TRAJECTORY OF DESTINY, A Novel

He takes the recon duty to spare a breaking man.

The drone strike takes everything else.

Lieutenant Grant Powell is returning from Mosul in silence — paralyzed, brain-damaged, and sealed inside a stillness that no neurologist can fully assess or comprehend. What the military hospital records as absence, nurse Claire Emmerson begins to read as presence. Something is happening in Room 7 that the monitors are not designed to detect.

What the monitors cannot see: a classified and secret implant, placed by a government program no one in the hospital knows exists, transmitting - and receiving. In the disrupted neural landscape of Grant’s traumatic brain injury, it is doing something its designers did not entirely predict. His paralysis is not impeding his virtual reality as he climbs volcanoes and dives from the cliffs at Acapulco.

Claire is not in a position to see any of this clearly. She has returned to the ward from six weeks of compassionate leave, still carrying the invisible weight of a concussion she sustained in the accident that killed her husband — a collision she walked away from believing herself intact. The dreamtime she is beginning to enter suggests otherwise.

Corporal Whitfield, hospitalized under the disintegrating weight of guilt — Grant took his shift, Grant absorbed the blast — is on an anti-psychotic protocol. It is not working as prescribed. It is working as something far stranger: dissolving the filters between what he has always perceived and what he has always been told is not there.

Three people. Three different doors into the same impossible field.

And then Claire misreads the evidence.

The abraded fingertips she finds on Grant’s hands — the raw skin left by real granite, gripped by a consciousness that traveled to a mountain while his body lay still — she reads as a pain response. She increases his medication. The agency’s instruments register the neural suppression as implant failure. They increase the signal. The cascade that follows is part thriller, part revelation, and entirely without precedent.

On the side of a volcano above the Costa Rican canopy, on the Acapulco cliffs where the surf crashes into the rocks below — Grant and Claire are moving toward each other through a space that exists at the frontier of what neuroscience is only now learning to map. Whitfield is there too, stepping from an aircraft doorway with Grant beside him, both of them falling, finally, briefly, free.

Love, when it arrives in Trajectory of Destiny, is the biggest surprise of all.

Coming soon.