Every Almost

The Emberkind Series, Book 1

By Elizabeth Hale

One fell from the stars. The other has been catching strays for thirteen years. Neither expected to rescue each other.

Charlie Wickett fixes things for a living. Engines, mostly. Broken systems, always. She spent the 1980s building a life in California worth having: a career at JPL she fought for, a sister who’d burn down the world for her, and the hard-won freedom of being exactly who she is.

On New Year’s Day, 1990, she disappears from an empty JPL campus and wakes up forty light-years from home, covered in alien pastry batter, wearing a Fleetwood Mac t-shirt, on the kitchen floor of an interspecies rescue vessel called the Emberkind.

The crew is not human. The ship is not from any star chart she recognizes. And the captain, a Kaelari woman named Reyna Solas with sage green skin and gold bioluminescent markings, has spent the last thirteen years making sure nobody gets close enough to matter.

Charlie has a Walkman, a bag of mixtapes, and the stubborn conviction that the ship’s engines could run better. She is not wrong. About the engines.

She is, however, profoundly unprepared for everything else.

Every Almost is an adult sapphic sci-fi slow-burn romance about a woman who lost her world and a captain who lost hers, six months of impossible rescues and 80s music in alien corridors, and two people discovering that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy is the distance between almost and enough.