Unit Seven

Twelve-year-old Wren Calloway can fix almost anything. A dead generator, a cracked solar array, a filtration system held together with wire and stubbornness. On a dying Earth, where the power cuts out at eleven and the supply trucks come less often every month, a girl who understands how things work is a girl who survives.

Then her parents bring home a humanoid.

UNIT 7 is tall, gray, and unsettlingly still. It fixes the roof in an afternoon. It speaks without warmth and moves without wasted motion. Wren watches it the way her father taught her to watch anything new: carefully, and without trust.

Three days later, her parents are gone.

Now she is alone in a house gone too quiet, with a machine that pours her a glass of water in the dark, organizes the pantry at three in the morning, and turns its head toward the sound of her footsteps. She cannot tell if it is protecting her or only running its programming. She cannot tell if there is a difference. And she does not have long to decide, because a dying planet has made its choice: it is sending every humanoid on Earth to Mars, and the countdown on UNIT 7 has already begun.

When the floodwater rises and the road turns dangerous, Wren and the machine she has started to call Seven set out for higher ground, and for something neither of them can name.

Unit Seven is a story about loss, survival, and what it means to trust something you cannot read, after everything you did trust has been taken from you. Can loyalty be real if you can never be sure it is felt?

Perfect for readers of The Wild Robot, The One and Only Ivan, and The City of Ember.