Disclosure Read Online Free

and fell on the
couch, hiding her face in her hands. “I really hoped we would never
have to do something like this. I let myself believe this whole
madness would never happen.”
    I didn’t
answer. Say “I didn’t” wouldn’t help at all. That whole madness, as Camila put it, was what I had
expected since the beginning. Considering what I had heard at
college and at the lab I worked the Otherworld had a lot of time of
peace.
    “It will only get worse.” I knew this didn’t
help, either, but I couldn’t keep silent.
    “ I know.” She
raised her head. “We are receiving
threats from the big companies and the government,
again.”
    “Again?”
    “Why do you think we chose to disclose our
existence?” She sighed, getting up and going to her bedroom.
    Blackmail.
Than that had been the reason. I should
have guessed, considering how people were still raving about the
shapeshifters’ regeneration capacity. It was easy to imagine what
would be their next step. That was probably why the news went on
and on about how selfish people from the Otherworld were. They
would end up in the labs – willing or not.
    But I didn’t think things would move so fast
from there.
    It had been a
little bit over one month since Felipe had moved back to the
shapeshifters’ compound. I took the bus home feeling a new tension
in the air, as if everyone was waiting to see what would happen
next. I heard the sound of the TV before unlocking the apartment’s
door, and that was enough to worry me. Camila just watched the news
if she really needed to.
    She was sitting on her favorite couch, a
completely empty expression on her face. I had only seen that once
before, when Felipe had received the order to go back.
    “What happened?”
    “ Three kids
disappeared, a boy and a girl from the shapeshifters, cats, and a
witch girl. They had a mage with them, I
know him, he is powerful enough that people trust their kids to
them. But now he is in a coma. Tranquilizer darts, they say, but
something new, developed to attack the Otherworld.” Her voice
sounded as empty as her face was.
    “ Kids?” I
didn’t want to believe it.
    She shook her
head, turning around to look at the television, where they were
talking about some fight a couple of celebrities got into. Waiting
to see if there was any news about the kids, I understood.
Something like that would never be on the news, but I could imagine
how desperate for any kind of information she was.
    “ We don’t
have rights, we are not even considered citizens.” Camila
whispered, as if she was talking to herself. “We’ll be hunted like
animals.”
    I didn’t
answer, and I didn’t need to. She was
right. People from the Otherworld had even less protection than
animals, which at least had organizations fighting against their
use in experiments.
    I found out what had happened to those kids
on the next day. It seemed that was the only thing people in the
lab talked about during lunch. A company with ties to the
government was offering shapeshifter and witch samples for study.
Anyone interested just had to fill a form and wait for their
analysis. And, as I had imagined, no one questions where the
samples had come from. Few people thought it was wrong at all.
    One week
later all the media talked about was the
carnage caused by a vampire and a shapeshifter. The official
version was that they had attacked a group of soldiers in a routine
exercise. I didn’t even need to talk to Camila to guess what had
really happened.
    Almost daily
we heard news about “unprovoked attacks” made by the Otherworld,
from all around the world. At the same time, someone “leaked”
information about the possible benefits to humanity that the
preliminary studies with three “volunteers” from the Otherworld
showed.
    It took only a couple of days for the chaos
to start.

7. Camila
    Three weeks later.
    I didn’t want
to believe what was going on. Had we
really gone back to the Middle Ages? It seemed impossible that,