The Hatch

"With technology becoming so complex and overriding ethical boundaries and our ever-expanding push into space, we have to develop our senses to their fullest potential. We have to evolve faster." These are the words her mother spoke the night before she left on an EASA-sponsored mission in space. She never came back.

After her mother's funeral, her brother also joined EASA. He went missing too.

Having lost both mother and brother, Britta Tate does not want to go with EASA when they come for her at age thirteen, but she doesn't have much choice. They process her as a psychic intern and begin a grueling regiment of training. Ten years later, she is accomplished at many psychic abilities, but she is frustrated that her astral searches have been unable to track down her brother. Perhaps he just doesn't want her to find him.

And why does the number forty-nine keep appearing?