The Future of the Past

On a dig in the Jordanian desert, Rein Stout makes an impossible discovery: a metal cylinder, buried for three thousand years, etched with her name and a date that has not yet arrived.

It should not exist. Its alloy cannot be synthesized with any known technology. It was placed exactly where she would find it—by someone who knew her name.

She calls the only person who might believe her: Harry Jameson, a physicist working on retrocausality. They were colleagues once. Lovers. They lost a child, and then they lost each other.

The cylinder is the first of many anomalies. A message from a woman named Stacey Smith, who speaks of a war fought over the right to alter history. And she says that Rein is the fulcrum—the one who will decide what happens next.

As they race across the desert, pursued by an operative who will stop at nothing, Rein and Harry discover that the past is bleeding. Small things are being erased. The future is watching. And they must decide whether the world that would be saved is worth the world that would be erased.

What do we owe to the dead? What do we dare to hope for the living?

The past is not a quarry. It is a conversation, and the conversation must continue.