Excerpt from The Unveiling by Quan Barry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Unveiling

With every second, she could feel herself disappearing. The air smelled brisk like early spring. A faint breeze stirred the water, drops raining off her paddle each time she lifted it. For a dizzying instant, she couldn't even recollect the specifics of her own face. To make it all worse, her sunglasses were gone.

"This can't be happening," she whispered. She had no proof hers wasn't the only human consciousness left on the planet. She recalled a philosophy class she'd taken as an undergrad. The professor admitting that the greatest questions of philosophy still had yet to be solved. Who are we? Is there a god? How do we know who we are without others around to reflect our personhood back at us? In the middle of the talk, she began to panic, her breath growing ragged as the blood pounded in her throat.

What would it feel like to be dead?

In the lecture hall, she could hear someone hyperventilating. She knew the one struggling to breathe was her. Something small and dark was stirring behind her ribs. She worried she might scream.

It was nonsensical, like dividing by zero. Whether you acknowl-edged it or not, every human had the capacity to transform in a flash from everything into nothing, the whole human race acting like that moment would never arrive. There will come a time not of my choosing, she thought, and on that day this power to blink out of existence will be fulfilled. She'd grabbed her things and rushed out into the noise of the city. It was only there she could breathe again.

The polar light bounced around unimpeded. Striker shielded her eyes with her hand. Could the sun already be damaging her vision? Even a pair of cloth goggles like the kind Percy had described would've been better than nothing. From horizon to horizon, the indifference of Antarctica swallowing her whole.

I have to get out of here. It was dawning on her that agoraphobia was the flip side of claustrophobia. The same feeling of being obliterated either by too much space or not enough of it. How long did it take the dead to realize they were dead? What part of her would even perceive the difference?

Desperately she scanned the landscape. Her gaze raking the emptiness until her vision burned. She could hear a voice begging please. The earth was pummeling her with her own insignificance. Finally her eyes snagged on something.

I have to get out of here. It was dawning on her that agoraphobia was the flip side of claustrophobia. The same feeling of being obliterated either by too much space or not enough of it. How long did it take the dead to realize they were dead? What part of her would even perceive the difference?

Desperately she scanned the landscape. Her gaze raking the emptiness until her vision burned. She could hear a voice begging please. The earth was pummeling her with her own insignificance. Finally her eyes snagged on something.

A band of icebergs was migrating her way. Her mouth flooded with hope. Beyond them she might find the others or maybe with a little luck the Yegorov. She might even run into one of those giant cruise ships with five thousand passengers, the ship floating like a white city. If there was nothing beyond the ice but more emptiness, there was a strong possibility she would zero out. Don't take your ass past go. Do not collect $200. Already an inner void was rooting in her chest. The feeling like falling off a cliff. Arms pinwheeling through space. She placed her feet on the footrests in the front of her boat and locked her eyes on where she was headed.

"Wait for me," she begged.

Excerpted from The Unveiling by Quan Barry. Copyright © 2025 by Quan Barry. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.