The world now liked divided not amongst political or geographic boundaries but amongst financial ones. Wealth is power, and taht power rests with only a handful of families.

The few who provide a service to their ruling Family are cared for and protected. They are Serfs.

All others are Waste.

Nearly five years ago, at a formal meeting of the families, Malcolm Carlyle ordered his Family's Lazarus – his daughter, Forever – to execute her own brother, Jonah, and implicate their perrenial rival, Jakob Hock. So began the Conclave War. Every ruling Family on the planet aligned itself with Carlyle or Hock in a years-long conflict of attrition.

Unbeknownst to all but the two of them, Forever let Jonah escape, her first act of defiance in the face of the neurochemical conditioning that had forced her unquestioning loyalty to Family and father.

When Jonah's twin, Johanna, took the place of their ailing father as Acting Head of Family, she and Forever made a deal; Forever would help Johanna end the Conclave War, and in exchange, Johanna would help free her from her conditioning. In so doing, she shared the truth about Forever's creation and introduced her to the next iteration of the Carlyle Lazarus, nicknamed Eight. Both Forever and Eight – and those who came before them – were revealed to be the product of a genetic engineering project directed by Bethany Carlyle and James Mann, with each iteration trained for combat by Gunnery Sgt. Marisol Occampo. Marisol became a party to this subversion; Bethany and James remained in the dark.

During the course of the war, Carlyle was betrayed by its allies in the Morray and D'Souza Families, and the prospect of Carlyle's survival looked grim. But Forever did as she had promised Johanna – vowing to wipe out the traitorous Families, she killed the D'Souza Lazarus as well as Joacquim Morray, whose free will had been annihilated by the Morray Family's programming.

But now the clock is ticking. As the Conclave War reaches its end, Eight is scheduled to undergo the installation of her telemetry package – the same system that allows Forever's family to track and monitor her wherever she goes, whatever she does. To free herselves, the time has come for Forever to do what was once unthinkable…

Fracture II: Jonah Carlyle is rescued by some Bittner Waste. Calls himself Jonah Kar, Raises a child with a Bittner wife, and eventually goes to war with them against the Vassalovka Family which brought the war to their doorstep. He returns home to find only his biological child survived a bio-weapon attack.

Forever (Seven) and Eight keep up the clandestine meetings and establish electronic communications. Forever convinces Johanna to go on an elite mission to kill the entire D'Souza and Morray families. Marta Morray betrayed her family. Forever then goes to Hock territory to request a meeting.

Eight's growth is so advanced they have to install the telemetry package sooner than expected because her healing would interfere with the surgery.

Jakob Hock demands Johanna, their Father (Malcolm) and estranged Mother, and Forever attend the meeting. Forever meets her “mother” for the first time, and they look very much alike. We learn the history that Carlyle was in a relationship with Jakob's sister Leah Hock when they were brilliant young university students, and cheated on her. Her death was thought to be suicide, but it was just deduced that Carlyle murdered her.

Forever prevents Malcolm from killing Jakob, revealing her free will. She then infiltrates her own Family's headquarters and escapes with Eight before the telemetry package could be installed.