First Lines Fridays

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

Harlon sees the lantern beams slicing up the mountainside towards her home. They’ve come at last, the people called the Automators. The red symbol on their black uniforms is a fist closing round the earth and now it’s closing round her family too: they’ve come to take her brother and her sister, Ash and Xeno. But she and Ma won’t let them.

Any ideas?

I’ve just finished this incredible book which I have no doubt will be a book of the year for me.

Goodreads Synopsis:

When animals talk, it’s time humans listened: Harlon has been raised to protect her younger siblings, twins Ash and Xeno, and their outlawed power of communicating with animals. But when the sinister Automators attack their mountain home they must flee for their lives. Xeno is kidnapped and Harlon and Ash are separated. In a thrilling and dangerous adventure they must all journey alone through the ice fields, forests and oceans of Rumyc to try to rescue each other and fulfil a mysterious promise about a lost island made to their mother.