Chapter One

May.2050

The nightmare woke her again, she groaned as she stirred lazily to check the digital alarm clock beside her colt. It was 4am, she groaned again. Drilling starts by 5 and she knew there was no chance to steal a little bit more sleep, she lay back down to ponder over her constant dreams, dreams which she had begun to get used to that she didn’t wake up screaming in terror anymore, it had always been the same nightmare every night, the blood curdling screams of a tortured man, flashes of lights and the grim goggled faces of people in long white coats.

She had been trying valiantly to bare it all in silence, but the constant bouts of sleepless nights were already telling on her performances at the daily drills, if there was somebody to talk to, she would have done that already but the fear of being taken back to the lab, prodded, injected by the painful probes to find out any malfunctioning in her system had kept her lips sealed.

She once tried to confide in her best friend and sibling Binta, but the 5th generation children were constantly under watch and even if she did succeeded in disclosing her dreams to her, she doubted Binta would know what to do about it.

They were simply known as the 5th generation children or Meta-human prototypes, Omo Abami, and other numerous names given to them by the different staffs of Darwin Regeneration and Evolutionary Genetics alias D.R.E.G.S Labs. With another groan, she forced her body out of bed to wash.

“Since i cannot go back to sleep, i could as well get ready for the day.” She mumbled as she stood before the ceiling to floor length mirror, staring at herself for a full minute, a fifteen year old palomino skinned girl with reddish brown haired and sharp grey eyes stared back; she was larger than her age, and broad at the shoulders. That was as close as she got to looking normal, a normal fifteen year old do not have wings, lift weights three times larger than her size, runs twice as fast, a normal fifteen year old would either faint away or run like crazy, screaming her head off when she sights an anomaly like her, it wasn’t that she was hideous, she just wasn’t normal.

“It’s not as if I see other girls my age anyway,” she talked to her reflection as she forced herself into her facility tights.

She was born in the facility and had never seen the outside world. Spreading her aching wings, occasional simmerings of electricity raced across their beautiful plumage, red brown like her hair and laced with a splattering of green. She smiled as she thought of swooning and fleeing teenagers yelling like banshees.

Having watched videos of birds and their wings, Omotola knew the 5th generation children’s wings weren't as fragile but were hard as steel and sharp as knives, they were not made only for graceful flight; they were deadly weapons of both defense and offence.

An hour later, she left her cubicle and headed down the facility corridors led by her handler, a mapper drone and a handful of masked armed guards called Askaris to protect the institute’s staff from the children and the other generations.

The mapper drone hovered midair, humming with advanced technology acted as a navigation guide through the enormous facilities. She studiously ignored her handler Katie, a plump short bright faced middle aged woman who chatted on in her throaty British accent about her schedule for the day and her weekly checkup with the doctors and took little notice of her brooding as they finally stopped in front of the quarter’s lodge elevator exit.

There they were joined by Binta and Shettima, fourteen and fifteen years old respectively, 5th generation children with handlers, mapper drones and guards of their own.

‘‘Morning Omotola,’’ Binta called over rather loudly, mischief on her pretty brown face as her handler frowned down at her. She also boasted an athletic physic like Omotola but that was where the resemblance ended, she was a lot shorter with curly black hair and spotted brown wings shrugged restlessly at her shoulders.

Shettima mumbled his greetings and went into the elevator to wait for the others, mild boredom on his handsome Middle Eastern face. They gathered in to join him and the elevator purred into motion dinging as they passed each floor. After a long series of dings, it finally stopped and the mapper drones lead its occupants out via twists and turns till they got to the drilling unit where the rest of the children were already waiting.