Mage Against the Machine

Welcome to the Ring of the World. Try not to die. They were nobody's idea of heroes. Shaun is a twenty-three-year-old ex-jock with a mountain of debt, his late mother's clapped-out car, and a talent for making bad decisions. Ava is a middle-aged lab tech who gave up her dreams to raise her brother and has been quietly furious about it ever since. They work for the same faceless mega-corporation, they can barely stand each other, and on any normal day their paths would never cross. But this is not a normal day. When a mysterious alarm pulls them into a secret sub-basement and face-to-face with a door floating three feet off the ground, Shaun does what Shaun always does — acts first and thinks never. One opened door later, they're stranded in a world of ancient magic, mythical creatures, and legends made flesh. Oh, and humanity has been outlawed on pain of death. Armed with a talking sword, a forbidden mathematics that can rewrite reality, one deeply reluctant octopus, and a Fae prince with serious family issues, two people who have absolutely nothing in common are going to have to learn — fast — that survival is a team sport.