Numbers

Prologue

The scarred boy sinks his diamond dagger into the back of the woman's head and grimaces. He does this so often, killing members of a species he has worked so hard to protect. While the boy cannot see himself when he slits someone's throat or stabs into a skull, he can feel the black cloud of death he creates. With his gifts, he can hear their final thoughts, screaming from the open wounds like terrified children. The boy pulls back his scarf and touches the purple scar on his neck—it has begun to fade, but it is what connects him most to his long dead adversary.

Four down, the scarred boy thinks grimly as a red-haired agent appears from the dark alley and helps him with the dark body bag, about fifteen hundred more to go.

The woman zips it up, her face stony when the dead woman's body abruptly materializes in the black bag. She collects two vials of Black from the woman's purse, and pulls free a vial of her own, pouring sulfuric acid into the Black, erasing it from its corrupt existence. When it's done, the woman smirks at the air, not looking at him, but at the space he was standing before.

"Good work, Smith," the woman says.

The boy pops into view a few feet away. He has stumbled away from her. There was a time nearly two years ago, where she would have given anything to capture and kill him. Now, they are partners in the FBI. He was practically handpicked by the red-haired agent when he volunteered to aid the Bureau in hunting MogPro supporters. Because of their history and respect for one another, the boy quickly grew fond of being around the woman. Killing alongside her, however, still made him uneasy.

"John, you okay?"

"I'm fine," he replies curtly. "Just—let's just get rid of it."

She nods, and he proceeds to hoist the bag over his shoulder—his strength and stamina are still superior to the average human's. They leave the alleyway behind and walk into a nearby warehouse. It is a filthy place, smells of mildew and dust, like most old buildings in Detroit. However, the boy cannot shake the nostalgia of a different warehouse in a different city just a few hundred miles away. A time when his friends had separated once again, just after they had a time of peace. When his newfound ally and, soon after, friend, had chosen to attack his own home so they could push ahead in their war.

He drops the body bag in the middle of the empty warehouse, and uses his powers to set it alight. The two agents watch it burn, a seventeen year-old boy and a forty-seven year-old woman, a woman that the boy has grown to think of, yet never openly mention, as if she was his own mother. She covers her nose at the stench of melting flesh. The boy watches it burn, emotionless. He is desensitized to the sound and smell of the flames destroying his enemies.

***

Lightning flashes outside. It's a random storm, one that the raven-haired girl cannot fully control. Or at least, not right now. The storm is subtle and stops almost immediately. She runs her trembling hands through his shaggy mop of blond hair. He lifts his head from the source of her abrupt lightning storm, the boy's hazel eyes watching her amorously. The girl feels his short, torrid breaths tickling her thighs.

She lets the boy go and props herself up on her elbows to see him. Before she can even finish the thought, the boy rises from beneath her and crawls atop the raven-haired girl. His hand meets the side of her face as he leans down to greet her lips with his. Her hands explore his frame again, one of them meeting the side of his face as the other journeys down his front. She passes his torso and manages to find something new, something exceptionally warmer than the rest of him.

The boy's body tenses, his hips bucking forward. Unlike their other previous encounters, he is not expecting this approach from her. She knows how he so easily anticipates her desires, how the boy can almost reach into her head and pluck the thoughts from the orchard of her mind. The blooming of a new ability, a new Legacy. He refuses to share it with her, more focused on practicing with the new gift in this way. She doesn't mind. In fact, she enjoys being free of schooling him on his powers. He appreciates this, too.

He appreciates it very much.

The raven-haired girl can hear him telepathically mulling around in her mind milliseconds before he puts himself within her. She drops this connection from the touch of his skin against hers, the gentle feeling of his blond hair grazing her face. His hands travel her as well, stopping—along her shoulder blades, beneath her breasts, down the sides of her slender waist—where he can sense are spots that drive her insane. The boy is steady and rhythmic, studying her with great care, as if she were a battlefield. As if they were still in war.

He pulls her to him, once again breaking her train of thought. The girl hooks her legs around his waist. She lets her hands drift back up, one of them now running through her long hair. Her other hand grips his shoulder. A brief flush of red appears on his cheeks before quickly dissipating. She knows that he loves seeing her this way, despite how much it embarasses him. To hide his smile, he leans down to the side of her neck, his teeth grazing the soft flesh there. The raven-haired girl bites her lip in response, struggling to keep herself from releasing a more intense storm than before. However, both of them will reach their limit soon.

On her shoulder blade, she can hear him whisper her name into her skin.

But it's not the name she has chosen.

It's the number she was cursed with.

***

The gate slams closed, the metal can be heard clanging together even this deep into the forest. It's not exactly the best gate they could have built out here. But it does the job. It keeps people safe. She jolts awake to the sound, a thirty-eight year-old woman who miraculously made it to Earth, only to find herself alone less than a year after arriving. It should not bother her—over thirteen years ago, she sat alone behind a different desk, on a different planet hundreds of lightyears away. Her feet clank against the metal surface as she sits up. The woman mutters an expletive under her breath and suddenly, a monitor on her desk soundlessly spark to life, responding to her voice.

"Username and passcode, please," the icy, feminine voice of her autonomous software greets her.

The woman hates the way she programmed that operating system—yes, it's a computer system and with her skills, she can easily change it whenever she pleases, but it was too close to home for her. The voice, albeit cold and robotic, sounds so familiar the woman. It sounds like her long dead friend. A voice she heard twelve years ago on her identity band, alerting her to the end of the world. Then, later, that voice speaking in hundreds of different languages while aboard an antique ship—a ship she had still failed to work up the courage to go and excavate from the desert. That voice, calling her name as the Mogadorians...

She looks at the digital clock in the corner of the monitor. 1:56 AM. She needs to stop doing this, she realizes. The woman had lost track of how often she stayed late after work. She lived on campus, but not in her office. Protecting the Garde could have been done from home, like how it had been done for the past decade. Until the war finally died down. Because to her, that is all that happened. It became quieter, less noticeable.

But it never ended.

Instead of logging on, she takes her white tablet from the table and walks over to the windows, looking out at the Academy while she checks on the whereabouts of the Garde. The woman had upgraded the tablet since it was returned—it could now track both Loric and Human Garde, and she had managed to hack into the drones and warship over Alaska to watch over the Mogadorians.

Out of the corner of her eye, the woman notices movement outside. The sprawling campus is usually devoid of life this early in the morning. She notices the headlights of vehicles glowing past the massive redwoods. The woman sees the logo on the hood of the first truck with her naturally enhanced sight. Earth Garde. On the side of the truck reads the slogan: YOU ARE THE BRAVE NEW WORLD.

The Academy opens tomorrow, she realizes, however, part of her knows it will be different than what they expected.