# Chapter 1: The Girl in the Black Dress

The airlock sighed open, and Alex stepped into the light.

Pinnacle Station turned thirty thousand kilometers above Earth, a golden ring of glass and chrome revolving slowly against a spill of stars. Tonight every lamp in its great ballroom burned for the Terran Defense Coalition's annual charity gala — the one night a year when the people who actually ran the solar system put on their best clothes and came out to lie to each other's faces.

And the night Alex Summers — seventeen, five-foot-five, athletic, and definitely not a woman — walked into the middle of them in seven-inch heels.

He'd spent three hours assembling the armor. The dress was a column of black silk that hugged every curve the prosthetics gave him, cut low in the front and slit open to the hip on one side, so that every stride flashed a long line of thigh. The wig fell in dark waves past his shoulders, real human hair, custom-fitted, each strand laid with the care of a master craftsman. The breasts were medical-grade silicone, warm and faintly heavy against his chest, fused to his skin with a permatex adhesive and airbrushed to match his natural tone so perfectly that not even the station's scanners had blinked at him. Contour powder carved his jawline into something softer. Eyeliner made his eyes look enormous. Matte lipstick the color of old wine finished the mouth that could not, under any circumstances, open.

Because that was the rule tonight. Alex Summers, mysterious woman in black, does not speak. She smiles. She tilts her head. She lets every man in the room project his favorite fantasy onto her, and she gives nothing back.

He flexed his toes inside the heels, adjusted his posture, and walked in.

The ballroom was a cathedral of champagne and holograms. Waiters in white gloves floated trays of glowing canapés between clusters of guests. A chandelier the size of a shuttle hung overhead, made not of crystal but of thousands of interlocking drone lights that pulsed in slow, hypnotic colors. Around it, Earth turned like a blue jewel behind kilometer-wide windows. Somewhere below, the Ultor Project's newest mech — the Avenger-class frame — was being unveiled.

Alex didn't care about the mech. He cared about the guest list.

His sister had been gone for ten years.

He'd been seven …