Departure 37

ATTENTION, PASSENGERS – FLIGHT 37 TO NOWHERE IS NOW BOARDING.

On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was not planned. The pilots had received disturbing middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: Do not fly today.

None of the women admit to making the calls—and some of them absolutely could not have—they’re dead.

While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a sixteen-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home—a place she loathes. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is to escape back to Brooklyn.

She’s about to get much more than that.

Her new home is ground zero for a story that begins at a remote naval base in Indiana during the winter of 1962, when a physicist named Martin Hazelton discovered something extraordinary—and deadly. Experimentation with it was in process when the pressure of the Cold War forced his hand, and his discovery became literally ahead of its time. Now, decades later, its dark potential has come full circle and every second is the enemy. With the future in her hands, only Charlie can stop what’s coming