The Island of Bones

Now they’ll never know we were here first.

Dr. Iris Lettsome is reading a sugar-mill window wrong. The Annaberg ruin on St. John has a windmill aperture that should look out across the cane fields. It does not. It aims, instead, at a slab of stone on a cay her people have walked past for three centuries and a partner named Kwame Cudjoe who can hear, in the spacing of an abeng song, the correction his ancestors built into the chain.

What they are reading is the Codec. A distributed visual cipher cut into the islands by behiques who knew, with five hundred years of warning, what was coming with the sails. The window aims at a disc. The disc aims at another window. The chain runs hemisphere-wide.

Across St. John, Salt River, and the bone-bleached terminus at Cayo Hueso, Iris and Kwame are not alone in the reading. A Sevilla heritage trust whose unbroken line traces to the Casa de Contratación has been waiting a long time for the chain to surface, and is prepared to bring down a privateer-bay cave roof on top of both of them if that is what closing the window finally requires.

Beneath all of it, in a 1493 prologue and a thousand-year-old warning cut into a stone, a pale stranger leaves a signature in a language no one alive can read.

The first volume of the Island of Bones series. A Caribbean treasure-hunt thriller built on real history, real astronomy, and the long patient discipline of a line that has been hiding the truth in plain sight since before the sails appeared on the eastern horizon.

Now they’ll never know we were here first.