Previously in Quantum Gravity: from a manor called Overton, a writer has been sending her newspaper columns across time, through a 1971 Kenbak-1 computer, to two young women in the 1980s. Indra and Kendra read them as warnings and build ahead of what’s coming: a fund for every birth, a council of women, laws mirrored across a border so they can’t be torn on one side alone. She isn’t predicting the future, she’s laying its floor in advance. And the people who had other plans for that future have started following her, to Overton and now across the strait to Tangier.

“The last thing I remember is the cool stone at my back and the slow unfurling of his wings.
Then the world tips sideways.”

Too many threads at once

The final chapter opens with the writer falling. She has reached too far, held too many threads across too many years, and her body simply gives out. She comes back to the world in pieces: crockery clattering downstairs, a lobby radio, arms carrying her through a hotel door into the full noise of Tangier.

Her people close around her. Hasna is on her feet before the door has swung shut. Wolfgang doesn’t ask what happened. He breathes once, the wolf just under his skin, and reads it all from her: whose arms she came from, the burn of where she has been, and how much it cost her.

Then two men who do not trust each other take up their posts on either side of her bed and agree, without a word, to share the watch.

“Mikhail watches the street. Wolfgang watches the rise and fall of my chest, the wolf inside him pacing but contained.”

前人栽树，后人乘凉

The phone rings almost at once. In England, the writer’s household has turned her estate into a circus on purpose. There are tents in the forest, fires at night, Traveller families hunting rabbits, and children galloping badly on borrowed horses. The men in the vans still drive past, but there’s nothing to see except noise. A birth is coming to the manor in a month, and the forest is full to keep it safe.

Chinese readers know this saying: those who came before plant the trees, those who come after sit in the shade. It is usually said with gratitude, looking back. Here the planting is still under way, and you can see what it costs. One woman has given more than her body had to give, so that two others she will never sit beside get their shade.

The book ends quietly in a hotel room. Nobody fights and nothing is solved. Three people hold the line between worlds by doing the simplest, hardest thing of all.

They wait.

Somebody has noticed the planks.

That’s what the vans are. Not press, not burglars. Men paid to wonder why history keeps refusing to fall where it was pushed, and patient enough to follow the ink back to the hand. You wanted to change the outcome, girl. Outcomes have owners.

“Hard to play ghost when you’ve got Travellers posted at every tree line and kids galloping up and down the lanes. Our ‘visitors’ don’t like mud on their polished shoes, it seems.”

[Start the series here →]

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange, published by CYcrds OÜ