The Girl Who Raised Star-Jellies
A Space Station Adventure

About this book:

Fourteen-year-old Lyra Vance has never known a world that doesn't hum at fifty-two hertz—the station's heartbeat, the scrubbers' breath, the centrifuge's lullaby. Waystation Nine is a rusting relic orbiting a dying star, home to twenty-seven souls and a thousand leaking valves. But when her father returns from a routine ice-harvesting run with a cracked canister from a cometary fragment, the station's monotonous rhythm fractures. Inside isn't mineral slurry. It's something that pulses with sapphire light, something that swims through vacuum-cold brine and shouldn't exist forty astronomical units from any sun.

Terrified of Commander Ruiz's biosecurity protocols—which mandate incineration for any unclassified life—Lyra and her mother make a desperate choice: hide the creatures in the station's abandoned drainage sump, beneath the very hydroponics bay that feeds the crew. As the star-jellies multiply in secret, drawing power from the station's failing systems and painting the dark with impossible colors, Lyra finds herself the guardian of a discovery that could save Waystation Nine—or doom them all. With the station's power grid collapsing, oxygen reserves dropping, and suspicion closing in, a fourteen-year-old girl must bridge the gap between bureaucratic survival and a symbiance no manual prepared them for.

Atmospheric, heart-pounding, and luminous with wonder, *The Girl Who Raised Star-Jellies* is a love letter to the kids who grow up in the margins of the future—where every breath is recycled, every rule has a reason, and the most dangerous thing in the universe might just be hope.