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

ceremony held not long after the disaster for the thousands who had died. Kit remembered it clearly, as she did the president's speech a week later declaring the site off-limits to civilians. The remaining residents of Fairmont were given a large subsidy and notice of eviction. That had caused enormous outrage, but the end result was a media blackout of the ruined town still in effect more than a decade later.
    No cameras, no satellite imagery, no aircraft shots. Nothing. Trespassers tried to get close, but after the first few were tried and convicted in federal court, loudly and publicly, the number of people who tried trickled off to one or two a year.
    Looking at the pictures, Kit understood why the government was so keen to keep Fairmont off the map.
    The sequence of events was laid out before her. Heavy equipment, fleets of earth movers and trucks bearing soil and gear of all kinds, worked across the images. Steel frameworks began to rise inside the crater, massive beyond belief. The town around, a blip of civilization in an otherwise heavily wooded area, was razed to the earth and planted over with trees and grass.
    Dotting the pictures were the occasional Next, carrying immense loads in one frame, blurring from job to job at super speed in another. On the one hand, it was hard to imagine a structure so large being built at all, much less in the span of a few years. On the other, a workforce including hundreds of superhumans would have been a huge advantage. It must have been, given the results.
    In the void created by a single man, a subterranean building grew. The last few pictures showed the strange underground structure being covered with a layer of soil, seed, and hay. Only a few pieces of infrastructure jutting from the ground gave any indication of what lay below.
    Around those elevator shafts and power lines, buildings were erected. They looked like offices. There was even a garage.
    Looking at the last photo, taken from nearly the same position as the famous original, Kit saw that the very place she stood was precisely in the middle of where the crater had been. Ground zero.
    Her eyes unfocused from the image, though not before she noticed the frozen tines of wind turbines nestled behind the trees surrounding the place. A lot of them.
    Kit saw her face in the glass of the photo's frame. Thin, with smooth skin the color of caramel. Her black hair was cut boyishly short, barely long enough to wrap around a finger. Hazel eyes stared back at her from the angular cheekbones shared by tens of millions of Indian women, but with the full lips of her father.
    Just a woman. But then, Ray Elliot had been just a man.
    “You Singh?” A resonant voice asked from right beside her.
    Kit had trained too long and hard to be easily rattled. She didn't overtly react despite the stress of the day wearing on her nerves, though she was surprised anyone could sneak up on her. That shouldn't be possible for a normal person.
    Kit turned calmly to face him. That bit about normal people came back to the front of her brain as she took in the speaker. Suddenly she didn't feel so bad.
    “ I asked if you're Agent Singh,” the man said again, and this time she nodded. He wasn't especially tall or broad, but he was still huge . The normal negative spaces people have, such as the spot between the thighs where they don't touch, or the distance between the arm and side where the forearm dangles at rest, just weren't there. The man was thick in every dimension. His arms were inhumanly muscled and nearly uniform in width. He wore sweats that sat on his frame like spandex, every inch of him outlined in detail.
    Another Next, here? What is this place?
    “Yes,” she said, clearing her throat. “I'm Kitra Singh. Ah, Special Agent Singh, that is.”
    “ Deakins,” the man said, thrusting out a hand. Kit shook it—strong, and with the intentional delicacy of the abnormally strong—and let out a breathy sigh. Deakins chuckled. “I know. New