In a world where only the strongest survive, love is a weakness. A segregated spaceship is bound for a new world, but to uncover the dark secrets hiding aboard, 16-year-old Z must team up with a mysterious stranger and compete in a series of deadly trials.
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16-year-old Z isn't broken. Not really. When a machine tore her arm from her body, she rebuilt the missing flesh into something stronger: an arm of steel and circuits. When the Top reduced rations, Z combed through discarded trash and swollen bodies, making do with the scraps the Top didn't want. That's life in the Beast: a space ark carrying the remains of Old Earth survivors to New Earth. The Top live in extravagance, the Bottom barely survives, and the two never mix.
Until the day Z finds a dying woman thrown in the trash, who begs Z to return her necklace, and the dark secret it holds, to the Top. Z has no intention of returning it, but when Z's past crimes earn her a place in The Letter Trials-a series of dangerous games where winning means moving up and losing means death before a cheering crowd-the necklace becomes her one hope to change things.
But right from the start things go wrong. Z saves Dagger, a handsome stranger with a dark past. If she wants to unearth the secrets of the necklace and survive the trials, she'll have to work with Dagger--even if everything she knows has taught her to rely on no one. The further they rise, the darker the secrets of the necklace become, until Z realizes if she wants to change anything, she'll have to become as broken and ugly as the world she's trying to save.