Assigned to Nova

On a ship eight hundred years from Earth, the woman who trusts only evidence falls for the one thing she can't measure.

Dr. Nova White18 does not deal in feelings. She deals in evidence - in what a body admits before its owner does, in the distance between the face a person presents and the truth underneath. So when a routine appointment turns up an undocumented flag on a Gold sector record, she does the only thing she knows how to do. She follows it.

What she finds is worse than any working model prepared her for. For eleven years, the pairing program that promised the ship compatibility has been quietly selecting for something no one agreed to: the projected usefulness of the children each match would produce. Thirty thousand people were optimized like cargo. Nova is one of them. And she is going to publish all of it, under her own name, whatever it costs her.

The patient who started it is Atlas Gold1 - the polished face of the administration her disclosure will bring down, a man so practiced at running every room that he has dropped the performance exactly once, in her exam room, when he was too frightened to hold it in place. He was matched to someone else. So was she. Across a year of reckonings - a citizen vote, a fabricated arrest, a charter for a world not yet landed - Nova keeps filing the same observation under a category she has no word for, and cannot stop watching a powerful man learn to tell the truth.

The evidence has been sufficient for months. In the one investigation she never meant to open, the doctor who acts only when the case is closed is about to learn the difference between adequate and enough - and that choosing someone after you already love them is still, in the end, a choice.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Cerebral, slow-burn romance between two hyper-competent people
• Whistleblower heroines who bring down a system with a paper trail
• Generation-ship science fiction and the ethics of who gets to be born
• A powerful, guarded hero who tells the truth to exactly one person
• Dystopias about consent, bodily autonomy, and informed choice

Assigned to Nova is the second book in the Assigned Series.