Bestselling author Katharine Kerr joins with Mark Kreighbaum to present a vivid, alluring and terrifying world of the future. They call it Palace, the capital of a planet located in a region of space known as the Pinch. Here a bitter Lep outcast has been hired to murder two humans: Arno, the son of the Master of the Cyberguild, and Vida, a young woman destined for sensual slavery in the Pleasure Sect. Arno is on the track of strange anomalies in the Map, the cyberspace repository of knowledge. And Vida has powers that could change Palace forever. As Arno goes into hiding to escape the assassin, Vida seeks refuge at Government House, the corrupt center of authority, where betrayal is a way of life and death.

In the second of a vivid new series, Mark Kreighbaum returns to the alluring, terrifying future world he and bestselling author Katharine Kerr created in Palace. On a planet wreathed in perpetual mist and scarred by a bloody uprising, the fragile peace between the arrogant humans and the oppressed Leps hangs upon a few key survivors. Vida, now a power in Palace's ruling family, tries to bridge the gap between the species, only to find her brilliant destiny threatened by a devastating secret. Her lover Rico, powered by cyberdrugs, races against time on the back roads of the virtual Mapspace to trap the Lep terrorist Riva. Meanwhile, in the city catacombs, Dukayn, Government House's security chief, steps up his sadistic interrogations, fueling the fire...until suddenly the threat of civil war is all too real. Now, as Riva plots to unleash the most dangerous Lep of all time, Vida and Rico find themselves locked in a perilous battle to recover a lost biotech that holds monstrous death . . . or the very keys to life itself.