I don’t answer. The way he keeps saying my name gets on my nerves. We continue the tour through five sleeping cabins, each with its own bathroom, a spacious, wood-paneled bridge where we met the captain and first mate, a high-tech kitchen, and the upper deck. His sister Lucille is there, lying on a wide, cushioned chaise lounge next to a sunken hot tub. She wears a sheer, black cover-up over a bathing suit and holds a book in her hands. Her eyes are invisible behind dark sunglasses, but I sense she’s watching me.
“Hey, sis,” Speer says. “Say hi to my new friends.”
Lucille smiles. “Maddie was ecstatic that you were able to come, weren’t you, Mads?”
The girl nods with another burst of giggles. I want to ask why she said this was a matter of life and death.
“Want to come with us, Luce?”
“No thanks, I’m comfortable here.” She smiles and raises her book, although I’m pretty sure she’s not reading.
When we return to the main cabin, I hurry to start the farewells. I need to get out of here. “Thanks for the tour. But we need to go—”
“Not yet, surely. I thought we could talk for a minute.” He turns to his daughter. “Maddie, why don’t you go for a swim? I’ll let you know when lunch is ready.”
The girl nods obediently and leaves. Speer plops on the couch and puts his feet on the coffee table. The rest of us join him.
“I have to admit, after Maddie told me about you, Jared, I was curious,” Speer says. “I started following your press. There certainly have been a lot of crazy rumors about you.”
“That’s basically how rumors work.”
“Oh, I know. There have been plenty of rumors about me too.”
“Do you really believe we’re living in a computer simulation?” asks Ethan. Bree jabs him with her elbow.
Speer laughs loudly. “That’s a whole different conversation. Anyway, Jared, I’m the type of guy who likes to get to the bottom of things. So I did a little digging about you. Imagine my surprise when I learned that you and I are actually related.”
My chest tightens. “Really?”
“Yes. It turns out our great-great-great grandfathers were brothers, Lucas and Jean-Claude Laurent. In the mid-nineteenth century they grew up in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, a tiny French hamlet on the border of Switzerland.”
“That’s where the LHC is,” Ethan blurts.
“Ironic, right? Anyway, Lucas—your ancestor—went off to join the circus in France at age fifteen, but Jean-Claude, my ancestor, joined the army and went to fight in the Crimean War. It did something terrible to his nerves, and he ended up at the convalescent home in the Alps. He met a pretty Swiss nurse there, got married, settled in St. Moritz, and had five daughters. One of them married a Swiss watchmaker named Otto Speer, my great-great-grandfather. So, you see? That makes us cousins four times removed.” He waves a hand in the air. “Or something like that.”
“Wow,” says Bree. “How did you figure that out?”
“It wasn’t easy, considering the Lucas side of the family kept changing their name. Lucas had two children, a daughter Noelle and a son, Jean-Luc. Lucas died young, and his wife Charmaine remarried and moved to Bordeaux but she kept her own surname. I found marriage and death records for both Charmaine and Noelle, but no death record exists for Jean-Luc.” Speer’s eyes bore into mine. “Don’t you think that’s odd?”
I shrug. “It was probably lost somewhere.”
“Possibly. But there’s more. Around 1938, a woman named Colette Laurent emigrated to Canada with two children, Jean-Luc and Raphael. Neither of them were her own children, as she never married. Colette had two brothers, one of whom, Raphael, was killed in the war, so I assumed that the younger Raphael must have been his son. As for Jean-Luc, well, I figured he must have been the son of her other brother. That is, until I found his passport photo. Oh, wait—I have it on my phone.”
He swings his feet off the table and digs his phone out from his back pocket. He scrolls through it for a moment before he shows it to me.
“Does he look familiar?”
I try not to react.
Bree gasps. Grace’s fingers dig into my thigh.
“It looks exactly like you, don’t you think?” Speer says.
I shrug. “A family resemblance.”
“Right, that’s what I thought. I was still curious about Charmaine’s son, the first Jean-Luc. I mean, what happened to him? Why was there no record of his death? So, I did more digging. I found some letters, correspondence from Jean-Claude indicating that his brother’s son Jean-Luc suffered from a genetic disorder that was the dread secret of the family. The letter talked of an ancient line of giants that once roamed the earth and so on. It seemed like a lot of nonsense—you know how superstitious people were back then. But it got me thinking. Maybe Jean-Luc never died at all. Maybe he was still alive.”
I freeze, barely able to breathe. His gaze lingers on me, reading my thoughts, knowing things he should not know. He continues, savoring his tale.
“Well, once I started down that rabbit trail it was hard to stop. Fast forward to about five years ago, a man named Ralph Lorn and his ‘son’ Jared emigrated from Canada to Buffalo, New York. That would be you, right?” Speer smiles. “I looked for your birth certificate and discovered it had been somewhat—how would you say—doctored? The names of your parents were fake. I began to put two and two together. And the sum of it seemed impossible, but it was the only explanation.”
Grace is silent beside me. Bree and Ethan exchange glances, too stunned to speak.
I should deny it. Pretend I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I sense it would be futile. He wouldn’t have brought me here if he wasn’t sure of himself. Besides, his perseverance has made me curious.
“What exactly do you want?” I ask.
Speer’s grin broadens. He leans toward me, his elbows on his knees. “I want to know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Travel through time.”
6: Dangerous Game
Grace
Time travel? That’s what he thinks?
I don’t know whether to be relieved or panic-stricken. Ethan turns his head away as if he’s trying not to laugh. Bree’s breath catches.
Jared straightens, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, we can talk about this, can’t we? The cat’s out of the bag, as you Americans say. Look, Einstein proved that time is relative. Astronauts have actually traveled seconds into the future. We know that gravity can bend time. That’s one of the reasons why I’m fascinated with space tech. I believe a time will come when we will be able to slip through worm holes—dimensional tunnels, as it were—and go back and forth in time. And I think you know all about that, my friend.”
Jared shakes his head. “I’m not a time traveler. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, he is,” Ethan blurts out. We all look at him and his face reddens. “Sorry, Jared, but you have to come clean. You’re right, Mr. Speer. I didn’t believe it at first either, but it turns out he has this genetic mutation that makes time travel possible. When he disappeared in Norway, we figured it was best to pretend he died, since we never thought he’d come back in our time. We were all surprised when he reappeared.”
My jaw almost drops to the floor.
“So you can control it!” Speer’s voice rises in excitement. “Jared, I know I may sound a little crazy, and many people have called me that, but you of all people know what I’m talking about. I need your help.”
“My…help?”
“My daughter, Madeline…she’s sick. She has a genetic disease, Huntington’s. Onset is usually early twenties—it causes degeneration of nerve cells in the brain, total loss of muscle control, mental breakdown, and eventual death. There is no cure. Yet.” Speer gets up and goes to the bar. He pulls a Diet Coke from the mini fridge as he talks. He’s become fidgety. “She got it from her mother—I didn’t even know she had it until it was too late. There have been advances
in gene therapy that could save her, but researchers say they are still decades away from being able to implement them. We don’t have decades. I need it now.” He returns to the sofa and sits, but he doesn’t open the can. “Please, Jared. Help me save my daughter. I need you to help me travel into the future and get that cure.”
Bree nudges Ethan and glares. Ethan clears his throat.
“Uh, wait. I didn’t say he could do that. He doesn’t actually choose the time—”
“There’s got to be a way.” Speer sets his jaw. “And I will find it. If you would allow me to study you and learn more about you, we could work together to figure this out—”
“I’m sorry.” Jared is on his feet. “But what you are talking about—it’s not possible.”
“But would you at least consider—”
“No. Whatever you think of me, you have it wrong. I can’t help you.” Jared turns to me. “We need to go.”
We say hurried goodbyes. Speer looks crushed beyond words. Maybe Jared shouldn’t have been so harsh. Speer’s grasping at straws and Jared definitely isn’t a time traveler, but still. The man wants to save his child. Any father would go to the ends of the earth to do that.
Owen escorts us to the end of the gangway where the driver waits, still as a statue, in the electric car. Has he moved at all the entire time we were on the yacht?
“Oh, my gosh, that poor man,” Bree says as we leave for the city. “That was so sad. Are you sure there’s nothing you can do for him?”
“There’s no point in giving him false hope.” Jared’s voice is hard and distant.
“You could have done that healing thing you did with Ethan,” I say. “You could have offered.” I can’t hide the irritation in my voice.
“The guy’s a scientist. Do you think he’d go for that faith healing stuff?”
“He was going for the time travel stuff. Is that so much more believable?” Bree snorts in disgust.
“Why did you even say all that, Ethan?” I ask. “About time traveling. You know Jared isn’t a time traveler.”
“Don’t you think it’s better for Speer to believe Jared’s a time traveler than for him to know the truth?” Ethan lowers his voice in case the driver is listening. “And anyway, it might be true.”
“What do you mean?”
“Time is different for Jared than for the rest of us. He ages ten times slower, which means time moves ten times slower for him. Plus—and this is something we’ve never actually talked about—do you have any idea how long you were in the Abyss?”
I glance at Jared. “I don’t know—a few hours?”
“A few hours.” Ethan shakes his head. “Try three days.”
“Three days?”
“Ralph told us not to mention that to you. When you went into the Abyss, you passed through a time barrier. And I think…” Ethan hesitates before continuing. “You might still be in it.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“It’s too soon to tell. But suppose that when you went into the Abyss, you entered a different time path from the rest of us. Maybe it’s Jared’s time path. I’m not sure.”
“How could that be?”
“Imagine time is like a river, okay? A river ebbs and flows depending on where you are. Sometimes it runs fast and sometimes it runs slow. In space, time runs slower the faster you travel, which makes time travel theoretically possible, exactly like Speer said. If you were near a supermassive black hole, for instance, time would slow down—”
“Okay, my brain is starting to hurt.” Bree rubs her temples. “Why don’t you two click your heels together and chant, ‘There’s no place like the future.’ Maybe you’ll be magically transported there on a rainbow.”
“This is not a fairy tale,” Ethan retorts. “Didn’t time stop in the Bible? More than once?”
Jared shrugs. “Stopping time is one thing. Traveling through it is another.”
“Actually, there is time travel in the Bible.”
“Where?” I ask.
“Do you know that story where the disciples are in a boat in a giant storm? And Jesus shows up walking on water? Well, it says that as soon as Jesus got into the boat, it immediately reached the shore. I’ve done the math on this one. The boat was only halfway across the lake at the time Jesus appeared in the middle of the night. At least two miles from the opposite shore. But as soon as He got in, the boat arrived in Galilee. And it was morning.” Ethan folds his arms in triumph. “Time travel.”
“Whoa,” Bree says. “Have you been reading the Bible?”
“That’s totally not the point. Angels travel back and forth through time, right? Heaven is outside of time, and so are the heavenly places. And Jared is half-angel, so that means he might have the capacity to do the same thing.”
Jared shakes his head. “You’re forgetting I’m also human—mostly human—and the human part of me would prevent that other part from going off on its own. Have you ever seen me disappear or walk through a wall? I can’t do that stuff.” He leans back in his seat and looks out the window. “We should stop talking about this.”
We ride the rest of the way in silence, but I am stuck on what Ethan had said about me. Was it possible I had entered into a different time path too? After all, an angel—an actual heavenly being—had resuscitated me with his breath. I went into the Abyss virtually dead, and Ariel brought me back to life.
So the question is, if an angel gives you CPR, does that make you something more than human?
Part Two
Origin of Symmetry
7: New Born
Angel
Darwin Speer lies on a surgical table. Several attendants hover around him in the white, sterile operating room. One bolts a steel frame to his head while another covers him with blue sheets. Speer is awake and smiling, telling jokes that make the attendants laugh. A doctor puts the mask over Speer’s face and administers anesthesia.
A moment later, a surgeon enters, accompanied by nurses and a few observers. He drills six tiny holes into Speer’s skull, inserts a catheter into each of the holes and injects something into them with a large syringe.
“What is happening?” I ask Uriel. We have gone forward in time, two months from Grace and Jared’s encounter with Speer on the yacht.
Uriel speaks. “Speer is having Jared Lorn’s DNA injected into his brain.”
“Jared’s DNA? How could he have that?”
“Do you not remember? Think about the events on the yacht.”
I go back to the boat. And then I see it—the broken glass and the blood—and I understand. Speer’s tale of time travel was a ruse. What he really wanted was Jared’s blood. His genetic material.
“He said it was his daughter who was sick.”
“That was a lie. The girl isn’t even his daughter. She is his niece, borrowed for the occasion. Speer is the one who has the disease.”
“So Speer believes in the family legend, after all? He’s knows Jared is a Nephilim?”
“Of course not.” Uriel scoffs. “But he knows Jared has a genetic mutation that allows him to live far longer than the average human. They injected the DNA with a virus that will attach to Speer’s cells and alter his genetic makeup.”
I am amazed and appalled at these humans, at their daring, their ingenuity, and their blindness.
“Can we stop him?”
“No,” says Uriel. “We are here only to observe. Elohim will not allow us to interfere.”
We watch the surgeon complete his work, remove the catheters, and close the holes in Speer’s skull with special plugs. He is whisked away and the surgical team disperses. Maintenance crews come in to clean up.
***
The surgical room recedes, zooming out through the walls. Now, we are outside a medieval castle shaped as an irregular square with tall towers in each corner. The massive structure sits atop a ridge overlooking a narrow lake. The courtyard hums with activity. Armed guards in black uniforms patrol the area while others drive electric jeep
s up and down the winding road to the castle gate.
“This is The Ark,” Uriel says. “It contains Speer’s labs and his hospital unit. It is also the headquarters of the Interlaken Group.”
“What is that?”
“An organization of powerful men and women, giants in their chosen fields. They provide the funding for Speer’s various experiments.”
In the distance, I see the massive wooden globe that marks the site of CERN. They have already started digging, tunneling under the earth to make the collider twice as long and four times as powerful.
“Shouldn’t we warn them?”
Uriel glances at me. “Do you believe they would listen?”
8: A Beginner’s Guide to Destroying the Moon
Jared
I’m glad to be back home, even if “home” is a bunker built beneath the charred remains of the Mansion. We call it the Hobbit Hole, the brainchild of Ralph’s “housekeeper” Emilia. I was absent when the Mansion burned and Ralph and Emilia went underground, so I’m still not sure how they managed it.
The large main room has three openings. One leads to three tiny bedrooms, one to a galley kitchen, and the other to the Lair and the music studio. The Lair is Ripley’s domain, a cramped space chocked with computers sitting on pizza boxes, unidentified gizmos, Snickers wrappers, and three years’ worth of Mountain Dew bottles. Ripley, a former student of Ralph’s, is now his “research assistant.” He works and sleeps in the Lair, so we avoid going in there as much as possible. It has a peculiar smell.
Emilia greets me with a hug and a large mug of hot chocolate.
“We’re certainly glad you’re home in one piece,” she says with a wink. “We never know with you, do we?” I’ve come to think of Emilia as a weaponized Mary Poppins. She spends most of her time filling us with food and hot chocolate, but she has other skills we know little about.
“I always come back in one piece,” I say.
“There you are!” Ralph’s jovial voice echoes down the bedroom hallway. He appears in a Hawaiian shirt, pajama pants, and slippers. He used to be a professor at the local college, but since going underground, his only occupation is reading and studying my origins. He told me he’s working on a book, a mammoth study of the Nephilim race. I doubt he will ever finish it.
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