Forbidden Resonance (eBook 0)

Before the Gynarchy. Before the collar. Before he became Male E0269.

There was a boy who watched his parents die — and a love story the universe tried to erase.

Ethan Drake doesn’t know what he is.

Orphaned at six under circumstances the military buried, he carries a birthmark that burns without explanation, a pendant from a mother he barely remembers, and a talent for flying that draws the wrong kind of attention. At a military academy on Mars, Ethan builds the only life he’s ever known — discipline, silence, and the void between stars where nothing can touch him.

Then Priya Sharma walks into his navigation class, and something ancient wakes up.

Priya has spent longer than any human lifetime watching from behind a perfect disguise. Her orders were simple: observe humanity. Don’t interfere. Don’t get attached. In over a century of discipline, she has never broken a single one — until a first-year space cadet looked at her. A man whose blood carries secrets that mirror her own. Constellation marks that pulse when they touch — broadcasting a signal that powerful forces are already hunting.

But Priya isn’t the only woman who sees what Ethan doesn’t know about himself.

Anaisa Bello — daughter of the British Prime Minister, heir to political power, and the most dangerous kind of brilliant — decides that Ethan Drake is the only real thing in her engineered world. Behind the hidden passages of 10 Downing Street and across the proving grounds of deep space, she wages a quieter war: to make him trust someone before the universe takes that option away.

Earth is dying. The ISA Mayflower — humanity’s first interstellar colony ship — is preparing to launch. And the forces converging on Ethan Drake have been patient for a long time.

Behind the Mayflower’s manifest, a secret committee is deciding who deserves to survive. A hidden architect has been shaping the crew list for reasons no one aboard will ever be told. And a psychologist with predatory ambitions has secured herself a position close enough to Ethan Drake to do what the universe, so far, has failed to do — take him apart quietly, from the inside.

The clock counting down to launch is also counting down to a choice made in love, paid for in memory, and carried in silence to the stars.

Some bonds are written in starlight. Some are written in blood. And some demand a cost that no one should have to pay.

Forbidden Resonance is the origin story of the Zhiva Universe — a science fiction romance set against the dying light of Earth’s final century, where Ancient genetics, military duty, and a love the galaxy tried to legislate out of existence collide on the eve of humanity’s last departure.

This is where it all begins — Book Zero of T.R. Schneider’s Zhiva Universe.