The Mind Bender Files

The sirens came too late to matter.

In a narrow city alley, a man walking home from work is shot once, cleanly and efficiently, by a boy who then stands beneath a flickering streetlight and waits for the police. Officers Russ Delaney and Miguel Ortega have seen gang initiations, drugged-out teenagers, and every kind of violence the city produces. They have never seen a child like this: composed, obedient, emptied out.

He gives them a “designation” instead of a name. He tells them they arrived “ahead of sequence.” He recites a creed taught to him by a man he calls Dominus: Still the mind. Still the hand. Purpose is greater than pity.

But an apple rolling in a rain puddle, a mother smoothing a child’s hair, a voice calling from another room: ordinary things keep pressing against a locked door in his mind. Behind it, a boy named Carter is not yet dead.

The Mind Bender Files is a psychological thriller about the people who turn children into instruments of obedience, and about the buried self that refuses to disappear.