Storm-Dragon

Winner of the First Special Prometheus Award for Young Adult Fiction 2026

Skut Harkkson hates Highpoint Station. He hates the concrete dome, the expensive food, the mean kids who know his father's farm is three hundred miles away and that he can't go home. He misses Faraway - real land, real tides, real work - and every day locked inside the settlement's walls makes him feel like something important is dying.

Then he finds the storm-dragon.

The creature is tiny, half-dead, and furious - and somehow it talks directly into his head. Not words, exactly. Feelings. Hungry. Cold. Trust. Skut names it Snarky, hides it in his shirt, and starts sneaking outside the settlement's walls to feed it. Which is how he ends up fishing the forbidden lower jetties with Podge Greene - the new kid who survived a planetary invasion at age ten and isn't afraid of much. The two of them, with Snarky riding Skut's shoulder and diving for fish, start to build something that looks almost like a life worth living.

But Vann's World has three moons, tides that kill without warning, and predators that make Earth's wildlife look like house pets. And none of that matters when the real threat arrives: a Ghat slaver ship, landing under false papers, loaded with soldiers who have done this to entire planets before.

Now Skut, Podge, and Snarky are outside the walls in the dark, with a handful of adults, two flechette pistols, a forklift, and a storm-dragon who generates five hundred volts and is willing to use them. The settlement is locked down. The hostages are running out of time. The VIP ship is landing in the morning - straight into a trap.

What follows is a boys' adventure in the oldest, best sense: two kids who actually know things figure out how to win against people who should be unbeatable. Vann's World is alive and deadly and extraordinary, and Skut and Podge understand it in ways the invaders never will.

Storm-Dragon is a standalone novel - fast-moving, funny in the right places, and built on the principle that boys who read voraciously deserve stories that don't condescend to them.