New Release

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 XL-136 was supposed to be a beginning.
Dr. Vita Townsend has spent her career studying how worlds can be made habitable. Now she leads the crew of the spaceship Calliope beyond the outer rim to survey a lush alien planet that could become humanity’s next home.
But an impossible electrical storm tears the Calliope from the sky, stranding them beyond rescue.
Stuck on an alien planet with little hope of rescue, Vita and her surviving crew race to repair their vessel. But XL-136 is quickly proving not to be the passive wilderness their scans had indicated. Its plants respond to touch. Its creatures adapt with impossible speed. And buried beneath the jungle are signs that someone from Earth has been here before.
As the crew’s own biology begins to change, one truth becomes terrifyingly clear:
The longer they remain on XL-136, the harder it becomes to tell whether they are adapting to the planet—or the planet is adapting to them.
BEYOND THE RETURN is a dark science-fiction survival thriller where exploration gives way to isolation, and survival depends on understanding a world that refuses to behave as it should.