Gods of the Game #3 by Phil Tucker

In the wake of their shattering victory, Brutal Deluxe ascends at last into the Premiere League–krieg chess at its most savage, lethal, and politically charged. To anchor his impossible squad, Virgil unveils his most heretical gambit an Echo, vat-grown and memory-sown, a man wearing a dead prodigy’s face and the broken remnants of a stranger’s soul. He calls himself Lance–and he must master his fractured self even as the world’s elite gather to break him.Worse, Nullpoint–the league’s untouchable dynasty–has thawed a legend from cryogenic exile to ensure his ruin. For Jessie, the looming confrontation is a long-promised reckoning. For Lance, the riddle of whose blood truly burns in his veins is more terrible than Charoen ever dreamed.Behind every match, a greater war is a contest of empires and ideologies, between the AI guardians who would lull mankind into complacent slumber and Virgil’s ruthless dream of unshackling humanity to seize the stars once more. To hoist the Premiere Cup, Brutal Deluxe must shatter the order of the world. And Lance must prove that even a stolen life can be claimed, fought for, and made truly, irrevocably his own.