Excerpt from Alone Out Here by Riley Redgate, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1
JULY 19, 2072

I startle awake to a world that's alive. Everything is a tumult of sound and motion, a siren howling overhead, a glow pulsing through the barracks' windows, a bare bulb over my bunk trembling like a furious fist. I sit bolt upright as the screaming starts.

For an instant I can only stare at the rows of bunk beds in chaos. I know exactly what's happening—I just don't understand how. The eruption isn't due until next spring. Soon is the shorthand that news anchors have been using, as in, soon, cubic miles of lava and ash will explode from Mount Shasta, a peak in Northern California, and cause a chain reaction that will render the planet uninhabitable. Since the announcements, we've watched the ground swell like an abscess and waited for the lance to drop, hoping and praying for more time.

Now I don't hope. I don't pray. I'm rolling out of my bunk and cramming my feet into my sneakers. If the last three years have taught me anything, it's that denial is useless. Only the facts matter, and there's just one fact to cling to now: The Lazarus, one of the generation spaceships that were meant to save millions of people, is standing half a mile outside our barracks door.

I seize my backpack from the floor, but the strap snaps taut, caught beneath my bed frame. "Move," I grunt, pulling harder. "Come on, move!"

It isn't coming free. I need to open my hand and run, I know that—but a protective panic is blazing up in me, the thought that this is all I have.

Someone lets loose a string of Arabic behind me, and a pair of hands heave the frame upward. The bag flies free. As I hug it tight to my chest, I cast a wild look around, but the speaker has already disappeared in the mayhem.

I wrangle the bag onto my shoulder and sprint for the exit, darting between the shadowy, muscular bodies of soldiers. Warren and Jones, my Secret Service detail, passed me to these officers yesterday—six high-ranking military officials assigned to safeguard our group. Last night, on the way to the cafeteria, I heard them muttering mutinously to each other about babysitting. Now they're barking commands over the siren, trying to corral stricken eleven-year-olds into line.

I join the cluster of people at the door just as a girl flings it open. She cries out, clapping her hands over her ears. In pours the sound, the undertow of rolling bass, the gut-shaking drop of the earth tearing apart.



Our cluster recoils, stunned by the roar and the sea of haze outside. Mount Shasta is a hundred miles away—but then, that's nothing to this kind of explosion. Two hundred years ago, the Krakatoa eruption shattered eardrums fifty miles out; people three thousand miles across the ocean heard sounds like gunfire. The last Yellowstone eruption dropped ash from Los Angeles to the Mississippi River.

A high voice yells, "Kimbieni!" The Kenyan president's daughter, Caro Omondi, darts through the crowd and over the threshold, small and nimble, her long braids cascading out of their black silk scarf. The spell is broken. The rest of us plunge after her into an oppressive heat as tangible as water.

We hurtle across a concrete plain that glows dully under stands of floodlights. Thick haze rolls through the light like cumulus clouds in rapid time-lapse, shrouding most of the complex. The Vehicle Assembly Building, where the ship was constructed, is a shadow in the distance, and the Launch Control Complex—which looked yesterday like flecks of static fuzz breaking the horizon line—is completely invisible.

Only the Lazarus is clear, looming dead ahead. The ship is X-shaped and aerodynamically sharpened, like the tip of a Phillips-head screwdriver. Even half a mile away, the size of the thing is staggering. Booster rockets are bundled to its four wings at intervals, tall and sleek and alabaster white, and the whole apparatus sits astride a positronic impulse launcher a hundred feet high. Most of that bulk will unbuckle during liftoff and tumble down into the Pacific.

Excerpted from Alone Out Here by Riley Redgate. Copyright © 2022 by Riley Redgate. Excerpted by permission of Disney-Hyperion. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.