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

As we run toward the launchpad, an unexpected calm closes around my head. Caro and the others diminish into splashes of color, just another field of contestants in another race. I imagine lines spray-painted on tufts of grass, guiding me toward a clock suspended at a finish line. As concrete scrapes beneath my sneakers, I feel the mile repeats I used to run in suffocating August heat, and the ache of an oncoming shin splint, and the cramps that dug like a fork's tines beneath my ribs. All these painful tools that forged me into an instrument of survival.

Then I'm leaving the group behind. I'm passing Caro; I'm speeding by a Thai girl who's pressing her glasses to her face; I'm overtaking a younger boy whose lips are quivering as if he's on the verge of terrified laughter. Lilly used to laugh when she ran alongside me at the end of a practice. She never had my endurance, but she could sprint like no one else. She'd cut halfway through the route and reappear near the end, challenging me, crowing as we flew toward the finish line, "Is that—the best—you can do?"

I push harder until only one figure remains at my shoulder: Sergei Volkov, a sandy-haired Russian boy I recognize from our tour of the Lazarus. A head taller than me, he holds pace as we match kick for kick. Soon we're skidding to a stop at the base of the access tower.

I pummel the elevator call button, my throat burning, while Sergei stares back into the haze. The door opens, and I dart inside, about to hit the button labeled Ship Access, but Sergei seizes me by the wrist and speaks urgently. The words are inaudible under the siren.

"What?" I yell.

He yells something back in Russian and points toward the dark figures growing out of the haze, then stretches out an arm to hold the doors open for them. I feel a shock of guilt and do the same.

We wait until two dozen kids have crammed themselves in, packing the elevator wall to wall. Then the mirrored doors glide shut, dulling the noise outside. Coughing follows, a flurry of hands brought to mouths. Everyone's eyes are rimmed pink and streaming from the haze, including Sergei's, but he nods to me. I nod back, wiping my face clean, tying my hair up into its usual high ponytail.

At last I have a second to think, but none of my thoughts are reassuring. Our barracks are a temporary building constructed miles nearer to the ship than any other. The Launch Control Center is nine miles away—any closer, and their delicate instruments would have shattered under the thunder of the Lazarus's engine tests. The crew's living quarters are even farther out. How quickly can they cross that distance versus how quickly will tectonic aftershocks ripple down the fault line of the California coast? How soon will the ash fall thicken like a blizzard versus how soon can we seal the doors?

In the long term, the ash cloud by itself would have been survivable. The death knell is what scientists found when they probed beneath Mount Shasta: impossible quantities of methane that will blast out from deep geological reserves, transforming our atmosphere forever. Three days from now, the outgassing will be complete. Within two weeks, Earth's cloud cover will have begun to expand, trapping in ever more water vapor and heat in a vicious cycle, and after a month, the air at half of Earth's latitudes will be unbreathable. Then, as the ice caps melt, the sea will climb to flood most major cities. In the coming decades, our oceans will boil away altogether until Earth resembles Venus: a dry-surfaced, 800-degree wasteland. Before 2069, hardly anyone knew the term for this process, runaway greenhouse. Now it's one of those phrases you hear so often that it feels almost meaningless. Images of fires and floods war in my mind as the elevator rises at an agonizing crawl. A girl jammed in at my side is speaking in Arabic, her voice small and terrified. Soon she's hyperventilating, repeating a phrase again and again until it's a cry. Finally she punches the wall of the elevator so hard that the car shivers. Half a dozen others yell back at her, their languages mixed into an unintelligible clot.

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.