In this world, sixteen-year-old Charlotte and her fellow refugees have scraped out an existence on the edge of Britain's industrial empire. Though they live by the skin of their teeth, they have their health and each other. When a new exile with no memory of his escape or even his own name seeks shelter in their camp, he brings new dangers with him and secrets about the terrible future that awaits all those who have struggled has to live free of the empire's Machineworks. The Inventor's Secret is the first book of a YA steampunk series set in an alternate nineteenth-century North America where the Revolutionary War never took place and the British Empire has expanded into a global juggernaut propelled by marvelous and horrible machinery.