The Next Chronicle (Book 1): Next Read Free Page A

area than necessary. It had seen quite enough of that.
    Shouldering her luggage and mustering courage, Kit Singh made her way through the front doors.
    As she passed through them, a faint buzzing sensation washed over her. It felt like fresh laundry when you pass your hand over it, that barely perceptible rush of static electricity. Strange.
    She expected a lobby but got a waiting room straight out of a prison. The entrance area was empty but for lines of chairs wrapping around the wall, each of them one solid piece and bolted to the floor. Ten feet in, a wall of steel and concrete stretched across the width of the room. It was broken only by a heavy steel door banded with yet more steel, and a window constructed with the same security measures in mind. A bored-looking man of middle years leaned back in his chair behind the bars of the window, giving her a lazy glance.
    From the sound of it, he was playing Angry Birds.
    The disciplined agent in her began to twitch, but outwardly Kit was placid. The man paid her little mind as she moved toward his cage, finally looking up only after her bags were on the floor and her arms folded over her breasts.
    “Help you?” the man, whose name tag bore only the word “Tucker,” said laconically.
    Kit took a deep breath and channeled her calm. “I hope so,” she replied. “I'm Special Agent Kitra Singh. I've been assigned here from—”
    Tucker put a finger to his lips and interrupted her. “Not a good idea to mention names in the public areas.”
    Kit looked around the empty room pointedly. “I really don't see how that matters, since there's no one here to overhear me.”
    Tucker's finger darted away from his face and toward the corners of the room. Kit followed the motion and saw cameras nestled in the high places. A lot of them.
    “ About a year back,” Tucker said, “We had a fella could take control of electronics. Did it subtle, avoided messing things up. Didn't make it obvious, but he was gathering information on us by watching the camera feeds. So, no, lady, it isn't a good idea to talk out here.”
    With that he slapped a button, and the door beside his cage slid open.
    Kit hesitated. “I don't know where to go.”
    Tucker waved toward the door. “Just follow the cussing,” he said, his southern patois growing thick. “You'll know you're there when it's right in front of you.”
    Kit's eyebrows came together in confusion. “Cussing? Like, someone swearing in anger?”
    Tucker smiled at her like she had learned a new trick. “Yes, ma'am. That'll be Director Archer. He's expecting you.”
    Kit dragged her gear to her shoulder and strode through the door. Better to get it over with now.

Chapter Two
     
    While the entrance to the place was severe, the hall behind the bars was tasteful and pleasant. The cold white paint and industrial materials of the facade were nowhere to be found. The hall beyond the entrance was drywall, painted beige, with dark mahogany trim and cream carpet. It made the place look like a law firm, a sharp contrast with the forbidding lobby.
    Most interesting were the pictures. Along each side of the hallway, identical silver frames showed a progression of images that depicted a transformation to Kit as she walked along. The first showed an aerial shot of a massive crater—no, not a crater. It was a famous picture, maybe the most famous in the world. It was the perfect half-sphere left in the dirt after the disaster at Fairmont.
    A mile and a half in diameter and cut scalpel-clean, Fairmont had been wiped off the map in a heartbeat. Whatever Ray Elliot had done, it had turned a large chunk of a Louisville suburb into a basin devoid of life. That moment, too big and deadly for any sort of cover-up, had ushered in the era of the Next. In the hearts and minds of people across the world, the destruction of Fairmont had begged the question.
    What are we, compared to that?
    The pictures alternated across the hall, next showing the huge memorial