Washington, D.C., 2027. Eva Harris is a public health director for a nonprofit in the gov-tech industry and mother of two - including a son who defied every medical projection and chose to live. She has spent five years rebuilding her life inside the machinery of a broken system, trying to make it less brutal for the people it was designed to overlook.
Then a pendant finds her.
Stopped by a stranger on the Metro, the ancient gold piece bears the mark of Nin-Isina - Sumerian goddess of healing, Lady of Isin - and carries with it a covenant four thousand years in the making. When Eva falls asleep on her evening commute and wakes in ancient Mesopotamia, she discovers that the pendant is not a gift. It is a recognition. A confirmation of power she has already been wielding - in PICU waiting rooms, in policy meetings, in every moment she refused to accept that some lives mattered less than others.
Guided by Ninmah, a temple priestess and daughter of immigrants who earned her place in rooms she was never meant to enter, Eva learns that the 'Me of Healing' - the divine blueprint for healing and restoration - was deliberately fragmented and scattered across time when Nin-Isina removed the pendant during the fall of Isin. The fragments have been hiding in plain sight across Washington, D.C., waiting for a vessel who could recognize them.
To restore the network, Eva must retrieve three sacred artifacts: a surgical scalpel that overruled a death already decided by algorithm, a sheet of ancient music encoding frequencies that heal what medicine cannot reach, and a burial shroud that witnessed transformation and kept the shape of it. Each artifact reveals a deeper truth about the systems that manage suffering without ever seeing the people inside it - and about the woman Eva has already become.
The Mark of Nin-Isina weaves Sumerian mythology, Afrofuturism, and Medicaid policy into a novel about what it means to heal from the inside of the systems designed to break you. It is a story about mediumship as architecture, grief as initiation, and the ancient conviction that the individual - every individual - is worth the full attention of the divine.
