Doors to the Stars: She Who Dares, Wins

“My boots crunch on shattered glass as I pick through the city’s skeletal remains.”

My latest novel is a departure from my other more adult-targeted work. I set out to write a short story for my daughters, but ended up creating an epic YA space opera about an orphan sixteen-year-old girl who scavenges radiation-poisoned ruins on a dead planet called Miller’s World.

Her name is Wulan—it means “moon” in her language, and she’ll tell you she’s nothing like what that name implies. “Moon, literally. It means things like, uh, I don’t know… femininity, grace, beauty—stuff like that. Everything I’m not. But I don’t care. Those things don’t keep you alive.”

Her brother Arjuna died from sepsis when he was six—sleeping beside an open sewer will do that. Her friend Cassandra died because Wulan couldn’t find antibiotics in time.

Everything Wulan touches turns to ash.

That’s what she believes, anyway.

The Galactic Concord was a glorious golden age of peace and unity that spanned millennia.

In an age lost to legend, humanity discovered doors to the stars. Ancient alien gates that connected thousands of worlds in an instant. The Galactic Concord used them for millennia—peace, unity, prosperity spanning the galaxy. Then they tore themselves apart in a cataclysmic civil war that fractured the galaxy.

The War’s atrocities traumatized them. The gates—think of it as an allergic reaction—rebelled against the eruption of galactic violence and began rerouting the network randomly, sending entire war fleets into hazardous voids or the hearts of stars.

The gates weren’t just machines—they were living, semi-sentient biotech forming a vast distributed mind. When the violence became too much and the gates started fight back, the Concord panicked and shut the whole network down.

In the chaos that followed, the Ascendancy rose to power on a simple truth: separated worlds are weak worlds. Controllable worlds.

FTL travel exists, but it’s so slow and dangerous that most planets might as well be islands. The Ascendancy hunts down every piece of Forger technology they can find, making damn sure no one can ever turn those gates back on.

But inside a crashed rebel cruiser buried in fifty years of decay, Wulan finds something they missed.

A Forger disk. A key.

And the moment she touches it, everything changes.

The disk calls to her. Wants to bond with her—permanently. Fuse with her flesh and bone. She’ll never be just Wulan again.

But she’ll have the power to wake the gates. Reconnect the galaxy. Break the Ascendancy’s stranglehold on billions of lives.

I told her to keep breathing. And then I stole her air.

There’s one problem: the gates aren’t just technology. They’re minds. Ancient, alien, still traumatized by The War. Wulan doesn’t just need to activate them—she needs to heal them. Negotiate with intelligences so vast and strange she can barely comprehend them.

But when things go catastrophically wrong, Wulan faces an impossible choice: stay human and break under the weight of her failures, or let the disk take her pain—and her humanity with it.

I’m no savior. Ryn said the disk was cursed. But she was wrong; I’m the one who’s cursed. Everything I touch turns to ash.

This isn’t about a chosen one destined to save the galaxy.

This is about a girl who’s already failed everyone she’s ever loved trying to figure out if she can live with what she’s done. Whether atonement is even possible.

It’s about smart people solving impossible problems under impossible pressure—decoding the language of alien minds while running from death squads. About negotiating with traumatized intelligences that could snuff out her consciousness like a candle. About choosing between being a person or becoming a weapon.

And it’s about a radiation-sick junk rat with a battered spherical drone companion who just wanted to keep a few kids alive, but keeps getting dragged into saving a galaxy that never gave a damn about her.

Doors to the Stars is literary science fiction with the guardrails ripped off. It’s dark within YA boundaries—real consequences, real trauma, real guilt carried by characters who don’t get easy absolution. The violence serves the story. The deaths matter. The moral complexity isn’t decoration.

Wulan makes choices with devastating unintended consequences. She contemplates giving up. She bonds with a crew that becomes family just in time to watch them bleed. She faces the reality that healing might require becoming something that scares her more than dying.

But she keeps going. Not because she’s brave. Because stopping would be failing the dead twice over.

She who dares, wins.

But winning might cost everything she has left.

Read the first chapter here.

DOORS TO THE STARS
April 2026

YA was stolen from you—here’s your chance to steal it back. The genre that gave us The Hunger Games, Code Name Verity, and Children of Blood and Bone—stories that trusted teens with real darkness, real consequences, real complexity—has been hijacked by adult romance readers looking for spice ratings instead of substance. Join the Advance Reader Team for Doors to the Stars and be part of proving there’s still an audience for YA that respects your intelligence. You’ll get early access, behind-the-scenes content, and the satisfaction of launching a book that refuses to underestimate you.

Your honest review helps other teens find stories that actually feel true to what being a young adult is like. This is about reclaiming a genre that was always meant to be yours.