No Man's Land: Volume 2 — Sarah A. Hoyt

No Man's LandSufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable-and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire-Skip to his friends- has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.Volume 2Skip thought he'd figured out the rules of survival on Elly.He was wrong.Now his potential allies from the Star Empire are turning up dead, one by one. Spies and saboteurs have infiltrated every level of Ellyan society, and Skip is running out of people he can trust.As he races to save the king and archmagician-his only remaining allies-disturbing secrets about Elly's culture emerge alongside buried truths about his own family's past. One moment he's explaining the bewildering concept of binary gender to confused Ellyans, the next he's making impossible choices that could strand him on this world forever.His last gambit is reckless. The odds of success are slim. And failure means losing everything-his mission, his allies, his only way home.But some fights are worth the risk, even when the deck is stacked against you.Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is the one you never see coming.