The Anomaly Project

CHAPTER SEVEN

TODD

Birds are singing, the sun is shining, and clouds are drifting merrily across the sky. It'd be a beautiful sight, if not for the massive white building inside which there are diabolically evil practices, including but not limited to life-threatening and torturous experiments on innocent children.

Sounds fun, doesn't it?

I'm sitting on the floor of a room on the top floor of some apartment, somewhere amidst the ruins of downtown Boulder, Colorado. The streets are empty, litter strewn across the sidewalks. Far off in the distance is the inner city, a collection of tiny living quarters surrounded by a barrier of barbed wire. And even farther off than that is the white concrete building known as Forrester Industries.

I'm not alone in the room. Two of my friends, Tessa Jordan and Masato Sasaki, are with me.

Tessa, my 19-year-old cousin, stands at the window, staring hard at Forrester Industries. To me, it's nothing but a small building in the distance, but she can see every detail of it – she can see the paint chipping on the outside walls, she can count the windows and see what's going on inside them, too. Not only that, but she can even hear people talking inside the building as well.

Masato is sitting across the room, facing me. He's 23, with shaggy black hair and dark, intelligent eyes, and is probably the most restless person I've ever met. He's been tapping his fingers rapidly against the hardwood floor for the past hour, and it's been driving me crazy. Not his fault, though, I suppose. It's his enhancement – super speed. He's always itching to move around.

The three of us have been up in this apartment for what seems like years, although it's probably only been a couple of hours. Masato shifts his weight, sighs. I can tell just by looking at him that he's thinking about Brooke Dekker, his fiancée. We left her back at our camp on sentry duty while we went on a scouting trip. I hope she's doing all right.

Please, of course she's all right, I remind myself. We're superhuman. How could we ever not be all right?

Tessa hasn't moved an inch from the window. I groan inwardly. I detest waiting, and my patience is already wearing thin. To break the boredom, I stretch out my hand and absentmindedly make my thumb go invisible. Then my index finger, my middle finger, and so on. Once all my fingers have vanished, I make my palm disappear as well.

Masato watches me with an awed look on his face. "You know, it's really weird, how you can do that," he informs me.

"Genetic engineering will do that for you," I respond. "Besides, it's just as weird how you can sprint from New York to California in less than ten minutes."

"Eight minutes," Masato mutters, smirking a little.

"All right, braggart, but can you walk through walls?" I make my hand intangible, my other ability, and sink my fingers into the wooden floor. It has no effect on me besides a vaguely cold, tingling feeling.

He rolls his eyes. "Now who's the braggart?"

I grin and glance over at Tessa, still standing at the windowsill. "You see anything, Tess? You've been staring at the same spot for a good five minutes at least."

She nods slowly, not moving her eyes away. "Actually, yeah. There's some new activity going on in that window." She gestures toward the tiny building in the distance.

"Specifics, please," Masato says, standing up and joining her at the window. I follow suit, coming to stand on Tessa's other side.

"Three windows across, two up," she says. "On the second floor."