Page 55 - DivineSparkRisingFinal

Nicholas Boothman
The words hit him harder than he expected, like
someone reaching into his chest and unhooking an
old chain. For a moment he wasn’t a professor, a
codebreaker, or even a betrayed lover. He was just
Henry, stripped bare, unedited.
Carolina touched the stone reverently.
“It’s Fragment Four,” she said. “The Identity
Disruption sequence.”
He closed his eyes. He knew this pattern.
Intervention therapy used versions of it to disrupt
self-identification with trauma. But this was more
elegant. Cleaner. It could dissolve a toxic belief like
acid on rust.
They photographed the inscription and
translated the glyphs.
“There’s a coordinate cipher here. A place.”
Henry decoded the numbers. “Alentejo.”
“The cork forests?”
“Or what’s beneath them.”
Before they could speak further, they heard
footsteps above, fast, sharp, deliberate.
He motioned for silence. The footsteps turned
into voices.
Portuguese. Two men.
“Too soon,” she mouthed.
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