It isn't safe for Cass Mendoza at Halcyon High anymore, not after the sky over Tidewater burned green and the planetarium imploded from the inside. So Cass and their best friends, June Park and Theo Rangel, grab boards, a duffel of batteries and instant noodles, and the star maps Dr. Mireille Sato left behind—cryptic notes scribbled on bus transfers, coordinates hidden in mixtapes, and a password that changes with the phases of the moon. It's up to them to decode what Sato really meant before AstraDyne's black vans or the cops pin the planetarium collapse on them. Their cross-country odyssey takes them from the wind-whipped bowl under the St. Johns Bridge in Portland to the silent ribs of the Coyote Ridge Observatory in New Mexico, from a skatepark cut into Denver's old freight docks to a lake of black glass in Utah where the air tastes like thunder. Everywhere they roll, someone is listening for them: drones disguised as gulls, rival crews paid to watch, and rumors of a signal that makes metal sing.
While they dodge capture and scrape through with scraped palms and stolen rooftops, their friendship is tested in ways they never imagined—by secrets Cass keeps about their missing sister, Luz; by the way Theo hesitates before every risk; by June's belief that some rules should never bend. The ultimate showdown lights up the place their story began: the Tidewater Bowl, that concrete cradle of summer where Cass first learned to drop in, now blooming with stardust that hums to rhythm and motion. There, under a sky stitched with aurora and satellites, shocking last-minute revelations collide with acts of reckless courage and a new kind of magic—constellations you can ride, gravity you can tune with your heartbeat. The mysteries tie off as cleanly as grip tape on fresh wood, and the message that powers every push remains clear: choice weighs more than destiny, and love outlasts even the cold of space.
Series Information: Thirteen-year-old Cassio 'Cass' Mendoza is a board-obsessed kid in Tidewater, Oregon, living above Sunlotus Skate with their mom when a midnight meteor shower changes everything. A shard from the dunes hums in Cass's pocket, the deck they build from wrecked maple feels alive underfoot, and strangers start asking about the scar shaped like a comet on Cass's wrist. With new friends June and Theo, they stumble into a rising force that once tried to rewrite the sky—a private network of weaponized satellites and a project code-named Perseids. As Cass learns the truth about their family, the planetarium's secrets, and what it means to stand your ground, they find a chosen family of shop rats, night-shift astronomers, and kids who skate like they're writing letters to the stars. These neon-and-salt-air stories are rich with alleyway sessions, parking-lot powwows, late-bus courage, and skies full of impossible promise—perfect for tearing through alone or reading aloud on the long ride home from the park.
