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

"I'll wait for the rest," I yell back, pointing toward the bay doors. Sergei balks, alarm crinkling his forehead, but Caro tugs him back into the elevator with the others.

I turn to the gap in the hull, staring down the pale artery of the access arm, and tighten my ponytail until pain radiates across my scalp. My momentary loss of control has passed. It won't happen again.

For eight years, I've had to be a counterpoint to whatever is collapsing around me. After the Washington Monument bombings late in my mother's first term, when the whole country was screaming war, my parents trained me on a list of talking points so I could fend off any questions at school in a sober, level-headed way. After the eruption announcements, the whole world was terrified, so my parents and I had to look calm whenever we walked onto a stage. The First Family means stability. Leigh Chen is an establishment, a First Daughter before anything else. She's an illusion that matters immeasurably more than I do.

A second group of kids rushes into the ship, dripping sweat and gasping. I direct them toward the elevator bay, but I don't follow. The crew must be close now, bundled into trucks and speeding toward us. Any moment they'll appear in the elevator, any second...

One moment I'm on my feet. The next I'm flung into the air like a flicked insect.

I crash onto my hands and knees as a colossal boom thunders through the walls. I know what the sound is instinctively: thousands of tons of molten rock punching out of the earth's crust. I scramble upright, my palms scraped and stinging. Faint screams issue from the Residential Wing, where the second group disappears toward the cabins on an upper balcony. I move to follow them, but a cool voice stops me. It arrives from everywhere, radiating through the empty atrium and throughout the immense body of the ship: T-minus five minutes to Liftoff.

I stare up past the walkways in disbelief. Someone went to the ship's bridge and started the launch sequence with none of our personnel aboard.

Before I've made a conscious decision, I'm bolting up the ramp toward the elevator bay. They have to stop this. When I know nothing else, I know we have to do what we're expected to do.

The elevator deposits me on the tenth floor. I sprint around the balconies and into the Command Wing. The floors are spongy black mesh, bouncing me forward. T-minus four minutes, the voice says.

"No," I gasp out. As I race forward, the lights and walls begin to tremble, and I don't know whether it's the earth moving beneath us or the Lazarus's forty Cerus engines purring in preparation. I wheel around a bend and flinch back, burying my face in my hands. The hallway ends in an open door to the bridge, where a brilliant glow pierces the windshield, banks of floodlights glaring into the ship.

I lurch over the threshold, peering through my fingers. A dark-haired girl is standing at a dashboard so long that it wraps around in a boomerang curve. Beside her, someone in the commander's seat is navigating the launch gear with quick, fluid motions. The grid of buttons and joysticks is cast in graduated relief, like the skyline of a model city. Overhead, a low female voice says, Error. Clear launch pad. Error. Finalize inertial measurement unit alignment. Error. Final leak checks incomplete.

The person in the seat flicks a switch and presses a palm down on a screen. Retracting access arm, says the voice.

"What are you doing?" My scream bursts out over the rumble of disturbed metal as the auxiliary power hums to life. "Nobody's boarded yet!"

I clatter down the dozen steps, hand outstretched to wrench the seated figure back, but then the chair revolves to face me. I stop dead. The woman in the seat is as tall and broad-shouldered as an Amazon, a frizz of honey-blond hair floating around her face. This is the Lazarus's head pilot, Commander Sara Jefferson. Now I recognize the dark-haired girl as her daughter, Eli, who stood at the commander's shoulder yesterday like a lieutenant, eyeing our tour group with wary interest. They must have been here already when we came aboard.

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.