Book 1: The Butterfly Koi

About the Book

Magic is here, personal pools of energy ready to keep portable technology running endlessly. Across Tokyo’s evolving power landscape, politicians, corporations, and criminal organizations are surging to take every advantage.

But some people can’t use magic, and Eika Fujiwara knows her family’s environmental opportunism is at fault. Determined to do something about it, she charms her way into securing the help of her best friend, brilliant magitech engineer Misora Toyama. Misora couldn’t care less about the plight of low magic downslopers, but in Eika’s idea for a battery that will knock down barriers, she sees the chance of a lifetime. If she can build a solution, she could prove forever that she is more than just a privileged rich girl.

Keeping this revolutionary project afloat will be the struggle of a lifetime in the face of family politics, developmental roadblocks, and the messy complications of others embroiled in their own fights: a researcher displaced by a U.S. ban on consumer magitech, a reporter determined to hunt down the yakuza family responsible for her father’s death, a wisecracking daredevil with mysterious underworld ties, and a Korean drama star with secrets. This group of rivals, friends, and friends-turned-something-more navigate dangerous boardrooms and back alleys even as the new battery turns out to be more groundbreaking — and dangerous — than they ever could have imagined.