Tidal Lock

A bondswright trained to measure bodies. A gladiator who learned to survive by going still. A fraud encoded in the architecture of empire.

Elara Marchant does not touch the conscripts she assesses. She reads them-tissue density, respiratory efficiency, neurological compliance-and assigns the numerical value of their remaining utility to the Bastion Authority. It is precise, bloodless work. She has always preferred it that way.

Then she is sent to evaluate Tavan Achelen: eleven years in the Pelagic Remnant's forced-labor program, a fighter whose body has been tuned to frequencies the system was designed to erase. The dates in his file do not match the dates in his tissue. The intercalary tables have stolen time. And the man beneath the assessment is still capable of something the Bastion has spent a decade trying to regulate out of existence.

As Elara traces a conscription fraud that reaches from the Ostramere reef to the Reckoner-General's office, she must decide whether the institution that taught her to read bodies also taught her to see them. As Tavan is transferred toward a house that will finish what the program started, he must decide whether the bondswright auditing his bond is the system's final instrument-or the first external signal his body has been willing to trust in eleven years.

Tidal Lock is the first volume in Thalassa: The Oceans of Storms, an epic fantasy of institutional conspiracy, somatic awakening, and the dangerous arithmetic of choosing to become each other's reference point.

Book 1 of 6. The count begins.