Page 13 - DivineSparkRisingFinal

Nicholas Boothman
Chapter 1: Lisbon
Henry Talbot didn’t look like someone who
could rewrite your life with a sentence. At thirty-
eight, he wore faded clothes, carried a canvas
satchel, and had the wary ease of a man who had
seen too much to be naïve and not enough to be
cynical. But ordinary he was not.
He grew up in Hexham, a market town near
Hadrian’s Wall in England, where history seeps
from the stones. His father taught, his mother
nursed, and he carried their love of learning to
Oxford, where he studied languages before
blending them with brain science and old
manuscripts.
Today, his world is wires, whispers, and
machines trying to think like people. And tonight
one of those machines has found something.
Something wrong.
That’s when the text arrived.
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