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

I lunge for the screen, but with my finger an inch away, I freeze. Commander Jefferson is the professional. She's right about the risks. What if I press the button, a tremor rocks the ship, the launch pad slips askew, and we die along with everyone outside?

The red words blink, tantalizing me. What should I do? What do I think is right? I can't remember the last time it mattered what I thought. I feel utterly and terrifyingly free.

T-minus ten, says the voice. Nine. Eight.

The ship's engines roar to life. My mind becomes a circus of hysterical thought, a whirl of No, no, please wait—not yet not now—give me more time. Not even all the time I want, not even measured in years, not even enough time to say goodbye. Just enough to answer the questions knifing through me: Is it better to stay or go? To risk it all or run for your life? Is it better to live knowing what you've done or die knowing what you are?

Seven. Six. Five, says the voice, calm and sweet. Whoever recorded it was smiling, I think.

The deep-tissue roar in the air swells, and as the metal casings over the windshield ease toward each other, I look up, shivers skating across my body, finger still suspended over the kill switch. Through the haze, a fiery light is shattering the horizon, and I think of a sun bursting out from our core, I think of a spirit erupting from a body at the moment of death. This can't be true, I think uselessly. It can't be real, because only hours ago, before I fell asleep, the moon was gazing through the barracks window. The real world is that stillness, that held breath of anticipation. Not this—this panic, this mess of smoke. Maybe this is just another nightmare, in the same genre as my last three years of nightmares, and at the end of the countdown, my eyes will snap open, and I'll breathe heavily for a minute before rolling out of bed, wanting water.

I look down to see a blank screen beneath my fingertip.

Four, says the voice. Three. Two. One.

Pressure lands on the crown of my head like an anvil. This is not a dream. I topple into the commander's seat, and it locks backward into a horizontal takeoff position. Spots explode in my vision as millions of pounds of machinery blast off. We move slowly at first, and then accelerate mercilessly, gravity compounding on my skull, my throat, my wrists, pulling down at the soft tissues of my eyes. I begin to slip out of consciousness, choking, my body pinned and trembling like prey, and I feel ashamed, naive, for expecting myself to wake up. The old true world has evaporated, the way old truths do all the time. People used to think the moon was fixed in a crystalline sphere. People used to believe Earth would last forever. The truth is always an unshakable thing until it's a story people used to tell each other.

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.