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For more than 150 years, she has traveled the Seven Systems, slipping in and out of Cold Sleep. She is a free-trader, the aristocracy of con artists, able to fleece the dishonest with their own greed.

The woman is known as Silver, when she is named at all --- and she may be the finest free-trader living. But even she is not prepared for the reality of Nuala, planet of deadly radiation levels, humans who heal by touch, and the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy. Eighty percent of the citizens are sterile, and the wealthy send their children out to seek mates and find others willing to expand the planetary gene pool. A Nualan can smell a lie at fifty paces. Truth, honor -- and their children -- are everything to the people of Nuala.

On Nuala, for the first time, Silver will be forced to use her real name -- Darame Daviddottir -- and she will walk the thinnest line between truth and lie of her long and varied career.

The scam she's come to join has just been blown to the skies, along with the throne lines of three separate sovereign nations. Now Darame has just one decision -- which group of Nualans will she support in the days to come? Mere chance threw her into the camp of the Atares, leaders of the largest clan on Nuala. Will she help them? Thwart them? Wait for the dust to settle?

The tipping point may have already occurred. Turns out she's mentioned in Nualan religious prophecy, and has caught the eye of the last adult male of a throne line. Sheel Atare is a "hot" healer, able to close ripped flesh and draw fever with a touch. A reclusive professor and medical doctor, unprepared to rule, Sheel Atare needs all the allies he can get.

Even allies who may be connected to those who brought down his house.

Garth Kristinsson's parents were free-traders, the aristocracy of con artists, able to fleece the dishonest with their own greed. But his father's last scam went horribly wrong, and at the last, both his parents were dead. Garth wanted answers no authority could give him, so he searched for decades for any clue, any lead on his father's partners-in-crime. One of them still lived -- he would find her on the mysterious planet Nuala.

Nuala... planet of deadly radiation levels, humans who heal by touch, and the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy.

"Silver" is Darame Daviddottir, a famous free-trader who is now a citizen of Nuala -- her husband, Sheel Atare, leads one of the planet's most powerful tribes. Together they have brought an uneasy peace to a world racked by sterility, intrigue, and unimaginable wealth. For the first time in countless generations, Nualans are actually working together, their council a voice for interstellar trade and a sounding board for inter-tribal cooperation. But the new ruler of Atare's ancient enemy is a spoiled and arrogant genius named Rex Dielaan. When off-worlder Garth meets aristocrat Rex, it is a meeting of two con artists ripe for mischief... and maybe murder. Two misplaced quests explode into a conspiracy of death, treason, and abduction. There's a plan afoot leading toward war, and it threatens Nuala's peace, Atare's prosperity... and Silver's life.

Rising like a phoenix from the embers of an abandoned scientific expedition, the people of Nuala are the definition of survivors. They have fought back against the deadly radiation levels of their beautiful, dangerous world. Nualans have battled frightening mutations, genetic shift, and the highest rate of infertility in the Axis Republic. Their reward is a society based on tolerance, compassion, and cultural diversity, descendants who can sense a lie (and a few who can heal by touch) -- and a bonanza of the rarest platinum group metal in the known galaxy.

Balanced on the border between the Axis Republic and the Fewha Empire, ruled by a constitutional monarchy, the small Nualan system counters its low birth rate by sending out its children to search for mates to expand the planetary gene pool. Some Axis citizens choose Nuala. One, a decorated soldier named Moran, is about to marry a Nualan princess.

But heirs to power and wealth have enemies, both homegrown and interstellar. There are those who would kill to keep an Axis warrior from marrying a Nualan... and those who think it's the perfect smoke screen to keep anyone from noticing where the border is about to shift.

Nuala means survival. Survival against all odds, all enemies, all fortune. They're going to have to prove it.