The Glyph Queen is a fantasy/sci-fi web-novel that is free online. Kindle and epub formats are available.
When Winnie was thirteen, the town watch taught her how to fire a rifle. Her school practiced drills in case raiders came. The town grew crops in makeshift greenhouse-adapted buildings—the only places warm enough during a worldwide nuclear winter.
In marches the Lakiran empire—a corporate-born nation overseen by once-CEO and now empress Victoria Paladino. They ride silent planes whose repulsion fields veer bullets away. After they conquer the town, in come the exemplars—Victoria’s personal oversight committee—rumored to read minds. They interrogate everyone, deciding who stays and gets dragged away.
Three years of occupation later, an exemplar visits, telling Winnie she may have a flair—a unique mental power, like many used by the exemplars. He whisks her away to the empire’s capital to learn from Victoria herself. After experimentation, she learns she can envision anywhere in the world she’s seen before. Victoria teaches Winnie to always ask why. Why must she have been somewhere before she can visualize it? Why is she limited to seeing only as human eyes can see? Through months of constant questioning and arduous visualization exercises, Victoria helps Winnie reach her power’s full potential, and the two grow close, despite Victoria’s initial coldness.
Meanwhile, in post-war Nigeria, streetwise teenager Naema sees a different side of the empire. Between corruption and oppression, everyone lives in squaller, fighting over rationed food tokens for assembled pastes. She too is told she has a unique flair, not by the empire, but by fugitives with similar gifts who know more about Victoria’s origin, her ties to an old witch coven, and the dark truth about what the exemplars do to people like Winnie and Naema.