Chapter 1
Scout Shannon hugged her dog Shadow tight as she slowly drifted back down to the floor of the spaceship cabin. Shadow was napping, but Scout stared fixedly out the narrow band of viewscreens Liam had configured, which provided a 360-degree view of everything around the ship for her and her companions.
She felt like they were all trapped together in a glass droplet, unable to escape, only able to gaze out at the alien world that stood just out of reach, frozen in time.
Their spaceship sat in the center of a vast lunar plain like an immense reddish-black mirror sparsely dusted over with a layer of what looked like ash. Scout could see it clearly through the screen in the floor of the spaceship as she settled down onto it. It was almost close enough to touch, that ash. It looked
