Enclave
The world is in chaos: war, plague, global ecological collapse. Seeking sanctuary for their children, parents enrol them in the elite Clothos Academy. Run by a mysterious man known only as Sarge, set in a former monastery atop a sheer cliff on a tiny island, Clothos will admit only 100 children before it is sealed off — perhaps permanently — from the terrors outside.
These precious, protected children are hardly the best and the brightest: empty-headed, anorexia-thin “starlets;” troublemakers barely one step ahead of the law; cast-off junior royals too embarrassing to be let out in public. The staff isn’t much better, from the alcoholic doctor and lovelorn guidance counselor to a teacher with a lust for power and an ancient monk with secrets of his own.
And the dangers from which these castaways are being protected? Stored on hundreds of DVDs, ready to be trotted out whenever Sarge needs to terrify his little flock.
And yet...
Two boys discover there are real dangers beyond Clothos’ thick stone walls when they hack the Academy’s self-contained computer network and connect, for a brief but disastrous moment, to the outside world. Worse, a stranger has penetrated the Academy’s defenses. And he has brought Death.
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Kit Reed
Kit Reed (1932-2017) was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.
Reed was born on June 7, 1932 in San Diego, California. Her first short story, "The Wait" (1958), was published by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation.
The New York Times Book Review said about her short fiction in 2006: "Reed has a prose style that's pure dry ice, displayed in dystopian stories that specialize in bitterness and dislocation." The Wall Street Journal said: "The title of Kit Reed's [2013] selection of her own short stories, The Story Until Now (Wesleyan), reminds us that although she has been writing award-winning fiction for some 50 years, she's still accelerating. The scope of these 35 stories is immense, their variety unmatched."
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