Eugene Lotosh

Strays Eugene Lotosh

This world is cruel and cold. Those who stand above the crowd are always hunted down. It's easier for adults: they know the rules of the game, they can hide, disguise themselves, avoid giving themselves away. Children, who don't even know that those rules exist, have nowhere to hide. In particular, those children whose special abilities cannot be explained by the modern science. They can break through sheet steel and crush reinforced concrete blocks but they are helpless in face of the indifferent bureaucratic machine that grinds their lives up into dust. Technology is needed to produce weapons, first and foremost - and if such technology doesn't exist, it must be created. Even if the price is as high as torturing ten-year-old children. Those trapped in secret laboratories cannot escape. They are kept in dark cells, administered poisonous drugs and forced to wear blockirator collars. They are brought to 'test benches' that are indistinguishable from torture devices. Children turn into deviants between the ages of eight and ten, and if they are unable to consciously help the military in creating new weapons, so much the worse for them. There is no hope for anyone: even the parents cannot protect their child from the Special Guardianship Act. And orphans...who ever cares about orphans!And even those, who miraculously escaped from terrible laboratories of the Institute of Man and did not die of poison, hunger and illnesses, could not possibly survive anyway. Detectives have tracked them down, and a special unit is already on its way to a long-deserted hotel in an old maron grove on the outskirts of a southern seaside city. The hotel that is about to witness the final act of a protracted tragedy. She is thirteen. Her name is Karina. She is a deviant. She has already forgotten the faces of her long-dead parents. And she has no future - unless a young couple she has just happened upon, somehow succeeds to protect her from the cold cruel world...