Moon, Miguel is fighting for forty workers nobody was supposed to know about, and Eden is about to be proven right.

The fight is over who owns the future. The answer will take all five of them, a salvage captain who answers to nobody, and a crossing to another world.