The Supernaturalist

Synopsis

Fourteen-year-old Cosmo Hill longs to escape from the Clarissa Frayne Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys. When a rare chance to get away comes, he grabs it, but the attempt goes fatally wrong. He can feel his life force ebbing away, sucked out of him by a strange blue Parasite … until a wisecracking gang of kids burst in, blast the creature and save him. They are the Supernaturalists, dedicated to ridding the world of these life-sucking blue parasites. When they realise that Cosmo has the ability to see these blue creatures too, they enlist him as one of them. Their mission leads Cosmo into a world of high-level corruption, James Bond type technology, thrilling adventure and finally back to a place that Cosmo ever thought he’d have to return … the dreaded Clarissa Frayne.

Extract

Satellite City. The city of the Future, proclaimed the billboards. A metropolis completely controlled by the Myishi9 Satellite hovering overhead like a floating man-of-war. An entire city custom-constructed for the third millennium. Everything the body wanted, and nothing the soul needed. Three hundred square miles of grey steel and automobiles.

Satellite City. A supercity of twenty-five million souls, each one with a story more heartbreaking than the last. If it’s happy ever afters you want, stay away from the city of the future.

Take Cosmo Hill, for example, a nice enough boy who never did anything wrong in his short existence. Unfortunately, this was not enough to guarantee him a happy life, because Cosmo Hill did not have a sponsor. And in Satellite City, if you didn’t have a sponsor, and they couldn’t trace your natural parents through public record DNA files, then you were sent to an orphanage until you reached adulthood. And by that time you were either dead or the orphanage had fabricated a criminal record for you so you could be sold to one of the private labour prisons.

Fourteen years before we take up the thread of the story, baby Cosmo was discovered swaddled in an insulated Cheery Pizza envelope on Cosmonaut Hill in Moscowtown. The state police swabbed him for DNA, searched for a match in the Satellite mainframe and came up blank. Nothing unusual about that, orphans turn up every day in the city. So the newly christened Cosmo Hill was dipped in a vaccine vat and sent on a tube to the Clarissa Frayne Institute for parentally challenged boys. Freight class.

Satellite City was not part of any welfare state, so the institutions had to raise funds anyway they could. Clarissa Frayne’s speciality was product testing. Whenever a new modified food or untested pharmaceutical product was being developed, the orphanage volunteered its charges as guinea pigs. It made perfect financial sense. The orphans got fed and cleaned, and the Frayne Institute got paid for the privilege.

Cosmo received his schooling from education software, his teeth were whiter than white and his hair was lustrous and flake-free, but his insides felt like they were being scoured with a radioactive wire brush. Eventually Cosmo realized that the orphanage was slowly killing him. It was time to get out.

There were only three ways out of Clarissa Frayne: adoption, death or escape. There was zero chance that he’d actually be adopted, not at his age. Truculent teenagers were not very popular with the childless middle-classes. For years, he had cherished the dream that someone would want him: now it was time to face facts.

Death was much easier to achieve. All he had to do was keep on doing what he was told, and his body would give up in a matter of years. The average life expectancy of an institutionalized orphan was fifteen years. Cosmo was fourteen. That left him with less than twelve months before the statistics said his time was up. Twelve months to plan for the final option. The only way he was getting out of Clarissa Frayne alive: escape.