Origins: The Bridge (working title)

Colonial (1600s–1700s)

The era when the Codec leaves the Caribbean.

The third and closing volume of the origin trilogy.

Two braided threads. The first follows the Privateer — a Brethren- of-the-Coast captain who recovers a fragment, hides it in Port Royal, and loses it to the 1692 quake-sink. The drowned clue. The parallel Book Two recovery, told here from the side that buried it.

The second thread follows the Founder — a Bridgetown ↔ Philadelphia Freemason who carries a fragment ashore in the eighteenth century and hides it inside the young republic. He is the bridge between the islands and the continent. He is the reason the modern hunt has to run inland in Book Two.

The era when the Codec leaves the Caribbean is also the era when the world stops keeping the kind of records that could prove the Codec ever existed. The chain survives because the keepers learn, in this century, to hide its existence as carefully as its content.

Currently in beat-sheet form. Drafting follows the origin sequence.