Origins. The Circle Trilogy, #4

Before the Circle, there was a refusal. Tahli Amat is a princess of the empire of Baht Paré, and on the night she is meant to accept a marriage that would secure her father's throne, she tells the truth instead. What follows is not a scandal. It is a fracture - a war between two philosophies of what a created people owes its makers, fought across generations, fleets, and worlds, until almost nothing is left of the civilization that began it. Through the eyes of a geneticist who begins to doubt his own science, a soldier who cannot unlearn the humanity of his enemy, and an Archivist who carries the true record no empire will permit to survive, Origins tells the story of how two exhausted, war-broken peoples finally build something neither of them is allowed to own: a third planet, a new template, and a species meant - for the first time - to belong only to itself. A prequel to The Circle Series.