Limbo of Witches

Somewhere between Heaven and Hell there is a lonely place... In the near future when things are not as they once were comes the fourth tale of the Witches of Isle Royale. To rewrite the witches' genetic code and set aside their programmed dissolution at 30 years old, Kim Murayama must cross the threshold into an uncharted land where the dead live and the living may never have been. It's a netherworld beyond dreams where death is very real and his only ally is the ghost of a would-be lover.

Isle Royale sits in the far northern reaches of Lake Superior, just about as far west as you can get and still be in the NE Sovereignty. After that you’d be in the Central Zone, which would be even worse. It’s no paradise in either place, but the Northeast Regional Sovereignty is probably the least beggarly of the six autonomous regions left after America collapsed. It’s a mean world no matter where you wander, so I don’t regret one minute we’ve spent with the mysterious witch-people on that far-away isle. Rustic, yeah, but Heaven comparatively. It was the summer of our third year ignoring the Sovereignty’s prohibition against contact with the quarantined “witches,” but there’d been no attempt to locate and remove us. Even Wilmut, Inc., the outfit that clones the Royales for their telomerase, hadn't been by in a while to harvest any of that elixir they sell to those who can afford the longevity it confers. Not since we ran them off the island last year. That was A Good Thing for the Royales, but, thanks to the genetic blueprint that Wilmut uses to build them, the witches still faced an untimely death. At 30 years of age all their cells stop working. The Denouement they call it. There was a chance, though. Doc Fredericks got hold of a three-volume manual swiped from Wilmut. He thought he could re-design the witches' DNA and turn off their programmed dissolution. Of course it had to be tested first. We tested it on my Mick the Witch. No one knew what, if anything, would be transformed. The night in Doc's lab on the Chinese Wall back in the Great City, when he gave her the shot, infused her modified DNA back into her cells, Mick had been Desor. Her chestnut brown hair and soft, empathetic brown eyes were the same as all the witch clones of Isle Royale from below the Minong. So when she and I woke one cool summer morning in our bungalow at Lake Desor, when science had worked its magic and her smoke grey eyes met mine, I touched her soft silver hair with the hope of fulfillment and, at the same time, a disturbing sense of dread.