Signal

The truth is not what they tell us. But it is time to find it.Twelve thousand years ago, a man knelt alone before a stone and cut a message into it — not for his own people, who already knew, and not for the creatures sleeping in the caves beyond the river. He cut it for a mind that did not yet exist, and for a hand that would reach the tablet after so many turns of the slow star that the number itself was an abyss.Dr. Nicholas Arden teaches introductory physics in New Mexico and tells his students that belief is for Sunday morning; in his classroom there are only numbers and the nerve to check what they say. He used to be somebody else, before his world collapsed, and he has spent years being careful not to want anything too much.Then a thin, straight line appears in data that should hold nothing at all. He breaks it into frequencies, checks it against satellites, against pulsars, against everything the universe does while going about its business. Nothing fits. And the longer he looks, the more certain he becomes that the signal is not natural — and that the same pattern is cut into stone that predates every civilization we admit to.An archaeologist in Arizona has seen those concentric arcs before. A friend who understands networks tells him not to write anything down — call, don't email. And within days there are people walking across his yard without hurrying, with the unhurried economy of those who have done this before.Book One of The Veil Chronicles — a conspiracy thriller for readers who suspect that every hidden story is a fragment of one much older story, and that some secrets were locked for a reason.