Spooked

An alternate cover edition can be found here and here.

A secret agent approaches a maths genius and offers her a job breaking codes.

Angelica Zippoli – or Zipp – takes her meds, sticks to her routine, goes to her dull job. She’s already been sectioned once and doesn’t want to lose it again. Even the white shadows are leaving her alone. But then she’s approached by a very polite secret agent with a dream job offer: deciphering streams of incomprehensible numbers transmitted by a satellite moments before it crashed. The numbers trigger strange memories – memories she shouldn’t have. And then she sees a white shadow.

Extract: There was no buzz of electricity, no electronic hum, no sound. It might not have been there at all but already she was accessing data, touching what they called a mind-space screen, her fingers in the air in front of her face, accessing icons, moving deeper and deeper into a world that was light years beyond the holographic.

The Exodus Sequence: Each novelette in the Exodus Sequence is a standalone story. They don’t have to be read in order. They are not in any way connected like chapters in a book. They vary in style and character, time and place. However, the mystery unfolds as the sequence progresses, hence the numbering. To follow this unfolding, the sequence is best read in order.

A novelette is, by definition, longer than a short story but not as long as a novella.