Tearfall
About
The Grays promised salvation. They brought Tearfall instead.
A woman surviving on spite and pork jerky.
An alien warrior honor-bound to atone for the mistakes of his people.
A secret that will destroy the last of humanity.
Captured and taken aboard the Grays’ warship, Cat wants nothing to do with the alien warriors who destroyed her planet. But when she discovers that people are disappearing from the Safeties—and that humanity faces total extinction—she must help her enemy unravel the mystery.
As the truth emerges, Tavik faces an impossible choice: betray his kind and his creed, or defend the defiant human survivor who has upended his reality.
And Cat, who has no desire to be a hero, must do the one thing the end of the world has taught her to avoid at all costs: trust someone with her life.
Praise for this book
Melissa Mickelsen’s Tearfall is set on a spectacularly ruined Earth. The reworking of humanity's digital preservation in place of biological life is unique in a genre full of the same rinse-and-repeat ideas. The tech is well executed, with ship-mounted hyper cannons that vaporize and wholly believable chains of command. An aptly named Rex is a sanctimonious commander with a warped view of what, and who, are expendable for his own preservation. I found it eerily relatable to real life right now. Caitlin is the perfect combination of likeable, reactive, flawed, and emotionally transparent, and rubs some of that goodness onto Tavik, whom I'd follow across a wasteland. Perhaps that desire comes from the author's ability to breathe visual life into the landscapes, the standout being a dry inland sea and its miles of cracked earth ringed by mountains, a living perimeter, and the vertical glow of migration. I'm here for whatever Mickelsen gives us next. Very highly recommended.