More than seven full months would pass before I emerged from my coma. When I awoke, I learned I had evolved into a different Homo sapiens subspecies.

It began with my appearance, which was bizarre, bordering on the grotesque. My skull had completely deformed, elongating to accommodate the increased mass of my brain. My body had enlarged as well, to better nourish the brain. My muscles were stronger, not only able to lift heavier weights, but they could fire faster, as if Bill Raby’s neural connections had doubled in speed.

There was a new clarity to my thought process. My mind could suddenly recall obscure documents I had read years earlier—word for word. My brain possessed an eidetic memory, but with highly expanded associativity, cataloging key concepts, drawing upon oceans of information in a millisecond of preconscious thought.

The entire colony was undergoing an identical metamorphosis.

As Jude was still in her coma, I decided to leave the ward, my new intellect determined to reveal New Eden’s secrets. My first destination was a massive structure, standing seventy-eight stories tall, encompassing a thousand acres. What drew me to this alien facility was its exterior lead gray surface, adorned in ever-changing patterns of lines and glyphs, which radiated the colors of the spectrum.

An imposing thirty-foot arch delineated the grand entry. Approaching the sealed hatch, I closed my eyes and focused my thoughts inward, imagining the doors unsealing to allow me entry.

Immediately, a strange buzzing sensation overcame me, as if my brain was expelling volts of electricity. I fell to my knees, overcome by vertigo.

When the buzzing stopped, I opened my eyes.

The portal had unsealed.

25

NOVEMBER 22, 2033: MANALAPAN, FLORIDA

7:35 a.m.

Ken Becker enters destination coordinates into the four-passenger jet-copter’s autopilot as his boss straps herself in one of the rear seats.

‘Don’t wake me until we get to Washington,’ Lilith orders. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she slips the virtual-reality helmet over her head and closes her eyes.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Becker activates the airship’s three-blade helicopter rotor, guiding the vessel into a hover maneuver. At thirteen-hundred feet, he shifts to jet mode. Wings, retracted beneath the airship, spread out horizontally, as the jet engines fire and the helicopter’s rotors and tailfin fold and retract.

The jet-copter leaps forward, heading north to the nation’s capital.

Believing Jacob Gabriel dead, Lilith Eve Robinson knew it was time for her, too, to move on and find her own higher calling. Guided by her new mentor, Don Rafelo, a product of her own schizophrenia, the fifteen-year-old left the United States in the fall of 2028, using Quenton’s inheritance to travel to the land of her ancestors: Mesoamerica, home of the Aztec and Maya.