In a world ravaged by unstable chimeras, Angela Belmonte is a hybrid, a mutant. The champion, the inspiration to many athletes locked away because of their condition. Now, Angie holds the key to the cure, the chance to reclaim her life. Will she aba...
The impertinent flame was always within him, beating like a war drum, to the rhythm of his self-centered heart. Even before he managed to sneak away with his new gang, to usurp the shining shell that was tearing his entire family apart; that cursed treasure he stole by breaching the security of his father's laboratory during the days he had been a refugee in the Land of the Rising Sun.
— Alberto! What are you doing? — Anton Asim Al-Nasr*, a bald, thirty-something Arab scientist, stood up the day he discovered his son having fun with three other Nippon children between six and eight years old, wearing wooden masks and blue kimonos. Lying next to the sacred artifact that the doctor had been assigned to decipher, they demonstrated an extraordinary skill that allowed them to sneak into his secret chamber, filled with advanced computers, meters below the fortress mansion that kept the Al-Nasr family hidden and safe for several months.
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— Anton-sama*! — The little thieves shrieked as they dropped their loot: an ultramodern suit of armor made of something resembling obsidian. The suit that had so bewildered the devastated scientist. All the children stopped, all except him, his own son, dark-skinned like his father, who looked at him defiantly and began doing pull-ups with the device's head, as if it were a soccer ball.
— Easy, old man. This thing is pretty tough —. He kicked the stylized helmet, like a motorcycle helmet. It bobbed up and down, a black so opaque it would completely erase the face of whoever wore it, performing the acrobatics he had learned from his sensei, the master of the house that had taken them in. — One, two. Up! — He cackled, finally catching his father's attention after months, to throw the helmet, which landed on his big head, which back then had no feathers.
With his prank, Asim Nasr changed everything. A void slept in the helmet, infinite as deep space, waiting for the right fool to feed it with the ardor of his heart.
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— Impossible... It works! — The professor gasped as he watched the suit's helmet swallow his little boy's head, leaving, in place of the mischievous boy's face, two lines of slits in the shape of the letter V, lighting up in oxide copper where his mouth used to be, to burst into a painful fiery smile. With a guttural cry, Nazz transformed into a black Halloween pumpkin, with no trace of his eyes, with that forced laugh mocking the one who had left everything for his secrets; the same absent father who now lunged to tear him from his child's head, seething with the anger of a thousand hells.
