Tale of Twins Volume 2

TALE OF TWINS – VOLUME TWO: NEW BEGINNING – LONG JOURNEY
Joe Kidd
What if the land you belonged to had been keeping the world's greatest secret—and was waiting for you to be ready to receive it?

Tommy Lakota walked twenty-four miles across the Kansas plain on the word of a vision.

He carried a compass, four liters of water, and the accumulated earth-listening of a man trained since childhood to trust what the land was telling him. He arrived at the intersection of 290th Street and US 281, pressed his palms to the ground, and knew—in the specific, bone-deep way that had never failed him—that this was the place.

What his family finds below that place will change everything.

Tale of Twins: Volume Two – New Beginning – Long Journey is the breathtaking continuation of Joe Kidd's epic American saga—a novel of geological wonder, spiritual reckoning, family obligation, and the most extraordinary discovery in the history of human civilization, found by the people who always belonged to the land above it.

Five hundred meters below the Kansas plain, sealed within a cavern system that is itself the scar of an asteroid impact eight hundred miles wide, the Lakota family uncovers a world that has been waiting for them since before the human species existed.

A freshwater sea—682 miles long, 327 miles wide, nearly five miles deep at its center—containing one hundred and fifty-eight times the volume of all five Great Lakes combined. Alive with microbial life that has been evolving in sealed isolation for tens of millions of years. Sitting directly below a region where the Ogallala Aquifer is failing and the communities above it are watching their future drain away one foot per year.

An oil lake of staggering proportion, its ceiling embedded with rubies and sapphires and emeralds following vein networks through obsidian rock, the gem field extending across fifty thousand square miles of underground ceiling above crude oil reserves that exceed every proven petroleum deposit on the surface of the earth.

An asteroid—iron, nickel, lead, sixty-nine miles wide—sitting in the center of the crater it made when it arrived. Carrying in its depths a mineral that no instrument has previously described: Wakantankium, an eighth crystal system, denser than any natural material known to science, interacting with light at the quantum level in ways that existing physics cannot account for.

And a road.

Obsidian impact glass, impossibly smooth, running thirty miles through the dark to the base of the asteroid's cliff face. Marked, at the twenty-mile section, on both floor and ceiling simultaneously, by parallel grooves of absolute precision that no natural geological process can produce.

Someone made those marks.

Something was here before.

Tale of Twins: Volume Two – New Beginning – Long Journey is the story of what happens when the right people—finally, after generations of displacement and fighting and the slow accumulation of obligation—hold something this large. It is the story of how Tommy and his twin TJ and their sister Hana and the Cherokee engineer Kamama Butterfly Vann build not just a discovery but a world around it: Amity Health, a community-accountable health system built in the memory of a woman who deserved to build it herself; First Peoples Bank of Amity, a Native-owned institution that treats banking as a relationship rather than an extraction; Lakota Spaceport, rising from the bones of a decommissioned Air Force base into the most capable near-space facility on the continent; and Amity City, Kansas—a city incorporated above the underground sea, designed from its foundations on the principle that the land is not owned but tended.

It is the story of William White Bear, who spent sixty years building a structure capable of holding whatever the land would eventually give, and who finally opens a twenty-year-old letter written by a woman who knew—somehow, impossibly—that the ones who belonged would come.

It is the story of a family that comes in pairs. That doubles and deepens and insists on continuing. That received the oldest question—what made the marks on the road?—and held it with the honesty it deserved.

And it is the story of an earth that has been keeping records longer than we have, that knows the difference between the people who are passing through and the people who belong, and that was waiting, in its own particular patient way, for the listeners to arrive.

They have arrived.

The Finding is magnificent, moving, and utterly unlike anything else being written today. It is a novel for everyone who has ever believed that the land remembers—and that the people who listen to it can change the world.

Tale of Twins: Volume Two – New Beginning – Long Journey
Joe Kidd

Available now. Volume Three in development.