Solitude and Retaliation (Virtual Wars, #2)

In the future, a young woman must overcome her fear and try to bring justice to her wronged best friend.

The year is 2210. Cloning is legal, artificial intelligence is highly regulated, and half a century after middle America became a desert, extremists are still capitalizing on the massive post-climate change industrial reshuffling and job losses to expand their influence. Their newest scapegoats are the genetically altered clones, called models, which were created for menial labor tasks.

Larken Marche is one such model, though she lacks the legally required bar code on her wrist and so passes as a normal citizen. Larken is one of what's known as the Firsts, a batch of untracked models created from the genetic material of a disgraced researcher who never let her call him father, and a mother who died before Larken could make memories. It's always been up to Larken to chart her path through life, and this was never made more clear than after an extremist attack left her wounded and nearly dead. The attack catapulted Larken into fame, forcing her to watch her every move and protect her secret. It also turned her from an optimistic and capable high-school star into a jaded and broken adult.

Larken withdraws from society to keep her secret, and possibly reclaim some of the life she'd wanted before becoming the poster child for model rights. She attends university and makes friends, though every friend she makes is another way to let her secret slip accidentally. It's a risk she's willing to take, and her life seems to be improving. When she discovers her new friends are involved in an on-campus student group linked to the extremist organization that tried to kill her, she begins to suspect that they might be after her secret. And tensions rise even higher when her friend, roommate, and fellow model, Samantha Caldwell, disappears, only to return with cuts, bruises, and very little memory of what happened during her absence.

Investigating Samantha's disappearance puts Larken and her other friends directly in the crosshairs of the same extremists who'd tried to kill her in the past. Seeking justice for her friend may expose the very secret Larken must protect to the public. It might also cost them both their lives. Whether to help or not is the impossible decision that Larken must make to kick off this 366-page second novel of the Virtual Wars Saga: Inertia and Momentum. And can she make any progress helping Samantha without first dealing with the desolation that eats at her soul?

Betrayal and backstabbing abound in this gritty novel, a merger of Bladerunner's dystopian-styled future with the revenge tour of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, with the loyal heart of The Hunger Games.