Star Splitter

The place had been trashed.

Panels were torn from the walls, exposing bundles of tangled wires, and some of the ship s guts had been ripped out. Cables hung from the openings and snaked across the floor. The few scattered pieces of equipment I could see looked dented and damaged. Even the bulkheads appeared crooked, their edges no longer perfectly joined in the corners.

Then I saw the bed on the floor.

A chill crawled across my shoulders and down my back. It looked like a nest between an outer wall and a control console. There were blankets and a few other random items, like a flashlight and a pile of empty food ration packages. It smelled like a bed, even from across the room. Not terrible, just the familiar, musty odor of sheets that needed to be changed. But that only made it creepier, because it meant that someone had been living in there with me while I was being printed.

That wasn t how destination ships were supposed to run. This was not how a destination ship was supposed to look. I wondered if there had been a mistake, and they d sent me to the wrong place, some abandoned or derelict ship, possibly light-­years from where I was supposed to be. That could explain the awareness spreading through every newly printed cell of my body that something was off, physically. Something I couldn t quite identify.

I looked for anything close by that I could use to cover myself, and right next to the body printer, on a narrow table that pulled down from a bulkhead, I saw underwear, a tank top, and a jumpsuit. Someone had folded them neatly and left them there. For me. A pair of utility boots waited in the shadow of the pull-­down table, along with a pair of compression socks.

I slid down from the body printer to the floor, where I felt and heard the gritty scrape of sand beneath my bare feet. There wasn t supposed to be dirt on a spaceship, either. But I hurried, shivering, to pull on the underwear and tank top, then snatched up the jumpsuit and unfolded

Matthew J. Kirby is the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of the middle grade novels The Clockwork Three, Icefall, The Lost Kingdom, Infinity Ring Book 5: Cave of Wonders, and The Quantum League series, the Dark Gravity Sequence, and the Assassin’s Creed series, Last Descendants. He was named a Publishers Weekly Flying Start, he has won the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, the PEN Center USA award for Children’s Literature, and the Judy Lopez Memorial Award, and has been named to the New York Public Library’s 100 Books for Reading and Sharing, and the ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults lists. He is also a school psychologist, and currently lives in Utah with his wife and three step-kids.

A 2024 Edgar Award Nominee!

A Best Fiction for Young Adults selection  A Kirkus Best Book of the Year A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year A Core Excellence in Young Adult Science Fiction selection

A twisty mystery of partial truths and unexpected reveals. BCCB

The expertly juggled storyline nurtures a tension that blossoms into a palpable sense of dread as the downright spooky nature of the disaster is explored. Themes of identity hit hard, as they come with high stakes. An intense, read-in-one-sitting kind of ride. Kirkus, starred review

Dual timelines imbued with believable hard science, harrowing action, and strong characterizations permeate Kirby s breakneck adventure. Questions of personhood are skillfully elevated, explored against an inventive future backdrop in which cloning is the norm and the potential consequences of deceptively simple-sounding procedures come at high costs. Publishers Weekly