There wasn't one single company capable of matching the quality of work Karen and Henry were doing. Most of them tried to duplicate her work by ordering a model and disassembling it to find out how she accomplished it. Piece by piece, their lab technicians would dissect her models. At the end they experienced the same results as the medical research laboratories. Except for being polymer instead of skin and bone, it was an exact duplicate of the entire human anatomy. The programming she was running to complete one model had to be horrendous and yet she never made two models alike. The bytes of data Karen was using was incomprehensible to most model makers. They weren't programmers though, most of them were chemical engineers designing the plastics used in their manufacturing. Karen was a computer engineer who worked on the design of the models from a graphics equation perspective. Henry helped research the plastics used to build the models. Same problem to all the companies competing in the model market. Different approach by the engineers.

“Okay, sit down,” I indicated the toilet. Audrey obediently plopped down on the seat while I grabbed my makeup wipes. I briefly wondered how hard I would have to scrub her face to get this crap off. Really depended on how they’d sealed it on. If it was just a setting powder yeah, okay, but if they’d gotten carried away? I might have to take a belt sander to her face. I leaned in and readied the makeup wipe. “We’ll have you home in just a bit.”

“Um, Aleah?” She said. She looked up at me, her eyes wide and tear stained. Pleading.

Note: This story takes place during Book 3: Finding Audrey

Webster’s dictionary defines Speed as the fallowing: the rate of change of position along a straight line with respect to time over a set distance. In other words, the quicker you can get from one place to another. The question is what do you, do when your family has spent the last two generations in search of ways to accomplish this goal faster and faster. Would do you do when the family business is the search for more Speed. For Robert ‘Robby’ McGuire the answer is easy. You grab your sister and strap on a pair of Formula One racecars then go for broke.

Sliding the phone back into my pocket I quietly used the bathroom and exited back into the hallway. It was a bare hall; no pictures or anything hanging up on the walls, and I only passed one other room. Passing out of the mouth of the hall I emerged into the kitchen where Shelby was stood at the stove stirring stew beneath a yellow hood light, contrasted against the white lights of the kitchen and a backdrop of faded, peeling wallpaper. Zeke sat at the kitchen table, the shotgun apart as he cleaned it carefully with a series of brushes and fluids.

the same accident that caused the loss of his leg at age six also stimulated the latent genetics that ran in his family to trigger a mutation. Although becoming one of the ‘exo-humans’ the government monitored would prove to be the least of his worries once he stumbled upon his family’s secret.

CHAPTER V

The days and weeks settled into some resemblance of order for David and Karen. By the end of the month, David had over two hundred mice with fuzzy feet. Karen laughed at him as she told him it would take very tiny clippers to shear them. She certainly didn't think the sheep industry should be worried yet. It would take a lot more mice than what David had to make one pair of mittens.

“I’m not giving the letters back,” I said adamantly to Tiffany as I finished scrubbing my hair out. It had only taken a few hours but oh my god it had sucked.

“So you’re just going to leave her there?” Tiffany raised an eyebrow.

“They’re not going to actually keep here there,” I was confident that she’d come back the next day.

“Um yes, they will,” Tiffany said. “It’s TRI PI.”

“I’m not giving the letters back, and that’s final,” I began to brush my hair out and dry it. It was such a long process.

“You, girl, what’s your name? Why you sleepin’ on my lawn?” A gruff voice stirred me to life as the world came to me through squinted eyes and my vision was flooded with rays of light filtered by a thick canopy of tree branches far overhead. My skull pounded from a trauma I couldn’t recall and my hand dug into dirt as I coughed and sputtered to life. “What’s your name little girl? You’d best be about answerin’ me!”

In Book 3, Audrey disappears and Aleah is forced to face her demons - will either of them survive?

David must have caught her happiness. He whispered in her ear, "Ten thousand dollars was too cheap a bet. I should have bet a hundred thousand we would get in tonight."

“Audrey?” Aleah gently shook nudged her shoulder. While we’d been downstairs, she’d fallen asleep on the bed, her head buried in Lauren’s lap. “Wake up sweetie.”

She opened her eyes slowly, rolling them to look up at Aleah. She remained silent until Aleah finally spoke again.

“You’re staying here tonight,” Aleah said finally. “We don’t…usually allow that sort of thing, but...we don’t want you to leave…like this, okay? You’re staying here. I need you to get up though so you can change.”

CHAPTER 70
We made our way back to Central in convoy, some of the vehicles peeling off to deposit their prisoners at other nicks, the numbers being rather too big for one Custody Suite to hold. I was glad to be able to get rid of all the Personal Protective Equipment that had been weighing me down. I am not a small girl, nor exactly chest-heavy, but I am sure the designers of the ballistic vest were either misogynists playing a nasty joke, or simply nerds with no concept of what a woman’s body actually looked like. Bloody uncomfortable things.

Raven stops a few blocks away from the garage to gather herself. She was still pissed after seeing one of the men responsible for sending her to jail. She tries the breathing exercises she recently learned from Barbara.

Barbara had found her crying and upset about a memory that resurface from her time in prison. She instructed Raven on how to center herself and let the emotion flow out of her, instead of letting it have power over her. She needed to get her emotions under control before she got back to the shop.

“Tiff, what’s going on with you?” Isabella asked as we pushed a squeaky cart down a grocery aisle later that night. “You’re like…glowing.”
“Oh, nothing,” I said in sing-song voice. She was staring at me. She didn’t need to know anything. Tonight we were out getting stuff for tomorrow’s dinner. “Do you think we should go with a roast?”

“Think we should make Audrey make whatever it is we have,” Isabella huffed.

“Does Audrey even know how to cook?” I was genuinely curious. I really had no idea.

“Yes.”

“What? Really? She never even eats.”