The Vanishing Girl Read Online Free PDF

slid into the front seats.
    The driver looked at the female agent in the passenger seat. “What’s the ETA, Debbie?”
    The woman glanced at the dashboard and tilted her head. “We should arrive around seven — eight at the latest.”
    Wherever we were going, it would take us five to six hours to get there.
    The engine turned over and we pulled out into traffic.
    I looked out the window and my chest constricted. The scenery flew by, and with it, my freedom.
    “ Where are we going?” I asked, already tired of watching San Francisco fade away behind me. The whole scenario felt like a nightmare — horrible, but too fantastical to be true.
    “The facility is in the California costal hills near Big Sur,” said Debbie, a curly-haired brunette. “It’s full of teens who share your ability to teleport.”
    My head snapped up.
    “Just like Caden Hawthorne, the boy who cuffed you,” she continued.
    Hawthorne. I now had a last name to go along with the first. I didn’t linger on that piece of information for long though, not once I processed Debbie’s words.
    There were more of us. I guess I wasn’t quite as anomalous as I’d thought.
    I rubbed my wrists, which were still red and sore. It had taken me twenty minutes to get my Swiss Army knife out of my bag and cut them off. The two agents hadn’t tried to stop me, but they hadn’t tried to help, either. Most interesting of all, they hadn’t taken away the knife.
    They didn’t see me as a threat.
    “I know this must be hard for you,” Debbie said, “but I promise you’ll love the facility.”
    Unlikely .
    I looked out the window, choosing my words carefully before I spoke. “You’re not taking me to jail or recruiting me for the military, are you?” It was a rhetorical question — I knew they weren’t. I was receiving special treatment — the SUVs, the multiple agents, the escorted ride to the facility. Neither a typical soldier nor a criminal would receive this type of treatment.
    Silence. Then, “Our program is called the Prometheus Project. It is a secret operations unit funded by the U.S. government, and its aim is to protect and maintain national security. To those without clearance it goes by the pseudonym the Generation Project.”
    This was the project name Dane Richards used in front of my parents. I was taken aback by the government’s audacity. They hadn’t even allowed my parents, who consented to the program, to know its real name. That might be innocent enough, except that if the project’s true name was classified, then there must be other things about it that were classified as well.
    Technically, I could be going anywhere and used for any purpose the government deemed necessary.
    Debbie continued. “The Prometheus Project began over two decades ago when a group of scientists were hired by the U.S. government to mutate human genes. These scientists discovered that by manipulating the genetic code, they could alter a person’s appearance and intelligence. They could even create abilities never before seen. One of these was seeing if the human body could teleport.”
    She fell silent, letting me take this in.
    I felt my throat work, but no words came out. They made me a freak. On purpose. It was unforgiveable — I wouldn’t wish this ability on anyone.
    “But when the children with this mutation were born,” Debbie continued, “they weren’t teleporting. And, after seven unsuccessful years of trials, the funding was pulled, and the program was shut down.
    “It wasn’t until the oldest group of teleporters hit puberty that the project was revived.”
    I remembered my first trip was shortly after my thirteenth birthday. Puberty had triggered it.
    “When strange reports surfaced of children appearing and disappearing, the program was started back up. Ever since, we have slowly reclaimed the children with these abilities, most before they were eighteen. We’ve found the earlier we bring them in, the less traumatic the