Chapter One
Nest

The trip to Mars was the hardest thing they’d ever experienced. That’s what the grown-ups said. The small, cramped ship. The constant fear of something going wrong. The knowledge that they could never return to Earth.

But honestly, it sounded like a cakewalk compared to sharing a bedroom with Albie.

Because he snored.

I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since Albie started bunking with me. I’d tried just about everything to block the noise: earplugs, sleeping under the blanket, even a thick hat with earflaps. But none of them worked.

It was surprising because Albie was perfect. He was easygoing and did his chores without complaining. Of all us kids, he was the least likely to throw a fuss. The grown-­ups trusted him, even Sai. But it turned out there was one thing Albie wasn’t good at: sleeping quietly. And I didn’t know which was worse: Albie’s snoring or Trey wanting to change rooms

For as long as I could remember, Trey had slept in the bed across from mine. My drawings of cats and his drawings of aliens had papered the walls. Our plastic models crowded the shelves together. Then, two months ago, Trey suddenly asked to switch bedrooms. Next thing I knew, Trey was sleeping across the hall in the older kids’ room with Vera and Flossy, while Albie was snoring in mine.

And me?

I wasn’t sleeping at all.

Neither was Leo, from the looks of it. The old cat was sitting up in bed, flicking his tail in annoyance.

This room-­switching thing had happened once before. Back when Trey and I were little, the grown-­ups had moved us boys into one room and the girls into the other. Albie was older than me and Trey and so he was allowed to stay up later. The problem was that Albie would make a lot of noise when he came to bed, and he’d wake us up. The experiment was abandoned after a week. Now, all these years later, Albie was keeping me awake again.

Across the room from me, Albie let out a loud, waffling snort. I groaned, pulling the pillow over my head.

“Albie,” I said.

He didn’t move.

“Albie!” I shouted.

He sat up abruptly, looking around the dimly lit room in confusion. Albie was tall, with broad shoulders. Darby said he would’ve made a good football player. Football was an Earth game where you threw around a ball and knocked into people. I didn’t really understand it.

“What’s wrong, Bell?” Albie asked, his hair sticking out crazily everywhere. It was always funny to see him without his Dodgers ball cap. He only took it off at bedtime.

“You’re snoring!” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought there was an emergency.”

“It is an emergency! I can’t sleep!”

“I’m so sorry, Bell,” he mumbled, and lay back down. “I promise not to snore anymore.”

It was hard to be angry at Albie. He was kind and gentle—­a big teddy bear when it came right down to it.

A big snoring teddy bear.

“Aw, dust it,” I muttered. Albie could have the room to himself. I grabbed my blanket and left, Leo padding after me.

Not that I blamed him.

Even a cat couldn’t take Albie’s snoring.

V

Leo and I walked down the twisting corridor, our way lit by the cool blue light of nighttime. The light changed to mirror the time of day. In the morning, the blue would transform to a warm, bright yellow. This was supposed to help us have a sense of time because the settlement...