The Book of Elsewhere

The novel follows Unute, an 80,000-year-old warrior who cannot die. According to his mother's account, she brewed a narcotic drink, entered a vision, and conceived him with blue lightning during a time when her peaceful valley band was besieged by raiders. Born with superhuman strength and a berserker fury triggered by combat, Unute destroyed the raiders as a child. Each time his body is destroyed, it reconstitutes into a leathery chrysalis from which he hatches fully renewed.

In the present day, Unute (called "B" by those closest to him) works with the Unit, a top-secret U.S. military outfit based near Tacoma, Washington. The Unit deploys him on covert missions in exchange for researching the source of his immortality. His handler is Keever, a gruff, deeply loyal soldier. The lead researcher is Diana Ahuja, a physicist with three PhDs recruited after her own studies led her to discover Unute's existence. Diana seeks to reach the source of his power. B wants something different: not death, but mortality, the possibility of an ending that would make his existence feel like genuine life.

The novel opens with a crisis. A soldier named Ulafson, driven to despair by witnessing comrades killed during Unute's berserker rages, packed a bomb with folk charms such as holy water and rock salt and detonated it in a locker room, trying to destroy Unute. The blast devastated the room but left Unute sitting at the epicenter with his jaw destroyed and his chest open, regenerating. Since then, B has grown increasingly withdrawn, revisiting old mission sites and communing with the dead.

During one such visit, B and Keever discover something impossible: Thakka, a soldier killed during a prior operation and buried by a collapsed tunnel, is alive. Thakka has a hole in his skull but is blinking and whispering. Stonier, Thakka's husband and a Unit soldier, rushes to hold Thakka in his final moments before Thakka dies a second time. B later discovers a hidden ladder and trapdoor in the tunnel, evidence that someone accompanied an animal into the space around the time of Thakka's revival.

B disappears for days, then returns carrying a massive headless animal carcass. He tells Diana and Caldwell, who heads the Unit division studying ancient relics and technologies, a story spanning thousands of years. On an Indonesian archipelago, he watched a female babirusa, a species of deer-pig with dramatic curving tusks, perform a precise herbal ritual after losing her litter. A bolt of cold blue lightning struck one of the surviving pigs, just as lightning had once struck his own mother. The pig was born immortal, hatching from eggs just as Unute does. It has hated him across millennia, fighting him to the death only to return. He killed it and brought the body back, but its flesh has already recongealed into an egg in the containment lab.

Interspersed with the present-day narrative are historical chapters narrated by people who encountered Unute: a dying servant who traveled with him for years, a wife from the Thirty Years' War who describes his cruelty, and a boy stowaway on a 19th-century ship protected by a "woken," an animate construct brought to life by the lineage of Vayn, an ancient child of Life whose descendants can animate objects. A man in early 20th-century Warsaw finds Unute's hidden notebook logging his rare "elsewheres," deaths after which he hatches far from where he fell. In a framing narrative, a doctor implied to be Sigmund Freud recounts treating Unute as a patient.

Meanwhile, Stonier begins seeing Dr. Shur, the Unit's counselor, who directs him toward a local self-help group called the Life Project (LP), run by Charles Alam. The LP preaches opposition to death. Stonier finds unexpected comfort there and begins recruiting other bereaved people connected to Unit casualties.

Caldwell pursues a hidden agenda. He belongs to a nameless cult seeking to tap Unute's power and has spent years assembling a rough human-shaped figure from Unute's historical remains: preserved body parts collected across centuries. He immerses this patchwork creation in a tank, trying to bring it to life. When he obtains a tiny nub of hard flesh called an egg tooth, the keratinous spur a hatching creature uses to break its shell, he places it on the figure's forehead. Something shifts, but Caldwell is attacked that night by an unseen intruder and disappears, leaving behind a blood-soaked apartment.

Diana traces the LP's origins and discovers that Alam's co-founder, "S. Plomer," vanished shortly after the pair took over. Tracking Plomer through digital forensics, Diana finds a woman living under a false identity. Plomer reveals the LP's theology: Unute is the child of Death, a force called the Thowless, a primordial silence underlying all existence. Vayn, the daughter of Life, is his cosmic opposite. Alam is Vayn's distant descendant, carrying a diluted version of her power, including the ability to pour life into the dead. Plomer left because Alam became fanatical. When Plomer realizes Diana works with Unute, she reaches for a hidden weapon, and Diana shoots her.

Back at the base, the patchwork figure awakens, breaks free, and kills several soldiers including Keever. In his final moments, Keever confesses he was the one who first heard rumors about Alam's abilities and steered Stonier toward the LP, hoping Alam might bring back soldiers killed by Unute. The creature eventually collapses, sliding apart along its seams, and the egg tooth is gone from its forehead.

B discovers Caldwell hiding in his office, brought back from death by Alam and carrying the egg tooth on his tongue. Stonier and armed soldiers restrain B with experimental quantum-lattice shackles. Alam steps forward, identifying himself as Vayn's descendant and calling B "the enemy." B offers a deal: He will submit to Alam's plan if Alam first brings Keever back to life. Alam places the egg tooth on Keever's forehead and channels lightning. Keever revives.

Alam presses the egg tooth to B's forehead and floods him with life energy so intense it threatens to scatter his consciousness. Diana, bound and gagged nearby, spits out her gag and delivers the critical revelation: The Thowless is not death but stillness, entropy. Alam's lightning is blue, the same as Unute's. They are not opposites but siblings, both agents of Change, opposed to the primordial force of changelessness. Shur has been the Thowless's vessel all along, manipulating Alam into destroying the strongest agent of Change.

Shur shoots Alam. B leaps to shield Diana, taking a bullet. Shur turns the gun on herself, and as she dies, an ancient voice speaks through her: "Another time." B begs the dying Alam to use his power on himself, but Alam lets his hands fall and dies.

In the aftermath, B tells Diana that he, Vayn, and Alam were all tools of Change, opposed not to each other but to entropy. He also solves the mystery of his "elsewheres": When his egg tooth detaches during rebirth, his chrysalis forms at a distance while a replacement tooth grows. B visits the babirusa's egg one last time in a desert wadi, a dry riverbed, and watches the pig hatch. It charges him, but he gently turns it aside and embraces it. He tells it, "Go well, brother," and the pig walks toward the sun without looking back. In the novel's final pages, the doctor offers Unute a transformative insight: A creature in a chrysalis does not transform but dissolves, and an entirely new being self-organizes from that destruction. Unute is not immortal but "infinitely mortal." On his patient's face, the doctor sees surprise and wonder.