Amelia and the Mirror: The Origin
Amelia and the Mirror: The Origin (Book One)
What if the great inventions of the modern world were not made by human minds alone? What if something from nine hundred light years away has been guiding human progress, and has been doing it for far longer than anyone has kept records?
What if time travel is not about machines at all, but about the mind?
In nineteen sixty, an eleven-year-old girl measures her family's house with a ball of string and finds eleven feet that are not in any of its rooms. She follows a bird up to the attic, where she finds a room that is on no plan and a machine that says her mother's name. Her mother pulls her away, a priest seals the door, and the girl is sent to a school in the north. For twenty years nobody in the house speaks of her grandfather.
In nineteen eighty her mother dies. Amelia Forefore, a physicist in Manchester, comes home to Forefore Manor for the funeral and meets Thomas Caldwell, a historian who lies to her within four hours. That night she finds three hundred and nine letters of her own in a drawer that was never locked, along with a key. Then she climbs to the attic, where her grandfather Ludvik has been inside the machine since nineteen forty-five.
Ludvik tells her everything. In January nineteen hundred and three, a poor engineer in a northern town thought so hard about a door through time that the wall of a hidden ship began to ring. Something nine hundred light years away turned its head. It is called Zeta-2, and it makes nothing. It finds people who can make things, frightens them into war and lets them build it a fleet. Ludvik built its engine, its moving line and its machine. To keep his son alive, he did far worse.
Through the glass, Amelia watches Eratosthenes at Alexandria, Galileo in Padua and the Curies working in their shed at night. Every window opens onto a real moment in history.
Ludvik's work draws in Nikola Tesla, who never leaves New York, and the three stones of Matter, Anti-Matter and Creation are scattered across the world. Zeta-2 wants all three. With them set in its frame, the Overmind stops being a machine for looking at the past.
Amelia and Thomas go after the stones. Their trail leads to the north face of Mount Kailash, where the mountain exacts its price, to a market of stranded aliens beneath Thirty-Fourth Street in New York, and to a secret base in the Nevada desert. Along the way they meet Bombi, a Hyiirian who whistles for his ship, a talking dog who sells salt, and Anna, a bird with gold eyes who is more than she seems.
Zeta-2's servants, the Faradians, wear human faces and sit in ordinary chairs, watching and waiting. Who can you trust when enemies wear the faces of the people you love? How do you fight someone who can turn your own mind against you? And what would you sacrifice to save more than your own world?
Can one woman, with a power she is only beginning to understand and a few unlikely allies, stop a being who has been pulling the strings of human history for generations?
If you have ever wondered:
Whether Tesla's greatest work was shaped by something from beyond EarthWhether the mind holds the key to time travelWhether one person can stand against a power that has worked in the shadows for generationsThen this book is for you. Read it, and count the stairs with Amelia.
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