Charlie Forêt

Cade Varro was the best Operative House Veldrath could buy. Then the escort failed, the heir was lost, and the tribunal reset him to nothing. Book 0.

He built the NSA backdoor. Then he ran.

A dark technofantasy where magic and quantum physics might be one force.

Finn Miller helped design the chips. The NSA subsidized them until no manufacturer could afford to pass, and his microcode, built on a quantum trick his own team couldn't follow, opened a door into almost any device on Earth.

The men holding that door use it to blackmail senators and move people like cargo. Finn has the proof. The agency has his name.

He's slipping out the back of a New York building, agents in the stairwell above him, when he finds a woman sobbing in the alley. Her name is Elara. She's a priestess from another world, and a chaos mage has burned a compulsion into her soul: find the most powerful technomancer on Earth and bring him back.

Finn thinks a spell might be a signal. If it is, he can block it.

He works it from the physics end. The mage who sent Elara works the same force from the other end, and he wants Finn under his control.

Before it's over, they both cross into Elysia, her world, and into the mage's reach.

And Elara can't tell whether what she feels for Finn is hers or the spell's.

Paul Taylor has died before.

A fusion lab explosion in 2033 ended a brilliant physicist's career — and a life hollowed by every relationship he never built. Then he wakes up in June 1979, fourteen years old, with fifty-one years of accumulated knowledge pressed into a teenager's body. He understands immediately: he's been given a second chance, and he intends to use every patent, every formula, every memory of the future to take it.

By sophomore year, the patents are worth millions. By junior year, the NSA has classified him as a strategic asset and the FBI is watching his machine shed. Paul knows exactly how to outmaneuver a federal agent. What he doesn't know is what to do about Jeryl Salaway — the girl he loved in his first life, who refuses to be a memory waiting to be retrieved. She isn't a chess piece. She's a real person with her own intelligence, her own ambitions, and her own reasons to push back on a boyfriend with suspiciously advanced ideas.

Paul can outmaneuver institutions. He can't outmaneuver love.

For readers of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, 11/22/63, and Replay — a time-travel epic for anyone who's ever wondered what they'd do with a second chance and fifty years of warning.

The empire Paul built in secret has grown too big to hide. By twenty-one he is engaged to Jeryl, running a defense company worth hundreds of millions, and quietly laying the groundwork for something no private citizen has ever done: commercial access to space. The technology is real. The money is serious. So are the people it has drawn to him.

A professional hit team surfaces in Salt Lake City. Soviet intelligence runs an operation against him overseas. In Washington, a nervous Congress debates whether an inventor who knows things he should not is the future of American capability or a threat that needs to be contained. Paul can manage the business. He is still learning to survive the consequences of it. And through the danger, he and Jeryl are becoming what he never wrote into the plan — genuine partners, in the work and in the fight to protect it.

He planned the empire. He didn't plan the enemies.

For fans of Replay, The Martian, and Cold War thrillers where the history gets rewritten from the inside.

In his first life, Paul Taylor was a physicist who changed the world and missed everything that mattered. In his second, he got Jeryl, two children, a space empire, and the kind of life he'd spent sixty-five years failing to build.

Then he lost her.

Another Past: Book Three opens with Paul as the world's richest man — orbital stations, a lunar resort, Mars on the near horizon — and closes with the question that has haunted him since before he was reborn: can you reach back into the past when time will not let you go?

Between those two points: a conflict with China that tests whether private power can act as a sovereign force in international affairs; children growing up with their father's ambition and their mother's absence; a new relationship with Chrissy — an astronaut and the right next chapter — that Paul keeps failing to fully embrace; and a grief that drives him deeper into multiverse physics than any human has gone before.

The empire continues. But this book is about what Paul built it for, and what he is willing to give up to answer the question that never leaves him alone.