Alone out here, p.1
Alone Out Here, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Riley Redgate
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.
Designed by Samantha Krause
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Redgate, Riley, author.
Title: Alone out here / Riley Redgate.
Description: First edition. • Los Angeles : Hyperion, 2022. • Audience: Ages 14–18. • Summary: When the president’s daughter—eighteen-year-old Leigh Chen—ends up on the only ship escaping a dying earth, she and a group of teenagers must grapple with the challenges of what it will take to survive as the last remnants of humanity.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021011160 • ISBN 9781368064729 (hardcover) • ISBN 9781368065344 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Survival—Juvenile fiction. • Environmental disasters—Juvenile fiction. • Teenagers—Juvenile fiction. • Space flight—Juvenile fiction. • Interpersonal relations—Juvenile fiction. • Outer space—Juvenile fiction. • CYAC: Survival—Fiction. • Environmental disasters—Fiction. • Space flight—Fiction. • Interpersonal relations—Fiction. • Outer space—Fiction. • LCGFT: Psychological fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R427 Al 2022 • DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23
Visit www.hyperionteens.com
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
PART ONE: FLIGHT
Chapter 1: July 19, 2072
Chapter 2: Alone
Chapter 3: The New World
Chapter 4: The Pilot
PART II: THE LAZARUS
Chapter 5: How to Forget a Home
Chapter 6: The Ship’s Crew
Chapter 7: Augmented Reality
Chapter 8: The Conservation of Energy
Chapter 9: Red Tape
Chapter 10: The Hermes
Chapter 11: Crawl Space
Chapter 12: The Lock and the Cell
Chapter 13: Forward
Chapter 14: Back
PART III: NEWDAY
Chapter 15: The Order of the Republic
Chapter 16: The Golden Record
Chapter 17: Flying Lessons
Chapter 18: Open Spaces
Chapter 19: Artifact
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Li An,
first first reader
I REMEMBER ONE NIGHT MORE CLEARLY THAN THE REST. It was the hottest July on record, and I was fifteen, lying awake and sweaty on the faded linen sofa in Lilly’s basement. With the way the crickets were squalling, Lilly couldn’t get to sleep, which meant no chance of sleep for Marcus or me, either. So the three of us were talking ourselves out into the universe, fantasizing in scratchy voices about God and death and the first day of sophomore year, and around two a.m., we wound up whispering about the end of the world.
We’d kicked the questions around before. Maybe you did, too. If the Apocalypse hit tomorrow, which five people would you pick for your zombie survival team? Which three things would you take down to the nuclear bunker? What would you save from the wasteland?
We never settled on answers. Lilly drifted off halfway through, and the next morning, Marcus kept swapping his choices back and forth, clarifying the rules over breakfast. “Is there internet in this wasteland?” he asked, thumbing his glasses up. “If I brought my headset, could I have unlimited games?”
Lilly rolled her eyes and said, “God, Marcus, what kind of amateur apocalypse do you think this is?” and I lay back in her window seat and laughed, loose-limbed, careless, because everything we were saying felt unreal.
That was three years ago. Now, most nights, I lie awake and watch those moments replaying across the backs of my eyelids. I retrace the pikes of sunlight angled through the kitchen window or feel the frayed threads of the sofa, the patches that Lilly’s golden retriever pawed to death when he was too young to know better. I hear the way my best friends sighed after they laughed, deep and contented, like they’d just taken a cold drink on a hundred-degree day. It hurts to remember, knowing that two months later, the announcements froze that world like amber engulfing a living thing. But I can’t make myself stop.
I wish I could show it to you, too—really show you. I wish I could scan my old life out into VR space so you could walk all the way inside. We’d step through Lilly’s messy little kitchen like archaeologists through some perfectly preserved temple, and I’d pause the scene, point to the scar on Lilly’s chin, and tell you that happened when we were thirteen, the day she hacked off a foot of her hair with a pair of garden shears on a dare from Marcus. He wasn’t even being serious, and as for me, I stood there and watched with a stupid grin on my face, not believing it would happen until it did. And maybe you’d say Lilly sounds reckless or impulsive, and Marcus and I should have known better. And I’d say, probably, but that’s Lilly, that’s Marcus, that’s us. That’s what I’d save.
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.
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.
<
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.
“Hey! Hey.” I touch the girl’s back, and she twists toward me. She looks maybe thirteen. Her dark eyes are enormous, and she’s breathing so hard that her lips are fluttering like paper.
“It’s okay,” I say, hoping she knows some English. “We’re nearly aboard. We just have to follow the launch process.”
I expect the girl to snap at me, or maybe to burst into tears, but she hesitates instead, searching my face. I glance at my reflection in the elevator door and see what she sees. I’m as straight-backed and composed as my mother delivering a speech. My fear is invisible.
“What process?” the girl says, still shaky. Some of the other kids are watching, too—the ones who toured the Launch Control Center yesterday instead of the Lazarus. Their group must not have gone over the procedure.
I raise my voice. “Passengers go up to the cabins and follow the instruction cards in the bedside tables. Just stay calm. The crew will be here soon.”
The words have hardly left my lips when the elevator door cranks open. We clatter out through the access arm, and at the end of the passageway, we have a stroke of luck. The hull door is already open. After crowding into the airlock, we find the secondary bay doors open, too.
We step into the Lazarus. The ship is another universe, quiet, still, and dim. We’ve emerged in the atrium: the intersection of the four wings, the center of the ship’s X. Overhead, walkways curve like ribs through ten stories of space, joining one wing to another, limned with traces of light. I wonder about the lights, why those recessed spots are already glowing like eyes in the jungle.
“Syuda, syuda,” Sergei calls, waving everyone toward a ramp that spirals up the wall, leading to the ship’s interior elevator bay. I’m about to follow when my gaze snags on a Korean boy’s profile. In the half-light, shaggy black hair disheveled and glasses askew, he looks like Marcus.
Right now, is the Cho family driving to the nearest bunker site, Marcus’s sister watching the eruptions on her phone while the fiery pictures flicker across Marcus’s enhancement lenses? Is Lilly flying around her bedroom, snatching up mementos while Mrs. Dionizio yells for her to hurry?
If my mother were here, she would take one look at me and say, Leigh, are you with us? It’s a phrase she says brusquely, like a teacher checking on a distracted student during class, but to me it’s always been reassuring. I notice you’re gone, she’s saying. What can I do to bring you back?
The thought of her wipes out every other thought, the way a dead bulb in a string of lights makes the rest go dark. My parents are in Geneva for a summit of the Global Fleet Planning Commission, and there’s nothing like a launch site anywhere in Europe. Besides the Lazarus, our prototype, every ship in the fleet is still a half-finished husk. The other kids and I traveled out to California to learn how our ships would operate next year, like a field trip. We were supposed to be tourists here, not permanent residents.
I shove my hand into my backpack, groping around for my watch and earpiece. I have to call my parents. Lilly and Marcus, too, before they’re underground and out of range. I rip at zippers, stretch elastic, but halfway through searching the front pocket, I lose my momentum, because suddenly I remember the watch’s milky solar strip glinting, half-covered by the pillow where I stashed it last night for safekeeping.
A high-pitched noise builds in my throat. Safekeeping. I want to fling my bag across the atrium, but I can’t move.
Even if I were back there, if I could call and they could answer, we’d say—what? What could we fit into this last shred of time? What could I possibly say that would be enough?
“Leigh!”
I startle back into myself. Sergei is at the top of the ramp, Caro at his side. He makes a frantic motion toward the elevators.
“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…
