Jennifer Ventrice lies on her back facing the late-afternoon sun, her assigned recliner situated between the starboard rail and the lazy river. The seventy-three-year-old Brooklyn native is awake, watching an opti-vision movie projected inside her wraparound i-glasses. Despite her sensory comforts, Jennifer is nervous. It has been fourteen years since she and her husband were forced to flee the United States, and though her passport and embedded smart chip reflect her new identity, she knows her spouse’s enemies have long tentacles and other ‘less conventional’ means of tracking them down.

Relax, Eve. You already made it through international checkpoints in London and Miami without any problem, security in Bermuda should be—

No! She clenches her eyes shut, the self-scolding inflection causing the movie to pause. It’s Jennifer, not Eve. Jennifer … Jennifer!

She powers off the movie, momentarily blinded by the sunlight reflecting off the ocean until the smart lenses adjust their tint. This was all Dave’s fault. Why couldn’t he have allowed her to use her real first name as an alias? Didn’t he realize how hard it was to think of herself as anything but Eve?

*

For the thousandth time she thinks back to the date—November 25, 2033—the day Evelyn Mohr ceased to exist, the day Lilith Mabus forced Evelyn’s husband and the rest of their entourage into exile. Only twenty years old at the time, the unleashed widow of the late billionaire Lucien Mabus had firmly entrenched herself as CEO of Mabus Tech Industries and its space tourism company, Project H.O.P.E. Within months, Lilith had used her newfound influence in Washington to coerce President John Zwawa into allowing MTI to take control of Golden Fleece, a covert NASA project overseen by Evelyn’s husband, Dave.

What Lilith Mabus sought was access to zero-point energy, a warpdrive propulsion system that powered the extraterrestrial starship excavated back in 2013, which she hoped to use on her Mars Colony shuttles.

What she found instead was her long-lost soul mate, Jacob Gabriel.

Jacob and his twin brother, Immanuel, had faked their deaths years ago. Intoxicated by Lilith’s pheromones, Jacob submitted to the one act his father had expressly warned him about—copulating with his schizophrenic Hunahpu cousin.

Jacob and his mother had left the Earth aboard the extraterrestrial starship on November 25, 2033, leaving behind Immanuel Gabriel, his two bodyguards, and the Mohrs as fugitives from Majestic-12 and Lilith Mabus. Identity changes accompanied relocations in Canada, Mexico, Honduras and Peru, Evelyn Mohr playing the dutiful role of supportive wife while her husband continued to advise and tutor Jacob’s still-evolving dark-haired Hunahpu twin.