Shifters

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Torrence 

Walking to school the next day nearly gives me a heart attack. 

There are vans. 

Everywhere.

It’s like one of those CIA movies Jay likes to watch, the ones where the main character makes a bugged phone call and then the feds are swarming his place. It’s that bad. I try to keep my head down as I’m walking, but there are Academy agents everywhere, the little embroidered crest on their breast pocket glinting in the sun. It’s a shield of arms, with four quadrants; one for each sect of DNA experimentation. Aunt Helen has shown it to me a dozen times. I know which one Jay and I fall under, and that they’d love to have us back. 

Seeing it makes my heart thrum faster. 

All I have to do is stay calm. Aunt Helen warned me about this kind of thing. They’ll never stop looking for you, they’re collecting every subject born in Facility 16 that escaped that night. Fourteen years ago, when I was only three, one of the Academy facilities, the one Jay and I were born in, completely shut down. No one knows why. I vaguely remember the blaring red hazard lights, the shocked voices ordering my aunt and the other care givers to take the children to the bunker, even farther below ground. When Aunt Helen tells me the story I remember little bits each time, from the scattered view of a toddler. 

She and the other workers didn’t want to be a part of the project anymore, so they each took two children and ran. 

103, that’s how many of us escaped that night. 

“You live on this street, Miss?” the deep voice startles me, and the agent holds up a hand to stop me from walking any further. I try not to stutter, try to keep calm, to let this man with the bald head and thin lips know that I’m normal, average, belong here. 

“Yessir,” I say, and he nods. I can feel the itching starting at the middle of my spine, that relentless gnawing. Whenever I’m scared or angry or hurt I always feel that, that fight or flight reaction. Mine, of course, is always flight. But unlike Jay I’ll never actually do it. I look farther up the street where most of the agents are crowded and try not to flinch; there are several lengths of red tape boxing in a section of the sidewalk, where the branch fell yesterday. Where I made the branch fall yesterday.  Aunt Helen was right to be scared. 

“Have you seen any…” the agent pauses, looking me over, and I swear my heart falls out my butt, “suspicious activity, in the last day or two?” He has one hand at his side and one buried deep in his pocket. I hate pockets. They hide too many things that people can reach for too easily. I swallow and try to answer him without throwing up. 

“No sir, nothing out of the ordinary.” 

I think for a minute how much fun it would be to tell him that I saw a pair of twins going around telekinetically lifting cars the other day. Send the Barney Boys packing, make my life easier. But the Academy isn’t a life I’d wish on my worst enemy. I don’t remember much from my time there, other than I wasn’t so much a person as a number. A mutant weirdo. The prickling in my back intensifies, driving that last point home.