The Moon’s Shadow - The Veil Chronicles, #2

The truth is behind the veil. Some guard it. Others seek it.

There is a place where not even the Earth can hear you. Anyone who has orbited the Moon knows it — the stretch where the spacecraft slides behind the lunar disc and the link with home does not fade but disappears. One commander crossed that silence eleven times and grew used to it, as far as a man can grow used to something that so resembles death. The twelfth time, a rhythm appeared in the dead channel. Slow. Patient. Even. Like a pulse. Like something waiting.

Five months after everything that happened, Nicholas Arden has finally learned how to sleep. The house is not in their names. Nothing is. They pay cash, change their small habits, and never stay anywhere more than a few months — because they will be watched for the rest of their lives, and he has accepted the watchers the way a man accepts the weather.

What he does now is slow, desk-bound and almost dull: three laptops, a wall of printouts joined with tape and string, and the work he has given the rest of his life to. Keeping the truth. Sarah calls the room the cathedral of coincidences — a temple whose orientation points not at the sun, and a hundred other things that mean nothing separately.

Then Danny calls from the shack at the foot of the mountain, thinner than Nicholas remembers, and says he has not lost his mind and would like that established before they decide otherwise. On his screen a green line is flickering, level and patient. What comes out of the speaker is too regular to be a pulsar and too deliberate to be a dead star. It is the same rhythm the commander heard in 1972.

Book Two of The Veil Chronicles. Some secrets were never meant to be uncovered — and this one has been waiting on the far side of the Moon for fifty years.