The year is 2020: Corporations control everything. In the name of domination, these sprawling organizations have recruited their own military forces to fight clandestine battles against one another—-a war fought in the boardrooms and won in the shadows, with the public none the wiser. Ex—bounty hunter Joanna Dark has unwillingly seen the front lines of this war. Her run-in with dataDyne, the world's most powerful hypercorporation, has left her with a wound that only vengeance can heal. Daniel Carrington, the charismatic founder of the Carrington Institute, has been locked in an ongoing war with dataDyne for years and sees Joanna's deadly skills as the key to victory over their mutual enemy. But Joanna is young and lost, unable to accept her abilities as virtues or fully trust Carrington's intentions. But when an explosive secret is unearthed—-one that could finally bring down the threat of dataDyne once and for all—-Joanna finds herself thrust back into the fight, one that brings her face to face with her past . . . and the forces shaping her future.

Business is war. Welcome to the era of the hypercorporation, business entities so sprawling and vast that they field private armies and buy entire nations outright. These corporate empires—-from Zentek to Core-Mantis OmniGlobal to dataDyne—-are constantly engaged in covert battles for market dominance, and the general public sees and knows nothing as they are used as pawns in this global chess game. Joanna Dark, an operative of the Carrington Institute, has sworn to bring down the dataDyne Corporation, the largest, most pervasive hypercorp in the world. But Joanna's vengeance is personal: She holds dataDyne responsible for the murder of her father and will do anything to destroy them. Returning from a field operation that turned bloody, she is exhausted, wounded, and in desperate need of downtime . . . but the murders of two prominent corporate officers have put the Carrington Institute on high alert. Someone out there is single-handedly redefining the term "hostile takeover" and has placed the Carrington Institute—-and its enigmatic founder, Daniel Carrington—-square in the gun sights of every hypercorp on the planet. It appears that each murder has been carried out by none other than Joanna Dark. In hopes of clearing her name, and the Carrington Institute, Joanna must battle ghosts from her past, high-tech mercenaries who want her dead and a killer who could be wearing anyone's face...