An exciting fantasy debut where Stephanie Garber meets Iron Widow.
Gold. Power. Glory. Love. Four prizes that eighteen-year-old, mixed-race factory workers Eliza and Jules—barely scraping by in Ikaria’s slums—can imagine only in their wildest dreams. When Jules's deteriorating health takes a turn for the worse and Eliza is thrown to the streets by her abusive mother and stepfather, Eliza hatches a plan.
She sets her sights on the Ikarian Empire's inaugural Fleet of Wonders: a brutal naval competition where fifty fantastical battleships crewed by the nation's greatest young minds race to invent a weapon deadly enough to fend off a brewing war with Ikaria’s neighbor. The victors win life-changing riches…if they can survive their rivals' cutthroat attacks.
Impersonating foreign nobility, Eliza and Jules steal aboard the Belladonna, the crown vessel of the Fleet. Among their crew is none other than Pierre, the imperious, alluring heir to the very factory Eliza and Jules escaped—and a powerful smith who can bend metal to his will. Finally embracing her own darkly magical abilities, Eliza agrees to train with Pierre to give their crew an added advantage—all while the seductive push and pull energy between them becomes irresistible …even as Eliza catches the eye of Charlotte, a dangerous, enigmatic aristocrat, whose deadly charm is only outmatched by her lethal way with a sabre.
Meanwhile, as Jules falls for sweet, bookish Suman, a medical student who has given him a new lease on life, Jules risks revealing his true identity as the two get closer.
As they advance in the competition, sinister revelations leave Eliza and Jules torn between the empire that offers them their dreams and their blood ties to a nation Ikaria once conquered. In the end, they must decide who they are and what price they will pay to change their fortunes—if their hearts don't betray them first.
