The Anomalies

Chapter 1

Kieran had been called before the Agency's 'Grand Council'.

Seventeen years had passed since Zoe's disappearance and he, in that time, had become the best Hunter, the best operative in existence. The most feared and the most skilled at his job.

Getting to that position had entailed enormous physical and mental effort. He had trained to the point of exhaustion and had taken on all the most difficult cases, putting up with having to cooperate with his father and pretending to go along with him.

He had risked his life several times, acquired a number of scars all over his body and a reputation as the infallible Hunter.

He had not embraced that role to please the man or share his ideas and methods.

He silently loathed it with his whole self.

He had become a Hunter to be in the best position to find her; assuming she was still alive.

Kieran did not and had never believed that Zoe and her family were dangerous.

Even though he was just a kid at the time, he knew that those people had not and would never willingly harm anyone.

The Agency was hiding something shady behind a partial truth and he was determined to find out what was really going on.

Fortunately, since he had started working for the Agency, methods seemed to have changed. Now the Anomalies were no longer executed but were captured alive and taken to a 'rehabilitation facility' where they were stripped of their powers. At least, so it was said.

Kieran, however, had never seen any of those he had captured in those years and had never seen with his own eyes the place where they were supposedly taken.

He suspected that this 'rehabilitation facility' didn't even exist and that it was an invention of the High Councilor to appease the many killings that had taken place in the past.

His father had dragged him along on that fateful day seventeen years ago to witness the capture and elimination of that family as a lesson for the future.

According to his parent, he was to become an agent of the Agency, a Hunter, and nothing was to influence or interfere with his work.

If his mother had been alive at the time, she would not have allowed this, just as she would not have consented to the extermination of Zoe's family and the constant physical and psychological abuse he had to endure from his father! Instead, she was dead, accidentally killed by an Anomalous, leaving him alone, at eight years old, at the mercy of a cold and ruthless man.

Well, in the end, he had become, apparently, what his parent had intended, albeit with a different intent, he thought astutely.

Kieran stood for a moment in the square in front of the imposing white marble building, the Agency's headquarters.

It stood like a gigantic obelisk, pointing in its magnificence towards the blue sky. Perfectly positioned in the centre of the capital Es Alink, the largest of all existing cities on the planet. Es Alink had risen in the centre of the whole territory called Section One or 'The Lowland', shaped like a star.

'The Lowland' was surrounded by five other smaller sections with the same shape, also called satellites. To the north was section two or The Great Forests, to the south sections four and five together called The Dryspell, to the east section three called The Solitary Cliffs and to the west section six also called The Deep Waters.

The central cities of each 'star satellite' were connected by large roads that drew a gigantic pentagon.

<<I am expected by the Grand Council>> he told the guards stationed in front of the building's main entrance.