When your mind makes you the enemy, either your mind must die, or you will.
Unless yours is the mind they can’t break.
Adverse Reactions
by Deborah J. Lightfoot
Genre: Dystopian Paranormal Suspense
Purity demands a
bullet. Devin brings a reckoning.
Since she was six years old, Devin Perridin has been locked behind the walls of
the family home to keep her hidden from those who would kill her. But at
sixteen, she is exposed as a “Syke,” one of an outlawed minority who
possess extraordinary powers of mind over matter. Snatched from hiding, she
escapes the firing squad, but only to be imprisoned in a house of horrors: the
Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of
Persistent Mental Disorders. After an unknown time of torture and
“behavior modification,” brutally designed to destroy her
psychokinetic reflexes, she emerges from the asylum severely damaged in mind
and spirit. Her salvation may lie in the series of crimes triggered by her
release: first kidnapping, then attempted murder, and then a mustering of
forbidden forces to assault the remote pseudo-psychiatric facility where she
had been tortured into near-mindlessness.
Drawing upon a strength she had always known was hers but had never before been
able to consciously control, Devin defies the authoritarian society with its
unjust laws that demand her death. She pushes through pain, isolation, and
moral quandaries to seek justice for not only herself, but all members of a
maligned and cruelly persecuted minority. A post-apocalyptic, paranormal
allegory for the times in which we live.
When your mind makes you the enemy,
either your mind must die, or you will. Unless yours is the mind they can’t
break.
“This novel is immediately immersive, with an opening scene that sucks readers in with vivid sensory detail and a great sense of suspense.” —The Black List
“What a story! I was picked up from the first page and you never let me go thereafter. The premise is original … compelling … convincing.” —ARC Reader
“A very enjoyable read. Excellent pacing. Immersive language. Polished, effortless writing. I’d love to see a prequel (or three)!” —ARC Reader
“Relevant to the current situation in the world. Ostracizing others who are different out of fear and ignorance. Cruelty and inhumanity.” —ARC Reader
“Believable and relatable.” —The Black List
“Thematically rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast.” —The Black List
**Get it #OnSale for only $1.99 4/21 – 4/24!**
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Chapter 1
VAPORS BILLOWED INTO the chamber in thick masses of orange. Devin choked on the sickly sweet odor.
“Don’t fight it, child,” came the voice—equally cloying—from the darkness beyond the floodlit, glass-walled chamber. “Give yourself up to it.”
The gas surged into Devin’s face, blinding, gagging her. She made it go away. By force of will, a moment’s mental reflex, she flung it back.
Fresh air flooded her nostrils and drove out the syrupy stink. She sucked in a cool, clean breath.
“No!” snapped the voice, crackling with amplified static. “You must not.”
The therapist dropped her with two thousand volts. Devin collapsed to the chamber’s floor, her body jerking, her nerves on fire. The pain was beyond enduring. A pain this intense must be lethal. But she did not die. As she convulsed, her muscles knotted in spasms, she could not scream. No part of her, not even her voice, was under her voluntary control.
“Try it again, child.” Smooth and saccharine once more, her unseen therapist spoke from the concealing shadows as the shock ended and Devin’s pain faded. “Stand up,” the torturer ordered. “And this time, do not fight it. Or your punishment will be the same: swift, sure, and severe.”
Devin struggled upright. She had to brace against the curved glass wall of the gas chamber to keep on her feet. Her muscles had melted from knots into jelly.
An orange cloud flooded the chamber and filled her nose with the stink of rotting fruit.
“Breathe it,” her therapist instructed. “You must.”
But again, Devin reacted by instinct alone. No conscious thought interposed between stimulus and response. The cloud approached; she pushed it away. Pure reflex, action of mind: act of self-preservation. The gas held back, suspended in midair, blocked by the power of her impulse.
On the instant, thousands of volts knocked her to the floor. Pain engulfed Devin, such a pain as must be lethal but wouldn’t do her the service of killing her. She writhed, silent and barely conscious.
Her therapist withdrew the punishment. Devin remained on the floor of the isolation chamber, curled in the fetal position, her long brown hair covering her face. Her body was hers to command once more, but her muscles had no strength to obey.
“You give new meaning to the word persistent, don’t you, girl?” muttered the disembodied voice. Then, more forcefully: “The first step toward healing is to admit you are diseased, Miss Perridin. You have an illness. A mental disorder. I am offering you the cure—in a pleasant aerosol spray that you need only breathe. Once inhaled, the drug acts quickly, and its effects are lasting. But you must take the first step and acknowledge that you want to be cured.”
The voice grew soft, sugary. “Child, for as long as you hold to the notion—the mistaken notion—that your disorder is in some way a strength or a benefit to you, you will continue to fail. And you will suffer the consequences of that failure. We can’t have that, can we?”
Devin gathered the remnants of her strength and rolled onto her back. To stand was impossible; she could barely shape a word.
“No,” she whispered.
She wasn’t speaking to her tormentor.
But: “That’s the spirit!” the therapist responded, sounding genuinely enthused. “Now we try again. Take your medicine like a good girl.”
The orange stink flowed in at the top of the chamber. Devin, lying face up, watched through the curtain of her hair as the cloud descended. She had time to ward it off, to make it go away. But in the soul of her being, nothing sparked. Her reflexes, her instincts, failed to respond. What had been a spontaneous force of mind over matter could offer no resistance.
Devin’s mouth filled with the sickening taste of defeat. The orange cloud enveloped her, a sticky weight, and she choked down lungfuls.
“Wonderful!” her therapist exclaimed. “My dear, I couldn’t be more pleased. This is the tipping point. Your recovery will be much easier from now on, I promise.”
Devin breathed the sickly sweet drug and felt the core of her mind go dead.
Then came the retching. Her body contorted in gut-shredding paroxysms as the drug made her vomit—or attempt to vomit. Her keepers had starved her for so long, her stomach had nothing to bring up. The dry heaves racked her with such violence that she could not breathe. After long moments, unconsciousness brought relief.
Castles in the cornfield provided the setting for Deborah J. Lightfoot’s earliest flights of fancy. On her father’s farm in Texas, she grew up reading tales of adventure and reenacting them behind ramparts of sun-drenched grain. She left the farm to earn a degree in journalism and write award-winning books of history and biography. High on her bucket list was the desire to try her hand at the genre she most admired. The result is Waterspell, a multi-layered fantasy series about a girl and the wizard who suspects her of being so dangerous to his world, he believes he’ll have to kill her … which troubles him, since he’s fallen in love with her.
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I’m a Mom, a Grandmom, and a Veteran. Nothing scares me! That’s the saying on my favorite T Shirt. I’m enjoying life too much to let the little things slow me down. If you can’t tell from my Avatar, I live in Florida where I enjoy the sunshine and endure the hurricanes with good grace. Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good!
