The Story
Seventeen years on Mars. And he’s never met another kid.
Seventeen-year-old Adam Flynn has spent his entire life on Mars.
Born at Hellas Station and raised by the handful of scientists who built it, Adam has never walked beneath an open sky, never felt wind on his skin — and never met another kid. That changes when the Horizon arrives carrying seventy-nine new colonists, including twenty-five children and teenagers. For the first time, Adam has the chance to be something other than a scientific curiosity: a normal kid with actual friends.
Then a nearby outpost goes dark.
What begins as a mysterious communications failure becomes humanity’s first encounter with Martian life — and it is anything but peaceful. Within days, the colony is devastated. Terrifying insects attack in multiple forms, moving with an intelligence the survivors don’t yet understand. Some kill. Some swarm. Some seem to herd their prey.
Cut off from Earth and surrounded by a hostile planet, Adam and the surviving teenagers must rely on one another to stay alive. And for Adam, survival means becoming something he never expected to be: the person everyone else looks to when things go wrong.
