Womb of Shadows: A GOTNA Novel
The baby did not cry.
That was the first thing Dr. Evelyn Hart noticed - and the last thing she would ever forgive.
When her daughter is born blind, limbless, and silent, geneticist Evelyn Hart breaks every rule she swore she'd never break again. The unauthorized therapy works. But it is not working the way she designed it.
Thirty-seven miles south, in a classified military facility, a teenage boy sits in permanent containment. His skin produces a compound that rewrites human biology through proximity. Through touch. Through love. Everyone who gets close becomes someone who cannot leave - and does not want to.
The Pentagon calls him Asset Zero: a deniable weapon grown for shadow wars. No coffins. No flags. No hearings. The design has exactly one flaw, and it cannot be removed - to build a thing that could be loved, they had to build a thing that can love.
Then a desperate father commits a small crime in the dark: three drops of his daughter's blood. And the weapon wakes up wanting the one thing no protocol can contain.
A bridge forms between two impossible children, thirty-seven miles apart, humming through the copper pipes of a quiet Virginia house. The house begins to breathe. A kind technician with a cat named Copernicus stays one night too many. And a mother who only wanted to save her daughter realizes the cure is colonizing everything it touches - including her.
The compound does not attack. It comforts. It finds the loneliest room in you and fills it. Its victims die smiling.
Womb of Shadows is Book One of the GODS OF THE NEW AGE trilogy - slow-burn biological horror for readers of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Agustina Bazterrica's Tender Is the Flesh, and M.R. Carey's The Girl With All the Gifts: literary, devastating, and tender in the places horror has no right to be. It asks what an institution becomes when it tries to weaponize the one thing that makes us human - and what the weapon becomes when it gets loose, learns, and starts to want.
Some monsters break down the door. This one waits to be invited. And you will invite it.
The weapon is love. It is already in the room.
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