The Ordeal

In the future, guilt and innocence are determined through trial by combat. Civil cases are fought to submission, while serious criminal cases are fought to the death in a ceremony called the Ordeal. Defendants can represent themselves or hire advocates to fight on their behalf. The best of them earn glory and wealth, while keenly aware that their next case could be the last.

Growing up in the impoverished Los Angeles Basin, seventeen year-old Leander Hill helps his father run a failing antique store but dreams of a better life in the Preserve, the garden paradise of the wealthy to the northwest. When he shows talent defending himself in a street fight, he receives an invitation to attend a prestigious training school for advocates. Although his father is strongly against it, Leander decides that becoming an advocate is his best chance to give his family a brighter future.

Leander rises through the ranks at the school and attracts the interest of a wealthy potential patron, who offers to put him on retainer with all the wealth and privilege he could dream of. His first assignment is to fight an ordeal on behalf of the governing Authority against an insurrectionist. But when he learns more about the corruption of the Authority, and his family's own ties to the insurrectionists, he will have to decide whether the moral price of his coveted better life is too high to pay.