Breaking Free, Part 1

**Note: Yes, I am considering expanding this into a novel.  Think of it as a sample chapter.

Six years.

Six long, painful years.  Years that will probably haunt me for the rest of my natural life.

Or unnatural.  Life, I mean.  Kind of depends on your perspective.

When I was ten, my parents signed me up for some testing.  Painless, the form had said.  One hundred fifty dollars per child, one child per family.  Education provided for the next eight years, since I would have to live at the facility.  I have a lot of brothers and sisters, so my family was never rich.  Free education being included was just icing on the cake.  I was sent to this science lab, and my family got their one-fifty bucks.

Of course, I would learn later that my whole family disappeared shortly after I was recruited.  Left during the night, the article had said.
I closed my eyes, blocking out memories.

I had this one chance, and I could not, would not mess it up.  Because I highly doubted that our country’s fine military would allow their most powerful weapon to go running amok all over the country just because a form said she would be released when she turned eighteen.  So, at the tender age of sixteen, I was escaping from the secret military base that had been my prison for six years.
I jolted out of my thoughts.  The unmarked van we were traveling in had come to a halt.  The scientist who was my own personal doctor swabbed my left arm and poked it with a thin needle.  I felt the familiar jolt as the drug that was created to keep me from running away flowed into my veins.

The van’s door slid open soundlessly.  “Go on,” the scientist snapped.
I stepped out onto the street.  It was completely deserted; I was in an abandoned town somewhere in southern Africa where an enemy base was.  I followed the directions I had been forced to memorize the night before, rubbing the scars that criss-crossed my arms like so many spiderwebs.  This street, then that street.  I was on a mission here, one that was basically designed to scare the African military.

Once I was out of sight of the van, I crouched, reaching into my shoe.  Time to take a detour.  I pulled out a lone white pill.  It had taken months of research and considerable risk on my part, but I had finally put together the exact chemicals that would counteract the drug the doctor had given me.

Quickly, I swallowed the pill, wincing at the terrible taste and wishing for water to chase it away.  I waited a moment, rubbing my scarred arms again.  The operations that had turned me into an incredible weapon had been much more painful than that form had said so long ago.

“Falcon,” I whispered.

I opened my eyes, which I had instinctively scrunched shut.  I had turned into a young peregrine falcon while my eyes were closed, which is precisely why I am such a dangerous weapon.  Those operations may have turned me into a morphing freak, but I am an AWESOME morphing freak.

Not to mention angry.

Because, see, it would be amazing to have an entire army of humans that can change their forms to that of animals.  But it isn’t right at all to run an untested, painful operation on an innocent ten-year-old who wanted nothing to do with killing people in foreign countries.  Not right at all.  So I was just going to have to teach those scientists a lesson that they would never, ever forget.  Besides that, they would have to come up with a new mind-controlling drug, because I had conquered what I had been injected with earlier.

I smiled.

Well, okay, fine, I didn’t exactly smile.  Kind of hard to with a beak.  But if I would have been a human, I would have smiled.

I went to my human form, then changed to cheetah.  Fastest land animal around, you know.  I dashed along the empty streets looking for an area with tall buildings so the scientists in the van wouldn’t see my escape.  After only a few minutes, I found one, then switched back to the falcon form.  I took off, feeling the wind beneath my outstretched wings and the giddy rush that came with high altitude.  The people in the van would never see me go.  They wouldn’t realize for hours that their precious experiment was gone from them forever.  Their weapon was going to backfire, and they were going to wish that they had never created me.
I had a lot of work to do.