Ever since the rain turned green, Kyrie’s world has been bathed in glowing dust. She packs it into old mascara tubes and sells it as makeup alongside dried cacti, threadbare blankets, and long-expired canned food. There’s not much else to do when everyone outside Kyrie’s small town in the Mojave Desert died from the plague-bearing rain ten years ago.

Everyone—except the man in the rubber mask.

He’s on the dangerous side of the fence, huffing infected air like it’s nothing, babbling to Kyrie about college and umbrellas and yogurt and everything else that disappeared the day it rained. He doesn’t seem to know that the world ended, and he has no explanation for how he survived the apocalypse. But Kyrie doesn’t believe in ghosts.

She can’t trust him, but he’s right about one thing: Towns without secrets aren’t surrounded by chain-link fences. And chain-link fences won’t keep out the plague forever.

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About the Author

Lauren Smyth is an economics journalist at World News Group. Since signing her first publishing contract at age thirteen, she has written five young adult novels, coded two narrative video games, and started a blog enjoyed by readers and writers around the world. When she’s not in the broadcast studio, you’ll find her crafting episodes of her Grammar Minute writing podcast or training for her next trail run.

More from Lauren

You’d think the apocalypse already happened in Mojave, CA.

Toxic dust could invade your lungs and kill you. Owls burrowed in the ground for lack of trees. Bobcats mated and had their kittens on neighborhood roofs, and every so often, a jet screamed overhead with a thunderclap in its wake.

I arrived in the middle of the night, and when I woke up, I was in a world different from any I had ever known. As a military kid, I had eaten fresh Belgian waffles, stood drenched in Ohio rain, and fallen asleep to Las Vegas lights. But I had never seen a place so unearthly, or so tantalizingly mysterious, as Edwards Air Force Base. I stood at the window and goggled at the scenery for a while. And then I began to make it my own.

One of the first things Edwards AFB taught me was how to write. That was a byproduct of my decision, at a mature eight years old, to become a detective.

My friends and I climbed into a ditch and found a broken arrow, half the feathers ripped away, the point still intact. An assassination attempt, of course. Old golf balls buried in the dirt—secret messages to a dangerous enemy. The allure of jets overhead, of opaque military acronyms, of drab camouflage and deadly temperatures and rumors of drug lords and cowboys and sand sharks wandering the desert, gave wings to our imaginations.

The first story I wrote was a collection of “clues” we’d gathered, an attempt to frame them all into a narrative that explained how the base was going to be attacked and how we—well-prepared with our military IDs and iPods—would save everyone. I started writing in a notebook with a hot pink cover, and a hundred more notebooks kept up the thread. The story wasn’t yet a book. But it was my first attempt at weaving a story greater than anything I had experienced.

Fourteen years have passed. All That Glows is my fifth book. It’s based on everything that came before it—most importantly, on Mojave and Edwards AFB and all the time I spent trying to tease out the desert’s mystery. It captures what I felt when I was there: small, under the broad desert sky and the huge airplanes; large, compared to the tarantulas that scuttled past my boots in the dust; melancholy, when I thought of how far away the rest of the world was; determined and thrilled, as I dove into the adventure I was living and the ones I hadn’t lived yet.

In All That Glows, you’ll poke your finger on cacti needles and get your shoes tangled in grabby creosote. You’ll experience the blazing daytime heat, the tumbleweeds, the bland architecture, and the rest of Edwards AFB’s unusual scenery, all set in fictional towns. You’ll count the desert stars and shiver in the cold twilight wind. You’ll have a mystery of your own to solve, and if you can stick it out to the end, you’ll have befriended a dry-humored, scrappy cast of characters.

Here’s the first line from one of those old notebooks: “When can we go outside, Mom?”

And here’s the first paragraph of All That Glows: “On the night the world ended, raindrops stained our roof tiles green. I was the first to notice when I went outside to dump the dishwater.”

A lot has changed, but the sense of adventure Mojave taught me hasn’t. If anything, since then, the mystery from back then has only heightened. Maybe the golf balls weren’t a secret message, but maybe a new kind of missile was tested while I was there. Maybe the broken arrow was just a kid playing in his backyard, but maybe one of those jets flew faster than sound seven times over.

I won’t ever know. I only have my memories. But I can imagine the battles and the sacrifice and the bravery. And so, if you’ll join me for this expedition, I’ll show you what my mind’s eye saw when I looked out across the desert.

Giveaway

All That Glows Celebration Tour Giveaway