Sixteen-year-old Aspen Pierce is the nation's "trophy pet" and future empress. A girl created in a lab to ensure the relevance of the tyrant John Gray. Branded as Project 001, she lives a life of gilded isolation, her every move watched by the Workingmen guards. But Aspen lives with a dangerous the mind-control ability she loathes to use, all while struggling to grow up and protect her younger brother, Ezra, at all costs. When a daring rescue mission led by the Secret Society of Projects (TSSOP) tears her away from her home, Aspen is thrust into a rebellion. Alongside the wall-phasing, disappearing, and horribly teleporting, wisecracking Dax Channing, she must navigate a landscape of shifting loyalties and deep-seated conspiracies. As a mysterious energy crisis involving a rare mineral, Lumennite, threatens to plunge the nation of Yarg into darkness, Aspen discovers that her origins are tied to a lost experiment, and that very experiment may the very thing that destroys her family.