The Cloud Herder of Venus

About this book:

High in the breathable cloud decks of Venus, twelve-year-old Toby apprentices as a cloud herder—guiding massive, semi-living storms away from the floating domes of Cloudburst City with nothing but a lance, a glide harness, and nerves of steel. When a routine herding run goes violently wrong, Toby breaks protocol to save the city's anchor lines and discovers something impossible in the planet's crushing depths: a rhythmic pulse in the atmosphere, and vast, geometric shapes herding the storms themselves. Someone—or something—is driving the weather, and it's learning to hunt.

Master Corvo has spent a lifetime reading the amber skies, but even his mechanical eyes can't explain the intelligence stirring beneath the sulfuric veil. As the Guild dismisses Toby's warnings and the city's leaders cling to comfortable ignorance, a new class of storm rises—faster, smarter, and hungry for the metal hearts of humanity's last refuge. With his master hiding secrets and his only allies a rusted skyskimmer crew and a girl who speaks to storms through forbidden radio frequencies, Toby must master the deadliest currents in the solar system before the sky itself turns against them.

*The Cloud Herder of Venus* blends white-knuckle aerial action with deep mystery in a world where the atmosphere is alive, the surface is hell, and the only thing standing between fifty thousand people and dissolution is a boy who refuses to look away from the dark. For readers who crave inventive world-building, mentor-apprentice bonds forged in fire, and the thrill of watching a hero earn his wings one deadly thermal at a time.