Deadly Going Dark
Ten-year-old David Strong is physically assaulted while trying to protect his friends. To protect the abuser's family to form a powerful alliance, David's father allows an experimental drug to be used to erase his memory.
It does not work. Instead, his brain's emotional centers are dulled, and his prefrontal cortex is prematurely expanded, blunting his youth with adult cognitive abilities, reduced anxiety and fear, and the need for emotional and physical stimulation. After nine months at home, he is sent to military training camp where he struggles with suicidal and homicidal ideation, violent images and self-harming behaviors.
By thirteen years he knows he is different and before attending his sister's engagement to the same man who abused him and his friends, David makes a critical decision - he needs to leave home. Stopping for supplies and intel at the Delta Exchange, and he escapes into the Dark Zone, where there is no rule of law, rampant violence and where scavenging is the only means to live.
Months later he is drawn in to save a young woman who crashes in the Dead Zone and reluctantly assists her to safety only to be caught by her powerful father who offers him a choice: he can be set free back to the Dead Zone, or he can join his team, and live a very different life that will eventually lead him to the new frontier - Mars.
David Strong becomes a dark, forceful figure that lands at every interaction that connects with Cassandra IX, patrician and first-class citizen turned Colonel Kurtz, the greatest living terrorist on Earth and Mars, and Willard Bennett, former captain of the Jefferson Davis who first loses Cassandra and is later mutilated by her. Strong is the first to meet Gavin, the pleb soldier who follows Kurtz into the Martian wilderness, and Betsy Ann Hall before she becomes a specialist on the warship Robert E. Lee.
Deadly Going Dark adds substantial context that explains how Earth and Mars connect, intersect, and divides. It finally answers questions about where these bold dark worlds are heading.
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