Over the hills, the greenhouse glowed in the distance like a lighthouse, leading me onward, getting us there where the heater was warm and the seedlings grew, where the radio might work. Tonight I would tend to our wounds. In the morning, I would bury the gun in the snow. The people in the camp on the hill would cook us breakfast, if this was a good place. I would let them help. I was ready. Inside the greenhouse, Starla was stirring. She reached for the seeds at her feet.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Eric Smith, who is a champion among agents; to Margot Mallinson, my dream editor; and to everyone at MIRA. For their friendship, encouragement, and assistance with this story, thank you to Ellee Achten, David Dodd Lee, Angel Lemke, Geri Lipschultz, Robert N. Solomon, Michael Stearns, Christina Veladota, and Carrie Ann Verge. I am grateful to Alyssa Stegmaier, Erin Perko, Erin Glaser, Katie Miller, Morgan Hyatt, Angie Mazakis, and Sophia Veladota for their time and patience. Thank you most of all to my family, especially Andrew Villegas and Henry. I’ll take first watch.

Excerpt

Keep reading for a special preview of the next stunning novel by

Philip K Dick Award-winning author Alison Stine.

TRASHLANDS

In a future a few generations from now, the coastlines have been redrawn by floods and tides. In the garbage dump that was once Appalachia, a woman named Coral and her cobbled-together family work collecting plastic—the only valuable currency—as she struggles to save enough to free her son from the recycling factories.

A resonant, visionary novel about the power of art, parenthood, community, and the sacrifices we are willing to make for the ones we love.

CHAPTER 1

Early Coralroot

Corallorhiza trifida

Coral was pregnant then. She hid it well in a dress she had found in the road, sun-bleached and mud-dotted, only a little ripped. The dress billowed to her knees, over the tops of her boots. She was named for the wildflower which hadn’t been seen since before her birth, and for ocean life, poisoned and gone. It was too dangerous to go to the beach anymore. You never knew when storms might come.

Though they were going—to get a whale.

A boy had come from up north with a rumor: a whale had beached. Far off its course, but everything was off by then: the waterways, the paths to the ocean, its salt. You went where you had to go, where weather and work and family—but mostly weather—took you.

The villagers around Lake Erie were carving the creature up, taking all the good meat and fat. The strainer in its mouth could be used for bows, the bones in its chest for tent poles or greenhouse beams.