The Unanchored

Sera Thorn has never owned the ground beneath her feet.

She works the Sink beneath the Rim, salvaging what remains of worlds buried beneath the one people call home. Six civilizations lie below the Seventh Standing, layered one upon another across thousands of years. Their ruins still hold objects that function, machines no one fully understands, and records whose truths have been altered by time.

Sera knows something else about what survives.

Debt survives.

When her father dies, his arrears pass to her under an ancient legal provision called passing-at-probate. The debt is older than she is, and the system that created it has no interest in whether she agreed to inherit it.

In the Sink, even memory has a price. Casting can alter what the world allows, but payment comes from the caster's own memories. A childhood detail, a face, a place once loved—small pieces of a life can disappear and be replaced by something that was never theirs.

Then the floor comes up.

Four holes open across the Rim, threatening thousands of lives and exposing something that should have remained buried. As people scramble to survive, old institutions, forgotten histories, and competing accounts of the past begin to collide.

Sera is pulled deeper into a world where nothing is as permanent as it appears—not memory, not history, not obligation, and perhaps not the ground itself.

Alongside salvagers, Warborn, Elderborn, record-keepers, and others carrying debts of their own, she begins to uncover questions that reach far beyond her father's ledger.

Who has the authority to decide what a person owes?

And what happens when someone finally decides to challenge the answer?

The Unanchored is the first volume of The Other Worlds.