F I N N

Walking into Mr. Hunt's apartment was strange.

Though I knew him perhaps better than anyone else on our team, I'd never even thought about the fact that he had his own home like this. It was silly; of course he had to live somewhere. But we'd only seen him in the context of the ONNT headquarters and in meetings. Seeing that he had a whole other aspect to life seemed to make him seem less like a distant businessman and more like an actual person.

He was fast to usher us inside. "Come inside. Quickly." I was glad to see he had nothing with the ONNT logo on it; every time I saw it, I was reminded of the charred remains of that soldier. And then the nausea and revulsion set in.

As we followed him down a fancy hallway leading to the main space, Mr. Hunt threw a look over his shoulder. "I'd better not notice anything missing after we're through."

"It's sweet how well you know us," Arlo replied to him. He then gave me a wicked grin that gave me the impression he wouldn't follow our host's request.

In fact, when Arlo was like this—his normal borderline-psychotic self—it was easy to forget he was sick. He did a good job at hiding it. But I saw what he tried to hide with maniacal smiles and slightly off-kilter comments. His thinning, bony frame. The dark smudges under his silver eyes.

Before he saw me looking and became smug, I turned my focus back to this new place. Though Mr. Hunt's prestige and elite status had probably diminished after he was fired, it still showed in his living arrangements. Glass tables, dark silk curtains and ornate flower arrangements decorated his home. A wall fully made of glass showcased a beautiful view of the city below.

To my left, Riley kept suspicious eyes on Mr. Hunt. It then occurred to me that she didn't know who he was. My heart sank with the weight of what had happened to her. There had to be some way to retrieve her memory.

Mr. Hunt sat in a chair and gestured to the couch opposite him. I sat along with Arlo, while everyone else opted to stand.

"So." Our old boss opened his hands in a curious gesture, "What brings you here so urgently?"

"We're sorry for the short notice." I spoke for us, knowing none of the others would be as polite. "We just...have a bit of a problem."

His eyes flicked upward when Jaxon hissed the name, "Marcella Krasowski."

"I don't know you," Riley gestured to Mr. Hunt, "Or any of you." She turned to the rest of us. "I'm not even quite sure why we're here. I don't even know who that woman was, but I do know she's horrible."

Mr. Hunt watched her in a way that made me realize he had only heard the bare minimum of what happened to her. This was the first time he was really catching up with us in weeks. Contact with him had been dangerous, for reasons he wouldn't disclose to me.

"Describe to me what she's done so far."

Taking turns speaking, we caught him up on everything noteworthy—the several fights against Delphinium, Ms. Krasowski's constant undermining us, Benny and Delphinium's accident and the latter's incident last night.

"A broken neck practically healed in only a week?" He asked in awe. "That's miraculous. Whatever Orion did to her clearly worked."

"We assume she's still back at the ONNT headquarters." Jaxon's voice was hard, angry at the mistreatment of our friend. "We haven't had any contact with her since yesterday."

"Marcella has her," Mr. Hunt muttered to no one in particular. I caught the dark undertone in his voice.

I narrowed my eyes, sensing there was something bothering him—something beyond the obvious. "Do you know something we don't?"

His dark eyes darted between all of us, a sense of urgency now in his gaze. "I know many things. None of them are good, but there's one thing you all must know. One thing we've kept from you from the beginning."

"What is it?" Arlo asked excitedly. For some godforsaken reason, he always seemed to like danger and deadly secrets. I, on the other hand, was more than happy to steer clear from those things. But not now. This was something necessary, I could see it in Mr. Hunt's face.

Glancing at the door behind him, our host's voice dropped. "What I'm about to tell you is top secret. I told you to be careful before, but you're in too deep now." He shook his head. "There are people willing to kill to keep this secret under wraps." A hush fell over the room as the severity of this situation became real. "I'm only telling you this because it was wrong of us to hide it. You deserve to know."

He paused. "Have you ever wondered where your abilities came from? Why only you eight, plus Benton Shires, have them? And why you're all so close in age and nationality?"

Though we had never talked about it, I had wondered about it, mostly in the beginning. The chances of nine enhanced humans, each being eighteen and nineteen-year-old Americans, were below zero. And I never knew my parents; there was no chance of asking them for reasons they believed why I was the way I was.

"Before I was director, Marcella Krasowski had the job. Though very young, she was brilliant and calculating, brimming with so many new ideas. The perfect choice, the council thought. And at first, she was.

"Then, things changed. As she settled into her position, she began to show her true nature: ruthless, highly ambitious and apathetic. Very desperate for power. The way she dealt with terrorists and criminals was more brutal than anyone else before her. But there was nothing they could legally fire her over, and she did her job well. So she stayed in the director's seat.

"Sometime past the second year of her instatement, she hatched a top secret plan of hers, an idea she'd been envisioning since she joined. But none of the authorities knew about it until it was too late."

He swallowed and the room was so quiet I could have heard a pin drop. "Her goal has always been to enlarge our horizons, to achieve the impossible. And what is more impossible than humans being able to manipulate elements and have superhuman abilities? No one knew why she wanted to do it: maybe to create genetically enhanced soldiers for our nation or perhaps just to prove that she could.

"However, she quickly found that it was impossible to put the enhanced gene into a living human and have it come to fruition. It simply lay dormant inside the test subjects. Nothing worked. Until she had another bright idea: that perhaps pregnant women could transit the gene onto their unborn children. It could theoretically be activated inside an unmade body, in someone who had never been without it."

I closed my eyes. I had an idea of what he was going to say next, but it didn't make it any less horrifying. "Requests for test subjects went out. Some women reached out, falling under her guise of making history." He paused. "But of course, no test subjects would come willingly once they learned of the risks. Marcella became desperate. So desperate that she had the women who'd backed out of the deal snatched from their homes and placed them in a lab to have the procedure done. Being unconscious the entire time, the women had no idea what had happened until they were back in the safety of their homes. Almost as if they'd never left.

"Under her threats, her soldiers watched the women closely after their children were brought into the world. Out of the six patients, only one woman was able to produce an enhanced child. That child was Benton Shires."

Someone inhaled a sharp breath between their teeth. All eyes went to Kane, who looked as if he couldn't quite process what Hunt had said. "My mother..."

"Your mother was a test subject in Marcella Krasowski's monstrous experiment. She proved that select humans indeed pass down the enhanced genes—though activated only in certain infants. However, she couldn't figure out why only some of the babies' bodies—in this first case, Benton's—held the gene where others wouldn't. Some testing and educated guesses opened up the doors for a second round of the experiment on the same woman and seven new ones, in which the results were not only one, but eight children with enhanced abilities."

I could feel the shock in the room. She'd been the one to create the eight of us, the one to inadvertently bring all these troubles upon us. She was the reason I'd had to go through the foster care system. The reason why Arlo had gone to the laboratory. The reason Riley had been subjected to an orphanage her whole life. The reason why Gigi had been convicted of murder and declared insane. The reason Delphinium had been turned into Orion's lapdog, why Jaxon and Kane had family issues. I could only assume Jake's power lent itself to the way he was now as well.

It was all her doing.

"When the rest of the ONNT found out about what she'd done, they kicked her out and vowed to never bring her dark deeds to the light of day. They agreed to let the enhanced children be, at least until they posed a threat. But because Marcella had been sly in her studies, if it was ever uncovered by the public, the blame of the experiment would go to the innocent council. Not her. That was how she's able to blackmail them into doing what she wants." It was how she got the director's position back. And with it, she was slowly gaining power again.

"It was so well-covered that I hardly knew about it until a year ago when Delphinium was still making a name for herself as a brainwashed Imperium assassin. Once I knew, I did everything I could do to reverse the damage Marcella had done—beginning the process of freeing Gigi and Arlo and having the ONNT take Finn in as a soldier. But as you know, the damage was already done." He shook his head. "Her idea...she honestly thought she was doing the right thing for the future of humanity."

I said softly, "So does Orion." Everyone tried to soothe their consciences by telling themselves they were doing the correct thing.

"Be careful with this knowledge," Mr. Hunt told us gravely. "Marcella will not let this information get out. I don't know what lengths she will go to if she knows I told you."

"She could try to kill us."

The next statement surprisingly came from Kane. "And she has Delphinium." He let that truth sink in. Who knew what they were doing with her there?

Jaxon cracked his knuckles with one hand. "So we get her back. And if we're lucky, we kill Marcella Krasowski."