Exodus Code (novel)

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Exodus Code was the first and, as of 2024, only Torchwood novel published following the conclusion of Torchwood: Miracle Day in 2011. It was the second Torchwood collaboration between John Barrowman and his sister, Carole, following the comic story The Selkie in 2009.

After its release, no further Torchwood stories were produced until the release of the audio story The Conspiracy in 2015.

Publisher's summary

From Torchwood star John Barrowman, and Carole Barrowman, an epic thriller that finds Captain Jack and Gwen in a race to save humanity itself.

It starts with a series of unexplained events. Earth tremors across the globe. Women being driven insane by their heightened and scrambled senses. And the world is starting to notice — the number one Twitter trend is #realfemmefatales.

Governments and scientists are bewildered and silent. The world needs Torchwood, but there's not much of Torchwood left.

Captain Jack has tracked the problem to its source: a village in Peru, where he's uncovered evidence of alien involvement. In Cardiff, Gwen Cooper has discovered something alien and somehow connected to Jack. If the world is to be restored, she has to warn him — but she's quickly becoming a victim of the madness too...

Plot

Part one

In 1930, Jack is flown over la Madre Montâna in Peru by Renso to see three spinning rings of igneous rock which he sketches, finding the patterns that they form somehow familiar. He hears music and a chorus of his own voice in his head telling him how things are and will be for him and sees his mother, but he is able to push them all away before having a fit. Renso's wrist inexplicably snaps in half, causing the biplane to go on a collision course.

The crashing biplane is seen by the people of a secret Cuari village and the High Priestess sends Gaia, the star guide, to meet the deity that they believe has arrived as prophecied and guide him back to Uku Pacha. Gaia witnesses Jack's resurrection and has him trapped in a grotto from which Renso saves him some hours later. The volcano starts to erupt and Gaia tries to keep Jack from leaving, but Resno, who sees her as a mountain lion, shoots her and Jack records his experiences in his notebook before his fading memories disappear completely. When he realises that a fissure created by the volcano seems to be targeting him, he sends Resno to safety.

Months after the Miracle, Renso's granddaughter Isela finds his journal and the unsent letters that he wrote for Jack. She has the opportunity to escape her life at Hacienda del Castenado if she helps kidnap Olivares Donoso, a man with connections to the Three Families and whom Rex has sent Agent Carlisle after. She succeeds in shooting and flipping the minibus he is in and Darren Crowder updates Rex, showing him the footage and telling him that it gets worse.

Part two

Gwen, whose temper has been worsening, meets a woman who seems to be mentally unwell whilst shopping with Anwen and attacks the shop manager when he moves Anwen and reaches for the woman's arm. The woman rips off her own ear and Gwen looks into the incident further using from the burnt Torchwood SUV, during which she has a vision of a puma which leaves her knuckles bleeding. The next day, a voice in her head which she tries to resist makes her slice three circles into her arm and try to kill Rhys, but Jack arrives after receiving a strange email and shoots her in the shoulder before she can do so.

Andy arrests Gwen for her attack at the supermarket and has her taken to a psychiatric ward, explaining that she is one of several women who have been involved in unusual attacks by self-harming women. Jack researches the phenomenon, which is worldwide, and sees an image of Gaia in the mirror, but he has no memory of her or the three circles in Peru. The SUV disappears during a tremor before Jack can make use of the Torchwood software and Gwen manages to escape from the ward, after which Jack deduces from the affected women hurting their ears, tongues and and eyes that they are synaesthetes.

After sharing his deductions with Dr Olivia Steele, Jack returns to Mary's and manages to track Gwen to a pier after she sneaks inside to leave her wedding ring behind for Anwen. He tries to stop her from committing suicide to protect Rhys and Anwen by jumping into the sea, but they both fall into the water and he has to knock her out with a punch to save her and get her home. There, he starts to remember that he saw the three rings on Earth and, when she becomes conscious again, Gwen asks Rhys to kill her.

Part three

Jack contacts the crew of the Ice Maiden trawler and takes a sedated Gwen aboard to keep her under his observation. Vlad and Eva have been monitoring eruptions in the ocean floor and the geysers they have created which are desalinating the oceans, releasing pheremones and will turn the Earth into a bomb when the hydrothermal chimneys seal over.

Based on what he was told by Sarah Jane Smith and the data in the email that Cash sent him, Jack believes that his blood triggered a Helix Intelligence inside the Earth's core and that it needs his DNA to escape, leading it to release the pheremones to search for him with the women's behaviour being a side effect. Gwen comes around and insists that she help Jack in his mission to Peru, where everything started, as they are a team.

Part four

Isela's stepbrother, Antonio, betrays their father, Asiro, and saves Donoso from being captured by his men and Rex's agents. Jack uses the chaos to find out the whereabouts of his notebook from Asiro and retrieves it from Isela, who believed that it was her grandfather's and agrees to take him to her mother, named Gaia like her own mother. Cash and Hollis hold back the CIA agents hunting Isela whilst Jack, Gwen, Eva and Vlad climb the mountain with Isela and Gaia and Jack reveals that he was wrong about the Helix Intelligence; it needs a sacrifice to heal the Earth and not to break free.

The ritual requires the sacrifice of someone of the underworld, someone of the heavens and someone of the Earth, the third of which is the true person that the hydrothermal vents have been releasing pheremones to find. Gaia is shot in the form of a puma as she attacks Captain Anderson and is absorbed by the Earth, a process which starts to happen to Isela before Gwen pushes her out of the way to sacrifice herself in her place, thanking Jack for how he made the world better for her. The circles tighten around her and Jack.

When Jack comes back to life, he learns that the woman who was sacrificed was actually Shelley, the Ice Maiden's artificial intelligence which he upgraded with alien technology to help investigate the hydrothermal chimneys, in the form of Gwen and mimicking her genetic code. Two weeks after the ritual destroys the chimneys, he is welcomed aboard the Ice Maiden by Cash, Dana, Hollis and Sam.

Characters

Worldbuilding

Notes

Audiobook cover.

Continuity

External links

v • e
Torchwood novels and short stories
Novels
Short stories
Consequences
Yearbook
Magazine
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