The Scorpion Rules

Greta is the Duchess and Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, and she has lived nearly all her life at the Precepture as a hostage. The world is four hundred years in the future, and an AI named Talis enforces peace with one rule: if a ruler starts a war, that ruler's child dies. Greta has been trained since childhood to meet that fate with dignity.

Freedom is close. If she reaches eighteen and her mother has not gone to war, she walks out alive. Then Elian arrives, a new hostage from an American alliance, and he refuses to bow to the AI's control. His defiance cuts into the rigid routine of Greta's world and leads her to question the system she was raised to accept.

This is dystopian science fiction with a political edge, following a young heir inside a closed, tightly ordered institution. The pressure builds as tensions between nations rise and the Precepture's careful order begins to fail.

The central question is personal. To stay alive, Greta has to decide what she is willing to become. The book is the first in the Prisoners of Peace duology.