Anomaly

Chapter 9 -The Net

The Directorate never rushed.

Rushing left evidence. Rushing left mistakes.

And Elias Hale was too important for either.

In a command room buried beneath a government building that bore another name on its doors, his file glowed across multiple screens. One image showed the stairwell thermal scan, faint heat curled against concrete. Another tracked traffic cameras across the district, timestamps stacking in precise sequence. A third displayed a simple map, pulsing with three red markers that updated with every report.

Elias was one of them. The other two were decoys — figures matched to his height and build, walking the streets miles away, seeded into the system by operatives to test whether he was being tracked by anyone else.

The Directorate never assumed it was the only hunter.

Veyra stood at the edge of the room, coat hung neatly on the back of a chair, his posture rigid. His eyes scanned the feeds without blinking, cataloguing Elias’s movements: a corner store, an alley, a library. Each step ordinary, each step proof of exhaustion.

“He’s disoriented,” said one of the analysts, her voice even. “Patterns erratic, no destination. He’s not running. He’s drifting.”

Veyra nodded once. “Which means he doesn’t yet understand. Or he doesn’t want to.”

Another operative, younger, leaned forward from the bank of screens. “Why not extract now? We have location. Containment would be simple.”

“Containment is always simple,” Veyra said without turning. “What matters is what we see before we close the door.”

The younger man frowned. “You mean… watch him?”

“I mean observe.”

A brief silence. The hum of machines filled it, punctuated by the quiet tapping of keys.

Then the analyst spoke again. “There’s a risk in letting him roam. If he slips surveillance—”

“He won’t.” Veyra’s tone left no room for argument. “Every step he takes draws the net tighter. He believes he’s free. That makes him predictable.”

Still, unease rippled through the room. Elias Hale wasn’t like the others. Survivors of fire, of toxins, of freak accidents — those could be explained, rationalized, bent into shapes the Directorate understood. But scattering into nothing and returning whole? That was new. New was dangerous.

And dangerous was tempting.

Veyra let the silence stretch before speaking again, his voice lower, steady.

“He will reveal himself. They always do. Fear becomes desperation. Desperation becomes exposure. And when that happens…” He allowed the thought to hang, unfinished.

Every operative in the room knew what he meant.

The map pulsed again. Another update. Elias Hale, location tagged at a crosswalk downtown, hood low, face turned from the camera — but still visible enough.

Veyra’s eyes narrowed. His lips pressed into a thin line.

“Let him wander,” he said at last. “Let him struggle. Let him believe he has time.”

He stepped back from the monitors, his shadow cutting across the glow.

“Because when we take him, it won’t be a boy we capture.”

His eyes lingered on the name at the top of the file.

“It will be what he’s becoming.”

The room smelled of recycled air and burnt coffee, humming with the constant thrum of machines. Screens flickered as new data fed through, timestamps rolling forward like a heartbeat.

Elias’s file stayed pinned at the center, his name glowing faintly on every monitor.

One of the older operatives — Kade, grizzled from decades in the Directorate — cleared his throat. His voice was gravel, but steady. “With respect, Veyra, we’ve seen this before. Give them space, they get bold. They get careless. Careless means collateral.”

“Collateral is noise,” Veyra replied without looking at him. “Noise is useful.”

“And if the noise turns into a mess we can’t clean?” Kade pressed.

The younger operative shifted uneasily, caught between the two. “It’s not just risk,” he added. “It’s precedent. If he’s the first of his kind, how many more follow? How many slip through if we wait?”

The analyst at the console spoke softly, almost reluctantly. “Reports already suggest an increase. Scattered cases worldwide. None confirmed to this level, but the numbers are climbing.”

That silenced the room. Even the hum of the machines seemed louder for a moment.

Kade’s eyes hardened. “Then why gamble? Why not bring him in, close the file before the Board decides we mishandled it?”

Veyra turned at last, his gaze like a blade. “Because we aren’t here to close files. We’re here to learn. If Elias Hale is what I think he is, the Board won’t want him erased. They’ll want him understood. Replicated.”

The word hung in the stale air, sharp as glass.

Replicated.

The younger operative swallowed hard, looking away. Kade muttered under his breath, but said no more.

Veyra stepped closer to the monitors, his reflection cutting across Elias’s blurred image. He spoke quieter now, but every word carried.

“Anomalies aren’t problems. They’re previews. Each one shows us where humanity could go. And Elias Hale… he might be a glimpse further ahead than we’ve ever seen.”

He let the thought linger before adding:

“Which means we don’t waste him on haste. We let him show us what he is.”

The analyst tapped a key, shifting the map. The red marker of Elias’s location pulsed again, moving through the city like a heartbeat they could track but not yet touch.

“Observation continues,” she said.

Veyra nodded. His eyes never left the name on the screen.

Elias Hale.

A boy who had survived the impossible.

A boy who might be the first of something more.

And if he was, the Directorate would make certain they owned whatever came next.

The silence in the command room thickened, filled only by the drone of cooling fans and the soft staccato of keystrokes. The analysts avoided looking at one another, their eyes fixed on the scrolling feeds, but unease rippled beneath the surface like static.

They had all seen anomalies before. They had all heard the justifications. Observation first. Containment later. But never one like this. Never someone who had shattered into nothing and returned whole.

Kade broke the silence again, his voice low but edged. “The Board won’t wait forever. They’ll want resolution.”

Veyra’s mouth curved, though it wasn’t a smile. “The Board doesn’t want resolution. They want proof. And Elias Hale is proof that their theories were right.”

The younger operative frowned. “You think he was engineered?”

Veyra didn’t answer at once. His gaze lingered on the grainy footage of Elias drifting through a crowded street, hood pulled low, shoulders hunched as though the weight of the entire city pressed down on him. A boy who looked ordinary in every way — except for the fact that he wasn’t.

“Does it matter?” Veyra asked at last. “Accident or experiment, the result is the same. He exists. And existence changes everything.”

Kade muttered something under his breath — too soft to catch, too bitter to mistake.

The analyst shifted in her chair, hesitant but unwilling to stay silent. “If more like him appear, how long before secrecy fails? Before the public sees?”

Veyra’s eyes cut to her. “That’s why we’re here.”

But even as he said it, he felt the weight above him. The Board would already have seen the first reports. Already debated in voices never raised, never named, in rooms that left no records. They would not simply wait.

They would shape the outcome.

He felt it then — the faintest flicker of unease at the base of his spine. Not fear of Elias, not fear of the mission, but of what orders might come down once the Board reached consensus.

Because the Directorate did not ask for permission.

It delivered.

Veyra straightened, smoothing the creases in his coat. “Maintain surveillance. No engagement until I say otherwise.”

The operatives nodded, though the unease did not leave their eyes.

On the screens, Elias’s blurred figure moved steadily through the city, unaware that every step had already been catalogued, every hesitation noted, every shadow tracked.

Above the feeds, his name glowed in stark letters.

ELIAS HALE – ACQUISITION PRIORITY ONE.

The order locked in, the room shifted back into rhythm. Screens cycled, feeds refreshed, data streams folded into secure archives. The machine moved on, tireless.

But the unease remained.

Kade lingered at the back, arms crossed, eyes hooded. He had seen dozens of anomalies rise and vanish over his career. None of them had ended well. Some disappeared into labs, never resurfacing. Others had been erased with quiet precision, their names stripped from records until only a redacted file remained. None had scattered into nothing and walked away whole.

He muttered, just loud enough for Veyra to hear: “We’re not hunters. We’re janitors. Cleaning up spills nobody admits were ever made.”

Veyra didn’t look at him. His gaze stayed on the central monitor, watching Elias’s blurred figure step through the daylight crowd. “Janitors don’t get to decide what the mess becomes,” he said calmly. “We do.”

The words left no room for argument.

Still, the analyst risked one. “Sir… what if he can’t be contained?”

Veyra’s reflection glimmered faintly against the glass of the monitor. For a long moment he didn’t answer.

Then he said, very quietly: “Everything can be contained. One way or another.”

The room went silent again. The hum of servers filled the void.

On the wall, Elias Hale’s file expanded:

Age: 17

Status: Active

Classification: Anomaly – Molecular Instability

Directive: Acquisition Priority One

The words glared in stark white against the black screen, sealing his fate with the cold certainty of protocol.

Veyra straightened, pulling his coat back over his shoulders. His reflection merged with Elias’s blurred image, two figures overlapping on the glass — the hunter and the hunted, already bound together by inevitability.

“Let him run,” Veyra said, voice steady. “The world isn’t wide enough to hide him from us.”

And with that, the net closed tighter, invisible and unbreakable, while Elias Hale walked unaware through the city, still clinging to the hope that what had happened might not be real.