18 Seas

 The world is almost all water now. Eighteen seas, each one deadly in its own way, and scattered between them the islands where everyone lives and dies by a single thing. The Gauntlet. Five boats, one stretch of killing water, and a crowd that turns island nobodies into gods. But the boats sail themselves these days. The hulls come printed and identical, the captains are the men who own them, and the sailing is done by machines that never tire and never miss. Nobody has put human hands to a Gauntlet boat in a generation. The crew is a dead art. For eight years the crown has belonged to Makoa the Undefeated. Rojo has worshipped him since he was a boy. More than anything in the world, he wants to be him. Then he gets good enough to be noticed, and learns that being noticed is the worst thing that can happen to a nobody. In one too-perfect evening that no one will admit was rigged, Rojo loses all of it. His boat. His money. His father's life's work. So he does the one thing the machine age forbids. He hauls a dead boat out of the scrapyard, a hand-built warship from before the automation, sailed the old way by human hands, the one hull the league was never built to predict and cannot easily sink. And he goes looking for a crew. What he finds is a magnificent disaster. A mechanic who would rather be left alone. A pickpocket terrified of water. Two strongmen who agree on nothing. A drunk with impossible aim, a lizard that talks back, and a navigator who flirts with the whole world and means none of it. They have no money, no standing, and no business on the same dock, let alone the same boat. What they have is each other, and a hull the machines never learned to beat. To climb, Rojo will have to give up the only dream he has ever had. Because the loneliest dream was never worth winning, and the only way to beat a game built on greed is together. Part adventure, part heist, part love letter to everyone the modern world automated out of a job, The 18 Seas is the first book in a big-hearted, propulsive series for readers of Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora. A drowned world, a dead art reborn, and a crew you would follow anywhere. Funny, fast, and with real teeth. The 18 Seas: Part One.