The world wasn't supposed to change this way.
In 2019, when COVID-19 first emerged from Wuhan, China, spreading across continents like wildfire, humanity braced for the worst. We'd seen the movies—zombie apocalypses, civilization's collapse, the end of everything we knew.
Instead, we got runny noses, fever, and a global lockdown that turned our living rooms into offices and our screens into windows to the outside world.
The vaccines came in 2020, heralded as humanity's salvation. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca—names that became as familiar as Coca-Cola. Conspiracy theories spread faster than the virus itself.
Bill Gates wants to microchip us.
Big Pharma orchestrated the whole thing for profit.
The vaccines will make us infertile and destroy the human race.
Most of us rolled our eyes and rolled up our sleeves anyway.
The first sign that something had fundamentally changed came on February 15th, 2025.
A grainy phone video showed a sleeping seven-year-old boy floating three feet above his bed, his small body suspended in defiance of every law of physics we thought we understood. The video broke the internet for exactly twelve hours before it—and the boy—vanished without a trace.
For six months, silence.
Then on August 3rd, another video surfaced: a teenage girl in a parking lot, frustrated tears streaming down her face as golden energy erupted from her clenched fists, reducing a concrete wall to rubble.
Two weeks later, a boy in Nebraska accidentally created a tornado in his backyard while having a tantrum about chores.
That's when the pattern became undeniable.
Children born after 2020—the vaccine generation—were manifesting abilities that should have existed only in comic books.
Pyrokinesis.
Telekinesis.
Matter manipulation.
Energy projection.
The biological lottery had rewritten the rules of human existence, and the winners were mostly confused teenagers with no instruction manual.
The disappearances started immediately. Government agencies that officially didn't exist swept in to collect these new "anomalies." Families woke to find empty bedrooms and official letters explaining that their children were being relocated "for the safety of all citizens."
Some parents fought.
Some hid their children.
Most simply watched helplessly as black SUVs drove away with their sons and daughters.
Those who evaded capture often became cautionary tales.
A boy in Detroit accidentally leveled half a city block trying to impress his girlfriend. A girl in Tokyo couldn't turn off her telepathy and spent three days screaming from the chaos in her head before taking her own life.
Powers without training were weapons without safety switches, and innocent people paid the price.
Technology adapted faster than humanity ever could. Within two years, power-suppressing cuffs became standard law enforcement equipment. Neural dampeners, energy disruptors, genetic inhibitors—an entire industry grew around containing what we'd accidentally created.
Fear drove innovation, and innovation fed fear.
But not everyone believed containment was the answer.
The world needed a new kind of hero—someone who could bridge the gap between the powered and the powerless, between fear and hope. Someone willing to step forward when everyone else was stepping back.
Someone like me.
My name is Mia, and this is the story of how I tried to save a world that wasn't sure it wanted to be saved.
End of Prologue