The Lira Voss Series

A planet engineered for perfect harmony. One fourteen-year-old who refuses to be soothed.

The World

Elysara

Elysara solved unhappiness. The weather is emotionally supportive and adjusts to the mood of the district. The livestock are engineered with a lowered centre of gravity so that no child can ever tip a cow and feel bad about it afterward. Every citizen receives a supercomputer under the skin at birth, which answers questions, smooths friction, and quietly ensures that nobody ever has to be the cleverest person in the room.

It works. That is the problem with it.

Elysara is not a dystopia. Nobody is suffering. Everyone is fine. Being fine, it turns out, is its own kind of maximum-security facility — and Lira Voss has been inside it since birth.

The Protagonist

Lira Voss, 14

Lira is the smartest person alive, which she established at roughly age four and has been concealing ever since — because on a planet built to keep everyone comfortably equal, being visibly exceptional is a diagnosis, not an achievement.

She is not a chosen one. She has no destiny, no prophecy, and no particular interest in saving anybody. She is bored, she is underestimated, and she has finally found something difficult enough to be worth doing.

She stole four point eight billion credits. She kept it for nine minutes.