The Life Below

"The sequel to The Final Six raises the stakes for its spacefaring teen astronauts" in a "fast-paced" and "fun" young adult sci-fi fantasy ( Kirkus Reviews). It was hard enough for Naomi to leave Leo, a fellow Final Six contestant, behind on a dying Earth. Now she doesn't know who to trust as she embarks on a mission to discover if Europa is habitable for humans. The International Space Training Camp dodges every question about its past failed mission, and Naomi is suspicious that not everything is as it seems on her own mission to Europa. With just one shot at Jupiter's moon, Naomi is determined to find out if there is dangerous alien life on Europa before she and her crew get there. Leo, back on Earth, has been working with renegade scientist Dr. Greta Wagner, who promises to fly him to space where he can dock with Naomi's ship. And if Wagner's hypothesis is right, it isn't a possibility of coming in contact with extraterrestrial life on Europa—it's a definite, and it's up to Leo to find and warn Naomi and the crew. Everything gets more dangerous the closer that the mission gets to Europa, and all questions the ISTC has been avoiding get answered in a terrifying way. If the dream was to establish a colony for humans on Europa . . . the Final Six are about to enter a nightmare. Praise for The Final Six: "This is a space competition of epic proportions." —Kendare Blake, #1 New York Time s bestselling author "So intense the pages practically fly by." — School Library Journal