" Telling Stories, Creating Worlds.”

In 2248, Mason Hale is one of Fleet's most dependable engineers, and he has spent his life waiting for the captain's chair his father once held. When Fleet offers him a place aboard the Elysium, humanity's first ship to another habitable world, he can only accept on his own terms: his mother, whose memory is beginning to slip, must come with him, along with her android caretaker Ava and the family's golden retriever, Bailey. He also wants a written promise that the mission will finally move his career forward. On the other side of the continent, botanist Olivia Bennett is given three days to say goodbye to everything she knows. She has spent her career dreaming of the forests of Kepler-186f, and she has been chosen to study them first.

 

Their paths cross at the launch-day security checkpoint, where Mason quietly saves the three research plants Olivia nearly loses. Over six months of deep space, that first favor grows into friendship and then love. Around them, the ship becomes a small world of its own, with a snow-filled park, a curved cinema, a restaurant beneath the stars, and a crew that starts to feel like family. But not everything aboard is as settled as it seems. A fault Mason repaired on launch day was never fully explained, and when debris begins slipping past the ship's defenses, his emergency repair outside the hull nearly costs him his life.

 

The night before landing, an asteroid appears on the ship's long-range sensors, larger and faster than anything the crew has faced, and the Elysium races to reach the planet before it does. The ship makes it to Kepler-186f, but not the way anyone planned, and the crash that finally brings it to rest does more than damage the ship. Far beneath the surface of the world the crew traveled so far to reach, something ancient has felt them arrive.