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            riverhead books An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com  Copyright © 2023 by Nick Binge Ltd. Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Riverhead and the R colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Binge, Nicholas, author. Title: Ascension / Nick Binge. Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2023. Identifiers: LCCN 2022033815 | ISBN 9780593539583 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593539606 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction). | Science fiction. | Novels. Classification: LCC PR6102.I53 A94 2023 | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20220812 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033815 Cover design: Tyriq Moore Cover images: (composite) Matt Wier / Gallery Stock; Glen Pearson / Millennium Images, UK; THP Creative / iStock / Getty Images Plus Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. pid_prh_6.0_143301904_c0_r0    For Oskar, for teaching me to always keep climbing    I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. . . . The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. —Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus   Foreword My brother disappeared twenty-nine years ago. It didn’t happen on a specific day, or even during a specific month. The process was a slow drifting—a realization that grew in me like a poison, a splinter at the stem of my brain. In 1990, he missed Christmas with the family, sending no message or explanation. He just didn’t show up. I wasn’t exactly surprised at the time. He simply was who he was: Harold Tunmore, an esteemed scientist and Renaissance man. There was always some far-flung discovery, some hidden spool of thread he had to pull that would take precedence over other people. I never really understood his devotion to the unknown, but I learned to tolerate it over the years. You simply couldn’t count on him. He lived way up in the clouds. It must be said that he had got better over the previous five or six years, becoming more of an uncle to my daughter, Harriet, in that time. He’d actually show up for birthdays and holidays, bringing with him strange and exotic trinkets from his travels. He’d swing by unannounced, much to my wife’s consternation, and take Harriet off on wild trips, exploring Scottish forests and camping by lakes. I’m not sure what had caused this change in him, but it was a welcome one. It was nice to see him more, after so many years of absences and excuses. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been shocked, then, when Harriet refused to come out of her room on Christmas Day until he appeared. She was only fourteen, still young enough to hope for the best in people. As for me, I’d been expecting it. It sounds horrible to say, but I’d been wondering how long it would be before he let us down. I received his first letter in late February, followed by two more in the spring. They were addressed to Harriet, but after reading them, she passed them to me to take a look. At first, I thought they must have been a joke. The content of them was so bizarre, implausible to the point of absurdity. I see now that was wishful thinking. They did not lead on chronologically, one letter to the next. There were similar threads in each, but they were dispersed in ways I could not make sense of. I later thought they might be in a code of some kind, a hidden meaning among the fantasy that we were meant to somehow decipher. What he expected Harriet to do with them, I had no idea. It doesn’t shame me to say I lacked my brother’s intellect. Everybody did. When we showed the letters to my sister, Poppy, she merely shrugged and said, “Leave it, Ben. That’s a maze with only dead ends. I stopped trying to work him out years ago.” He never came back. He never contacted me, or anyone, again. I waited, wishing fervently for some kind of sign, imagining that he was simply out in the world, digging up artifacts and making bold new discoveries. Over time, bit by bit, I found myself actively looking for him. First, I phoned old friends. Then I visited universities he had taught at. All the while the worry grew inside me, bubbling underneath the surface. I told myself that this was just Harold being Harold. This was just the sort of thing that he did. After two years of searching, I had found nothing. It was an exercise in pure frustration. I spent weeks on the phone with police, with laboratories where he had done research. I spent weekends traveling to see old acquaintances and colleagues, leaning on connections at my legal practice to expedite matters. Urged on by Harriet, I did everything I could to follow the thread of where he might have gone. But there was no thread. No hints. Not a single scrap of information. It was as though, in the winter of 1990, he had simply vanished into thin air. All I