The Seven by Sean Patrick Little Read Free Book Online

counting days and clock-watching until we got old enough to leave! Maybe we've all just been waiting for a spark to help us get up the courage to leave? This is a spark! We pack our bags, meet in the lobby before dawn, bust Posey out of the lab, and get out of Dodge before Cormair can force us all into brain scans and muscle stimulation tests."
Sarah bit her lip. She looked over at Holly.
"Let's do it," said Holly.
"Andy?" Sarah looked at him.
He nodded. "It's time."
    Indigo frowned. "They're not going to just let us go down there and stroll into the lab. It's not a walk in the park. We can't even get past those security doors."
    "I..." Kenny suddenly spoke. He stopped, cleared his through and started again. "I...can."
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Doctor Cormair placed the girl into a tank of a special solution of his own creation. He didn't have an official name for it; for lack of a better term, he called it the hyper-womb. It was a cylindrical glass tank filled with an oxygenated syrup of steroids, antibiotics, and stimulus agents that was meant to provide accelerated rehabilitation to his charges. When their bodies began to change, the hyper-womb would heal them, and get them through the transformation process with minimal stress and at a greatly accelerated rate. The girl was suspended in the tank now, completely submerged. Her lungs had filled with the syrup, as had her stomach. By now, her blood stream was pumping medicine and steroids through her system to help her cope with the changes.
    Cormair sat and watched with self-satisfaction. He knew the children had been lying to him and now here was his proof. Doctor Sebbins monitored the girl's vitals on a machine next to him. She hadn't spoken since the girl had been brought down.
    Posey's hair hung in damp tendrils around her face and shoulders. From her back, the appendages were growing at a visible rate. The bones had at first looked like simple finger bones, but now they had elongated and thickened. A pair of gangling, slender bones jutted out from her shoulders and muscle tissue was ebbing from her body in long, corded strips to surround the bones, slowly crawling around them like caterpillars. The bony spines from the back of her arms had lengthened and thickened as well, curving in thin arcs toward her latissimus muscles. The spines pierced into her flesh, connecting with the muscle, but becoming wrapped thickly with muscles of their own. At the point where the bones originally broke through her back, her own skin was growing to cover the bones and the muscle without so much as a scar.
    "Brilliant, is it not?" said Cormair. He felt a need to break the tension in the room. He had respect for Dr. Sebbins as a scientist, but felt that her emotional attachment to the experiments had been too strong. Dr. Sebbins saw them more as people and not as projects and that was her biggest weakness.
    Sebbins looked up from her machine's monitor. "I'm sorry, Doctor. I wasn't listening. What did you say?"
    "I said it is brilliant. We scanned through hundreds of thousands of individual DNA profiles to find this girl who had the proper body mechanics for the experiment and was at the proper pre-pubescent age to begin implanting secondary DNA splices. This particular girl's DNA was complementary to bird DNA, thus she became an experiment to create something avian. Those appendages will develop into actual wings if my research was correct. Feathers and all!"
    "I know, Doctor. I've read the files."
    "But, are you not amazed? We are on the cutting edge of the future here, Dr. Sebbins. We are creating a new type of human being, an entirely new species."
    "People have been destroyed for playing God, Doctor."
    "Dr. Sebbins, you will not scare me with your fairy tales."
    "I'm just saying, Doctor: Look at literature, history. People have been punished for reaching above themselves. Does the name 'Icarus' mean anything to you?"
    "I am not worried. I have too much to lose to