Afterlight

Three years after the sky burned, seventeen-year-old Raine Hollow knows the rules of survival: trust no one, protect your own, and never forget that hope is a liability. In the overgrown ruins of her hometown, her entire world consists of two things: the endless search for supplies and her ten-year-old brother, Luca, whose innocence is the last light in the suffocating dark. The silence of their existence is shattered when a crew of armed scavengers rolls into town, led by the infuriatingly confident Cal Rylan.

Nineteen, tattooed, and carrying the ghosts of the old world in his eyes, Cal is everything Raine has learned to fear. He and his crew are just passing through, but a violent radiation storm and the emergence of a new, terrifying predator in the wasteland forces them into a tense, uneasy alliance. Trapped together, the friction between Raine and Cal ignites a spark neither of them expected, and the walls Raine so carefully built begin to crumble.

But Cal is hiding something—a secret tied to the off-world evacuation ships and the very day the world fell apart. When Raine overhears his crew plotting a betrayal that threatens the one person she has left, she’s faced with an impossible choice. Trusting Cal could get them killed, but in a world of ash and monsters, the boy who broke down her defenses might be their only chance at seeing another dawn.