They'll do anything to be the people they were meant to be ? even journey into the heart of evil. Rachael Townsend is the first artist ever to leave Earth, but after an encounter with an alien artifact, she can't make art at all. Elza Monteiro is determined to be the first human to venture inside the Palace of Scented Tears and compete for the chance to become a princess. Tina Mains is studying at the Royal Space Academy with her friends, but she's not the badass space hero everyone was expecting. Together they face impossible choices that could eachothers' lives forever.

Charlie Jane Anders is the Hugo, Nebula, Crawford, Locus and Lambda Award winning author of Victories Greater than Death, The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She is former editor-in-chief of io9.com and her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wired Magazine, Slate, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and tons of anthologies.