On Aquilo, humanity's colony at the far edge of settled space, four million people live inside domed cityhabs after centuries cut off from Earth by the Great Silence. Outside the domes lies the Vastness, an unbroken frozen waste where exposure means death within minutes. Everything inside belongs to the Company: air, water, work and rank, from the Board down to the badgeless who live illegally on the margins. Isthmus Isako has spent her life as an atier — one of the elite duellists the corporations contract to settle their disputes with a blade. They call her the Quickblade.
Now she is in her fifties, her long-time client has unexpectedly retired, and Isako intends to follow the custom of her calling: to walk out into the cold with her head held high and her family provided for. A competitor offers her one last contract instead, and it is one she cannot refuse. At the centre of it is Dragonfly Martim, the final apprentice she trained and the worst, who rose further through the Company than anyone expected.
What begins as a contract becomes an investigation — into corporate espionage, duty-bound duels, and a secret that could change how humanity survives among the stars. The Last Contract of Isako is Fonda Lee's first adult science fiction novel and a standalone: corporate samurai in space, carrying the political weight of the Green Bone Saga with the cold, patient menace of a Kurosawa film.