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Welcome Talia’s author website, where you’ll find anything and everything pertaining to her novels as she works toward getting published. Feel free to take a look around and stay a while!

Get a glimpse of her first novel!

Some fates are worse than death–survival is one of them.

In the two hundred years since humanity left the Earth’s surface to live in the sky, life on the ground faded to a myth, a tragic memory from which they severed themselves to survive. They floated above continents turned to sand and lands swallowed by the seas, watched storm after storm rage against their cities and their monuments until they broke apart the last vestiges of civilization, the many paying penance for the greed of the few.

As a lightning harvester charged with flying her ship into these storms for energy, Raina has seen more of the planet than most. She has spent her entire life soaring above its craters and scars, studying the gaping wounds of human devastation, as she honed her skills and became the youngest captain in storm-chaser history.

Her ship has flown for generations. Her skills are unparalleled.

But none of that matters the day they go down.

Read an excerpt of the first chapter:

Day One

ONLY WHEN RAINA WOKE from the crash did she realize, after a lifetime of defying it, that death had never been the enemy. Looking at the bodies crumpled and twisted in the wreckage around her, she found the real menace in the rise and fall of their chests. Not even the fear of dying could compare to the terror in living.
The bridge had blown apart, the wheel wedged in the far wall, and a massive gash split the hull in two. Sunlight poured in between its jaws, jagged edges of twisted metal devouring the day. It bathed the carnage in gold, glancing off smoke and ash, and carving a path of light through the debris. A white butterfly fluttered through.
Her eyes fell on the gash in her wrist and she stared at it as if it belonged to someone else, watching the blood slide down her arm and drip to the floor. From there she looked up with blank eyes, staring at her crew strapped into the starboard wall, slumped against their harnesses, clouded behind air thick and swollen with smoke.
She tried to move her arm, but it did not respond, lying limp across her chest. She tried her legs. Nothing. Her mind felt like it was submerged, her thoughts muffled and distant, a fog hanging thick over them. Move, she thought.
She swam through her own body, tugging on the thread that would lead her back to herself, guiding her mind upwards for air. Slowly, so slowly, she turned her head to the side. A figure sat hunched in on himself, his shoulders shaking. She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came out.
He turned, and relief cut through the haze as she locked eyes with Rance, tears streaking through the dirt on his face. “Raina,” he whispered.
Behind him, another figure moved. She squinted, peering through smoke and ash as they came forward, their name echoing in the back of her mind, too far for her to reach.
“Raina, we need you,” they said. She blinked, and his face cleared. Kieran. “Help us.”
His words rang through her, and her eyes flitted back to the bodies behind him. She grabbed the thread with all her strength and pulled, willing herself back into her body, into her pain. “The others?” she managed, her tongue heavy in her mouth.
Kieran offered her something, and this time, she reached out to grab it. A canteen. She took a sip, but her hand trembled and water spilled onto her face. She reached up to wipe her mouth. Her arm came away bloody.
“Raina,” Kieran said again. “We need to get out of here.”
In the distance, she heard a howl.