A Day Of Faces Read Online Free Page A

from the fire brought on his change, which attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.
    At the records office I’d found a secluded cubicle at the back of the room, behind filing cabinets and the endless shelves. Thumbing through brown cardboard folders I’d picked out the dozen-or-so babies that had been born on the same date as Cal. Which pretty much assured that they’d have the same abilities.
    There was nothing consistent about the recorded dates of death, other than that they all had them. All at very different times and in different places. Some had died during birth. Others as children, in accidents or domestic abuse incidents. One had died as a teenager, killed by a drunk driver while travelling the world before starting work. There was no consistency or pattern but none of them were still alive. None of the deaths on their own looked particularly suspicious, but Cal assured me that it wasn’t a localised coincidence.
    Cal wasn’t his real name, he’d said. I pulled out the file for Jason Parks. Born locally to rich parents, who had placed him into the orphanage along with a substantial investment to ensure his and the orphanage’s success. They sounded like nice people. Jason Parks was generally unremarkable, doing okay in his studies without setting the world on fire. Which is a bad turn of phrase, I guess, because he died when the orphanage went up in flames ten years back, along with most of the other kids and half the staff. It had been big news at the time, but I’d only been about eight so didn’t really remember it.
    Although most people are born possessing an obvious genotype, some abilities only became apparent during the change. It was basically a secondary puberty. Because why settle for one when you can have an additional embarrassing physical development? For me that meant that I only started generating my own venom around age twelve. Having that happen right around when I started getting interested in boys was all kinds of trouble. Nobody wants to be a bad kisser, let alone kill your crush with slightly over-enthusiastic smooching. It kinda put a dampener on that whole part of my life.
    It was the fire itself which introduced Cal to his new life. Turns out the shift he’d done that first night wasn’t a one-off. He could do it whenever he liked, aside from the off-putting pain and exhaustion it caused, going from one genotype to another. I’d never heard of anything like it. I was pretty sure it had never been known to happen before.
    “I think I’m the only one left,” he’d said, when I’d returned from the records office. “I’ve moved around a lot. Every town I’ve been, every country, it’s the same. Nobody’s noticed the pattern, or it’s been suppressed, or something. A whole generation has been erased. They do it slowly, carefully, so that nobody picks up on it. They’ve spread it out over two decades. They’re trying to find me.”
    Conspiracy always seemed like bullshit. No government or organisation was that organised. Even if they wanted to be like that, they’d just cock it up through incompetence. It’s better to think of our overlords as being idiots rather than evil, right? Whenever a shitty, stupid law got passed, that’s what I told myself.
    “Why are you telling me all this? Why me?”
    “Because I’m stuck in your shed.”
    And there was me thinking that maybe I was special.
    Because we weren’t really sure what to actually do, after the first week we moved into talking about normal stuff. Favourite movies. Awesome bands. Places we wanted to go, people we wanted to do. It was like hanging out with a friend. A secret, on-the-run fugitive friend with some kind of magical shape-shifting power.
    It was pretty great.
    Aside from the burning orphanage. And the police. And the actual reality of the situation. As long as we ignored all that, it was just the two of us, in a shed, talking shit until four in the morning, every night, until the sky started to