A Blade of Glass

Chapter 1

As she nosed the car around the corner, Detective Nickie Foster felt a wave of irritation at the warren of narrow one-way streets that filled the area. Despite the lack of pedestrians out at the early hour, she was forced to keep her attention fixed on the signs, to try and keep which way she could go straight, not to mention the streets themselves to avoid anything jumping out and surprising her, which meant that the cup of coffee whispering her name in the drink holder by her thigh was forced to sit untouched, not that she'd risk it with her boss sitting next to her, but still, she wanted the rich dark caffeinated drink to try and clear away some of the exhaustion that seemed to have settled into her bones.

As she drove, she saw a glassblower without a shirt who looked like he'd been interrupted part way through getting ready for the day watching them pass. A little further down the block she spotted a woman with a paint splattered outfit talking to a pair of burly men with braided beards that wouldn't have looked out of place in the latest Viking film.

She continued down the street, with its brick buildings and chain-link fences and wondered why the artistic community had settled here of all places. Sure, there was room for their studios, and there was the fact that their neighbors weren't the kind that could legitimately complain, not that that stopped them. She knew that the department got a constant stream of complaints from irritated neighbors about the pettiest of things, from the noise to the smells, they complained about it all.

She figured that they must have liked it, the sense of camaraderie, the sense of righteous indignation, like the city had pushed them aside, cast them out, so they'd made their own enclave with their peers.

Stifling a yawn, she checked the side streets as she passed and stole a glance at the passenger sitting next to her. He appeared to be asleep, but she knew that appearances were deceptive, especially in this case, something that had got her in trouble when she'd first joined his squad.

Her boss, Julian Drake, rested his chin against his chest, mostly hiding the bit of his white shirt and black tie that could be seen over his matching vest, all of which worked to reinforce the monochromatic air about him. The dark circles under his eyes, which shown in stark contrast to the paleness of his skin, seemed to have gotten larger and darker ever since she'd joined his squad almost three years prior. Despite being only a year older than her, his hair was a spiky shock of pure white that stood up over his head, lending to the strangeness of his appearance.

She knew that he didn't style it that way, it just stood up on its own, waving slightly. But that wasn't the most noticeable thing about him. Nor was it that fact that the only color on him was that of his now closed bright blue eyes, that looked to her like frozen bits of electricity.

No, the thing that everyone noticed first and the thing that left the greatest impression about him was the metal mask that covered the lower half of his face.

From the bridge of his nose down, the dull metal mask hid his features. Extending out over his cheekbones and around his chin, it left almost no skin from his eyes to his jaw visible. The strange, angled cuts in the front offered a view of a mesh and nothing else. It was something that he never removed, at least not if he could help it, even though it was a clear sign that he was a G.E.P..

A Genetic Evolutionary Para-mutation, or G.E.P. was the name for a group of individuals that had extraordinary powers from flight to super strength and anything else, they were still rare, but were slowly becoming more common.

Derogatorily called Gep's, they were treated with a mix of envy and suspicion and had made the work of the police immensely more difficult. Nearly every crime that happened saw a suspect blame it on a mind controller, even though the few that existed were all on government watchlists, it never stopped them from trying. Not to mention the fact that teleporters could get into places that they weren't supposed to, shape shifters could assume new identities or even leave false fingerprints at a scene, along with a host of other problems and illusionists could make someone commit a crime without even realizing it. And that wasn't even mentioning the ones that tried to use their powers for conquest.