***This is currently a web series!!! I’m releasing a chapter at a time on my website at www.sjpiercebooks.blogspot.com. You can read there or go to Scribd, download their app, and read there.***
Hunger Games meets Avatar meets Gladiator in this spellbinding new Young Adult Science-Fiction web series by bestselling author Susan James Pierce.
Fear can make you a target…
Two hundred years after the Great Disaster, the day earthquakes ravaged Earth’s landscapes, humanity has finally regrouped and is working toward a better future. But in New America – one of three small, remaining landmasses – the threat of overpopulation makes a better future seem bleaker by the year.
Mira (Mirabella) Foster and her parents are citizens of New America, and with the threat of starvation and disease looming on the horizon, a new discovery threatens to push everyone to the brink of chaos: blue markings develop on people’s skin. Markings that are distinctive of a humanoid alien race named Changers that secretly sought refuge on Earth years ago. Markings that allow them to camouflage their skin, but also make them feared, and eventually, targets of violence.
Mira’s dad is one of them.
Anger can make you a spectacle…
Banished to a treacherous, uninhabited island, a newly orphaned Mira and her kind struggle to survive and settle into a new way of life. Her main priority becomes seeing to Jackson’s care, her friend with Muscular Dystrophy, and tending to her garden as a way of distracting herself from the pain of losing everything she loved. But just as she’s adapting to this new life, their Elders approach her with a plan to insert themselves back into New America to uncover a conspiracy. A conspiracy, they believe, that includes the presidency and landed them on the island, costing many Changers their lives, including her parents’.
In a world where staying on the island means a possible untimely death, as does risking her life to uncover a horrible secret that might one day set them all free, which one will she choose? And if she chooses to help, can she tame her anger over their mistreatment long enough to make sure their plan goes off without a hitch? Because, after all, the last thing her kind needs is to make spectacles of themselves, and as she knows all too well, both anger and fear have a perilous knack for destruction.
All proceeds from pre-orders are going to a local kid named Brayden who has Muscular Dystrophy.
Spectacle
Excerpt, Chapter Two
Following the scent of
cheese toast and eggs, I stop short when I see my mom standing in the kitchen
doorway, her hands fidgeting with the frayed hem of her apron, a tight smile on
her face. I don’t like the way she looks at me – worried and afraid and about
to cry all at the same time. “Mirabella, dear,” she says, almost whimpers.
“Daddy and I need to talk to you.”
Heat crawls over my
skin, flushing my cheeks and leaving gooseflesh on my arms. Dread squeezes my
lungs. “Okay,” I manage, but it takes me a minute to remember how to walk. Mom
doesn’t move out of my way.
I notice the radio isn’t
on again. Dad usually listens to it for his morning news.
She kneels to look me at
me on my level, and I know now something really bad must have happened… or is
happening. Yet again, the rings around the moon were right.
“Everything’s okay,” she
lies, reading my worried expression, “But I want to warn you about your father
before you see him.”
My eyebrows draw
together. Warn me?
I hear dad shifting in
his chair, and he grunts nervously. My chest clenches tighter. All I want is to
see him. To know what’s going on. I can’t fathom what she would have to warn me
about.
“His skin is… different than before.”
“Different?”
“Yes, baby,” she
soothes. “And whatever you do, please don’t scream. You know how thin these
walls are.”
I muster a nod.
“Okay,” she says,
clasping my hand and straightening, “It’s time.”
She leads me into the
kitchen, my heart racing, eyes snapping right to my father. He’s sitting with
his face behind his hands, his elbows resting against the tabletop. The skin on
his arms and hands look the same to me – smooth and the color of coffee with
milk. Still normal. I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Is she looking?” he
asks through his hands.
I answer for her. “Yes,
daddy.”
He lets out a long slow
breath – a brooding sigh.
“Show her, Grant,” mom
pleads.
Moments pass. He sighs
again and slowly moves his hands away. Behind them, blue marks, starting at the
corners of his eyes, branch out in a rough, jagged pattern - like webs of blood
vessels, but more defined - over his cheekbones and stopping along his jawline.
Smaller patches curl around his temples. It almost looks like a butterfly, almost
beautiful, like these odd markings are meant to be there. Like someone had
painted them for fun. I would assume this is all a joke had my mom not been
acting so weird.
I look up to her
questioningly. Why would this have made me scream?
Her hand meets her
chest, and I can tell she’s relieved I didn’t freak out, but not all the
concern is gone from her eyes. At least she’s smiling normally now.
“So you aren’t afraid?”
she asks.
“Why would I be?”
Her lips press tight.
She throws a nervous glance at my father.
“Because these are
permanent,” he says. “And they’ll get worse.”
Susan James Pierce has a degree in Marketing Management, works for a Fortune 500 company in Atlanta, Georgia, and devotes her precious, spare time to writing Fantasy, Paranormal and Sci-fi novels.
Please visit www.sjpiercebooks.blogspot.com and sign up for her mailing list or subscribe to her blog if you'd like to hear when new books come out! Coming soon:
Iris (Novella: The Captivated Series) Available now!!!
Fight for Me (Book Two: The Captivated Series)
