PERFIDY: Betrayal began not with a plot but with a question that I found myself returning to over many years. The question was simple on the surface: What if there are people in other galaxies, not so different from us, dealing with the same things we deal with? Conflict. Ambition. Loyalty. Love. The more I sat with that question, the more the world around it began to take shape. The Empire. The Organization. The agents who served it. The planets that resisted. The individuals caught in the space between all of those things. By the time I began writing, the world had been living in my imagination for a long time. The writing was, in some ways, the easier part. This is what I hope readers feel when they read the book: not that they have been transported somewhere impossibly foreign, but that they have recognized something familiar in a place they never expected to find it.