Seventeen years have gone by since the Coordinated Endeavor crashed on a distant exoplanet. Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are now the devoted parents of two teenage children, Owl and Yarrow, in a hardscrabble frontier home. Though life on Minerva is full of danger, the family’s bond is enough to make it all worth it—until they learn that the biggest threat to their survival might come from within.
More than thirty thousand years in the past, Ambrose wakes on Earth to find that his mission to save his sister was a ruse. His mother betrayed him, and the truth of her plan—to send twenty clones of him to continue human civilization thousands of light-years away—sets Ambrose spiraling. When he discovers that another spacefarer is suffering his same fate, he will have to decide whether to risk crossing a world at war to reach him.
Separated by time and space, a young family and two strangers learn that their lives are intimately intertwined. They race to uncover the unexpected connections that might save them all . . . and perhaps humanity as well.
Eliot Schrefer is a New York Times bestselling author and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature. His other awards include a Printz Honor, a Stonewall Honor, and the Green Earth Book Award. He is also the author of Charming Young Man, The Darkness Outside Us, Endangered, and Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality. He lives with his husband in New York City and is on the faculty of the Hamline University MFA in writing for children and young adults. Visit him online at eliotschrefer.com.