Bound

Bren keeps Kharvask's bonding rigs running: four-hundred-year-old machines that no one alive knows how to build. A tradecaste artificer, he has spent nine years believing that if he becomes good enough at fixing things, the world will have to make room for him. Then, lying beneath the dais at a highborn bonding ceremony, he finds a crack in the coil a few breaths too late. The discharge passes over three hundred nobles and binds him to a stranger. Mira is Unbonded caste, the lowest the kingdom has, and she had her own reasons for being in that hall, none of which she's willing to share. Now they're bound by a power that was never meant for people like them, and hunted by an Authority that doesn't tolerate mistakes it can't control. On their trail is Director Vane, a man who is always one step ahead of where they're running. To survive, Bren and Mira must learn what the bond can do. And the more they learn, the more everything they were taught about it begins to look like a lie. Bound is the first book of The Bondsmen of Kharvask: a literary fantasy about trust, caste, and what two people can become once they stop holding back from each other