Humanity has learned that the boundary between worlds can be crossed. Now it must face the civilization on the other side-and the catastrophe that made that civilization what it is.
The systems that once promised safety have fractured. The Directorate is no longer a single authority, its people are no longer a single voice, and the assumptions that shaped humanity's first encounters with another civilization are beginning to collapse.
For forensic pathologist Simone Calder and the scientists, investigators, and survivors who have followed the evidence across worlds, the next discovery is more troubling than an invasion.
Their enemy may have been telling the truth about one thing.
Something happened long ago that threatened an entire civilization. Survival demanded extraordinary measures. Generations later, those measures have become institutions, dependencies, and obligations that few people are permitted to question.
But survival has a cost.
As Simone investigates a death that carries evidence of a history the Directorate would rather control, she encounters people whose bodies have been shaped by systems they did not choose and whose lives depend upon technologies they may no longer be free to abandon.
Breaking those systems could liberate them.
It could also kill them.
With alliances splintering and the boundary between worlds becoming increasingly unstable, Simone and her allies must confront a dilemma with no clean solution: how do you free people from a system when that system has become necessary for their survival?
Then a signal appears.
It does not belong to the Directorate.
And its history may reach farther back than anything humanity has yet discovered.
ANATOMY OF THE UNMOORED is the fourth novel in M. L. Bellamy's five-book ANATOMY series, a speculative science-fiction thriller combining forensic investigation, dimensional physics, first contact, institutional conflict, and a deeply human exploration of freedom, dependency, responsibility, and what happens when survival itself becomes a form of captivity.
