Beginning in the year 2201, one month before Bodhi Rawls collapses from malnutrition in the opening of Bodhi Rising, and over a thousand miles away from where Bodhi lives, sixteen-year-old Larken Marche is living her best life. She has friends, like the aqueous Molly Kostic, the role-playing-gamer Jocelyn Reed, and a twin brother, Oliver. Also going for her is the fact that she’s the youngest member on the varsity lofting team, a game like a cross between lacrosse and jai alai, and is favored to go pro after graduation. Even without a pro career, Brighton Academy, her high-school, is one of the best in the nation. But when Larken’s brother is arrested in a crime which she’s pretty sure he didn’t commit, it sends her on a mission to clear his name. At the same time, HPM’s student chapter targets Larken, claiming she’s a model. When she discovers the claim is true, her entire life begins to unravel as she tries to control the secret, clear her brother’s name, and escape a killer android and her pet mechanized infantry unit. Throughout this journey of self discovery and resilience, Larken draws her strength from her (usually) loyal friends as an ensemble cast help her pick up the pieces of her idyllic former life in the first-in-series, Brighton Academy.

A year and three months later, Larken’s still struggling to put her life back together, with some clear revisions. The lofting career she’d dreamed of has become an impossibility, so she sets her sights on a more mundane life. Thanks to her friend Jocelyn’s coaxing and over-the-top busy-bodied nosiness, Larken finds herself enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle sharing an apartment with a model and the newest member of her troop, Samantha Caldwell. When Samantha is targeted and abducted by HPM, Larken not only must get her back, but when she finds out the extent of what HPM did to her, Larken discovers that yet again, her “normal life” is ripped away. She embarks on a mission of revenge, whether Samantha wants it or not. Growing their ensemble cast by adding the comedic and sincere Clayton Wilson and the naive yet powerful android Dandelion Lemaire, Larken works to keep HPM at bay not just in the city of Seattle, Washington, but across the United States. Can Larken do the impossible and stop the most powerful extremist organization in the United States? The answer is hidden within the pages of Human Pride, the second of the Virtual Wars series and the first in which we get a peak at Larken coming into her own as the leader of one of the armies involved in the Virtual Wars.

Seven years have passed. Larken has risen to prominence and her organization is starting to see some successes in the United States. Back at Emergent Biotechnology, which is still under Christine Hamilton’s control (though now Christine Barnett), we are introduced to model culture in the dregs of corporate headquarters. Amanda Briggs was ejected from the Mixed-Martial Arts fighting circuit following a career-ending injury and, due to a no-kill order in New York City, finds herself in the dregs of Emergent Biotechnology headquarters with other models who would have been killed in the past. She jumps at the chance to join the first free model community in New York City. Meanwhile, Larken’s relationship with her right-hand, Dandelion, evolves into more than just a partnership, and despite Dandelion’s crippling social anxiety, the two of them help to build out the community in New York City as the city attempts to replicate what Larken has already done on the west coast. But pressure mounts when a disease that polli are calling “Model Flu” racks the nation. Fear chips away at the city’s tolerance of the new community until the devastating conclusion of Inertia and Momentum, the third in the Virtual Wars series.

In the low point of the series, Larken, emotionally wrecked by the events that took place in the previous novel, Larken goes through the motions, and her organization begins to crumble into disarray. When she makes a tragic miscalculation in Texas, Larken flees, seeking solace and hiding in the only place that she can remain undetected. She leaves her organization in tatters, hoping that someone else will pick the pieces up. Will she ever be able to recover? And…where can a globally-recognized person like Larken possibly hide? The answers will shock even the most knowledgeable fans in this admittedly disturbing and dark novel, the fourth and darkest in the series, called Hidden Places.

Almost a generation later, Larken is en absentia and much of the work that she’s done in the United States has been undone by the Liberti Custodi. The novel opens with Phoenix Dozie, an expectant mother whose experiences so far don’t contain the same joy that she’s been told to expect. She’s expected to pick a ride-along, a former world citizen expecting to be reborn, whose consciousness will eventually merge with her child’s once the child reaches maturity. Phoenix didn’t want a child in the first place, and she can’t cope with the decision. She flees the doctor’s office and her one-time doting husband who has turned jailer in the wake of Liberti Custodi’s victories in the United States. After a vicious Liberti attack nearly kills her, she begins hearing voices—particularly one commanding and abrasive voice—that both saves her life and puts her in harms way repeatedly. She thinks she’s sliding into insanity, and it’s possible that she’s right, except for one minor detail: her parents were in the resistance, and there’s an old family story yet to be told. Phoenix must discover who she really is, and then what to do about it, in this fifth novel appropriately named Tower of Silence.

In the final and concluding novel to Virtual Wars, combining the Reality Gradient series, the Notions of Home serial, and the Virtual Wars together, Phoenix is now fully aware of who she is and what she must do. The earth sits on the cusp of another dark ages, and Phoenix can’t let it happen. But she knows she’s not powerful enough alone. Phoenix has to locate and ally with the most powerful being in the known world, Qadesh (from Libera:Goddess of Worlds), who has been missing for almost a decade, however much her followers have thrived on Earth. An epic multi-worlds battle unfolds between Phoenix and her allies against the Liberti Custodi and theirs across the virtual and physical worlds alike. The stakes couldn’t be higher as the war for all of reality reaches its final, terrifying yet hopeful, conclusion.