Jason Shannon

The Third World has collapsed, and is dominated by gangsters and pirates. A twenty-year-old tabloid princess, nude sunbathing pictures all over the net and who once ordered a sex bot to her hotel room on a royal embassy, is all that prevents a nuclear war with Russia. In South America, terrorists are torching the Amazon, and decades-old tension between the Americans and the French prevent cooperation to hunt them down. And the Chinese are on top of the world.Enter John Galveston, a suave, debonair, and vulgar grey marketeer. In a cashless society, he exclusively uses paper yuan, and bounces around the world selling anything and everything. He'll come face to face with these fanatical terrorists, and in the process, find himself in an anarchic black hole - two thirds of South America is rumoured to be either an anarchist wasteland, or paradise. Yet that is only one mystery surrounding the enigmatic nation of Andea....

Courtenay has been sold into the Concubinage, shipped away to become a bed warmer for a noble of the Mongol court. Her sister, who now refuses to go by any name except Irbis, desperately wants to get her back, and has run away from home to get to that office before it's too late. But it is too late - a riot consumes the town and Irbis is lucky to get out with her life. Now rescuing her sister isn't an option, and she has only one real choice: to escape her father, to be there for her sister, she's going to have to join Courtenay as an imperial concubine.... Tamerlan, the khan's eldest son and former heir, who'd renounced the throne in favour of self-imposed exile at a Buddhist monastery, is hot on the trail of the ghost assassin that slew Lord Chiledu in Queensland, has tracked the phantom all the way to Alice Springs. And he's making waves with the court, openly challenging his younger brother, the khan's new heir - and getting closer to finding out the nature of the grand calamitous future looming above them all.... In Perth, Prince H leg is dealing with another invasion of his prefecture, an attack that consumed the northern town of Geraldton; and attack that caught Adam and Moxie in its net.... And in the desert, more than a thousand kilometres north of her sister riding in to rescue her, Courtenay's coach is ambushed, laid to waste in a bloodbath by a darkness so rare it's barely more than myth: the Mongolian death worm. Now, their security gone, their guide and a number of concubines dead, Courtenay and three others are left to wander adrift in the vast Australian desert.... This edition is the second of two volumes.