Horror meets coming-of-age in this thrilling novel in which forgotten Cold War mysteries make a terrifying reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called "a master."
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 anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: do not fly today.
There are a few concerning elements to the calls. None of the mothers remember making them-and some of the mothers are 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 an 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. All Hazelton wanted was time to seek an explanation, but pressure from both American and Russian actors forced him into a perilous race.
