This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Some orders cannot be taken back. Some words wait too long to be said.Commander James Rhodes has spent his entire life becoming the soldier his father built him to be. Methodical. Controlled. The man who always knows the mission and never says the wrong thing, because he has learned to say almost nothing at all. Now he is flying to the far side of the world, to a frozen crater in Siberia where something is pushing through from t...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Barbara Matthews hasn't slept through the night since September. Ninety-two days since her son Bron called to say he was going camping. Ninety-two days since she heard his voice. Ninety-two days of nothing. When her older son Derek shows up with a fragment of metal that no lab can identify — warm to the touch, humming with something that settles behind her eyes like a word she almost recognizes — Barbara knows two things: something impo...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.An abandoned pickup sits on a forest service road deep in the Montana high country. The keys are still in the ignition. The driver's door hangs open. And leading away from it, through a corridor of trees gone gray and dead, a set of bootprints crosses the ground to the edge of a smooth, warm pit burned into the earth, and stops.Ranger Calvin Rourke has spent his whole life in these mountains, and twenty years in the Army before ...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.For forty-one years, Ren has kept the lights on.He was thirty-four the day the others left the station, young enough that the years still felt like they belonged to him. He stayed. Someone had to. And so the work became his life: the corridor lines glowing gold in the deep hours, the hull ticking and settling in the cold of space, the plants in the lower bay growing because he was there to make them grow.Alone on a stati...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Forty-three children. One guardian. An impossible choice.In the vast reaches of space, a Ketheri keeper stands watch over forty-three human children held in stasis — refugees from a war they were too young to understand. When the facility that protects them begins to fail, the keeper must make a decision that no protocol was written to cover. The First is the story of duty pushed past its limit, of compassion that crosses the bo...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Some transformations cannot be undone.When a routine deep-space mission goes wrong, one crew member begins to change in ways that defy explanation — and defy everything they thought they knew about what it means to be human. The Becoming is the story of a threshold crossed, a line between worlds that was never meant to be touched, and the price paid when something vast and ancient decides it has found what it was looking for.

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Six weeks after federal agents seized every piece of evidence from a missing man's campsite, Sheriff Calloway still has copies. She wasn't supposed to keep them. She kept them anyway. Now, alone in her office after hours, she's looking at a photograph that doesn't make sense — a shape in the tree line that shouldn't be there. The agents who took over the investigation weren't surprised by what they found. They had equipment ready before...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Before the war, there was a moment of contact.When a lone researcher stumbles upon something buried deep inside an abandoned cargo facility, she finds herself face to face with an intelligence older than human civilization — and standing at the threshold of a choice that will change everything. The First is the story of that moment. The one that started it all. The discovery that was never supposed to happen, and the woman who h...

The Dark Side of Reform: Exploring the Impact of Public Policy on Racial Equity contains nine chapters on the development of social policies with the potential to advance racial equity. In addition to studying these policies and their implications, the chapters in this volume demonstrate how lessons from the past can be used to inform the direction of current discussions. At the heart of these conversations are concerns about whether Black people, in particular, will receive the full benef...

Pro Football and the Proliferation of Protest: Anthem Kneeling and Standing in a Divided America examines the take-a-knee NFL protests, a trend that has led to deep political divisiveness in America. The author explores this phenomenon by incorporating analysis of media coverage, impact on attitudes and behaviors, and racial, religious, gendered, and political perspectives. The analysis allows readers to recognize both positive and negative prejudice and to proscribe possible solutions for...

Global estimates of human trafficking range from 600,000 to four million victims each year with the majority being victims of sex trafficking. This strikingly large range belies the difficulty in gathering, defining, and accountability of sex-trafficking data. Victims of sex trafficking may be forced into pornography, prostitution for the military or militia, spousal prostitution, and prostitution for the sex-tourism industry. In response to the problem of sex trafficking, many nations hav...

Assessing a university’s legacy in the age of segregationThis anthology reckons with the University of Virginia’s post-emancipation history of racial exploitation. Its fifteen essays highlight the many forms of marginalization and domination at Virginia’s once all-white flagship university to uncover the patriarchal, nativist, and elitist assumptions that shaped university culture through the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Including community ...