This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Cressida Cowell

Excerpt from Which Way Around the Galaxy copyright © 2023 by Cressida Cowell

Cover art copyright © 2023 by Mariano Epelbaum.

Cover design by Sasha Illingworth. Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Interior design by Carla Weise.

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Originally published in 2022 by Hodder & Stoughton Limited in Great Britain

First U.S. Hardcover Edition: September 2023

First U.S. Trade Paperback Edition: October 2024

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023939524

ISBNs: 978-0-316-53649-3 (paperback), 978-0-316-53662-2 (ebook)

E3-20240916-JV-PC-REV

“The Neverland is ‘a map of a child’s mind’…”

I have great dark wings that can fly like a bird through time and space and galaxies.

I have eyes that see into people’s hearts.

Climb on my back and fly with me, child, but get a good hold of my neck, for I fly SWIFT.

Black holes do not scare ME.

I can shrink to the size of the head of a pin. I can grow vaster than the universe.

Hold tight as I jump from planet to planet.

See my cloak of stars!

How bright it is. How dazzling.

Do not trust me too much. For I fling my dust this way, that way, to lead you in dangerous directions. I pretend I am going one way, and then I take you where you do not want to go.

Look!

I am leaping, up and up, out of this world, where the oxygen is too thin for humans to survive!

How long can you hold your breath?

This is a story that is out of this world.

Now, come with me if you dare

And enter a world you have never seen before

Through the ragged “X” made by the swordstick of a pirate.

Can you see that world shining from the other side of the page?

What you thought was solid melts away.

And something different is left behind.

Another map behind the map you thought was there before?

There could be buried treasure or a grave for all your dreams.

You will be the same, but someone else entirely.

Pause a moment

And imagine what that world might be like…

Imagine somewhere unlike anywhere your human eyes have ever seen before.

I know this will be hard for you because it is difficult to imagine any other world than your own, particularly if you are a grown-up and your imagination has become stiff and hard and slow. So remember what it was once like to be a child, if you must, to help you imagine this other world. This other planet.

This planet is called Excelsiar and it has three moons: one pale orange, one a beautiful turquoise, one purple and green. The sun is redder than your own sun, and many of the mountain ranges are striped, almost as if they are made out of candy. And, oh, the jungle in that world! A jungle so green it makes your eyes ache, with rivers that burn and smoke.

Most of this planet is covered in an ocean that can be black as ink and red as wine, and the creatures in that ocean glow starlike in the glorious darkness as they swim lazily through the seas. Many of these animals you will recognize from worlds all across the universe: whales, porpoise, jellyfish… but in the enormity of this particular dark ocean, the jellyfish can be large as islands, drifting ominously with their tentacles hanging down.

There are great continents with land masses that are either sinister wastelands of dust-blown desert or tangled jungles brimming with life. Every now and then, the forest is punctuated by the stripy mountains that climb up into the violet clouds, and there are floating cities built on gases, populated by all sorts of creatures that perhaps you thought were just myths. The skyscrapers and the trees have twisted around each other in spirals; the roads can be rivers all on fire; the buildings are growing, very slightly, every day, like big bamboos.

Now, calm your breathing, for there are truly terrible things in this planet’s jungle who hunt by the smell of fear, and they hate human beings with a hungry, bloody hatred. They can sniff out fear from a distance of several miles, and you do not want to draw the attention of these creatures. You do not want them to sense that you are here. The instant you find yourself becoming anxious, the sweat beginning to form on your forehead, the first flutterings in your stomach, make your heart slow down.

HOLD YOUR BREATH.

Are you ready?

Hang on to the sides of this book very tightly.

Sharpen your wits.

Open your eyes, clean those smears off your glasses, prick up your ears.

Cling tight to the hairs on the back of my neck.

On the planet with three moons, a young human boy was running through the choke of a vividly tangled jungle, heart pounding, chest heaving with sobs, absolutely petrified.

The boy was called K2 (pronounced “Kay Too”), and he was rather ordinary-looking, thin as a twig, covered in grazes, his clothes in rags and ruins about him, his glasses so scratched and broken he could barely see where he was going.

K2 was right to be so terrified.

For this was a planet where human beings were hunted to the death.

Above K2’s head there was a whirring, flying robot, about the size of a small dog. The little robot was called Puck, and he was in an even worse condition than the boy. One of his rotary wings was bent so he was flying lopsidedly and a whole chunk of his left-hand side had been shot off. It was a miracle he could still fly at all.

“We is being chased by people-eating plants…,” said Puck.

“Yes, Puck, I know,” panted K2.

All around K2, the jungle was alive and waking up.

“And hunted by that thing I absquolootely cannot mention…,” said Puck (but he was unfortunately mentioning it, nonetheless). “That hairy, scary unbemaginably terrifying BEAST… with its grabbers and its stingers and its big… What’s the white pierce-y unloving bits on the ends of the gnashing things called?”

“Teeth,” gasped K2. “But please don’t talk about it, Puck! That Beast and those others all hunt by the smell of fear, and the more you talk about them, the harder it is to stay calm.”

But K2’s stomach had already liquefied with terror, and the vegetation must have caught the smell of his fear, for nearby vines unwrapped themselves from tree branches, reaching out long tendril fingers, growing in front of K2’s eyes.

“Is… there… anything… you… can… do?” cried K2 as one long, curling python of a vine whipped out languorously and tripped him up. He squirmed out of its grip, staggered to his feet, and ran on, limping even more than he had been before.

“Lasers would be good!” said Puck enthusiastically.

“You’ve got lasers?” said K2 in excitement.

“I HAS got lasers!” said Puck, always keen to please.

“Use the lasers, Puck! ” squealed K2.

“I has got lasers,” Puck admitted sadly, “but I’s afraids my lasers gots jammed up with sand in that dessert.”

I think he means “desert,” thought K2, because that would make more sense.

“Let me see… what’s I sqwat in here instead?” Puck put out a little robot arm with an array of attachments, like a more sophisticated version of a Swiss Army knife. “Fork?… No… Can opener?… No… Ice-scream scoop?… No… Egg whisk?… No.”

WHEEOOOOOOOOOWWWWWW!

K2 ducked just in time as a great harpoon shot above his head and straight into a tree trunk ahead of him. The area around where the harpoon had struck turned a great spreading black, as if the tree were bleeding.

The tree let out an enormous scream that made K2’s ears ring with the sound of it.

“Sorry, tree…,” said K2 as he stumbled past the poor shriveling sapling. “I’m so sorry…”

“I’s sorry too, K2!” wailed Puck. “I’s got nuffink helpful!”

“Don’t worry, Puck, that’s not your fault. You’ve done your best…”

K2 was in Big Trouble, but he knew that his robot was in dreadful danger too.

“You hide in my backpack,” he recommended. “They hate robots nearly as much as human beings. Go in there and keep quiet and maybe they won’t find you. That’s an order, Puck!”

The little robot dived down into K2’s backpack, for robots have to obey orders, even if they don’t want to.

K2 could smell the Beast that was chasing him now, a rich, hot stink that reminded him vaguely of the scent of lion, for he had breathed it once before when he visited a zoo. But this was a far more powerful, angry stench, and it exploded the memory of the poor weak reek that came from the caged lion he had inhaled before and replaced that faint echo with something far more scary.

All around K2 the trees were reaching back their branches to comfort the stricken, poisoned tree, murmuring soothing noises, and he knew that underneath the ground where he could not see, they were stretching out their roots through the sluggish soil, and at any moment, the roots would push through that mud and vegetation that was already bulging up in leaf-quakes underneath him and catch him by the ankle…

And if they caught him, the Beast would be on him.

WROOOOOOUUUUAAAEERRRRRR!

The astonishing roar reverberated around the jungle and around K2 as if he were being turned over like a big ocean wave, and as the sound drummed right into the heart of his body, he no longer knew whether he was running away from the Beast or toward it.

And the Beast caught him.

Or more precisely, another great tendril of vine came licking around K2’s ankle, tripping him up, and although he shook it off, he stumbled, and that slight hesitation enabled another tendril to get a good hold of his other foot, and he was tipped over onto the ground and in five seconds flat, wrapped all around with vines and stems as thick as curling ropes…

… and dragged across the jungle floor to face the Beast.

And I’ve just realized, it isn’t really the start of the story.

So save your very reasonable, heart-beating, stone-cold terror for a moment, for we will not carry on in that dangerous world right now. We will wait until you are more prepared.

I’ll just leave K2 being dragged to who knows WHAT dreadful fate, while I go back and explain how and why he was so very far from home in the first place.

For K2 was a long, long, LONG way from home.

Let me just check my tablet, where I have the official guide to all the worlds in all the universe… Yes, I’m right.

Sooooooooooooo many longs, there isn’t room to put them all here.

I do not know where you are, dear reader; you could be literally anywhere in the numberless galaxies, so this planet may be very familiar to you or you may have to travel quite a distance to get there. But as you fall into the strange rectangular portal of this book, imagine you are falling through space, mile after soft black mile; think of a number and times it by a billion.

From morn to noon you will fall… until suddenly you arrive at K2’s home, a small and unimportant blue planet called Earth.