In the remote prairie town of Purity, there are some who possess extraordinary powers of the mind. Their fate, if they are discovered, is death by a bullet to the brain. The wealthy, however, have an alternative way to die: they may submit to “therapy”—torture—at the Peaceful Hills sanatorium. For most of the inmates, it is a worse death than a sniper’s bullet. The asylum is brutally designed to snuff out every spark of psychokinetic power, turning a Syke’s brain to mush. Few inmates survive.
Devin Perridin does. She’s the One Who Got Away. But can she find her way back into her right mind? And bring a long-overdue reckoning to the town of Purity and its house of horrors? To exact vengeance on those who put her in the asylum, and avenge the murders of her fellow Sykes, Devin will need the aid of a denim-clad desperado—and a generous helping of Old Magic.
Adverse Reactions is a dark standalone novel about persecution, psychokinetic power, and what it means to reclaim your mind after someone has tried to erase it. For readers who enjoy dystopian fiction, paranormal suspense, and weird Westerns.
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.
* * *
The therapist had lied, of course. Under the influence of the pollution that she had both inhaled and swallowed, Devin’s “recovery” was an even worse torture than the treatments she had endured.
Two broad-shouldered orderlies held her head under water and she was drowning. In her drug-induced torpor, she had no urge to free herself from their grip, no impulse to will the water away, as she would once have done. Enough remained of her instinct for self-preservation, however, that she felt a moment’s fear. One moment only, but it was sufficient to trigger an “adverse reaction to her medication,” as the therapist termed it. Adrenaline mixing with the absorbed poison was the sure way to start her belly heaving. Devin choked on puke and water, and blacked out. Had her keepers not pulled her up and forced the liquids from her lungs, she would have strangled.
“Easy does it,” the therapist chirped, wavering into her view, looming over her when Devin regained partial consciousness. “Remember our Peaceful Hills motto: ‘Serenity, Tranquility, Quiescence.’ Keep your heart and mind perfectly still, child, and you’ll avoid the side effects. Let’s try again.”
The orderlies threw Devin in with an eight-foot rattlesnake. She sat quietly and let the creature strike. Nothing came from the depths of her existence to force it aside. She felt no mental impulse to ward off the serpent’s bite. The pain, sharp at first, became a burning sensation. Her arm purpled and swelled. As the venom spread, her lips and face grew numb, and her toes and fingertips tingled. Her mouth began to twitch. She felt no alarm, only a faint, far-off sense of relief at the absence of nausea. Her belly muscles were sore and her throat raw from her previous hours of retching.
“Better! Much better, child,” her therapist gushed. “You’re a fast learner when you’re properly motivated.”
Her keepers pinned the snake in a corner and gave Devin the antivenin.
Through more trials, she passed. They locked her in an airless, pitch-dark box no bigger than a coffin and waited for her to panic and choke on her own vomit. But she outwaited them, as passive and indifferent as the walls of her tomb.
They subjected her to plagues of biting insects, of a species Devin didn’t recognize. A type of fly, the creatures seemed, but equipped with razor-sharp mouthparts that slashed her skin. In a black, crawling mass they encased her from her brow to her bare feet, and with their needlelike suckers the flies lapped up her blood. Limply, Devin put her hands over her face to keep the swarms out of her nose and eyes. Otherwise she sat unmoving, giving herself up to the ebony horde’s insatiable thirst. From her wounds, blood first dripped, then streamed, puddling red on the gray concrete floor under her. Her breathing grew rapid and shallow.
When at last she slumped to the floor, too weak to sit up, her keepers released a foul-smelling mist that drove away the engorged flies. They put Devin on a stretcher and carted her off to the infirmary. A physician of vacant expression stopped the head-to-toe bleeding and gave her a transfusion.
When she had recovered somewhat—how much later, Devin couldn’t say, for there were no windows anywhere, and no hours when the overhead lights did not glare—her therapist had the orderlies stand her on a narrow plank above a field of iron spikes. For hours—possibly all through the day, or possibly through the night into the next unseen dawn—she balanced upon the plank. A fit of retching would have sent her tumbling, to die impaled on the spikes below. In Devin, the danger provoked no response: no adrenaline rush to trigger the punitive sickness, no defiance, not even boredom. Where she had once had emotions, she now embodied only apathy.
“You are making fine progress, child,” purred the therapist, emerging once again into Devin’s view. “The medication is most effective when the patient remains calm. You’ll want to remember that.” The therapist paused, then went on brightly: “Let me rephrase. You will remember that. Of course you will. I personally guarantee it. Our programs here at Peaceful Hills are dedicated to the goal of ensuring our patients’ successful attainment of lifelong serenity.”
As a final test, her keepers locked Devin in a fire-filled room. She had been through that particular exercise early in her stay at the sanatorium. The therapist had called it “diagnostic.” The first time they tested her, Devin had psyched the fire out. The flames had died as she thought them away.
No, thought had little to do with it. The mental reflex arose far deeper than the level of cognition. Never in her sixteen years had Devin needed to consider her responses. She had simply reacted. In much the same way that a person jerks back from a hot stove without conscious intent, she extinguished flames—or any perceived danger or discomfort—with a flash of her will. Her mind controlled matter and made it obey.
As a young child, she had defied parental attempts at discipline. Any hand that threatened to clout her, she flung back with force enough to cow her elders. Guildmaster Perridin and his wife Mariah had struggled to keep their daughter under control and guard the secret of her affliction. Long before she reached adolescence, Devin had recognized that her parents—her father, particularly—saw her as diseased. She had tried—she’d really tried—to control her impulses. But she never reached the level achieved by the abstainers: those rare ones her mother had told her about, who could refrain from using the powers of the mind that instinct summoned within them, and thus remain concealed, avoiding death or captivity.
“Heaven help me, my daughter is a persistent Syke.” Her mother whispered the terrible truth when she thought Devin couldn’t hear.
The Perridins never entertained, had no social life beyond the minimum required by her father’s position as Guildmaster for the town of Purity. Only in such seclusion could Devin hope to escape detection. Her reflexes were too keen to permit any interaction with others. When provoked by a stimulus, however petty, she reacted. Simple as that: simple, direct, unstoppable.
And impossible to hide forever. At just shy of sixteen she was discovered, her illness made public. The outcry bordered on hysteria.
“Euthanize her!” some demanded. “You’d shoot a rattler, wouldn’t you?”
“Off to the loony bin,” urged others. “She can maybe be treated, maybe mended. She’s young yet. Give the girl a chance at life. If they can’t cure her at the nuthouse, they’ll kill her trying, thank the medicos, and that’ll be an end to it.”
So the doctors put Devin into a coma—the only way to safely transport her by cross-plains train, over the western prairie and into the remote mountains, and thence to the Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of Persistent Mental Disorders. Had she been conscious during the journey, Devin could have broken the heads of her attendants. With a fleeting urge, the most short-lived impulse, she could have killed everyone around her, and without lifting a finger to do it. So the people warned each other as the train rolled out of town, muttering darkly amongst themselves about the monster who had hidden in their midst all these years.
At Peaceful Hills, the medicos knew how to deal with the likes of Devin Perridin. An untold number of Sykes had suffered as lab rats in the sanatorium’s search for the perfect program of conditioning. “So the psychos respond by reflex, their actions not planned or thought out aforehand? Then we’ll grind ’em down until they have no reflexes.”
The treatment had killed many persistent Sykes. The ones who survived did not emerge from it whole.
At her final test within the asylum’s blind walls, Devin stood in the midst of flames, the heat beating at her, a singed odor rising from her clothes and hair. In the smoke and the scorched air, she couldn’t breathe. It didn’t matter. She was inert, uncaring. The witnesses to her concluding test at Peaceful Hills might have been hard put to know when she passed from indifference into unconsciousness. But apparently they saw enough to be convinced that her instincts were dead, her fight-or-flight reflex permanently annihilated. They ended the test before she burned past all healing.
Devin came to her senses reeking of smoke and in savage pain, but only vaguely aware of it, for she was gone from herself, lost in a mind and body she no longer recognized. The sweet, mind-killing drug had done its damage. The shell she inhabited was a stranger to her now, her wits murky and far distant.
“I am elated,” said the one who had done this to her. “They told me you were a particularly hard case. Most likely incurable. But we showed them, didn’t we, girl?”
A cold hand patted Devin’s burned arm. She did not flinch from the horror of that touch. Nor did she open her eyes to see again the face of her tormentor, seared permanently into her memory.
“Rest now, child. After your blisters have healed—they’ll leave scars, but who cares for that?—you’ll be heading home on the train. This time, you’ll be awake to enjoy the trip. Guildmaster Perridin will certainly know he’s gotten his money’s worth when he sees the wonders I’ve worked in you.”
* * *
Devin was indeed conscious as the train clicked down the tracks, making its slow, winding descent from the forested mountains that hid the sanatorium. The healthy population of Purity, out on the treeless plains some two hundred miles to the southwest, wanted a wide buffer between themselves and the nuthouse at Peaceful Hills. The sanatorium was reachable only by the narrow-gauge train that threaded its way through a long, tapering gorge. The train kept no set schedule, but ran when required to deliver patients and—only very occasionally—collect the cured.
As the latest, lonely discharge from Peaceful Hills, Devin had the train much to herself. She should go exploring, from caboose to locomotive. After the sixteen cloistered years of her childhood, she ought to begin satisfying a pent-up curiosity about the world. She could roam and explore, now. She didn’t have to hide. People would not fear and hate her now. A normal life was hers for the making. No time like the present to begin discovering the possibilities.
But the urge to act—to take any action at all—had drained from her the moment she allowed the orange gas into her lungs. Thus, Devin only sat in the sleeping car, vacantly watching the mountain scenery crawl past her window as the train switchbacked down from the pine-clad heights, still some distance above the gorge. She thought of nothing: not her parents, not the isolated life she had known or the promise of a full new life to come; not the ordeal she had endured in these mountains. She did not mourn her lost mental powers, nor wonder if they were gone for good. She only sat and stared, her mind empty.
Even when the train lurched to a stop, so abruptly that Devin was thrown from her seat, she couldn’t be bothered to grab for support. She hit the floor, indifferent to the jolt, and sprawled on the none-too-clean carpeting. The attendant who brought her meals would find her eventually, and get her back into her seat if it mattered. If it mattered at all.
The train did not resume its motion. Nobody within earshot spoke. In the absence of wheels clacking on rails, the silence was profound.
For the first time in this journey, Devin heard birdsong, lilting from the trees that lined the tracks. Involuntarily, she straightened a little, still on the floor, and cocked her head to listen. The songs conveyed such a feeling of freedom, of unrestrained primitive energy, they almost roused her from her lethargy.
Almost. She was sinking back into lassitude, her eyes glazing over, when footsteps sounded along the corridor outside her compartment. A door slid open nearby. Perhaps the sleeping-car attendant was checking on other passengers, if the train did indeed carry any. Whether the neighboring compartments were empty or occupied, Devin had neither looked nor asked. It did not matter. Very little mattered now.
The footsteps came to her own door, and with a scraping sound, it opened. The man who appeared in the doorway was not the attendant who brought Devin’s meals. He was no one she’d encountered at Peaceful Hills. She had never seen anyone who looked like him, except in books. Her education, from six to sixteen, had consisted largely of books. Her mother had encouraged her reading, as a way of diverting her mind from its syketic impulses. Devin knew the world mainly through the words and pictures printed in books.
The man who now stood in her doorway looked like a figure from an historical photograph, like he’d stepped out of a book about the former times, those yesteryears before the Great Contagion. In spite of herself, Devin’s gaze sharpened, taking in the man’s cowboy boots, denim trousers, tooled leather belt, and the shoulder-hung bandolier bag over a shirt of rustically coarse fabric. Homespun? she wondered, recalling a word from her reading and surprised into a momentary flash of curiosity.
Around his neck, adding to the novelty of his appearance, the man wore a fivesome of wolves’ teeth knotted on a leather lace. A band of dried snakeskin encircled the crown of his broad-brimmed hat. He’d pushed the hat back on his head, revealing tawny hair of a length to curl past his shirt collar. The sweat-dampened strands framed the face of a man who might be about forty, although his age was difficult to guess, his skin weathered and darkened by exposure to wind and sun.
The man was looking at her with the frankest sort of interest. Such was the intensity of his dark-eyed gaze, something akin to self-consciousness stirred within Devin. Perhaps it did matter whether she stayed on the floor or got to her feet.
Hesitantly, she gripped the edge of the seat that she’d left when the train jolted to a halt. Not taking her eyes off of her visitor, she started to push herself up.
“Here.” The man flashed a roguish grin as he extended his hand. “Let me help you, gal.”
The man’s voice was light, a little amused, and friendly sounding. Devin had no cause to trust the sound of a friendly voice, and so she paused in her effort to rise.
But a flutter of cautious interest had twitched within her, the sort of interest that she had not felt—in anything or anyone—since the orange gas killed her mind. The proffered hand beckoned, and the flutter urged her to take it.
When she did, the man pulled her to her feet.
“My apologies for dumping you on the floor,” he said when she was standing. His voice had a confident ring, and its affable, drawling tones bore no resemblance to the cloying excess of Devin’s psych-ward tormentor. “I’ve never stopped anything as heavy as a train before.” The man laughed, seeming pleased with himself. “Maybe I channeled a tad too much focus. The crew went flying. Out of commission but not dead, so far as I can tell. Maybe I’ll be wanted only for kidnapping, not murder. That’ll ease my path, I’m sure.” His grin widened.
Devin gave a faint shake of her head—hard to do beneath the apathy that weighed her down, its weight so relentlessly crushing that she could neither move freely nor think clearly. But the hand that still held hers seemed to momentarily lift her out of the heaviness, even as it had raised her from the floor. The sensation of lightness, of freedom, lasted less than a heartbeat, but long enough to permit Devin another flicker of wary curiosity:
Who was this stranger who stood smiling at her, speaking casually of kidnapping and murder? And what did he want with a brain-damaged psycho like her?
“Get your gear, friend, and come on.” The man released Devin’s hand and jerked his head toward the passageway of the sleeping car. “If you want your stuff, grab it and let’s get going. We’ve got a fair ride to make by dark, and the day’s not getting any younger.” He turned from her and moved into the corridor.
Devin did not move. She didn’t look around for her belongings. Had she any? She couldn’t think why she should. Owning things or lacking them; going off with this man or staying here on the train; taking action or keeping still; living or dying: they were all the same to her. The apathy had reasserted itself, entombing her once more in the orange-cloud cure.
“Gal, I need you to get a move on.” The man had turned back to face her. His gaze shifted upward to the luggage rack over Devin’s berth. “That your kit?” He reached above her head and pulled down a rucksack. Devin looked at it without recognition.
The man slung the bag over his shoulder, carrying it along with his own as he stepped again into the passageway. “Now come on. I don’t want to tote you, too.”
Stay or go: it made no difference.
So Devin went, trailing her kidnapper down the corridor and outside by way of the sleeping car’s vestibule door. As she stepped down onto the packed gravel of the trackbed, the sharp, clean scent of sun-warmed pinesap filled her nostrils. She breathed it in, and the memory of a syrupy stink faded by a whiff.
As her kidnapper led her alongside the train, Devin glanced up at its dark, smudgy windows, incuriously looking for the crew. It made no difference whether she saw them, or they saw her. Still, she looked. No one came into view.
Before they reached the rear of the train, the man stopped and turned to contemplate the sleeping car they had exited. “It’s a soldier’s duty,” he said, “to hinder and harass the enemy every chance he gets. I believe I can do a mite more hindering before we ride out of here. Watch and learn, friend. Watch and learn.”
Devin stood facing him. She had not turned when he did. The man gazed over her head—he stood a foot taller than she—and squinted slightly, as if the better to see.
From behind Devin came the squeal of metal deforming under stress. It didn’t seem to matter, but nonetheless she looked toward the noise, turning languidly, but in time to see the sleeping car buckle as though struck by an invisible wrecking ball. The car toppled sideways off the tracks and crashed downhill into the pines that lined the slightly elevated roadbed. Against their trunks it settled, with a groan that could have come either from the trees or from the contorted metal. The sleeper had crumpled through its middle like a tin can. Cars behind and ahead of it remained upright, but two of them were half off the rails.
Devin stared for a long moment, then turned back to her kidnapper. Her voice was flat and emotionless, rusty from disuse, and sounding distant in her own ears as she said:
“You’re a Syke.”
“As are you, friend.” The grin on the man’s face was one of sheer delight. “As are you.”