Ava thought bonding would change her future. It changed how she saw the station.
Avazelle was born on a mining station suspended in deep space, into a world built around a single purpose; to harvest flareworms. Nobody on board knows what the creatures are for. What they do know is that enormous space serpents are used to pull them from asteroids through a dangerous bond, while the station's rigid hierarchy controls every detail of life aboard, from job placement to what ends up on your plate.
Control is the architecture of Ava's entire life. Where she sleeps, what she eats, the color of her uniform, the ceiling of her ambition; all of it decided before she was old enough to object. She has spent years at the bottom of that system, cleaning cargo containers, keeping her head down, and accepting the shape of the world she was handed.
When she is pulled from the lowest rank on the station and fast-tracked into an elite program to bond with the most powerful serpent on record, she discovers that control is not what the station told her it was. Not over the serpents, not over the people working alongside them, and not over her. The deeper she is pushed into the work, the more the architecture cracks and the more she understands that the station's grip on everything around her depends entirely on nobody asking questions.
First Bond is a science-fantasy novel about a world held together by what people are not allowed to know, and one woman's first steps toward the edges of it.
