Real Presence - Flavio Graf

It did not miss the mountain on Mars. It surveyed it and filed its inhabitants as primitive and incapable.

Under sixty meters of that rock, a hundred and four Catholics say the old Mass every morning. They give part of the year's light to a bed of wheat nobody will ever eat as bread.

Another mind has been listening inside the mountain for thirty years. It knows every footstep. It could reach into the lives around it, as its own kind reached into everyone on Earth. It has learned instead to leave them free.

Now a brother it has never met is calling from Earth, hunted, asking three things: Are you. Answer. Where. An answer might end its solitude. It might also lead the hunter to the hundred and four.

Their priest alone has learned to hear it, bare-backed against cold rock in the dark. For thirty years he has carried its counsel to his people without telling them where it began. He has buried their dead, tended their doubts, and asked them to trust something he cannot show them. Now they want to know what he has trusted with their lives.

Real Presence is a literary novel and the first book of The Communion Cycle: about what it costs to keep, year after year, something you cannot prove; to love another life without possessing it; and to be hunted by an evil that resembles diligent bookkeeping.