The Tangent Zone

< b> < i> The Tangent Zone< /i> < br> Book description< /b> < br> < br> September 22, 2002. After entering a portal in northern Minnesota's aurora borealis and crossing a blue void, Thirty-nine-year-old Ottilie Clairveaux awakens beside a forest pool. The love of her life, Jonathan Thibodaux, entered the portal with her, but he is nowhere to be found. She assumes he is dead and walks to an ebony beach beside a purple lake, where fifty young men and women nervously pace. They are molts that were captured in the beams of her and Jonathan's dispersers and transported with her to this make-believe place she and Jonathan call The Travel Womb. They have no remembrance of their life as light being predators and ask Ottilie to tell them their story. She reluctantly begins their history. < br> < br> Ottilie and Jonathan, unknown to them, are descendants of the star system Fomalhaut, stranded on earth generations before. On September 22, 1969, when Jonathan' s mother, the new housekeeper, moves in with Ottilie' s parents in New Orleans, they meet, both six years old, and share an otherworldly love. They discover magic in the ebony sand of an hourglass Ottilie' s parents bought from a voodoo shop; this transports them temporarily to The Travel Womb, where they frolic as adults.< br> < br> On September 22, 1980, at seventeen, on a yearly canoe trip with her parents in northern Minnesota' s wilderness, at the peak of the sun' s eleven year cycle when northern lights are bright, they camp on Mystic Sky Lake beach, which has the same ebony crystals as the hourglass. Out of crystals from the hourglass and suffering withdrawal, they usethe beach crystals to evoke The Travel Womb. Confused, they accuse her parents of practicing voodoo and inhabiting their bodies in The Travel Womb; accidentally spilling the crystals, they cause her parents to vanish in the northern lights. Ottilie, crazy with shock, accuses Jonathan of practicing voodoo and shoots him as he flees in a canoe. < br> < br> The next morning Ottilie is better. Jonathan, only slightly wounded, is assisted back to the beach by a friendly camper, Sven, who seems to know Ottilie and Jonathan' s origins but refuses to tell them until tomorrow. Jonathan hints that he might leave in the northern lights to find Ottilie' s parents, and the next night Ottilie seduces him to distract him. He leaves, anyway, molts, is captured, and escapes from Fomalhaut ancestors who were sent to hunt down Ottilie, the last potential mother of her kind, in order to prevent her from reproducing. < br> < br> Because Jonathan has molted, she is now alone in the wilderness, and seeking answers, she canoes to Sven' s island campsite. Just as she approaches, she overhears two men interrogating Sven as to the whereabouts of Ottilie. Sven refuses to tell, and she sees two aliens throw him over a precipice, killing him. They spot her, accusing her of being a monster. She shoots one to death with her dad' s pistol and drowns the other. On the road out, she encounters two more at Sven' s burning house and crushes them between her truck and a firetruck. Then she encounters a beautiful woman alien, Pleilee, who accuses her of being the monster that killed her family. She pulls Ottilie from her truck and throws her into a creek. With a rock and a blow toPleilee' s chest, Ottilie believes she has killed her and heads south. < br> < br> Grand Marais is burning, attacked from a Fomalhaut Warp Zone, charred bodies all around, and she encounters an alien Jonathan impostor, who claims he has downloaded Jonathan' s memories to himself. He tells her that if she doesn' t die Fomalhauts will invade the earth and destroy it. He aims his disperser to kill her, but he loves her as Jonathan did. Longing for the impossible, they embrace. Then a mysterious diamond light fries him and flies toward the lake c