Redmark: The Neighbor

After fifteen years on Mars, the colonists have named every animal, mapped every rock, and mined the crystal that keeps two planets warm. Kids ride out with the survey crews now. The dark is just the dark. Everything out there has been counted.Sol Vale is six, and every night he taps good-night to the dark.When the Deep Survey drags Drill 9 farther than anyone has ever gone, his whole family goes with it: his sister Juno, twelve, who keeps the roster and keeps her promises, and the kind machine that counts every warm and breathing soul in the colony and has never once said the words I do not know.Then, one night, the dark taps back.And when Drill 9 cracks the roof of a city three billion years old, everything will depend on the one human who has ever spoken to the world below: a six-year-old boy, and the good-night rhythm he has always tapped out into the dark.The Neighbor is the first book of the Redmark Saga: an all-ages science-fiction adventure about the first children of Mars, the machines that count them, and what it costs to see somebody for the first time.