Mortals As They Walk

Description

In 2019, Pate Williamson is homeless, broke, and out of options. Until a stranger in a Bentley offers him a way out: a year of his life, in exchange for one million dollars, no questions asked. All he has to do is volunteer for a genetic research program in Vienna. He tells himself it’s just science.

Thirteen years later, in 2032, a twelve-year-old boy named Salim is walking home from an ordinary evening with his parents when three men in black take him from his own front hallway. Mute since birth, brilliant beyond his years, Salim escapes into the night with nothing but his wits, and a growing certainty that his kidnapping isn’t random. Someone has been waiting for him his whole life.

As Salim runs, Pate is still searching for a woman he lost, a child he was told never lived, and the truth about a project that was supposed to make humanity better, but instead broke everything it touched. Across four timelines and two continents, the past and the present are converging on the same impossible answer, and neither Pate nor Salim understands yet how closely their stories are entwined.

Mortals As They Walk is a literary science fiction novel, equal parts conspiracy, family story, and meditation on fate and free will. It asks how much of our lives we actually choose, and how far we’ll go for the people we love once we understand what’s been taken from us.

A previous edition of this novel was published in 2019 and is now out of print; used copies may still turn up online. This 2026 edition is the definitive text: thoroughly copyedited, with the novel’s four timelines resequenced to run chronologically within each thread.