"Get me those statistics. Now."

Usko Shaningwa's voice bellowed beneath the alarms that were ringing through the observation room, undercutting their pulsing wail with his deep baritone. His voice was fueled by his growing frustration, and he made it obvious, spitting out the last word as if it had been rotting on his tongue.

The two men behind him obeyed and raced off to their stations.

Usko closed his eyes to relieve the pressure building behind them and pinched the bridge of his nose. It had been a tremendously disappointing day, and it continued to get worse by the minute. He muted the 'fight-in-progress' alarms that had been blaring from wall-mounted speakers with a sightless press of a button, and the room went quiet. The only sounds were the humming of the computers and the frantic typing of Usko's agents.

The familiar darkness of his own closed eyes was refreshing. For nearly four hours, he had been staring at the monitor in front of him, eyelids peeled to catch every movement on the screen, to read every statistic and calculate their meanings. Its brightness had worn them down. Stress had fatigued them. So having just a few minutes to rest within that blackness was a welcome thing. It also helped him center his thoughts and let his racing mind—the most impressive in the world—do its duty without distraction.

"Sir, I think I've got what you're looking for," said one of the men.

Usko opened his eyes, torn from his world of quiet contemplation. He turned in his chair to see Agent Turkin, one of the few he had trusted with this sensitive project, at attention with a printout in his hand. With an almost violent urgency he snatched it out of Turkin's bony fingers and quickly read it over. His rejuvenated eyes slipped through the words like oil, and he finished it within seconds.

"The chances that these numbers are correct are negligible, Turkin," he grumbled, letting the paper fall from his trembling hand onto the floor.

"Yes sir. But Hayata and I checked them against our data twice. They're not what we were expecting, but it all comes through clear. And I don't think that our equipment is malfunctioning. We've been getting green across the board."

"Then check them again," Usko bellowed through clenched teeth. "He's never shown aptitude like this before. His zone magnifications are three times what he exhibited when we screened him, so unless he's been holding back for the past year under constant surveillance, these readings are impossible. His cortisol levels are baseline, he's released almost no adrenaline, and even his heart-rate has barely entered cardio range. It stands to reason that, with his abilities, the sensory bombardment would do little. But twenty back-to-back combat trials? He simply can't have been holding that much from me—no one could. He has to be showing some wear, and I need you to find it."

"Twenty one, sir," Turkin added, his voice betraying some level of discomfort. "Look."

Usko turned around in his chair and stared at the monitor. In its center was a live feed of the adjacent room, a large testing chamber with padded walls and a ceiling nearly thirty feet from an impact-resistant floor. The camera was centered on two figures. Both were wearing black suits like Usko, Agent Turkin, and the other members of Section 66. It made them pop out like illustrations against the white floor. Except that one of them actually was on the ground, motionless, with a crimson pool forming around his head.

"God damn it," Usko spat.

The man on the floor was Agent Bariskov, the twenty-first member of Usko's unit that had been sent to test Agent Todd's limits. Each one had been plucked from the world's best, enhanced to fight spiritual beings of immense power using state-of-the-art equipment and unparalleled training. Bariskov had been scouted from Russian special forces by Usko, himself, and was subsequently added to his personal guard. He had been so valuable to his former nation that it took a thirty million dollar 'donation' to their Secretary of Defense's 'discretionary fund' in order to secure his release. And even then, Usko had to spend a full day of his precious time in that bureaucratic fool's office in order to convince him to part with one of his most promising officers.

Yet there laid Bariskov, unconscious at Agent Todd's feet, blood seeping from a head wound that crept from his right ear to his brow. All of that money and trouble suddenly seemed wasted.

"Call in the medical team and set up Todd's next trial. Get somebody in there who will take him seriously."

"Yes sir," said Agent Turkin, returning to his station. He relayed the order over the com system.

Meanwhile, Usko rewound the footage on the screen, watching the moments play in reverse order as he dragged the cursor across the time-bar. One of the benefits of being the smartest man alive was that he had no need to replay it in the proper sequence. Or more than once; he had an eidetic memory and his brain was capable of rearranging what he saw without the need for conscious thought. And it was exactly what he had expected to see. It was also enough to make him grunt in profound disgust.

The image that unfolded as he rewound the recording showed Agent Bariskov, a seven foot tall bear of a man, lift from the ground onto his feet like a wall being hefted into place by a crane. There, his head met with Agent Todd's elbow, angled down from what ended up being a jumping strike. Going back further revealed that the fight between the two men consisted entirely of Todd predicting every one of Bariskov's attacks, dodging them with an almost purposefully bored look plastered across his arrogant face. Until that final elbow, it was seven minutes and twelve seconds of a man toying with someone twice his size, sidestepping or deflecting every strike as if he were fighting an overgrown infant. It was enough to make Usko sick to his stomach. And if it were not for the nanites of his Bloodline and their medical properties, he just may have been.

Though that was not always how Agent Todd made him feel. Usko had scouted him, too, and was initially impressed with the young man's tenacity and skill. Mackland Todd had been a well-known name in the underground fighting circuits of London, a former Cambridge med student who had dropped out of one of the most prestigious programs in the world, cut ties to his once straight-and-narrow life, and spent all of his time beating up strangers in back alleys and warehouses for money. He was someone who had a tremendous amount of will and a surprising abundance of intelligence. Not nearly as much as Usko, himself, of course. Such a thing would have been impossible. But it was enough to be impressive.

It was his 'zone-focus' that interested Usko the most, however. Having gained enough spiritual power—from where, Usko had never learned—to be found by the Section 66 satellite, Mackland Todd was investigated thoroughly. It was discovered that he had the ability to selectively choose his active senses, so accurately that he even qualified for the Bloodline program. He could manually cause himself to become deaf, blind, or even immune to physical sensation, given enough concentration. He was adept at ignoring distractions, a coveted trait that made him an excellent operative. So it was no surprise that he swept through training and became a full-fledged agent within six months, a tremendous accomplishment for a young man only nineteen years old—an easy age to manipulate.

Or so Usko had thought.

It turned out that Mackland Todd was just an ungrateful child. At the end of his training and the day of his Bloodline trial, Usko made his usual demand: Todd would swear loyalty to him and help him achieve his grand goals, parallel to those of Section 66. It was simple repayment for being elevated into service and given the chance to become a paragon of humanity. It was also a great honor, being chosen by a man with unmatched vision and brilliance, plucked from the masses and thrust towards greater purpose. Yet Todd declined, and impetuously so. Usko managed to cut him off from obtaining a Bloodline, but he had since become a thorn in his side that he could not seem to remove, undermining his authority whenever possible.

Throwing that thorn into the fires of these trials was a risk. Usko knew this. Murakami Akio was the one who wound up receiving Agent Todd into his unit, and he was perhaps the only man in the world that Usko sincerely feared. This made Todd essentially untouchable. Otherwise, Usko would have simply had him killed. Instead, he chose to subject him to the trials to learn more about his abilities and to prove who was in charge, all under the guise of combat training. It was a flimsy defense, but it had to be done. The information gathered over the past four hours, if accurate, was enough to allow for future precautions against a potential threat. The stress was just an unfortunate price that had to be paid.

With the footage reviewed, and Usko's disappointment in Agent Bariskov at its apex, he reset the camera to live mode. What he saw caused a bolt of shock to run through his spine, pinning him against the back of his chair.

Mackland Todd was staring up at the camera, his body turned to face it head-on. His dark eyes, set between sweeping brown bangs, seemed to dig through the circuits and concrete between them to tunnel into Usko's throat, sending a momentary spike of cold down into his chest. It made no difference that Usko had a Bloodline. It made no difference that, if pressed, he could exterminate Agent Todd like the flea that he was with a flick of his wrist. In that moment, all he felt was fear. All he saw was Mackland Todd mouthing the words 'let me out'.

All he could think about was that there were eight cameras set up in that room.

The raw feeling of a bloodied pair of knuckles was something that Mack could never get used to. Maybe it was because he had spent most of his life with his head buried in a textbook and his heart drowning in a bottle of London's finest, far removed from the back alleys and dive bars where life taught its roughest lessons. Or perhaps it was because he had chosen to use it as a reminder that he was just a normal guy sewn into a system that took itself to be invincible. No matter the reason, the sensation of battered bones, where every gripping motion came with a series of snaps and the feeling of old levers creaking into place, was both familiar and foreign. That was why he continually found himself rolling his fingers just to maintain the sensation that it was all real.

"Mr. Todd, please try to keep still."

The doctor, also dressed in government black, barely tried to veil the irritation in her otherwise airy voice. For the past twenty minutes she had been subjected to the compulsive snapping of his joints as much as he had been to her poking and prodding and patching. And from the look on her face as she flipped through his file, inking words out with a black pen, dashing quick notes in the margins to correct what Mack suspected were glaring errors in his medical records, the stress was piling up.

But it wasn't just because of how he was an admittedly horrible patient, eager to just get it all over with so he could put the experience behind him. It didn't even have to do with how his medical readings had changed so drastically since he had become a member of Section 66. No, it was because of the names that were bearing down on her head. Usko Shaningwa and Murakami Akio each had a stake in that same stack of paper, and the doctor was outside of either of their jurisdictions, a member of general operations. She would have to choose between the two once the examination was finished: who was going to get the folder first, or would it be one of the other Bloodline Agents. That was a choice that Mack didn't envy. Any decision was likely to come with a slew of potential consequences.

Murakami was the leader of Mack's unit, and the man was genuinely terrifying. It was borderline impossible to tell what he was thinking; his face never seemed to show even the slightest bit of emotion, even when he had interrupted Usko's trial, tearing the door off of its hinges and breaking Mack out of the room. And he was strong. Mindlessly strong. Mack had seen him take a shock-baton to the stomach without so much as a flicker of an eyelash. Even the other Bloodliners seemed to give him a wide berth.

Usko, on the other hand, was just an arrogant prick. Power-hungry, manipulative, and, worst-of-all, brilliant, Mack likened him to his own father. Maybe that similarity was what provided that initial draw that convinced Mack to join up with Section 66. Well, aside from the promise to become part of something extraordinary and to see things no normal human could ever hope to experience. But it all went sour the moment that he began demanding absolute loyalty. That was just too familiar, and Mack had no trouble backing away just as he had done with his real father. Usko had been out for blood ever since, and the past few hours were just the next level of his tantrum.

"We'll be done soon," the doctor said. She tucked a lock of black hair away as she stowed her pen behind her ear. "You're not showing any major injuries—just a few cuts and scrapes. That antiseptic should do the job fine. We just need to bandage you up and then you can go off and make as much trouble as you want."

"If things keep going like they have, you can be sure that I'll be making plenty of that," Mack responded. "Hardly seems worth it to waste the bandages."

Ignoring his quip, the doctor opened a drawer and produced a white roll of cloth. Without asking, she took his hands and expertly rolled the fabric between his scabbing fingers, sealing them tightly without sacrificing mobility around the joints. The stress that was pooling beneath her focused eyes clearly wasn't hurting her performance. She was definitely good at her job. It was little wonder that she was chosen to perform the examination by gen op.

As soon as the doctor was done, Mack moved to get off of the exam table. He wanted to get back to his quarters and figure out what to do next. Things had changed. Usko had revealed the lows that he was willing to stoop to in order to exert his dominance. And Mack had stopped holding back, showing his old mentor that there were things about him that were still beyond the grasp of 'the most intelligent man in the world'. It was a vast shift in the dynamic of their relationship, and it likely meant that he was going to have to take some drastic steps.

But the doctor stopped him, using the medical folder as a barrier against his chest. She was staring right into his eyes with a look that could only mean 'one more thing before you leave'.

"Can you explain how your statistics could have changed so much within a year? Your file says that you have superior control over sensory focus, but it mentions nothing about you keeping your cortisol levels so low. And your retina reaction time has somehow gotten better. Not by much. Most people would have missed it. But enough for me."

Mack sat back onto the table, surprised by the suddenness of the inquiry that now blocked his escape from the afternoon. It took all of the will he had to not blurt out something stupid just to play the fool and get her to drop the subject. That's what he would have done back in college if someone had questioned why he was always so good at taking tests, or how he had managed to dominate medical school at the ripe age of seventeen. It was his natural reaction to those who had questions about his zone-focus, that one thing that made him who he was—the thing that he had been holding in check since joining Section 66.

Just as he was about to open his mouth and spurt out some quick-draw line, Mack noticed a yellow flicker in the corner of his eye. It was the same thing he had seen during Usko's 'tests', on the day of his Bloodline trial, and at dozens of other points over his time as an agent. It came with a familiar but uncomfortable feeling of prophecy. It almost seemed like every molecule in the bleach-white room had shifted just a few microns to the left, barely perceptible yet profoundly important.

Up in the corner of the room, just next to the only security camera, was a small yellow post-it note. On it were the words 'tell her' written in cursive. Like always, the mysterious note appeared just when it had to, showing some order that Mack didn't entirely understand. But there was purpose behind it. There always was. Just a short while earlier he had seen a similar note beneath one of the many cameras in the testing chamber, saying 'stare here', which he did. Months earlier, it had said 'he's lying', posted in the corner of Usko's office just after Mack's Bloodline trial.

And then, like always, it simply wasn't there. Not that it had disappeared, no. It wasn't there at all—not anymore, and somehow, never to begin with. It was a feeling that Mack could barely explain to himself, let alone to someone else. But he had learned that there was a reason behind those mysterious messages, and it was wise to give them some credit.

Mack sighed and then stole a deep breath. His eyes ducked away from the corner of the room and met again with the doctor's, and he put on a face of seriousness.

"My initial statistics were misleading," he said, bringing a sincere seriousness to his voice. He could feel his accent pull through, proper and poised. "When I joined this organization, I chose to hold back what I could do. In reality, my zone-focus is quite a bit stronger than you were led to believe."

He pointed towards the black pen held behind the doctor's ear.

"May I?"

The doctor shifted in her stance, seemingly confused. Then, realizing what he was referring to, pulled it from behind her ear and handed it over.

Mack took the pen between his cloth-wrapped fingers and looked at it. He could see it moving slightly in his grip, the edges shifting against the sterile medical room background as black-on-white, clear-on-fuzz. Suddenly, it was the only thing that he could see. It was the only thing that he could hear—the shifting, shuffling of the plastic against fabric. It was the only thing that he could smell, feel, and understand. The focus on that pen was absolute. It was the pinpoint of light in an abyss of darkness, moving at a snail's pace, compared to nothing else because there was nothing else to compare it to.

That was his zone-focus. It was the thing that made him Mackland Todd.

With a pinch and snap of his fingers, the pen was sent spinning into the air. Mack watched it move, flipping and spiraling at what seemed like one rotation per minute. It took no effort for him to move his hand in time, placing his thumb beneath the descending point. It made brief contact, pressing into the cloth of his fingertip with a black dot. With a quick upward jolt of his hand, it was sent into another flip. Down on his pointer, this time. Then again onto each other finger. Finally, he timed a sideways dash of his hand that produced a single black line across all of his digits, intersecting each dot he had made with a perfect curve. The pen then landed on his lap and everything returned to normal.

The whole demonstration took two seconds. To Mack, it seemed like five minutes.

Unsurprisingly, the doctor went slack-jawed as Mack fanned out his fingers to reveal the symmetrical design. The medical folder was tight against her chest, her arms crossing in front of it as if it were a shield. Whatever words she had been planning to say were gone, and Mack watched as her eyes darted between his face, his hand, and the pen between his legs.

"You can let them know what I can do," he said. "I don't think it will be much of a surprise anymore."

Feeling like the moment had presented itself, Mack hefted himself off of the examination table, said his goodbye, and exited the room. As the door slid closed behind him, he could hear the doctor pick up the pen and open the file one more time. There were a lot of changes that had to be made.

Mack never liked the room that was assigned to him. Two years of those drab grey walls—metal slats riveted into place—had sucked the color from his world, replacing it with a sense of efficiency and duty that bordered on the mechanical. The hard edges of the steel bed-frame, the closet lined with identical suits on white hangers, the symmetrical arrangement of the wall-mounted monitors; it all contributed to that profound feeling that the agents of Section 66 were simply cogs in a larger machine, one with a purpose beyond reckoning. It was as much a room as it was a cage.

All he wanted to do was take a bucket of green paint and dash it against those damn, colorless walls.

The feeling of his aching knuckles trailed into this forearm, twisting his bones just enough that he could sense the pressure. It was waxing and waning like an ill-tuned radio, sending static to his brain every few moments. He twisted his wrist to help alleviate the feeling as he closed the door behind him. Then he locked it by pressing a predetermined code into a number pad.

Things had gotten out of hand. Mack had noticed other agents leering at him on his walk back from the medical wing to the barracks. Their whispers trailed behind him, plucked from pursed lips eager to talk about the man who had openly defied a Bloodline, who had lied about his skills and had made a fool of Usko Shaningwa. They wrung their hands in delight at every facet of this gossip. Who could be so witless as to withhold their potential from their own leader? Murakami Akio, no less. What arrogance could fuel such suicidal foolishness? What could posses a man to sign his own death warrant with such a perfect signature?

A post-it note.

Mack's balled fists slammed into the console table as he sat. The aches in his forearms clawed at his bones and crept around his elbows, sliding back towards his body as he ran his shaking fingers through his dull-brown hair.

Was he an idiot? All of those times that he had seen that yellow flash, each moment that he had sensed that out-of-place shift in the air, they had all culminated with this single act of terrifying stupidity. Every step he had taken away from the examination room piled on another layer of realization: he had made an enemy of more than just Usko. Every agent in Section 66 had been lied to, and they would all want a piece of his hide the moment his admission made the rounds. The hounds in the halls were simply circling until the Bloodline leaders got to him first. They were waiting for the scraps.

In the past, those notes had given him advantages. Where they came from, Mack had no idea. But they had always seemed to show up the moment that he needed clarity, when his journey through the organization came to a fork in the road. They were the signage—almost literally—that helped him determine which path to choose. And, up until today, they had steered him to safety. Now they had dashed him against the rocks.

As his fingers dug into his scalp in an attempt to excavate the reason why he had listened to that last note, the one that may have put the nail in his coffin, Mack caught a glimpse of a flashing red light. It was the 'message received' notification on his console: a small envelope that blinked incessantly until it was opened. The color meant that it was urgent—that the person who had sent it had used their highest clearance to give it priority in the servers. Those kinds of notifications most commonly contained orders from above, important schedule changes, or even mission parameters. And they were encrypted, requiring the palm-print of the intended recipient for verification.

Normally, Mack would have opened a red message immediately. But this time, with his fingers interlaced in his hair, temples resting in his palms, all he could manage to do was stare.

The world around that envelope began to disappear. A haziness trailed into his mind, obscuring his thoughts and turning them to foam. It crept into his eyes and left only that symbol behind, flashing on and off, leaving a floating outline after every blink. He noticed its slightly rounded edges. He could feel the color and vaguely remember its purpose. He ruminated on the drop-shadow effect that made it seem as if it could be peeled off of the screen. Yet each train of thought quickly skipped from its tracks and vanished into the haze, and Mack returned to that emptiness that had surrounded his head like a cloud.

He sat motionless for a full five minutes, eyes glued to the screen.

Eventually the fog began to lift. It was less like a bolt of sudden awareness and more like a lighthouse that slowly guided him back home, the blinking red of the envelope marking safe passage from the world of lost thoughts. Mack could feel the importance of his situation coming back to him. Only this time, the tides were manageable. He no longer felt as if he were drowning.

With his composure returning, Mack pressed his palm against the console, activating the identification program. The words 'Agent Mackland Todd' appeared alongside a twenty-digit ID code that even he had not bothered to memorize, and a picture of his face, proudly wearing a momentarily foreign, snarky grin, briefly flashed across the screen. The little red envelope flipped open and a post-it shaped document slid out. Mack pressed the icon with his finger and watched it expand.

-

Mackland Todd,

This is an urgent message. Read quickly.

Usko knows. The doctor chose him. Pretense is gone. He will have you killed. Agents are on their way.

Gather your things and leave. Flee the compound.

Go to 235 Caveat Street. Apartment 5-D. Open the briefcase.

You're different. You can stop this.

Go.

-

The document automatically closed just in time for Mack to fully register the last word. It flipped a switch in his head that sent his heart back into overdrive.

Without thinking, without analyzing, he found himself filling a duffle bag with everything he could grab. Two crisp suits, a taser, an extra pistol, a handful of energy bars, a baton, fast-food menus, three bottles of water, two pairs of shoes, two knives, a bottle of antiseptic, a roll of duct tape, a bathroom towel, toothpaste, and some toilet paper. He packed it down and zipped up the bag, slinging it over his shoulder. And as he made his way towards the door, he took out his cellphone and dashed it against the wall, splintering its metal guts across the floor.

They were going to have to put in some leg work if they wanted to catch him. Mack had no intention of making it easy.

Like he had done a thousand times before, he pressed down on the button that opened the sliding door to his quarters. Only this time nothing happened. The number pad to his left no longer said 'locked'. It was now flashing red with its big, bad, Usko-controlled cousin: 'lockdown'.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered.