A young girl quivered in her dog crate. She was surrounded by similar crates in a dismal testing facility known as The Laboratory. All the crates were filled with children of varying ages- many deformed and close to death if they weren't dead already. The bangs of her reddish-brown hair fell over her crimson eyes. She sat up as much as her cage would allow her.
"Luke? Falcon?" she called in a soft voice, looking at the two crates closest to her, where two sleeping figures lay.
The first boy's sapphire-blue eyes snapped open and he sat up. "What is it Angel? Is something wrong?" he asked concerned. He and the girl- Angel- couldn't have been more than 9 years old.
The second boy woke more slowly, blinking his golden eyes sleepily but his expression turned to concern when he saw Angel's troubled expression. He seemed to be around 8 years old. "Tell us what's bothering you, Angel." He whispered. He didn't want to attract attention from the scientists and lab workers, even though it was late at night and many of them had gone home already.
Angel blinked, distressed. "I had that dream again. Only in more detail." She paused, biting her lip before adding. "I'm scared…"
The first boy- Luke- blinked sympathetically at Angel. "Tell us about your dream."
Angel hesitated, looking at the two. She felt foolish for getting worried over a dream but it felt so real, and she had it so frequently. Nearly ever night she woke up trembling from her dream; a desolate, barren plain with charred remnants of a forest, smoke spiraling towards the dark, clouded, stormy sky, human corpses littering the ground. Some corpses were burnt and charred like the land, other impaled, a few dismembered but most seemed to have died with no signs of what killed them- as though they just dropped down dead. At the top of the ridge there always stood two dark, blurred figures, wings outstretched from their backs, black talons where their nails should be and fierce black eyes glaring at the scene before them. Two more blurred figured hovered behind the first two, wings unfurled and eyes narrowed.
"It was the same as always," Angel said in a small voice. "Except…"
"Except what?" Falcon breathed.
Angel blinked at them, her pale skin glowing in the darkness. Would her twin and Falcon be upset if she told them? Falcon may not be, he was always very silent and hid his emotions. Luke would probably shrug it off as nothing more than a dream. Yes, it would be OK to tell them.
"I could make out what the four figures looked like," she whispered.
Luke's blond hair fell across his eyes. "And? What did they look like?"
Falcon leaned in slightly, running a hand through his messy, spiky brown hair. "Yeah, what were they like?"
Angel took a breath. "Us. They looked like older versions of us." The two boys stared in silence so she went on. "The first two were a boy and a girl, older teenagers I'd guess. They had the same pale skin as me and Luke. The guy had the same sandy-blond hair and facial features as Luke too. Then the girl beside him looked like me, reddish-brown hair and everything. The two in the background were also a male and a female. The male was tan with the same skin tone as Falcon, with fierce golden eyes and brown hair spiked up with auburn tips. They all had wings like ours too. The first guy had white wings with blue highlights, the girl had black wings with red highlights like mine and the second guy had russet wings with copper secondary feathers and auburn streaks and flecks."
Falcon finally spoke up. "What about the second girl?"
"I didn't recognize her. She looked younger than the others by a couple years. Her eyes were chocolate brown and her hair was strawberry blond with darker streaks in it. Her wings were bright red with golden secondary feathers and orange flecks and streaks. They were all flawless, gorgeous even, like gods and goddesses."
There was another short moment of silence before Luke finally said, "Well now we can be positive that its just a nightmare. The second girl is a figment of your imagination and your subconscious put the rest of us in there because of what the scientists whisper about."
"But what if its more than a dream, Luke?"
"That's all it is. Now go back to sleep and forget your dream," he snapped before lying down to go back to sleep.
But Angel couldn't forget her dream and it continued with increasing detail as the winged demons caused more destruction, death, and chaos with each nightmare.
* * * * *
Angel, her twin brother Luke, and Falcon were three experiments in the cruel despicable Laboratory. Yet they were the lucky ones. Why? Because they weren't dead. The Laboratory experimented with grafting animal DNA into the DNA of humans. More often than not, the DNA unraveled and the experiment died. These three however, were one of the few stable experiments.
Angel, Luke, and Falcon were human-avian hybrids. While they were still fetuses inside they're mothers womb, bird DNA was grafted into they're human DNA. After birth they were taken to the Laboratory. By then, the physical changes were already showing. Now it wasn't only that they're DNA only 97% human and 3% avian. They had air sacs along with their lungs. They're bones were hollow. They had wings.
After a few years, the nightmare of Angel's ceased to disturb her dreams. She had other things to worry about as the testing became worse for all of them. When she was 13 years old, her brother was taken away. He had recently discovered an amazing ability to shape shift to change his appearance. Three months later he hit a scientists in anger. The next day he had been dragged away. He never came back.
Angel knew they killed him. She was sure of it. Any time an experiment never came back was an automatic signal of death. She cried herself to sleep on the night that she accepted that she would never see Luke again. Falcon listened to her cry. He wished he could comfort, but what could he say? He missed Luke too. They could only hope that by some miracle they could escape one day before sharing Luke's fate.
