Six months after Kendra Blake was abandoned on the desert planet called Astrid, failing her coming-of-age ritual?where eighteen-year-olds are sent to a dystopian world to pass a series of tests to prove themselves and are abandoned there to die if they can't?she's settled into a new life. With her handsome alien friend, Kai, and her baby sand dragon, Oz, all she's trying to do is survive on a hostile planet and protect her new village.

But when her best friend from Earth, Hayden Peterson, arrives to take his ritual, Kendra knows she has to help him. With the tests becoming even more challenging, it's clear the ritual's creator, Richmond Gideon, the billionaire owner of a space company called Minerva, is trying to punish her for daring to start a rebellion to end the cruel game.

When her alien friends start creating their own spacecraft to head to Earth and confront Gideon, Kendra will have to find more allies to join her rebellion in the dangerous outskirts of Astrid, dodge enemies and traitors, and try not to die on an increasingly lethal sand planet. Can Kendra get back to Earth and save the two worlds?