Winner of the 2021 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Best Fantasy Novel
“A coming-of-age adventure fantasy with a strong and resourceful female protagonist, quick action and fascinating characters. Brown uses his exceptional ability to describe Dara and the events of the novel as if they could exist in our normal, everyday world to make the fantasy elements of the story utterly believable.”
–The BookLife Prize
When Dara embarks on a perilous mission to take back the healing Lightband that was wrested from her grasp, two people stand in her way—her cousin Mercy, who has the power to afflict instead of heal, and Santee, the head of a shadowy group about to unleash a deadly virus onto a fragile, damaged world.
Her wrist shattered in a fall, Dara is airlifted to a secret government medical facility where a newly found fragment of element 120-X—main component of the Lightband—is implanted in her wrist bone, enabling her to heal with her hand. The medical facility comes under assault, and Dara escapes to the California desert with the help of an enigmatic Jamaican martial arts expert named Seb. Still bearing emotional wounds from her mother’s death, Dara trains for the gathering storm. When the desert hideout is attacked, Dara sets out alone to reunite with Diego, the boy she’s fallen in love with, and their faithful dog Linc.
Determined to find and take back her mother’s stolen birthright, Dara discovers the stunning secrets of her own family’s buried past and the extraordinary DNA code that flows in her veins.