Happy Monday and welcome to my stop on the A Crash of Fate blog tour!! I’m so excited because today I get to share an excerpt of the book with you! Read on to find out more about the book, author, and tour, plus enter to win a print copy of A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Cordova!

Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova
Published on August 6, 2019 by Disney Lucasfilm Press
Genres: YA, Science Fiction
Pages: 352
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Izzy and Jules were best friends until Izzy's family abruptly left Batuu when she was six. But now she's back, and Jules, the boy who never left, is unsure what to make of her. While on the run from vengeful smugglers and an angry pirate, Jules and Izzy will come to terms with who they are, and what they mean to each other.

Prologue

The girl climbed the rock face, higher and higher. She scraped her knee only once, and the cut had already begun to scab over as they neared the top. The frilly dress she wore was covered in sweat and dirt. Her father would be angry with her. He’d sewn in extra panels only the day before because she’d had another growth spurt practically overnight.

“Come on, Jules!” she shouted. “We’re almost there!”

“No fair, Izzy,” the boy called back. Loose pebbles fell over his head, and though he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t afraid of heights, he made the mistake of looking down, only for a moment. His palms were sweating and his belly flip-flopped from the fear of falling. If he wanted to fly, he’d have to get over his fears, and to do that he needed to conquer them. The trouble was, it was easier to think rather than do, and the doing was proving rather difficult. When the boy looked back up, sunlight beamed in his eyes, but he could still see the girl was already a meter or two ahead. He grunted and pushed himself to climb faster. “Your limbs are longer. That’s practically cheating!”

“Practically but not exactly,” she said.

Izzy Garsea held on to the nooks and crannies in the jagged rock. The suns beat overhead, relentless during the dry season. Not a single cloud provided shade, but they’d covered their heads with the scarves Jules’s mother had dyed bright blue only the previous week. Jules had helped, and his fingers were still stained from accidentally sticking his hands into the dye buckets. Blue and purple freckles dotted his golden-brown forearms like constellations.

Using a spire like a ladder to get to a cliff shelf, the boy and girl threw themselves on their backs, victorious smiles painted on their faces. So far away from Black Spire Outpost, it felt like the whole world was laid out just for the two of them. They could scream as loud as they wanted and not be reprimanded. They could do anything.

“One day I’m going to beat you,” Jules said, sitting up.

Izzy giggled and brushed off the pebbles that stuck to her hands. “Keep dreaming, Jules. I’m taller.”

His big toothy smile was sweet. “You won’t always be.” Despite being one year older than the girl, Julen Rakab was still a head shorter. For a six-year-old on Batuu, it meant he got his allowance stolen quite a bit by bigger kids and transient travelers prowling for an easy mark. But the girl never treated him that way. Left alone during the long stretch of day when their parents had to work, they’d forged a bond. With her, he was safe—well, as safe as two little ones could be while rock climbing. But he borrowed some of her fearlessness and followed as far as she was willing to take him.

They settled beneath the shade of gnarly trees that had somehow managed to retain their leaves. From their vantage point, the lands of Batuu spread beneath them, a swell of green and jutting rock. While their respective parents toiled away on various farms, the girl and the boy made plans of their own.

They unpacked their snacks from their pockets: a bag of popped grains he’d made the night before, dried fruit from the Garsea pantry, caf beans covered in chocolate she’d snuck from her mother’s hidden tin of sweets, and a canister of fresh water. They shared everything, but the boy always gave the girl a slightly larger bite of fruit, let her have her fill of chocolate and water.

“Da says I can start working on the farm for next year’s harvest,” he told her, handing over the metal canteen.

The girl gasped. Her already wide green eyes went wider. “But, Jules, who will play with me then?”

“I’ll still play with you, I promise.”

“Not every day.  I hardly ever see my parents at home. They leave at sunsrise, and by the time they come home, it’s dark and they’re too tired to do anything but eat and sleep.”

“Yeah, but they’re old.” The boy shook his head, hoping to reassure her. “My sister gets home and works on her knitting to sell in the market.”

“Why can’t you start when you’re older?” the girl asked.

“Because Da says if I want my own ship, I have to save for it myself.”

“Your own ship?” she said with wonder. She tipped her head to look up at the sky. A small luxury vessel was making its way to Black Spire. The Outpost was only a little cluster of buildings from that distance, but she knew how busy it was. Her father had let her go along with him once. She had drunk in the open shops, the bustling streets, the smell of roasted meats and nuts. “Will you take me with you?”

“Of course, Izzy. We can explore new moons and planets.”

Zoraida Córdova is the award-winning author of the Brooklyn Brujas series and The Vicious Deep trilogy. Her short fiction has appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, and Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft. She is the co-editor of Vampires Never Get Old, a YA anthology forthcoming from Imprint/Macmillan in fall 2020.  Her upcoming YA novels include Star Wars: A Crash of Fate (Disney/LucasFilm 2019) and Incendiary, book 1 in the Hollow Crown duology (Disney/Hyperion 2020). Zoraida was born in Ecuador and raised in Queens, New York. When she isn’t working on her next novel, she’s planning her next adventure.

Photo credit: Sarah Younger