The da Vinci Project:

Prologue

It had been a long time since Sophia had been home. Home, such a simple word for something so utterly complicated, at least for a girl like her. Her hands fiddled with the bracelets around her left wrist, gifts from her friends back in California.  She'd been attending Saint Mary's School For Girls since she was ten.  She saw her father only on holidays and for three weeks out of the summer.  It wasn't much but she had grown so used to it that the idea of being with him every night was both exciting and terrifying.  Her father was a complicated man. A strong, confident man. Her father, was Lucius Patton, and he was a man in the eye of the world. 

Sophia tried to remember the last time she saw her father. It was just six months ago and the two were on a plane to visit her grandparents in Washington, on a farm just outside of Seattle. She remembered how she had spent two weeks with him and how the two seemed almost like strangers as they sat across the table from one another, him reading his paper and her texting on her phone and complaining about the horrible cell service. He had laughed and made a joke about today's youth and their addiction to electronics and she had rolled her eyes and blown a curl from her eyes. They were strangers who loved one another. Two people bound by blood and nothing more in common.  She didn't even look like her father.  He was a tall, slender man with ebony skin and a commanding demeanor that complimented the graying hair at his temples. Sophia was a small, petite girl with light, caramel skin, green eyes and a head full of wild curls. She looked like her mother. Though he never said it, Sophia would occasionally catch that look of pain that seeing her caused him. He would smile to her of course, but the look in his eyes -- it was heartbreaking.

Glancing out the window Sophia watched as the skyscrapers and office buildings crept by. New York City. A whole different world from California. She marveled at the clouds of people moving in what seemed like perfect unison along the wide sidewalks. She watched bike messengers buzz around cabs and shoot across intersections.  Somewhere she could hear police sirens and squealing tires.

Wait.

Sophia stilled as she looked out the window, but her attention was on something else. Those sirens were growing closer, and behind them the sound of car horns had began to echo against the sirens. There was shouting now.

What was happening?

Turning in her seat and craning her neck, Sophia peered behind them. There was something happening. She could see people running and cars lurching forward as they were hit from behind by other cars trying to escape the path of...a woman?

She strained her eyes until suddenly, without much warning, the woman leapt into the air, landing on the sidewalk near her car. It was the first time Sophia had ever seen someone like her.  A mutant.

The politically correct term for them was 'Evolved' but everyone knew what they really were. They were monsters. They started out as human, but at some point in time something in their body changed. No one really understood what caused people to evolve.  There were a lot of theories about homo evolution. Some would say that it was purely an inherent thing, that parents of the evolved passed on the ability to evolve to their offspring. Others said that it was just terrible luck. A few, the more ridiculous souls and conspiracy theorists out there, believed that the government was responsible for triggering these evolutions, but no one could say why.  The scariest thing of all was that everyone, every living human being had the ability to evolve, and if they had the ability to evolve, they had the ability to de-evolve too.

That's what she was seeing now as the woman crouched on the sidewalk just a stones throw away from her car, a de-evolved being no longer human. The sight of her made Sophia slump into the seat of her car, her hands curling against the door panel as she peered out through the window. She saw a woman who looked to be in her forties standing there. She was dressed in a pink flowered sundress and a knitted button up sweater.  Her hair was brown and worn in a tight bun at the back of her head. From the back she looked like a normal woman, but her clothing was where the similarities ended.  She rested there, crouched on the sidewalk like some animal, her legs apart, her body low and a hand as gray as the concrete under foot braced her against the ground.  For a moment Sophia found her stance not unlike spiderman's, and it almost made her snicker, but she didn't.

After a few moments the woman turned toward the street suddenly, and Sophia found herself choking back a scream. The woman's face was distorted and vile. Her skin was ashen gray and her eyes bugged out as if at any moment their sockets would no longer be able to hold them.  Her mouth hung open and her lips drooped, like her skull had somehow pulled away from them allowing her tongue to hang out and making room for the hundreds of small, writhing things...pincers? They were pincers, like a bugs but there were so many that they looked like they were positively crawling from within her. Small hair like growths protruded from her arms and legs, even from her collar bone. Everything about the woman looked alien.  Sophia fought back another scream as the woman lunged at a pedestrian who darted by, trying to escape the chaos. She only barely escaped the grasp of the mutated woman but a broken heel and luck alone allowed her to spill in between two cars and evade the grasp. It was lucky for the pedestrian, but it was very unlucky for Sophia who found herself eye to eye with the mutant.

Sophia froze...