Six strangers, bonded to serpents that mine the stars. A station that never wanted them to last.
Avazelle has spent her whole life being told what she's worth, and it was never much. Born into the lowest rank of a mining station suspended in deep space, she scrubs cargo pods for a living and keeps her head down, same as every other "yellow" who knows better than to want more.
Then she's pulled out of her mundane life and into the most prestigious job around: working with giant serpents that mine flareworms from the asteroids nearby. She's placed with five other misfits, none of them an obvious choice for what they're being trained to do. The one rule drilled into all of them is simple: the serpents are tools, dangerous ones, to be managed and controlled. Ava isn't so sure. Something happens when she's near them that no one trained her for: they listen and then they answer back.
What the program doesn't tell any of them is that the prestigious job they've been handed is brutally dangerous, and that the bond they're being trained for isn't what it claims to be either. The drug they're fed every morning isn't keeping them steady, it's feeding something to the serpents, and the cost of finding any of this out runs higher than any of them expected.
What carries her through are the friendships she didn't expect to find, and experiences she thought she'd never have a chance to live. She falls fast, because none of it has ever been hers to have before, and only later starts to notice that something steadier has been standing beside her the whole time.
First Bond is the first book in the Talvex Serpents series, about a system built to keep people small, and the ones who start refusing to stay that way.
