GEN13 - Version 2.0 Read Online Free PDF Page A

to pencii-and-paper exams and computer assignments that challenged her mental abilities. But here, she also found herself pumping iron and running on treadmills—not to mention being poked and prodded every which way by mechanical sensors built into the glass walls of what looked like giant test tubes while she was suspended inside, wearing nothing but an embarrassed expression. There were times when Kat felt more like a lab rat than a “talented young person.”
    Of course, Kat hadn’t known the real reason why she and the others had been selected, any more than she knew the real purpose of the program. She didn’t know that she was part of the thirteenth generation of the Genesis Project, whose hidden agenda was to create super-powered operatives under the control of Ivana Baiul, the ruthless leader of I.O.’s Sci-Tech division. She didn’t know that, like her new friends, she’d been chosen because her father was one of the successes of the twelfth generation of the program—a member of a covert, super-powered strike force that was given the code name Team 7. Most important, she didn’t know about the drugs that were being slipped into her food at every meal, or the treatments that were being administered while she was “under examination” in the tubes. All of them added up to a regimen that was designed to activate her latent powers ... if they didn’t kill her first.
    In fact, Kat and her friends were far from the only test subjects at the facility. There were at least a half-dozen other groups of teens who were undergoing the same brutal regimen of tests they were. Over the weeks they spent training, however, each of the other groups would either wash out of the program or disappear.
    That destiny wasn’t in the cards for Kat, though. She still held vivid memories of the night when her gen-factor kicked in. The nausea. The headaches that wouldn’t go away and just kept getting worse. And then, the white-hot pain that coursed through every inch of her frame. It felt like her body was tearing itself apart—and, in a sense, it was. The very strands of her DNA ripped apart and reformed as Kat’s body expanded and morphed until she couldn’t even recognize herself anymore. She gained nearly a foot in height, not to mention enhanced speed and the strength and durability of a small tank.
    The others had proven to be gen-active as well. Bobby took on the code name “Burnout” to reflect his newfound ability to hurl blasts of fiery' plasma and transform parts of his own body into living flame. Sarah found herself able to manipulate Earth’s natural elements, while Roxy (newly christened “Freefall”) discovered her own ability to control gravity, making things either super-heavy or super-light. Grunge’s power was the most diverse, allowing him to mimic the properties and molecular structure of any object he touched. Sarah and Kat decided to keep their own surnames, Rainmaker and Fairchild, as their code names. And as for Grunge, well, no one could come up with anything more appropriate to call him than “Grunge.”    ’
    They weren’t the first of Gen 13 to go gen-active. That honor belonged to a psychotic brother-sister team known as Threshold and Bliss. The homicidal duo became Ivana’s personal pets long before the rest of them had even shown up on the scene. But Kat and her friends were the ones to adopt the name “Gen 13 ” as their own.
    Yet, Kat reflected, they’d still probably be pawns of
    I.O. today if it wasn’t for the intervention of John Lynch. Lynch had been the head of I.O.’s Operations section, and before that, he’d served alongside the kids’ parents as part of Team 7. He didn’t like what was going on at I.O., and when his conscience refused to let him look the other way, he decided to do something about it. Lynch’s career with the agency came to an abrupt end when he helped Gen 13 bust out of the I.O. compound and took in the young fugitives to teach them how to use