Zythra: Volume 2

Subject H-3097 is the most important asset in the Coalition's Hybrid Development Program. She is also sixteen, and she has started a list. The list is titled "Things Nobody Told Her," and item one arrives with the dinosaurs — who did not go extinct so much as leave early, and who would now like a reasonable portion of their planet back, in writing, with copies. What follows is a run of small catastrophes and smaller mercies. The monster both blocs are afraid of turns out to be running a flower shop, and Zythra decides the galaxy can survive one slightly inaccurate file. A committee that has only ever met human teenagers strapped to tables enrolls her in an Arizona high school for total cultural exposure; the experiment concludes on schedule, and the friendships decline to. A footnote about sixteenth birthdays is read aloud in session, with ceremonial consequences. And out past the charts sits the one planet nobody is permitted to visit, guarded not by danger but by an embarrassment so old and so mutual that four civilizations have agreed to keep pretending the meadow never happened. Then there is Marcus. Still in Arizona, still doing his homework, still texting at precisely the wrong hour — and now noticed, and filed, and assigned a solution by people with a directive and a very bright beam. Ten chapters. One birthday. No declared wars, though not for lack of committee effort. Volume Two of ZYTHRA — a comedy of enormous scale and extremely domestic stakes.