Invisible Death

ANGELA

I've never felt so... alone... in my life.

I've always been lonely, that's not new.

When I was born, my mother's womb had to be removed. It had been turned into an egg by Paul Breedlove himself, at my uncle's request. According to what my father told me, and my uncle confirmed many years later, my mother was born to have children. She was the first child. Her brother was born when she was already fifteen years old. She never told me how, but their mother died two years after his birth. Their father died of a coronary only three years after that. My mother was twenty, my uncle was five. And they were on their own. She brought him up. Somehow, she juggled a job and school, and she managed to become a registered nurse. She worked; he studied, until he was emancipated at the age of 15. Only then, when she was already over 30, she allowed herself to date. She met a fine man, a doctor from Brazil, who was specializing in heart surgery. He was of African descent, she was Caucasian.

My mother miscarried three times before me, and she would have miscarried again, had my uncle, already a top researcher at Genomex, not asked, actually begged, Paul Breedlove to save her pregnancy. It was her very last chance to become a mother and she would have died if she could never have had any kids. My uncle knew very well my father was dead set against the kind of genetic manipulation already under development at Genomex, but my father wasn't there at the time. He was away at a conference, a workshop, something. He was away and a decision would have to be made soon: either the womb was converted and the fetus transformed, or the pregnancy would end and the womb would have to be removed due to massive myoma polyp syndrome. Balancing my mother's wishes against my father's, my uncle collected the stem cells needed for the procedure himself.

When my father returned and found out about the changes made, he flipped. The fight landed my uncle on a dentist's chair, repairing the damage an ex-amateur boxer did to his mouth. My uncle has now half a dozen martial arts black belts. Back then, he had as many as... none. My father collected his wife and moved back to Brazil, where his family had wealth and political clout. He started a clinic that, eventually, grew up to be one of the finest hospitals in that portion of the country, with a cardio practice rivaling the best in the world.

When I was born, my father was appalled. He debated the validity of genetic manipulation on many levels, not the least of them the impact mutants with superhuman abilities, or under human conditions, would have upon the rest of Mankind. The creation of patchwork people, who had been mixed up, combined with animals, virtual chimaeras, always struck him as dangerous and heretic. The creation of aberrations who could change their body density, manipulate elements, bend the minds of others, to name but the most common, if common is a word one could use to define the transformed generation spawned by Breedlove and his followers, filled my father with horror.

So, when my mother's belly was cut open in a C-section and I was pulled out, small, with hands and feet resembling a bird's and, worse of all, wings, the feathers wet and covered with bloody amniotic fluid, my father was devastated. The operating room crew: OB-GYN surgeon, pediatrician, anesthesiologist, nurses, all of them were his friends, his colleagues and his employees. They were all sworn to silence. My mutation was kept secret, never made public.

As a child, my father kept me hidden in the family's property at Carneiros Beach, some 100 miles from Recife. I was homeschooled, at first by my aunt Theresa, my father's younger sister, already taking her vows to become a nun. Later, I had many tutors who thought they were teaching a poor crippled girl with a pronounced hunchback, twisted hands and unstable feet. In many ways, I was lucky. I never lacked anything, Carneiros was a dream come true, where I could fly over the sea for as long as I wanted and nobody would see me. But I missed company. I missed the experience of living among other human beings, studying in a regular high school and having classmates. And I had another problem, besides my odd looks and transportation capabilities. I was smart as hell. My mother said I took to her side of the family. Now I know why. I couldn't attend a regular school for two reasons. First, have you ever met a winged girl in high school? Second, I was light years ahead of other kids my age. I was so much ahead, when I turned fifteen, my father used his political connections to have me accepted at Pernambuco State University Med School, after I took SATs equivalence tests and got what is called in Brazil "pontos integrais", the highest possible results. That was no surprise. I didn't have anything else to do besides studying and flying at night to hunt.