The veil between altitudes

A dying historian boards a transatlantic flight — and finds herself at the centre of a six-hundred-year mystery she was always meant to solve.

Mara Ellison is thirty-eight years old, with a terminal diagnosis, a one-way ticket to England, and a residency at an obscure Wiltshire archive she applied to in an act of quiet desperation. She is a historian of the dead — of household records and forgotten lives — and she is doing what she knows: moving toward meaning while she still can.

On Flight 1147 from Chicago to London, a man dies in the seat beside her. His boarding pass vanishes. And a cardiologist named Dr. Nadia Adisa — who has been watching Mara since boarding — begins to tell her things she should not know. About the archive. About the manuscript. About a name written six times in a fifteenth-century document in handwriting that matches Mara's grandmother.

What follows is a journey into the liminal — the spaces between places, between lives, between the world of the living and something older and stranger beneath it. The Ashworth Collection holds a manuscript distributed across centuries and continents, passed from keeper to keeper with a single instruction: keep this until the right person comes. The right person, it turns out, has always been Mara.

As she assembles the gathered ones — a cardiologist, an archivist, a materials scientist, a filmmaker, a software architect — she begins to understand what the manuscript truly is: not a relic, but a transmission. Not a document about the dead, but a message from them. And what it asks of her is not scholarship. It is faith.

The Veil Between Altitudes is a novel about grief and inheritance, about the knowledge the dead leave behind and the living who carry it forward. It is a ghost story without ghosts, a mystery without a villain, and a love letter to everyone who has ever kept something precious without knowing why.

📖 81 pages