Length: 76,000 words

Status: Complete

Description

After losing his wife to suicide and his career to alcoholism, Dr. Carl Palmer accepts a last-chance position at The Blue Lake Institute, a psychiatric facility for the criminally insane. Desperate for redemption, he agrees to assist in the illegal human testing of a drug designed to isolate and remove trauma from the brain.

Instead of curing mental illness, the drug externalizes it.

Patients begin expelling living manifestations of their deepest wounds: physical embodiments of the Id that think, learn, hunger, and grow. When a catastrophic error results in the drug being administered to a traumatized child, the experiment spreads beyond the Institute’s walls, blurring the line between therapy and contagion.

As violence escalates and the creations escape containment, Carl is forced to confront the truth he tried to outrun: what we discard never truly disappears.

It waits.

It adapts.

And it comes back changed.