Altered: Possessive Instinct

Imagine a futuristic world where the population is strictly controlled. At a young age, individuals are graded for both aptitude and physical superiority. Those that make the grade are deemed Breedable and remain fertile to pass on desirable genetic traits with other fertile beings. Those that are found wanting are stripped of their fertility and are submitted to a lower caste for the remainder of their lives. Above all are the Altered, a genetically modified and superior race, a race of beings which epitomize everything that the human race hopes to be.

The Altered each have a single other being, an Honored, which they are irrevocably bound to. An Altered will do anything, be anything, for his or her Honored. The children sired from such pairings have brought only prosperity and joy to whichever place they call home. The children are strong, fit, and intelligent...a true testament to the best of humanity.

But what if there was one - an infertile woman - who was never meant to exist? She is one of the Branded, one of the few human beings in existence that slipped through the cracks. A woman borne of two individuals deemed unfit to have children. What if she, an infertile, was dragged through the dregs of society for all of her life and scorned for something she had no control over? What if she found herself ensconced in the impossible scenario of being one of the Honored?

Holly White has become the first and only known infertile - a Branded - to become the Honored of an Altered. What is to become of a society so set in their ways of shunning the deemed lesser when the lowest of them rises above all? There are bound to be those that resent the tarnishment she brings to their way of life and will stop at nothing to see order restored.