Title: We are the Catalyst
Series: The Psionics, Book Two
Author: Tash McAdam
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: February 25, 2019
Heat Level: 1 - No Sex
Pairing: No Romance
Length: 106900
Genre: Science Fiction, LGBT, cliffhanger, espionage, spies, military, young adult
Synopsis
Kidnapped and imprisoned, telepathic
children are forced to gather military intelligence. Repeatedly stripped of
their memories, they live in ignorance of the world above. You can’t tell
anyone a secret if you don’t remember it. It’s not child abuse if no one knows
you exist.
Epsilon 17 appears to be just another
mindless tool, empty of thought. But it’s a lie. The carefully constructed
shell she hides behind protects her from their mind wipes. One day she will
destroy the Institute. All she needs is a chance.
That chance could be Toby, if he doesn’t
die first. He should never have left the safety of the suburbs, but cornered in
an alley by a gang, he’s out of options. Of course, if he realized he had
superpowers, he probably wouldn’t have been so worried. Unfortunately, they
come at the cost of a finger, and his old life. Injured and panicked, he would
have stayed on the dirty ground until the Institute came for him, if it wasn’t
for Serena. Name-taking, ass-kicking Serena. She can punch through walls and
practically fly, surely she can keep him safe…
But the Institute is sending Epsilon 17
to hunt him down, and she’s never lost a trail.
Can ARC, the mysterious group Serena
works for, protect him? He has to get his powers in order, fast. It’s time for
Toby to stand up for himself. An underground war is raging, and Toby’s just
been drafted.
Join NineStar Press Authors
Alex Harrow,
L. A. Ashton, and
Tash McAdam
on FACEBOOK for a virtual launch party of their releases, EMPIRE OF LIGHT,
ECHOES, and WE ARE THE CATALYST!
Find the party
HERE. The
event is February 25th from 8-10 PM CST, but feel free to drop by and stay as
long as you wish!
For more info on each author and their books, visit:
Stop by for exclusive snippets, character takeovers, prizes, and swag!
Excerpt
I’m floating, weightless, sensationless.
The gel covers my body, every inch of my skin submerged and cushioned. The
drowning sounds almost pleasant when I describe it this way, but my eyes are
covered, liquid is pressing against my lips. It’s in my ears, filling my nose,
dulling my senses. I’m drowning in breathable fluid, oxygenated goop. The
sensation of lungs pleading for air lasts the short minutes I can hold my
breath…then I have to inhale and my body is flooded.
I scream. The noise vibrates soundlessly
in my throat, and then my body goes limp as my insides adjust, and my brain
revels in the fresh oxygen. This isn’t new to me, I’ve been here before. I know
how the gel works, giving me the oxygen my body requires at the cost of
instinctive terror and panic that overrides all logic. It turns out there’s no
getting used to suffocation. Even once the lungs realize they can drag oxygen
from the fluid, it’s an emotional drowning.
You lose every sense of who you are like
this, blurring at the edges until disappearing into nothingness, every sense of
self fading as you drift out of your body, into a void. The sensor pads
connected to my poor, bald head were itchy when they were applied, now they may
as well not be there—except I know they’ll still be doing their jobs. The
wireless connections to the computer equipment in the laboratory above me will
continue to let the doctors know when I have disappeared, when I can’t think
anymore.
It comes too fast. It always does.
Without any variation in pressure or sound around me, my mind rebels and flails
for anything to hold onto. It takes me hours, maybe. It could be minutes or
weeks, I suppose, but I think it takes me hours to calm myself, to drag back
the knowledge I have skin, I have a border, and I’m impenetrable and separate
from what is around me.
In the Tank, there’s no gauge of time,
nothing to touch or feel, no sensory hooks to hold onto. Insulated against
life, I can’t do anything except hang there, helpless. There’s no one here for
me to reach for, this time. Sometimes there will be others—different people,
different ages. I reach out to them, feel for them with the telepathic powers
that are both the reason I suffer and the only thing saving me from true
madness. Even momentary connections with others remind me I’m not alone. I
reach out, but they never feel me. They are truly alone, isolated from
everything and everyone.
I’m the only one who survives the Tank.
And I don’t know why. Of course, the scientists would never tell me anything. I’d
be punished if I asked. I’m supposed to come out blank and empty and unknowing,
like the others.
Thanks to the Tank, and the loneliness
of my life, I spend a lot of time speculating why I’m different. I think it
might be the dreams keeping me safe. I dream of a boy, a boy who runs in the
sunshine and plays a sport with bats and balls. A boy who lives a blessedly
unremarkable life. I think I made him up, to save me from the nothing. Could I
have invented a place to go and hide in vibrant experiences and Technicolor
feeling? Not like the Tank, where there’s nothing, nothing at all.
I’ve been in fourteen times as far as I
remember. Other people have been dipped opposite me, or next to me, ten of
those times. I feel their thoughts, their confusion and panic. I can’t see
them. I can’t see anything at all except for vague shadows which pass my
prison. Once a hand was pressed to my Tank, a black blur against the grey dark.
The thoughts buzzing in the person were angry and desperate. They wanted to
help me, but they couldn’t. I don’t know who it was.
Today, I’m alone. There’s no one else
being wiped. Even if there were others, I can’t Project—send thoughts or
feelings out of myself—so there’s no way for me to communicate. It seems to me
if we connected, maybe they’d stay.
Instead, I talk to myself all the time,
even under the draining numbness of the gel I drown in. It does something to
me, to them, to us. As soon as I’m submerged, I can barely sense at all, the
techs and other people mere scratching tickles at the surface of my
consciousness, not like the normal swirling chaos of the thoughts always
spinning around me, every fleeting miniscule flicker of awareness loud and
seething for my attention. For the vast majority of my life, I have to block
everything, block it all out so I don’t lose myself in the minds of others.
Not in the Tank, though. My powers are
muted and tamped down by whatever is happening to me. And the others?
Eventually their minds recoil at the endless nothing and they withdraw into the
safety of white noise, the illusion of peace.
Then the wipe begins—a skull full of
bees buzzing, crawling through memories and erasing the pathways making
someone’s self. People fade away as I listen to their mental screams and pleas
for mercy. They’re loud, then, as they beg for their memories, but the cries
always dissolve into whispers and then nothing, nothing at all.
I don’t know why I alone remain “myself”
in the Tank; perhaps I’m mad and there is no me. Maybe all I ever do is float
here in the numbing absence of everything and tell myself stories. But I don’t
believe so. I’m Epsilon 17, and I remember what that means. It is the name they
gave me—not one I want, but it defines me, nonetheless. Epsilon is my class;
I’m Epsilon Class, number seventeen. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon…there
are mostly Beta class here—the lowest, the least gifted. Alpha talents are so low
the Institute has no interest in taking them on as students. That is what the
Shepherds call them…call us, when they speak to us. Alpha talents get to live
their lives away from this.
We are “students,” as though they are
our teachers, here to help and educate us. In their heads, they call us sheep.
They have no idea I can hear them—hear everything they think. They are trained
to hide themselves, as I have taught myself to do, and it never crosses their
minds they aren’t as safe as they believe. Because they are wrong about me.
They have no idea I can tuck myself into a secret space inside my head and
resist the nothingness of the Tank. Maintain my sense of self. Protect my
memories. They know I’m special, but they have no idea how strong I really am…and
how much stronger I’ll be. Every time they leave me in the Tank, I come back to
my memories faster, and I hate a little more.
Soon all there will be left of me is
hate.
This is how I stay myself in the Tank.
Instead of waiting for it to end and feeling my mind snap when I realize it
never, ever will—I have been here forever and will stay here forever—I take all
the scraps of me, all the pieces making up who I am, and tuck them away, out of
sight, in a private bunker in my mind.
While I’m suspended, I disappear into my
dreams, if I’m alone. When there are others, I always wait until they have
gone, in case one day one of them stays with me. They never do.
Once I’ve hidden I don’t come out until
I’m sure I’m safe. Until I feel a soft, scratchy sensation and smell the faint,
fresh bleach of my sheets. The triggers my body remembers. When I’m tucked up
in my bed, I come back to reality, I realize I am not the boy-who-runs. And I
remember everything they tried to take from me.
The moments before it comes back are the
only times I feel safe.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was a
child, I didn’t remember at all. They cleaned me the same way they clean
everyone, and I became a fresh slate, a new start. You can’t tell anyone a
secret if you don’t remember it. It’s not child abuse if no one knows you
exist. We are the perfect soldiers in a war most of us repeatedly forget. We
are forced to participate and then erased as though we were never there, gifted
in a way people don’t expect and can’t plan for.
Mindreaders. Telepaths. Psychics. There
are many names, but here at the Institute, they like the scientific terms. We
are the Psionics, and they use us without shame.
If you are powerful, The Institute is
there, listening to your thoughts, guiding your hands when you are writing,
perhaps sending you dreams. Even controlling your every move like a puppet.
Assignments can last for years if the Government wants a consistent presence
monitoring one individual. You get to know them when they’re your target. I’ve
been in heads which haunt my dreams. It makes me wish I did forget, but never
enough to let go.
Two years ago, I was assigned to a
political leader in Muntgummery, near the East, for eight months. He was a bad
man. He liked to hurt women, and I had to watch it so the Institute could
blackmail him. The Government knew the city was going to drown in the ravenous
coastal waters as they rose and wanted to control who was saved. At the end, I
worked with a Projector, who used my knowledge of the target to get into his
head and overtake him completely. The city was abandoned to the flooding
shortly after. The top Test-scorers were evacuated, and then the tube tunnels
were sealed, Citizens, slumdwellers, and refugees alike were left to drown. I
remember them screaming as we flew over the rioting streets.
The list of secrets I know is long, and
I have nowhere and no way to write it down, so I keep them in my mind. It’s
safe there because, though the business we are in is to take secrets, nobody
knows I have any, and so nobody even looks. I hide everything under a blank,
unmarked surface, and their probes slide over me like I’m invisible, or empty
like the others—an untouched piece of paper waiting to be filled with their
knowledge and used to affect the course of the world.
I have been aware for five years, give
or take. It’s possible I have remembered myself before but didn’t manage to
hide it and was wiped so I really did forget again.
The first time I came back to myself,
they tried to wipe me again and again. Three times they put me back in the
Tank, until I thought I was lost, gone and mad. But then it happened. I found
the way—the way to leave what they were doing behind with my body—and keep my
mind safe inside another life. A better life.
I don’t know how many days passed after
that dip, but when I came to, I was restrained on a cold, hard table. I felt a
grasp at my thoughts, a touch against my mind. I knew what it meant—they would
put me back in, drown me again to kill these memories. We’re not supposed to
remember the Tank. We’re not supposed to remember who we are. I scampered away
inside my head and drew myself into the smallest ball possible, shielding my
thoughts. I was small and tight and tucked away in a corner, and I tried so
hard to hide and make the man go away. I felt him grope around—a blind man
fumbling through my head. He must have been satisfied, accepted the lack he
found inside me. He thought I was empty, and they could start again.
This is my story, and I’m putting it
away to keep it safe. That way when I disappear again, I can find all the
thoughts I’ve had, see the feelings I stored here. I don’t know how it works,
but it is enough for me that it does.
Because this is my mind, my secret self,
the weapon with which I’ll one day destroy everyone who has a hand in this. I’m
Epsilon 17, and I’m going to bring this regime down in flames.
The Tank fades away and I’m gone. The
boy’s packing a bag, this time. I think he’s frightened. I wonder what he has
to be scared of, this boy with parents who ruffle his hair and friends who
shout with laughter.
REVIEW
***SPOILER ALERT & POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING***
If you don't want any surprises ruined, you may not want to read this review. If so, please carry on.
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I was slightly sad to see that this didn't pick up where 1 left off. I come to find out that this can be read as a standalone, but the characters from the first are in this one, so we know they made it and are OK....for now...
Just like in the first book, each chapter oscillates between characters.
One chapter follows the events happening to Toby while the others follow Epsilon 17.
E17 is a young adult raised in the"Institute" and programmed for doing their bidding. She trains and studies and does missions for The Institute. After these missions, "soldiers" are dropped into what the call "The Tank" to wipe their memories so they're a blank slate to start all over again. This is The Institutes way of keeping them "loyal" to their cause. Only, our E17 has a secret. They hide their mind away while locked in The Tank and for the last 5 years have kept all the memories.
E17 isn't a fighter though, they're a thinker and loyalties are really not aligning with The Institute at the moment. Only problem is, it seem like the Director's son, Icarus, is the only one who can see through E17's barriers. It's not a good thing, or so it seems. Icarus seems a bit unstable and a total "Yes Man" for the Institute.
Meanwhile, Toby is over the wall with Serena and ARC, trying to hone in his newfound skills.
Apparently he was a Blank (natural shield against Psi's) but when his life was threatened, his skills burst through with a vengeance, knocking out Psionic's and systems within so many miles.
The Institute now wakes E17, one of the best Readers they have to track down Toby, Maelstrom, to bring him in as a terrorist. Only, what E17 is finding is that Toby isn't a terrorist threat, and maybe, just maybe he could be an ally.
A few things about this book that let me down...
The beginning was confusing because I really thought we were coming in where 1 left off, bummer.
Some of the chapters, especially with E17 seemed to drag on a bit.
The death of an important side character, seriously, what the hell? (said in best Gustavo Tiberius voice)
There is obviously something between E17 and Icarus, but that seems waylaid by what is happening with Toby and E17 and I really feel like there could be more...also what happened to Icarus? I don't believe for one second he and Pollux are down.
That all being said, i give this book a
3.5 action/adventure stars
Purchase
Meet the Author
Tash is a 30 year old teacher candidate at UBC in Canada, although they were born and raised in the hilly sheepland of Wales (and have lived in South Korea and Chile before settling down in Vancouver). Tash identifies as trans and queer and uses the neutral pronoun ‘they’. They’re also an English teacher and fully equipped to defend that grammar! They have a degree in computer science so their nerd chat makes sense, and a couple of black belts in karate which are very helpful when it comes to writing fight scenes.
Their novel writing endeavours began at the age of eight, and included passing floppy discs back and forth with a friend at swimming lessons. Since then, Tash has spent time falling in streams, out of trees, learning to juggle, dreaming about zombies, dancing, painting, learning and then teaching Karate, running away with the circus, and of course, writing.
They write fast-paced, plot-centric action adventure with diverse casts. They write the books that they wanted to read as a queer kid and young adult (and still do!)
Giveaway
