Lab Rat One

Part 3 of the Touchstone Trilogy.

Cassandra Devlin doesn’t know what she's for.  But she knows she's running out of time.

Since Cass was rescued from the abandoned world of Muina, the Aussie teen has proven more than useful to the people of Tare.  Expeditions to their home world no longer end in slaughter.  The teaching city of Kalasa has been unlocked.  After years of searching for answers, they are starting to make progress.

But space is tearing itself apart.  Ionoth attack in ever-greater numbers.  And "the useful stray" has been injured so many times that the Tarens hesitate to use her for fear of losing her.

With one particular Taren now her most important person, Cass is determined to contribute everything she can, and hopes to find some answers of her own.  What is the link between Muina and Earth?  Why are the reclusive Nurans so interested in 'rescuing' her?  And what role in the crisis do the inhuman Cruzatch play?

Can Cass keep herself together long enough to find out?

Book 1 of the Touchstone Trilogy.

On her last day of high school, Cassandra Devlin walked out of exams and into a forest. Surrounded by the wrong sort of trees, and animals never featured in any nature documentary, Cass is only sure of one thing: alone, she will be lucky to survive.

The sprawl of abandoned blockish buildings Cass discovers offers her only more puzzles. Where are the people? What is the intoxicating mist which drifts off the buildings in the moonlight? And why does she feel like she's being watched?

Increasingly unnerved, Cass is overjoyed at the arrival of the formidable Setari. Whisked to a world as technologically advanced as the first was primitive, where nanotech computers are grown inside people's skulls, and few have any interest in venturing outside the enormous whitestone cities, Cass finds herself processed as a 'stray', a refugee displaced by the gates torn between worlds. Struggling with an unfamiliar language and culture, she must adapt to virtual classrooms, friends who can teleport, and the ingrained attitude that strays are backward and slow.

Can Cass ever find her way home?  And after the people of her new world discover her unexpected value, will they be willing to let her leave?

Come for the apocalypse.
Stay for cupcakes.
Die for love.

Madeleine Cost is working to become the youngest person ever to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Her elusive cousin Tyler is the perfect subject: androgynous, beautiful, and famous. All she needs to do is pin him down for the sittings.

None of her plans factored in the Spires: featureless, impossible, spearing into the hearts of cities across the world – and spraying clouds of sparkling dust into the wind.

Is it an alien invasion? Germ warfare? They are questions everyone on Earth would like answered, but Madeleine has a more immediate problem. At Ground Zero of the Sydney Spire, beneath the collapsed ruin of St James Station, she must make it to the surface before she can hope to find out if the world is ending.