The Ninth Town

A literary YA superhero story about power, disposability, and who a town decides is worth spending.

The government poisoned Alderton, Illinois sixty years ago — and then waited for everyone to forget. They almost did.

Cal Hale is seventeen and has spent two years learning to keep his hands cold, because of what happens when they aren't. He's not the only teenager in his dying Rust Belt town who can do the impossible. And now a woman in a gray coat has arrived, unhurried and kind, with a folder full of towns just like his — eight of them, each one used up and quietly closed.

Alderton is the ninth.

Saving it will cost more than Cal knows how to pay, and force him and his friends to answer the question the town has been avoiding for sixty years: whether a place is worth fighting for when the whole world has already decided to look away.

For readers of Nimona, Steelheart, and The Rest of Us Just Live Here.