Artificial
(The Kepler Chronicles #1)
By: Jadah McCoy
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Published: April 4, 2016
Genre: New Adult Sci-fi
She struggles to feel human.
In 2256, the only remnants of civilization on Earth’s first colonized planet, Kepler, are the plant-covered buildings and the nocturnal, genetically spliced bug-people nesting within them: the Cull. During the day, Syl leaves her home in the sewers beneath Elite City to scavenge for food, but at night the Cull come looking for a meal of their own. Syl thought gene splicing died with the Android War a century ago. She thought the bugs could be exterminated, Elite city rebuilt, and the population replenished. She’s wrong.
Whoever engineered the Cull isn’t done playing God. Syl is abducted and tortured in horrific experiments which result in her own DNA being spliced, slowly turning her into one of the bugs. Now she must find a cure and stop the person responsible before every remaining man, woman, and child on Kepler is transformed into the abomination they fear.
He struggles not to.
For Bastion, being an android in the sex industry isn’t so bad. Clubbing beneath the streets of New Elite by day and seducing the rich by night isn’t an altogether undesirable occupation. But every day a new android cadaver appears in the slum gutters, and each caved in metal skull and heap of mangled wires whittles away at him.
Glitches—androids with empathy—are being murdered, their models discontinued and strung up as a warning. Show emotion, you die. Good thing Bastion can keep a secret, or he would be the next body lining the street.
He can almost live with hiding his emotions. That is, until a girl shows up in the slums—a human girl, who claims she was an experiment. And in New Elite, being a human is even worse than being a Glitch. Now Bastion must help the girl escape before he becomes victim to his too-human emotions, one way or another.
Excerpt…
“I knew I shouldn’t have let you come,” grumbles Lucca as he points his phaser into another empty room. “I didn’t sign up to be a babysitter.”Well, at least I can hit a fucking target. I stop just short of saying the words.
“You couldn’t stop me,” I tell him. “I’d just follow you.”
“Have you no fear?” Serge asks. I can hear the smile in his voice. That look is back—the starryeyed one I always ignore. Maybe if I ignore it long enough, his feelings will go away.
I kick a few pieces of glass out a window, watching as they bounce down the building. “No. My adrenal gland is full of curiosity.”
I see it then, my keen eyes catching movement on the demolished floor below us—a blur of dark armor and hulking mass in my periphery.
Cull.
We’ve been talking, and that means we haven’t been listening. Even now, Serge’s and Lucca’s quiet voices are a constant background noise.
“Serge,” I say, horror coloring his name.
The two men stand as still as the strange plastic people I’ve seen lined up in shop windows. Birds trill in distress as they flee their nests, and worse, there’s the rustling of something coming toward us.
I lied when I said my adrenal gland is full of curiosity. Curiosity isn’t what makes my blood thick and scalding in my veins, like magma. It’s fear.
I touch the knife at my side. I was trained to shove my blade deep into the chest cavity and twist upward until my hands are slick with hot viscera. I refuse to be one of those wideeyed women back at the Sanctuary—the ones who stare as the Cull’s pincers slice them in two.
But Cull are ruthless creatures, monsters left over from a time when genetic warfare was the norm. They were people once, and that’s what scares me the most.
Meet the author…
Jadah currently lives in Nashville, TN and works in law. When not babysitting attorneys, she can be found juicing her brain for creative ideas or fantasizing about her next trip out of the country (or about Tom Hiddleston as Loki – it’s always a toss up when she fantasizes).
She grew up in rural Arkansas, yet can still write good and sometimes even wears shoes! She did date her first cousin for a while but they decided against marriage for the sake of the gene pool.
Her true loves are elephants, cursing, and sangria – in that order. If you find an elephant that curses like a sailor whilst drinking sangria, you’re dangerously close to becoming her next romantic victim – er, partner.
She cut her writing teeth on badly written, hormone-driven fanfiction (be glad that’s out of her system), and her one true dream is to have wildly erotic fanfiction with dubious grammar written about her own novels. Please make her dreams come true.
Thanks for sharing, Kristin! 🙂
She lies in Nashville?! That’s cool!
I wonder if Kenyon still lives here. They should do a little Nashville con
I have to admit, this sounds rather different and caught my interest! Thanks for sharing.
looks and sounds intriguing! Thanks for sharing!
This sounds like a fantastic book! Thank you for sharing!!