Over a month has passed since Karin Makos has settled on Chamak. Together with her sister and the rest of the crew from the Nemina, she is finally able to do something useful in this war—heal the Lost that the Shadows have taken.
But time is not on their side, and more than the Shadow enemy lurks in the wings. Soon, Karin finds herself fighting for her life in the forests of Nova Earth, plagued by strange, vivid dreams of her past, and racing hard to prevent the catastrophe that threatens to swallow the planet—because if she fails, much, much more will be lost.
Excerpt from World Shift:
“You’re saying you know how my powers work?”
Karin Makos couldn’t help the frown that drew down her brow—or the doubtful tone that churned the sentence’s pitch mid-way through. Almost a month had passed since she’d landed in Fallon territory, and she’d been in and out of more science offices, clinics, hospitals, and laboratories than she would ever care to count, and this was her third visit to this particular complex. None of them had yet parsed through precisely what Seirlin Biocorp had done to her.
So, when a junior researcher with an inner-metro flare of green cutting across his hair in the style of a lightning bolt waltzed up to her—not even giving her time to shake the rain from her hands and sleeves—and informed her that he’d figured out how her powers worked, her mind ran a little skeptical.
She, and others like her, were unique among the human spectrum. They were carriers of special abilities—she with her ability to make and control light, her sister with her preternatural gifts toward violence, and others with considerably different aptitudes; the result of an odd biomedical project that had been granted a shitload of unrestricted funding, pushed by an impossible idea, and left to run amok for more than half a century in Old Earth’s unenforced or deregulated zones. They had been constructed as chimeric embryos of mixed DNA, soaked in some weird, archaic concoction of incubating chemicals for their development, then bottle-fed a mix of brainwashing and varying chemical and hormonal treatments until they either died from the stress or reached adulthood.
Most had died.
She would have, too, if her sister hadn’t gotten her out of there.
She knew that now. Had realized it last month when they’d discovered Dr. Soichiro Takahashi, the brain surgeon who had been on staff at their project and who had, on numerous occasions, operated on her head, and sat him down for a chat.
He was hard at work, too—yet another doctor trying to figure out the rest of her files.
“Well, yes and no,” the man backpedaled, his brown eyes ticking up and looking like they were focusing inward—if she was any judge of expression, she expected he was replaying his most-recent sentence back through his head. “Sorry, I should have been more specific. We’ve measuredit. You’re quantifiable.” The last word was emphasized with a bright grin, two even rows of white teeth showing past his thick lips. His gaze beamed at her as if he were presenting her with some grand epiphany. “Not magical.”
Her fingers twitched.
Magical.
It seemed, to her, that people had been throwing that word around an awful lot lately.
She resisted the urge to hit him. That was more her sister’s style.
“I have never been magical,” she said, forcing her teeth to ungrit from each other just enough to speak. “Scientists made me. Scientists can figure me out.”