Dark Angel: Before the Dawn
Chapter One
COLD PURSUIT
MANTICORE HEADQUARTERS
GILLETTE, WYOMING, 2009
Her bare feet pounding, breaking the crust of ice on the snow-packed
ground, her thin blue hospital-style smock hiked high over pumping
legs, nine-year-old X5-unit 332960073452 barely noticed the February
cold. Neither did she have any knowledge that in other parts of the
United States, Valentine's Day was less than forty-eight hours away;
that was part of a mundane, ordinary life as unknown to her as her
controlled existence had been to the outside world.
Though she had learned much at Manticore, all the girl knew, at this
moment, was that she was running for her life.
The deafening whir of choppers circling overhead did not cause her
to look up, and she avoided the wide white beams of searchlights
that probed, slashed the remote Manticore facility, turning the
gloomy woods into a haunted house of light, dark, and shadow.
Brunette locks shaved down to a severe concentration-camp buzz cut,
she was small, but not skinny-lean, lithe, wiry ... and, though
unmistakably a child, already battle-hard. ... read full excerpt from: Dark Angel: Before the Dawn ebook
