Beyond the Horizon

45. Albedo

The man had seen a number of astounding things since the beginning of Horizon Labs. He'd seen people ignite themselves and burn for ten minutes straight before the heat became too intense to control. He'd seen women who could snap their bones and repair them into diamond-like hardness, and men who could breathe underwater for hours like creatures from a child's fairy tale.

          There had been hundreds of experiments―and plenty of failures―but nothing pleased the man more than to inch steadily toward success.

          The man flipped through his notes, hastily scribbled on a pad of yellow paper. He'd been too excited to wait until he returned to his desktop, too eager to mark down his findings. He'd tuned out Rikiga's frantic mumbling as he'd scrawled down the results, so quickly that now he realized it might have been just a bit foolish. His handwriting blurred together into chicken scratch when his mind raced; he couldn't tell if the symbols stretched out before him properly reflected the miracle he'd seen unfurl like a flower.

          The man exhaled and set down the notepad. He supposed he could always review the camera footage to supplement the places where his memory had failed him. The basement cameras ran on their own system; Rikiga backed them up on tapes at the end of each shift, and the man kept them stored in a locked box deep within the records room. The box looked musty and old from a distance, often mistaken as out-of-date paper records from the First Trials.

          Although the First Trials had been a pivotal moment in the history of human development, much of Horizon Laboratories' research had advanced well beyond the experiments that transformed prisoners into advanced human lifeforms.

          Project Valiant had proven to be a much larger success than even the man could have predicted. That these creatures could breed in the wild and produce such powerful offspring was nothing short of a miracle.

          The man reclined in his rolling chair as he pulled up the record of VC-407. The violent red TERMINATED flashed across the boy's smiling face; the man found it ironic that this was the photo the agents had provided. The boy certainly hadn't smiled since waking up inside Horizon Laboratories. It didn't look right on his face.

          VC-10 had the ability to craft illusions. The VC's powers had been minimal and pathetic; nothing the man found particularly useful. Somehow he'd managed to escape in the catastrophic breakout spearheaded by VC-17, and his lack of hostility and minimal threat level had kept him off the Lab's radar for years.

          How did someone with the power of illusion father something as powerful as VC-407?

          The man clicked through the boy's file, reading over the report of his chaotic, telekinetic abilities. The survivors of the destruction in the small town of Okaida had written reports of the boy's ability to heft their coworker into the air with ease and launch their cars as if they were made entirely of feathers.

          It made no sense―but it was fascinating.

          The man's heart rate sped up at the memory of VC-407's eyes rolling in the back of his head as the experimental serum twisted through his body. The air around the room had shifted in that moment, the temperature rising as if someone had cranked up the thermostat. When the dust settled, as Rikiga unstrapped the boy's unconscious body and brought him to the stretcher, the man had inspected the thermometers. He'd discovered that the mercury within them had boiled over and spilled onto the floor, leaking down the wall like droplets of silver blood.

          So much chaos had erupted in a single moment. The metal tray full of screws and pins had launched across the room as if it'd been fired from the barrel of a gun, denting the metal wall and shattering the protective glass separating him from Rikiga and the man. The glass had been tested in a variety of intense environments, earthquakes and tornados and increased pressure, and the boy had shattered it with only a thought.