This is the end. The colony ship USC Westbound carries the last survivors from Earth, but a strange and incurable virus is killing everyone. In a desperate attempt to save the species, Executive Order 13 is set in motion. Shuttles equipped with stasis-chambers are loaded with elite Academy students who are immune to the disease, launching them into deep space in the hope of finding intelligent life or a hospitable planet.
Everything goes wrong.
Only one Academy student makes it to the shuttles, 15-year old Josh Tedesco, a mental case who has been wasting away in a cell. As rebels seek to gain the shuttles for themselves, Josh’s shuttle is launched in haste with a young female stowaway by the name of Leah who isn’t from the Academy and may not even be immune to the virus. Their mission seems doomed to fail before it can even begin.
After crash landing on an Earth-like planet, Josh and Leah are thrown into a struggle to survive against impossible odds: a brutal winter, an unknown foe, and only a sliver of hope for survival.
Josh is impatient with Leah, who lacks the skills and physicality that he possesses. Yet Josh hides a terrible secret from his time at the Academy, one that threatens the mission at any moment.
As the horrible truth of the new world is revealed to them, and an alien threat haunts their every move, they must do everything they can for each other to keep their hope, and their mission, alive.
Excerpt:
“She looked beautiful, a stark realization that took him by surprise all at once and in that moment turned slow and capturing, like a thousand pictures being taken within every passing second. The cold resolutions of survival and the calculations against empathy had shattered in a thousand refracted pieces that left only the image of her wet, melancholy eyes, devoid of malice and left vulnerable to him.“
