Page 1 of Girl, Unseen

PROLOGUE

Around twenty miles outside of New York City, Marcus Thornton was in his element. Quite literally, because his passion was rocks, minerals and fossils, so traipsing through an abandoned quarry on a Saturday afternoon felt like a completely normal thing to do. It might have been a far cry from the sterile halls of academia, but Marcus had never felt more at home.

Out here, among the bones of the earth, he could almost fool himself into feeling young again. Before the divorce, before the slow rot of routine had set in like a cancer. The classroom was his bread and butter, but the field was where his heart truly lay.

So, two hours into his search the, bitter November wind had begun to take its toll. However, Marcus powered through, because his mind was firmly fixed on the prize – a strange rock formation that lived somewhere in this quarry, unlike anything he'd seen before. To the untrained eye, it was just another part of the land that had been contorted by erosion, but for someone who knew what they were looking at, it was a potential game-changer.

The email that brought him here had been light on details but heavy on intrigue, and the attached pictures had sealed the deal.Strange symbols discovered in quarry outside city. Unlike anything I've seen. Thought you might be interested, Dr. Thornton.

Marcus had been hooked from the first line. He'd spent the better part of his 45 years chasing mysteries etched in stone, and this one had ‘career-defining’ written all over it.

He adjusted his backpack, downed the last of his coffee, and set out to cover the last few acres of land. He was already two hours in and the last of the sun was dying out now. Pretty soon, darkness would descend and kill any search attempts, and Marcus wasn't too keen on camping out until sunrise. Not in this weather. But he'd parked his car as high as he could drive so that any search helicopters could see him from the air in case he got stranded.

Once upon a time, this quarry had been a hive of activity, with scores of men and machines working around the clock to tear limestone from the earth. The stone they harvested had gone on to form the very bonesof the city – the towering skyscrapers and grand edifices that made the Big Apple what it was.

But time had moved on, as it always did. New building materials and cheaper imports had slowly choked off demand, until one day the quarry simply shut down, the machines fell silent, and the men went off in search of other work. Now it moldered in obscurity, visited only by the occasional hiker or geology buff. Or, Thornton supposed, the rare crackpot who thought they'd found something extraordinary etched into the stone.

As he slugged his way back up the ramp toward the peak, Marcus fished the photographs out of his backpack one more time. The person who’d sent him these photos hadn’t provided any specific location or co-ordinates, and had stopped replying after three exchanges. Given how Marcus’s excitement practically dripped off the screen, Marcus had to wonder whether or not the finder had sensed he’d stumbled upon something extraordinary, and since come back here to claim discovery himself.

Of course, there was also the possibility that these photos were forgeries, and this was all a big wild goose chase. Marcus was no stranger to them, but even if this was a whole load of nothing, it gave him an excuse to spend a day getting back to his kind of nature. Worst case scenario, he’d had three hours of exercise and an afternoon away from his empty house.

He crested a rise and paused to catch his breath. The photos in his hands showed what looked like a plain old jumble of rocks, at first glance indistinguishable from the countless other piles of rubble in the quarry. The rocks appeared to be primarily limestone, which was no surprise given the quarry's history. But there were other types mixed in there too - he spotted the distinctive banding of gneiss, the glittery sheen of mica schist. That in itself was odd. Those were metamorphic rocks formed under intense heat and pressure deep within the earth. They had no business being jumbled together with sedimentary limestone in a quarry like this.

The assemblage reminded him of something the Vishnu Schist, an ancient formation in the Grand Canyon, known for its chaotic jumble of different rock types all mashed together. The pile in the photo was a dead ringer for a small patch of the Vishnu, right down to the swirling, almost convoluted layering.

But how could that be? The Vishnu Schist was over a billion years old, formed during the Precambrian Eon. It had no business existing in aNortheastern quarry, let alone one that specialized in much younger limestone. It would be like finding a dinosaur bone in the middle of Central Park – theoretically possible, but so improbable as to be laughable.

If this was a hoax, it was a damn sophisticated one. Someone would have needed an intimate knowledge of geology to construct a forgery this convincing. And if itwasn'ta hoax, the implications were staggering.

Marcus took another look at the photos and tried to orient himself. Based on the angle of the shadows and the visible rock faces, he estimated the formation was about halfway up the quarry wall, probably on one of the higher benches where the limestone beds thinned out into interlayered shales and mudstones. Getting there would be a climb, but nothing he hadn't done a hundred times before on field expeditions.

He stowed the photos again and began ascending the near-vertical slope up to the only patch of land he hadn’t inspected yet. As he climbed, Marcus let his mind wander. If this formation was indeed artificial, the product of intelligent design rather than blind geological processes, then who had created it? And for what purpose?

The region's indigenous peoples had a rich tradition of rock art and stone monuments, but nothing quite like this. The precision, the sheer improbability of it all – it spoke to a level of technical sophistication far beyond what was commonly attributed to pre-Columbian cultures.

But if not them, then who? Some lost civilization? Ancient visitors from across the sea? Or perhaps, as much as Marcus's rational mind balked at the idea, something even more exotic?

The notion was fanciful, and he had no time for the kind of pseudo-archaeological woo that some of his peers trafficked in. But still, the kernel of wild speculation persisted, and it was oddly alluring. He could see himself as a talking head on one of those alien shows with interchangeable names: Ancient UFOs, Ancient Mysteries, Ancient UFO Mysteries.There’s no evidence that this is the work of an extraterrestrial life form, but there’s no evidence it isn’t, either.Marcus would happily sit on a fence for the sake of getting on television. That would show the other guys at NYU what he was capable of.

The climb up to the bench was a grueling one, and Marcus's hands were scraped raw by the time he hauled himself over the lip. His leg muscles burned and his shoulders had reached complete muscle breakdown, but the discomfort was forgotten as soon as he caught sight of his prize.

There, nestled in a shallow depression in the rock face, was the formation from the photos.

Marcus's mouth hung open in a moment of unguarded astonishment. His heart rate suddenly ramped up, and something like fear pumped through his veins.

It was real. That was his first, staggering realization. Not a hoax, not a fabrication, but an actual, tangible phenomenon that defied all known geological principles. The photos hadn't done it justice. In person, the sheer wrongness of it, the jarring juxtaposition of rock types and eras, was enough to make his head spin.

Marcus reached out a trembling hand. Part of him was afraid to touch it, as though contact might shatter the illusion and send him tumbling back into the realm of the rational. But another part, the part that had driven him to pursue geology in the first place, yearned to feel the grain of it beneath his fingertips. To confirm with tactile certainty that this was no mere trick of the light.

So he steeled himself and closed the distance. The surface was pitted and rough beneath his touch. He traced the swirling bands of gneiss, the glittering flecks of mica. It was all so achingly familiar and yet profoundly alien at the same time.

Marcus tried to blink away the image because this impossible assemblage must be the product of a dream. He felt a giddy rush of excitement, the likes of which he hadn't experienced since his first fossil hunt as a child. The world seemed to tilt on its axis, and reality reshaped itself around this single, extraordinary data point.

Before him stood a formation that simply shouldn't exist. Metamorphic gneiss and schist, with their distinctive banding and sparkle, were interlayered with sedimentary limestone. Igneous basalt, dark and fine-grained, jutted out at odd angles. And throughout it all, threaded like veins in marble, were seams of quartzite. It was as if someone had taken a slice of the earth's crust, from surface to mantle, and mashed it all together in a blender. Rocks that formed under vastly different conditions, in different eras and environments, were now fused together in a single amalgamation that could change what even the best researchers believed about Northeastern geology.

But what perplexed Marcus the most were the symbols.

Etched into the surface of the rocks, crisscrossing the crazy-quilt of geology, were precise geometric shapes and swirling, almost organic forms.

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