Page 21

Apollo

“You sure about this?”

Griffin asked.

“Yeah,”

Apollo stated without an ounce of uncertainty.

“Okay, let’s get started,”

Griffin announced, and the team spread out to survey the area.

Apollo looked at his ancestral land, the land bequeathed to him by his Iroquois grandmother, and felt at peace for the first time. This was where he’d create a safe space for his people, beyond the clutches of the Noah Group, so they could continue their mission to end their reign of terror. He watched his younger half-sister Ellen run into the long grass. Her arms opened wide, and he couldn’t help but smile.

Thanks to her Navy grandfather’s involvement, they shared the same mother, another involuntary Noah Project subject. However, their fathers were as different as night and day. Apollo’s father was a service member, a full-blood Iroquois, and with the thanks of Hendrix’s ability to map one’s family tree, Apollo had tracked them down years later. On the other hand, Ellen’s father was an asshole who wanted to gain fame for writing a book about the Project until the Noah Group came knocking and started killing family members. Thankfully, their new friends, Brick and his team, made it to Ellen before the Group did, and she was secreted away.

The Noah Project’s mission was to use genetic manipulation to create the perfect warrior without any concern for how they accomplished that. After the Project was shut down by the Navy, the test subjects were sent to foster care and orphanages worldwide without the knowledge or assistance to deal with their changing abilities. The survivors had mutations that crossed the spectrum from physical to mental and to what could be best described as supernatural.

Those wishing to use these abilities, especially the Noah Group, began collecting them years later to gain control and amass power. This needed to end. The fear, pain, and destruction caused by this group were immeasurable and crossed all lines: geopolitical, economic, age, and location. All were fair game and in extreme danger.

For years, the crew thought Apollo and his team were alone in this fight until recently, they learned of another group led by a retired Navy Seal named Brick. They’d run into each other in New Orleans during a recovery mission in which a member of their crew was executed by the Noah Group followers, and now the two teams kept the other in the loop from that point forward. The more people they had fighting against the Noah Group, the better.

Though Apollo worried about what public knowledge of their abilities might cause, he understood that the day was drawing closer. For now, their fight was held in the shadows, away from the general public’s knowledge. However, an invisible timer had already started ticking down the days, hours, and minutes before their anonymity was destroyed either by those in power or a survivor unable to control their abilities.

This raised another question plaguing Apollo: how many more survivors were waiting for help? He’d dedicated his life to this one quest after escaping and gaining his freedom and had been picking up survivors and team members ever since. Some in his group came from labs they’d closed down. Others were former military, commandos, and security-for-hire personnel due to their inability to function outside structured boundaries in normal society.

Their new start and continued mission would begin from this remote location owned under his given Iroquois name, Calian Brant, to keep it off the Noah Group’s radar. Still, Apollo and his team first needed to bring this land up to livable conditions. The lone cabin had no electricity or running water, but what the property didn’t have in amenities, it had in space, and that’s what they truly prized above all. Until basic structures and facilities were constructed, they’d stay in large fifth wheels and camping trailers that could temporarily provide them with what they needed.

They’d begin to source materials from contractors in Ticonderoga while performing the work themselves. In remote areas like these, it wasn’t uncommon for people to build their own compounds from the ground up. That way, their group wouldn’t stand out among the many in upstate New York hidden away in the tall forests, full of oaks, balsam, spruce, cottonwood, pine, cedar, and wildlife, along expansive waterways. This location provided them direct access to Lake Champlain, which ran one hundred twenty miles north to south from Whitehall, New York, to the Richelieu River in Quebec, Canada.

They had the makings of a safe home where their team could find solace, protection, and peace after years of being hunted, and Apollo swore he’d fight to the death to keep it that way.

***

I want to take a moment to thank all of you for following along on this journey with my team from Fire Lake and me. The team stood strong through the ups and downs, surprises, battles, mysteries, struggles, love, and redemption.

Along the way, we found stories of resilience, understanding, acceptance, and compassion, as I hope each of you finds in your everyday life. As I end this series, it is with great enthusiasm and excitement that I announce my new series, which will follow Rocko to New York, where we join Apollo’s team as they build a new home and double down on their efforts to stop the Noah Group from destroying any more lives.

I hope to see you all soon, beginning with Apollo, book one in The Noah Project series.

M. Tasia