A materials scientist has spent ten years asking a carbon nanotube fiber to hold. It keeps breaking. When the grant committee sends an external evaluator to write the report that will end her project, she finds the angle she's been wrong about for two years — and something else she wasn't prepared for.
The Tether follows Elena Voss from a basement cleanroom to Singapore, through the discovery that changes her field and the betrayal she chooses to go anyway. It is a novel about the geometry of stubbornness, the cost of being found by someone who already knows where you're going, and what it means to build something that holds.
