The Seven

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A shadowy, underground, anti-America paramilitary group called the Trust has pooled its resources and contracted a brilliant geneticist to force the next step in human evolution. The doctor, unaware of the group's true purposes, chooses seven children from a bank of DNA profiles and has them brought to 'the Home,' the name the kids give to the laboratory where they are raised. Through their adolescences, they are subjected to gene splicing, chemical enhancements, mechanical and biological implants, and rigorous testing. When Posey, who was treated with avian DNA, begins a massive physical change, the other six teenagers realize that their time with the Home is coming to an end and decide to steal Posey and run. Led by John, a genetically enhanced 'super-soldier,' the seven make their break from the Home, but Sarah (who can run faster than the speed of sound) is captured and taken to a hidden military installation. The others have to rescue her and shut down the base so the Trust can't continue with its plans to take down the U.S. Government in a military coup using the incredible powers of the genetically altered teenagers. As each of the seven comes to terms with his or her powers, they make a final, epic stand against base commander General Tucker and the Trust.

The Seven

Sean Patrick Little

Book One

Origins

S
arah knew where to find him. She always knew where to find him. It was like they had a psychic bond. When they were kids, he was always the first one she found when they played hide-and-seek; Andy could never hide from her for long. Sarah could always make a beeline for Andy's hiding spot.

She walked deep into the woods behind the Home, meandering along the old logging road with a flashlight in her hand. It was still daylight, and would be for a while, but where Andy was hiding, a flashlight would come in handy. After a time, she came to an old game trail and veered off the dusty tire rut into the heart of the forest. Tall, overhanging oaks laid down a thick blanket of shade and kept the late August sun from being unbearable. Locusts droned constantly in the trees and birds twittered mindlessly, cheerful despite the heat. A steep embankment along the path angled into a low, narrow valley. At the bottom of the valley was a dry creek bed that led deeper into the woods and to a small cave that Sarah and Andy had discovered years ago, not long after they first came to the Home.

The cave was carved into a hillside, a vein chiseled through limestone. The opening was small, barely big enough to squeeze though. When they were kids, it was huge. Now, Sarah eased her narrow frame through the opening feeling a hint of claustrophobia. Once through the opening, there was a gently sloped descent that opened into a small, round room. That's where she knew he would be.

Andy was in the middle of the cave, flat on his back, his bulky frame taking up a good portion of the space. Andy wasn't tall, but he was wide and thick, more muscle than fat, but a fair amount of chubbiness. He had thick, beefy arms and legs like tree trunks. His broad stomach, slightly paunchy, rose and fell slowly with his breath; his arms and legs were spread-eagle. Sarah trained her beam on him. His eyes were closed, but the light made him squeeze his eyes shut a little more.

"Andy, are you okay?"
For a long time, Andy didn't move. He didn't acknowledge Sarah in any way. Then, he inhaled sharply and blew out a long slow breath. "I'm tired, Sarah."

"I know." Sarah sat down cross-legged in the dust and dried leaves next to him. She caught the thin outline of a cave spider in the flashlight and quickly turned off the beam, shuddering.

"They ask so much of us, you know?" Andy's voice cracked a little. It wasn't like him to get upset. He was usually a rock, the one everyone else went to for a shoulder to lean against when they felt low. Sarah felt a tinge of worry creep into her belly.

"I know."

"I can't keep it up."

"Yes, you can. You're strong," said Sarah. "Stronger than the rest of us."

"Whatever," said Andy. He rolled to his side and pushed up to one elbow. "They keep saying that we're all going important to some stupid research thing and that we'll all understand one day...but, you know what I think? I think they're full of crap."

"You just have to keep working, Andy."

"No! No, I don't! I've been doing everything they asked of us. I haven't complained once, have I? I just keep on going through the tests and the surgeries, and I keep putting up with Cormair's crap and for what? For nothing. Nothing has happened to us in all this time! We're seventeen now! That means we've been under Cormair's control for ten years, can you believe it?"

Sarah shook her head. "It doesn't feel like ten years."

"To you, maybe. To me, it feels like twenty." Andy flopped back down into the leaves and closed his eyes. "Remember what it was like when we first came to the Home?"

Sarah remembered it clearly. It wasn't one of those things a person could forget. She remembered the long, dark bus ride with six other children. She remembered the crisply uniformed soldiers on the bus, large, muscular men in dark gray fatigues who gave them candy and soda. She vaguely remembered her parents' faces, filtered through a smudged, grimy bus window as they waved good-bye, before the soldiers put up the metal window covers blocking out her final view of her family.

The Home. It was a strange, run-down, oddly-angled Victorian-style house in the middle of a forest, a relic straight out of a Grimm Brothers' fairy tale. As the bus approached, Sarah thought it looked like the haunted mansion from Disneyworld. Dr. Cormair, the man who would rule their lives for the next decade, had been waiting at the door to greet them when the bus pulled up to the entrance. He was a thin, almost frail-looking man with dull, graying hair and severe, gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. His face was a permanent mask of impassiveness. He wore a starched, brilliantly white lab coat. Through the next ten years of their lives at the Home, none of the seven would ever see him without the coat, no matter the time of day.

Sarah was ushered to the porch with the other kids and they were photographed, once as a group, and then individually, front and side. They were shown to their rooms, each one sparse and devoid of character. Over the years, they would each collect a few mementos, some posters, and colored blankets or pillows with lace edges, but the walls remained the dull, light gray color they were when they moved into the Home. The rest of the rooms were just as dull. The couches in the TV room, the chairs in the kitchen, even the shower curtains, were all dull and colorless. The entire place felt barren and muted.

"I remember," said Sarah. "I was scared. I think we all were."

"Not me," said Andy. "My dad was a drunk. He hit me a lot. My mom never even bothered to stop him, because then he'd smack her around, too. When my dad was at work, my mom's depression was overwhelming. She just sat in front of the TV and stared blankly. She never played with me or my brother, or interacted with me except to tell me not to do something. The Home seemed like Heaven to me, at first. Kids to play with, I had a purpose, and best of all no one hit me. That's why I believed in the research more than everyone else at first, I think. I wanted to be special. I wanted to be important. I wanted to help people and to be able to be strong for kids like me, kids whose parents hit them and treated them badly."

"And you will be, Andy."

"When, though? Ten years of this crap. Ten years of electrodes and scans and tests and surgeries and training and...and...all that other crap. When does it pay off? When do we get to see results?"

"Maybe it doesn't," said Sarah. "Maybe this will all be found out to be a colossal waste of time and money and none of us will ever do whatever it is we're supposed to do. Then Cormair will have to abandon the project and we'll all get to leave here, go back to our families, and live normal lives."

Andy sat up. "I'll believe that when I see it."

"We're almost eighteen, anyhow; I can't see that they can hold legal adults against their will for long without breaking some sort of international law or something."

"You've been reading the news online, right?"

"Of course," said Sarah.

"Two words: Guantanamo Bay."

Sarah's face fell. "But we're American, right? They can't hold Americans, right? We're not terrorists."

Andy shrugged. "As far as I know, we're government property. We have been for ten years. I don't know if we can even be called 'citizens' anymore. With all the money and research they put into us, I don't think they're just going to let us go trotting free any time soon."

Sarah reclined back in the leaves and dust and touched her head to Andy's. Neither spoke for some time, both listening to each other's shallow, measured breathing. "Maybe I should stay here with you for a while?" Sarah whispered.

"I was going to go back eventually, you know."

"I know."

"So why did you come after me?"

"Maybe because I wanted to be away from the Home for a while, too."

Indigo was always a bit different from the other six. She was the first one to discover punk music and hair dye. She was the only member of the seven to ever sneak away from the Home and go to the little town down the road. Though she was never busted by Dr. Cormair, this was still a major offense the other six would never have dreamed of committing. She was a wild spirit and often butted heads with Cormair or the cadre of teachers brought in to educate them over the past decade. She was artistic and liked to read books the other six wouldn't even touch---Camus and Kafka, Ayn Rand and Dostoyevsky. She was arrogant, blithe, and sometimes cruel, often picking fights with the others for no reason. She was the only member of the seven who was Asian, Japanese to be specific, and she was the smallest and thinnest. She was also the one who endured the most testing.

Dr. Cormair began a trial of rigorous, near-daily testing from the first day she was in the Home. Indigo wasn't entirely sure what they were testing her for, but she knew it was something about her brain because every time they strapped her to a chair, they slapped electrodes all over her head and made her do mental exercises. She'd had to have a shaved head for a while two years ago because the researchers put electrodes onto the skin of her skull and a metal neuro-net on her brain. The doctors at the Home even implanted a device into her brain that could be plugged into a jack at the base of her neck, at skin level, that connected to electrode plots in her brain to run tests, among other fiddling they had done in her head. It had all been extremely painful. In ten years, Indigo had her head opened up a dozen times.

She stood in the middle of the Home's main laboratory, an impressive room tiled on all four sides with dark gray metal sheeting and filled with all manner of instruments, scanners, electrographs, and monitoring devices. Indigo was wearing a blue plastic skull cap that was wired heavily with electrodes. On a table ten feet in front of her sat a fist-sized, bright red plastic block. She was being tested...again.

"Indigo, I want you close your eyes and try to reach out to the block on the table with your mind, okay? Pretend that you control an invisible hand that juts out from your forehead, okay?" said Doctor Sebbins. She was a pretty, young doctor who had only been at the Home for two years. She had been brought in to teach Chemistry and Biology, but her personable manner made her one of the few teachers that the kids had actually liked. At the urging of the kids, Cormair hired her on a full-time basis. She moved into the Home and became Cormair's chief assistant.