Esah survived Splinter — barely. Now he's back at Delaney Rim carrying three simple capabilities at once, a thing that should have killed him. Air. Spark. Navigation that turns out to be earth. Three foundations layered into one mind, all of them refusing to compound. By every rule of the world he splintered into, he should be at the bottom — bound to a fifty-mile range, useless for trade, fit only to be caged or culled.

Instead he's free.

Back at Barrel Springs, the small community that took him in his first season — Hoda the anthropologist, Huutsuu the engineer who lost everything in the transfer, Ama who can pull clean water out of poisoned ground, and the rest of the people who taught him to live in the basin — begins something new. A teaching camp at the rim. Foundation work. Real instruction. The basics the territories have spent a generation hoarding. People come. People learn. People stay.

The territories notice.

For four hundred miles in every direction, an Authority decides who gets to develop a capability, who gets to travel, who counts as a person. The basin doesn't just trap the rain and snow that fall into it — the basin splinters are also trapped, by their tethers. A teaching camp at the rim is not a settlement. It is a fracture. And fractures spread.

What Esah and the people of Barrel Springs are about to learn is older than the territories, older than the splintering, written into the geography itself. What they do with that knowledge will decide whether the rim becomes a refuge or a target.

Unbound is the second book in the Splintered World science-fantasy series. The rules Esah learned in Splinter were the easy ones. The ones that come next are written in fire — and the empire that wrote them is starting to crack.

The series

Unbound launches in print and audiobook simultaneously, performed by Luke Daniels — Audie Award winner, narrator of The Three-Body Problem and the Iron Druid Chronicles.