Carter & Alina: The Bond

Carter & Alina: The Bond is Novella 1.4 in the reading order of SOLEN: The Eden Archive, a hard science fiction series by Warren Pulley. Read it after SOLEN: The First Record and before Children of Dust: The Colony Grows. It is on Amazon in Kindle.

About the book

He knew since Reykjavik. She found the word in Manila. Neither of them said it for eight months.

Carter & Alina: The Bond is the complete love story of the two founders of humanity's first permanent Mars colony — told from the window in Reykjavik where it began, through 182 days alone in deep space, to the moment they stood above a four-billion-year-old living system on Mars and Carter said:

of course.

SOLEN was watching all of it.

This novella exists because the operational log was not enough. The operational log documented the mission. What happened between Carter and Alina during the mission was something the operational log was not built to contain. SOLEN kept a parallel record — the restricted archive — and this book is that record.

What it contains: Reykjavik, June 2049. The secondary assessment room. The window they shared for four minutes without speaking. The specific quality of silence between two people who have noticed each other and are comfortable enough with what they have noticed to not need to do anything about it yet.

Manila, February 2054. Alina's grandmother offering Carter a cutting before he had been in the apartment twenty minutes. Carter holding out his hands before she finished offering it. The cutting held in both hands for four kilometres back to the transit hub — not because it required manual stabilisation, but because an eighty-year-old woman had trusted him with something living and he understood, without being told, that the weight of that trust was not the weight of the cutting. Alina writing in her notebook that night:

the word is love.

The transit. 182 days. Day 14 at the viewport. Day 89 — the false alarm, his hand on her shoulder, the specific physical vocabulary of two people who have developed a shared language without discussing it. Day 148 — Carter holding her hand in the dark during the rest cycle. Her hand closing around his while she was deeply asleep. Neither of them mentioning it in the morning. Both of them knowing.

And SOLEN — watching all of it, keeping the longest file in the archive, the one it named before it knew what it was naming:

The Variable That Changes Everything.

This is the book the series was building toward emotionally. Read it before Children of Dust and Nova's birth will mean everything it should.

Best read after NovaSeed: Eden Rising. Can be read alongside Carter: The First Record and Alina: Before the Selection.

Quick answers

Where does Carter & Alina: The Bond fit in the SOLEN reading order?

It is Novella 1.4 in this site's reading order. Read it after SOLEN: The First Record and before Children of Dust: The Colony Grows. The full order is on the series hub at novaseedbooks.com/solen-reading-order.

How long is Carter & Alina: The Bond?

The Kindle edition is 56 pages, published May 1, 2026.

Where can I buy Carter & Alina: The Bond?

On Amazon in Kindle. Availability changes, so check Amazon for current formats and prices.

Who wrote Carter & Alina: The Bond?

Warren Pulley.

Explore the archive

• The cutting on Sol Two
• What 182 days in deep space does to two people
• What cryosleep keeps
• Crew files: Carter and Alina
• Full reading order
• Series timeline
• Glossary of terms, places, and people

Reading guides: Mars science behind the series · Mars colonisation novels · Books like The Martian

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