Skinner Luce

Skinner was what servs called each other. It was because they were fake, their skins a disguise”

All around us, under most of humanity’s very noses, lurks a dangerous alien race. The Nafikh inhabit human bodies while visiting Earth, and an underground system designed to disguise and protect them from being discovered allows them to indulge their wildest and often violent urges. The circumstances of these brutal visits require the sacrifice of servs.

Servs are aliens themselves, created by the Nafikh to attend to their every need. Physically indistinguishable from humans, they are destined to live in pain, their very livelihood regulated by the Source, a powerful force of energy inside each of them that burns like a white-hot fire under the stress of their servitude.

Lucy is a serv who arrived a baby, and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, dwelling in both worlds but belonging to neither. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary human life she desperately longs to maintain, her family unaware of her darkest secrets.

But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, targeted in the dog-eat-dog world of servs, she'll find herself fighting to protect her family and the life she's made for herself. Skinner Luce is Lucy’s story.

Patricia Ward was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, emigrating to the United States when she was 18. She is the author of the award-winning novelThe Bullet Collection, a story of two sisters growing up in wartime Beirut, and an artist specializing in miniature books and dioramas. Ward lives with her family in western Massachusetts.