Anomaly

Chapter 7 -The Directorate

The Directorate did not advertise its name.

On paper, it didn’t exist. Its funding passed through half a dozen shells: defense think tanks, biomedical initiatives, experimental energy programs. All legitimate enough to keep questions buried. But within the Directorate, everyone knew their true mandate: identify, contain, and control anomalies.

Elias Hale was not the first.

There had been others.

Files lay stacked in cold vaults, rows of thin paper and glowing screens documenting cases across decades. A boy in Belarus who had survived electrocution with no visible damage. A woman in Cairo whose blood resisted every known toxin. A soldier in Venezuela who, in the heat of combat, had turned invisible for less than five seconds — long enough to vanish from sight of his squad before reappearing in a daze.

Each one had been flagged. Most were recovered. Some did not survive recovery.

But none of them had scattered and reformed.

That was new.

The Directorate’s official line was that anomalies were accidents — mutations, chance collisions of DNA and environment. Unlucky children born with cracks in the blueprint of nature.

But unofficially, behind locked doors, other theories persisted. Whispers that some were not accidents at all. That programs decades old, hidden beneath Cold War secrecy, had been deliberate. Attempts to awaken what lay dormant in humanity’s code.

If that was true, then Elias wasn’t just a mistake. He was an outcome.

And outcomes could be repeated.

The man in the coat — operative designation Veyra — knew better than most what that meant. He had served long enough to see anomalies turned into assets, their talents harnessed under iron control. He had also seen them erased when control failed. To the Directorate, anomalies were neither miracles nor monsters. They were resources.

And resources were not allowed to roam free.

The field reports had already been logged. The fall. The disappearance of the body. The inconclusive thermal scans. But the name changed everything. Elias Hale. Seventeen. Long medical history. Parents who had signed forms they likely hadn’t understood. Patterns in his records that, in hindsight, screamed of suppressed potential.

Veyra sat in the van with the file open on his lap, reading each page not for information, but for confirmation of what he had already decided: this one mattered.

This one could not be wasted.

Across the globe, similar files glowed in encrypted servers. Redacted photographs, blurred testimonies, footage cut short at the moment the impossible intruded. A map dotted with incidents, some suppressed, others explained away as hoaxes. Elias’s file was simply the latest addition to a network few would ever glimpse.

But there was a difference this time.

The fall. The scatter. The reformation.

It wasn’t just survival. It was proof of control — or the beginnings of it.

And if control could be trained…

Veyra closed the file, the edges of the paper damp against his gloves.

He didn’t wonder what Elias felt, waking alone in the city. He didn’t care whether the boy was afraid, or angry, or lost. Those things didn’t matter. What mattered was potential. What mattered was what the Directorate could make of him.

And if Elias resisted, as anomalies always did?

Then the Directorate would make certain he never resisted again.

The Directorate was not one thing.

It was a network, webbed across governments and corporations, threading through universities and defense councils. Some within it believed they were safeguarding humanity, ensuring accidents of nature didn’t spiral out of control. Others believed they were sharpening weapons, sculpting evolution’s raw mistakes into tools of power.

Most didn’t question at all. Orders were orders. Files were files.

Above the field operatives, handlers compiled reports. Above handlers, directors debated resource allocation in conference rooms buried beneath false identities. And above even them, rumors whispered of a Board whose names were never spoken, who had inherited the program’s earliest fragments from a time when the world had been divided by iron curtains and nuclear threats.

The files told a story that history never admitted.

A teenager in Osaka who could walk unharmed across molten metal. A prisoner in Siberia who froze to death in summer, his cell rimed with frost, the walls weeping condensation. A child in Nevada who vanished for three days inside her own house and returned with no memory of where she had gone.

Each case had ended the same way: containment or erasure.

And each case left a trace, a breadcrumb leading to a larger pattern.

Some operatives, in hushed tones, argued it was too many to be coincidence. Too precise. Too scattered across borders to be random. Someone, somewhere, had been nudging the code of humanity, opening locked doors in its blueprint.

Whether accident or experiment, the Directorate’s conclusion was the same: they could not allow it to unfold unguided.

Not when power this volatile could destabilize the world.

Not when it could reshape it.

Veyra closed the file in his lap, but the weight of it lingered. Elias Hale was not the strongest anomaly he had encountered. Not yet. But strength wasn’t the measure that mattered. What mattered was adaptability. Survivors could be sharpened. Survivors could be taught.

And the fall had proved one thing beyond dispute: Elias was a survivor.

Veyra glanced at the other operatives in the van. They sat with professional stillness, but he saw the flicker of unease in their eyes when the boy’s file had revealed the details of the rooftop incident. An anomaly who could unmake himself and return whole was something new.

Something dangerous.

He leaned forward, speaking low, as much to remind them as himself.

“Control or containment. Nothing else.”

The words hung in the air, heavy as doctrine.

Outside, the city swelled with morning noise. But inside the van, the hunt had already advanced another step.

Because Elias Hale was no longer just a runaway.

He was a variable. A question.

And the Directorate did not tolerate unanswered questions.

The Directorate’s creed was simple: humanity must not outpace itself.

Every anomaly was a fracture in that creed.

Left alone, they might vanish — or they might ignite something uncontrollable. The boy in Nevada who slipped out of reality for three days had been discovered humming a tune no one could identify, a melody that sent glass vibrating when she repeated it. The soldier in Venezuela who vanished on the battlefield had not returned until his squad had been slaughtered. Cause and effect blurred too easily when nature bent itself into shapes it wasn’t meant to hold.

So the Directorate intervened. Quietly. Precisely. Without hesitation.

Elias’s case was different only in degree.

He hadn’t merely resisted injury. He had crossed a threshold no anomaly had before: separation and return. Disassembly and reassembly. A living paradox.

It had been theorized in the Directorate’s archives — notes scrawled in the margins of old Cold War experiments, scraps of declassified documents no one was meant to see. If the body can be broken down, it can be rebuilt. If the self survives division, it can survive anything.

But theory had always failed in practice. Subjects had collapsed, unable to reconstitute. Most left behind little more than blood and tissue.

And now, in the middle of an ordinary city, a seventeen-year-old had done it without training. Instinctively.

The Directorate didn’t call that luck.

They called it a breakthrough.

Veyra felt the weight of it as he sat in the van, the boy’s name flickering on the screen. Elias Hale. The letters meant nothing on their own, just another file among hundreds. But the fall had carved them into something more.

He imagined the Board reading the report. Imagined the hunger behind their silence. This wasn’t just about containment anymore. Elias wasn’t a problem to solve — he was proof.

Proof that the old projects, the buried experiments, had not failed. Proof that somewhere in humanity’s code, the locks were opening wider.

Across the globe, anomalies were surfacing faster than before. Not many, not yet — but enough that the Directorate’s map looked less like scattered sparks and more like a constellation slowly taking shape.

The question wasn’t why.

The question was who had lit the fuse.

Some believed it was evolution, random and merciless. Others swore it was deliberate — a hand unseen, tinkering with DNA, releasing anomalies into the world like seeds scattered on the wind.

The Directorate didn’t argue over it anymore. The origin mattered less than the outcome.

What mattered was control.

And Elias Hale was about to learn what that word meant.

Veyra let the thought settle as he closed the file, his eyes flicking once more to the blurred thermal image of the boy asleep in the stairwell.

He almost pitied him. Almost.

But pity was wasted in this work.

“Dawn’s here,” one of the operatives murmured from the front seat.

Veyra nodded once. “Then so are we.”

The van pulled forward, melting back into the veins of the waking city.

The hunt was no longer beginning.

It was already underway.

The van was only the surface.

Beneath the city, beneath hundreds like it around the world, the Directorate’s roots stretched deep. Underground facilities disguised as water treatment plants. Research labs buried beneath university campuses. Safehouses hidden in plain sight.

At the center of it all, behind more locked doors than even most operatives realized, sat the Board. No names. No faces. Just a handful of voices that bled through secure channels when decisions had to be made. To some, they were myths. To others, they were the only authority that mattered.

Files flowed upward to them like tributaries into a vast, unseen sea. Anomalies catalogued, results logged, failures erased. No detail too small, no life too insignificant, if it meant bringing clarity to the one question that drove the Directorate forward:

What is humanity becoming?

And could it be guided?

Veyra had never spoken to the Board directly. He didn’t need to. He knew what they would want from Elias Hale. He knew the message his report had already carried upward: an anomaly survived complete molecular disassembly and returned intact.

To the Board, that wasn’t a threat.

It was an opportunity.

Around the globe, operatives readied themselves — some to observe, some to capture, some simply to erase. Elias’s name had already been added to watchlists in cities he had never seen, airports he would never enter. He didn’t know it yet, but he had become a ripple felt worldwide.

And ripples had a way of becoming waves.

Veyra looked once more at the blurred image of the boy on the thermal feed, curled against the cold stairwell wall, unaware that dawn carried more than sunlight.

“Sleep while you can,” Veyra murmured.

One of the techs glanced back. “Sir?”

But Veyra didn’t repeat himself.

The van slipped deeper into the waking city, its movements invisible among morning commuters.

Above them, the first rays of sunlight broke through the clouds.

And somewhere in a secure chamber half a world away, the Board received the report, a red file marked with a single word that would decide the shape of Elias Hale’s life.

Acquisition.