Quicksilver

Quinn Quicksilver, a 19-year-old staff writer for Arizona! magazine, narrates his own story. As a three-day-old infant, he was found abandoned in a bassinet on a highway outside Peptoe, Arizona, with only a card bearing his name and date of birth. No family ever accepted him, and he grew up at Mater Misericordiae, a Catholic orphanage run by Poor Clares in Phoenix. At 17, Sister Agnes Mary secured him a magazine job, and he soon moved into his own apartment. After 18 months at the magazine, Quinn made what he calls a fateful mistake: sending a saliva sample to Getting to Know Me, a DNA ancestry service. The consequences upend his life entirely.

A week before agents arrive, Quinn begins experiencing "strange magnetism," a psychic compulsion that draws him toward things he needs. It leads him to a gold coin worth $40,000 in the ruins of an abandoned desert restaurant. An antiques dealer buys it for $30,000. Over the following days, the magnetism compels Quinn to withdraw cash, tape $16,000 to his chest, and stow a packed suitcase in his car. He is unconsciously preparing to become a fugitive.

The crisis arrives at Beane's Diner, where two agents from the Internal Security Agency (ISA), a powerful federal law-enforcement body, flank Quinn at the counter. They consider him dangerously "unique" and threaten to shoot him if he tries anything. The diner staff intervenes by hurling hot food at the agents, allowing Quinn to escape through the kitchen. A delivery driver named Juan Santos picks him up and mentors him on fugitive survival: destroy his smartphone, use a burner phone, and beware of government license-plate scanners. Quinn retrieves his car, swaps its plate with a neighboring Porsche's, and plans to drive to Peptoe to find the three men who discovered him as an infant.

Before Quinn reaches the interstate, psychic magnetism redirects him to a derelict ranch near Wickenburg, where he crashes through a barn door and kills two ISA agents in the chaos. Inside, he finds Bridget Rainking, a young woman zip-tied to a ladder and groggy from chloroform, and her grandfather Sparky Rainking, bound in the trunk of a car behind the barn. Quinn frees them, and the three flee together.

As they drive south, Bridget reveals that she too submitted DNA to Getting to Know Me, and the company sent her genome report directly to the ISA. "Several sequences in my genome are not human," she tells Quinn, adding that he shares this anomaly (58). Sparky, a man in his late fifties with a mysterious past, explains that Bridget's mother, Corrine, his adopted daughter who had fetal alcohol syndrome, insisted she became pregnant without sexual contact and left the baby with Sparky before vanishing. Bridget possesses psychic magnetism, the ability to communicate with animals, and presentiments: strong intuitive foreknowledge of events. Sparky reveals that two years earlier, Bridget had a presentiment of a blue-eyed man who would save her life with a car, and she is certain Quinn is that man.

At a truck-stop restaurant, Bridget alerts Quinn to two well-dressed young men whose human appearances flicker to reveal monstrous true forms: circular hookworm-like maws, no discernible features, and six-fingered tentacular hands with retractable talons. She calls them "Screamers." Sensing they plan a mass shooting, Bridget and Sparky execute a coordinated ambush, killing both creatures at close range. In death, the creatures lock into their human disguises. The three flee toward Tucson.

Interspersed with the main narrative, Quinn recounts formative childhood episodes. His best friend at the orphanage, Litton Ormond, was the sole survivor of a massacre committed by his father, Corbett Ormond, who eventually tracked Litton to the orphanage and murdered the 12-year-old at a nearby bakery. Quinn, age 11, fell into severe depression. Sister Theresa, a nun with a doctorate in psychology, taught him about ants, birds, and fish over many months, leading him to a crucial insight: unlike animals governed by instinct, humans possess free will, which makes life meaningful but also makes evil possible. "Free will and freedom itself require the problem of evil" (270).

In Tucson, psychic magnetism leads the squad to a drug-gang stash house, where they retrieve approximately $265,000. They also acquire a German shepherd attack dog that Bridget befriends and renames Winston, and purchase an unregistered Ford Explorer from Butch Hammer, a mechanic with an intuitive ability to detect lies who has helped others like them before. That night, Quinn and Bridget each experience terrifying mirror visions of an apocalyptic future: burning cities, ghouls, and Screamers moving among the violent. Bridget privately confides to Quinn her presentiment that not all of them will survive.

In Peptoe, Quinn visits Hakeem Kaspar, one of the men who found him as an infant. Hakeem, now a reclusive UFO obsessive, describes a supernatural event from that morning: a door opening in the air onto a cobblestone road leading into star-filled darkness, an invisible presence standing just inside, and concentric circles of blue light descending from the sky that "programmed" the three men to protect the baby. Before Quinn can visit the others, ISA agents arrive by helicopter, and Hakeem directs the squad to Panthea Ching, a 30-year-old artist and seer who has been expecting them for weeks.

Panthea joins the squad and provides a cosmological framework. The Screamers are Nihilim, fallen beings from a destroyed first universe. Once beautiful beings called Rishon, they corrupted themselves through envy and hatred and became immortal monsters. They enter this universe through alliances with power-hungry humans and feed on suffering. Panthea theorizes the squad members were engineered with Rishon DNA and placed through surrogate mothers, making them invisible to the Nihilim.

After a harrowing off-road escape from ISA pursuit across the dark desert, the squad locates the Oasis, a lavish underground compound near the town of Ajo built by Bodie Emmerich, a tech billionaire who devolved into megalomania, calling himself "the Light." Underground, they discover 12 enslaved workers sedated and fitted with shock collars, 88 "soul children" kept compliant through drugs, and the "Special Selections": kidnapped prisoners reserved for extreme abuse by Emmerich and his elite visitors. Among photos of the Specials, Quinn recognizes Annie Piper, a girl from his orphanage who disappeared eight years earlier. Emmerich reveals that a visitor recently beat Annie so severely she could not recover, and he ordered his physician to euthanize her. Quinn shoots Emmerich, and the squad kills the physician as well. Among the freed Specials, Quinn finds Keiko Ishiguro, another orphanage girl, confirming that someone at Mater Misericordiae has been scouting children for abduction.

Quinn connects the pattern to Sister Margaret, a nun who had close relationships with both Annie and Keiko and who escorted Litton to the bakery on the day his father murdered him. At the orphanage, Quinn enlists Sister Theresa's help to confront Sister Margaret. When Quinn names the creature a Nihilim, its disguise collapses, its face folding into the hookworm maw. It flees to the basement and attempts to rupture a gas line to incinerate the building. Quinn pursues it into total darkness, focuses his psychic magnetism, and fires three shots, killing it. The body reverts to its original Rishon form and is secretly buried in the desert.

In a brief epilogue set one year later, the Oasis story has broken worldwide. The squad remains fugitives from the ISA, living nomadically, funding themselves from drug-gang stashes they nickname "Nottinghams" and employing a new shared gift called "identity projection" that lets them alter their perceived appearances. Quinn acknowledges his transformation from an innocent writer into a guardian who must keep righteous anger from becoming something darker. Bridget's presentiment that at least one of them would die has not yet come true, but the secret war against the Nihilim continues.