That question drove me to write The Fifth Floor.

I’ve always been fascinated by Julian Jaynes and his radical theory about the bicameral mind — the idea that ancient humans didn’t think the way we do, that the voices they heard weren’t metaphors but actual neurological events. What if that theory held a darker truth? What if some people still operated that way?

The Fifth Floor follows two characters bound by an impossible connection. Lara is a teenage girl locked inside a mental institution, accused of murdering her family — a family she can’t remember. Halfway around the world, in a black site buried in Israel’s Negev Desert, a young man named Lukas sits in a concrete cell with one desperate need: to find and protect her. He doesn’t fully understand why. He just knows something called Legion is coming, and Legion is death.

Here’s the twist that even the scientists in the story can’t explain: Lara and Lukas share identical DNA. They’re not twins. They’re not related in any way that makes sense. And yet they are fundamentally, inescapably connected.

I drew on my years in Special Forces to build the black site sequences — the calculated brutality, the interrogation techniques, the cold professionalism of people trained to break other people. But this story goes beyond the military thriller. It reaches into questions about what consciousness really is, who we are underneath it, and what happens when that foundation cracks.

The Fifth Floor is available now. Step inside.