Enhanced

This is something I started for a competition but I had such fun writing it that thought I'd carry it on for you guys!  It's a bit heavy at first but I'll lighten it up as I go.  Hope you like it <3

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As the morning mist smothered London’s skyline, a teenage girl sat beside the river and surveyed her surroundings, watching the way the sleet warped the silhouette of the Tower of London as it fell from a sombre sky into the water’s murky depths.

To the casual observer the girl appeared no different to you or me but the more astute might have noticed that she was untouched by the weather.  The rain that sent ripples scurrying across the Thames’s icy waters left her dry.  Her breath didn’t cloud in the freezing air.  The wind didn’t blow her red hair into her eyes.  To the world around her, Lakshima was less than even a shadow.

Pedestrians still stumbled along the cracked pavements, heads down, umbrellas up.  Motorists still slumped in their expensive cars, tired eyes peering through misted windscreens.  The Thames still wound its way through the city like an oil slick on a gull’s back.

Lakshima stood up slowly; her sleek, black wings fanning out behind her and casting the shadow of a fallen angel across the concrete parapet.  Passers-by threw her no more than a careless glance.  But then why should they care?

A girl with wings, a boy with a tail; all sorts of genetically modified freaks - they were rare but not unheard of.

Insignificant social outcasts; the world was riddled with their kind.

A biological breakthrough which started nearly a thousand years ago then rotted and became rancid.  The Enhancements.

When the first test subjects were delivered, the planet exploded in uproar.   The rich demanded the right to have their babies ‘enhanced’ whilst human rights activists screamed inhumanity.  As so often happens when money speaks, governments listened and went ahead regardless.

Once the enhanced babies became children, they surpassed even the most intelligent naturals.  What was the point in sitting an exam when your parents had had you fitted with a photographic memory?  Where was the need for football trials when you had been given superhuman agility?  Why did you need to learn when you had the entire internet programmed into your brain?

It became a world ruled by the rich where the naturals were treated as socially inferior and the enhanced were a powerful minority.  Until the Rebellion.

The battle lasted precisely twenty minutes.  Every natural who had ever been looked down on, beaten to the finish or ridiculed by the enhanced took up arms and fought.  The few enhanced who survived either fled or were taken prisoner.

Eight hundred years had passed since that fateful day and the enhanced still remained, still remembered.  Secreted in tiny pockets across the globe, they weren’t many but they were enough.

Their ancestors had ruled the world and the naturals had massacred them for it. The enhanced wanted revenge and they knew exactly how to get it…