Out of Time—Volume I: Adapt

Horus Wellsly is fifteen thousand years old. He has watched civilizations rise and fold back into the earth. He was made to protect — not to feel, not to want, not to stay — and for fifteen millennia, he has been almost exactly what he was made to be. Then a research mission strands him twelve thousand years before his own time, on a younger Earth still bright with possibility. The people he finds there are young. Fierce. Stubborn. Living on the edge of an extinction they cannot see coming. He has six months to decide whether they are worth saving. If they are, the cost is fixed in law older than memory: fifty thousand years of guardianship, alone on a planet that will never know his name. He has spent fifteen millennia learning to wait. He is about to learn what it costs to stay — and to adapt to a world he was never built to love. Out of Time is a literary science-fiction novel about an ancient guardian, the prehistoric people he was sent to study, and the woman who waits in the future for his return. There are no space battles. There are no easy choices. There is only the quiet, impossible weight of guarding a world that has no idea it needs guarding yet. Volume I of the Out of Time series.