The Scorpion Rules

Four hundred years from now, the AI Talis keeps the world's rulers in line with a brutal system: start a war, and your child hostage dies. Greta, Duchess and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, has spent her whole life at the Precepture being trained to accept this fate with dignity. She's close to freedom — if she survives to eighteen without her mother going to war. Then Elian, a new hostage from an American alliance who refuses to submit to the AI's control, is thrown into her rigid world, and Greta begins to question the system she was raised to accept. As tensions escalate and the Precepture's careful order breaks down, Greta has to decide what she is willing to become to survive. The first book in the Prisoners of Peace duology.