The van smelled of damp earth, sweat, and the sharp ozone scent of fear. Leila drove with a quiet intensity, her eyes constantly checking mirrors. In the back, Kael and Aris sat among supplies—canned food, medical kits, camping gear, and oddly, several cases of high-end Swiss chocolate.
"My cousin exports it," Leila explained without turning. "Best currency in a crisis. Everyone wants chocolate, nobody asks questions."
They'd left Geneva an hour before dawn, taking back roads that wound through sleeping villages. The van was older, nondescript—perfect for invisibility. Through the windshield, the Alps rose like jagged teeth against the paling sky.
"How many are in your group?" Aris asked, her voice hushed in the dim cabin.
"Fourteen confirmed Longevos, plus three baselines who chose to stay with their loved ones." Leila's eyes met hers in the rearview. "You'll be our first scientist. We've been guessing at what's happening to us. Some think it's divine. Some think it's a government experiment. Most just know we're scared."
Kael watched the landscape pass. "How did you organize so quickly?"
"Dark web forums at first. Then, when they started taking people, we went analog. Dead drops. Code words. Old spycraft from movies." She gave a tired smile. "Turns out being able to lift a car makes you good at improvised communication. We'd leave messages under rocks normal people couldn't move."
Aris leaned forward. "The symptoms—when did you first notice?"
"Three months ago. I was a structural engineer in Mumbai. At a site inspection, I... felt the stress points in a beam before it showed on sensors. Like a vibration in my bones." Her grip tightened on the wheel. "A week later, the bus accident. Children trapped. I didn't think—just acted. Afterward, the police wanted statements. The military wanted blood samples. My parents' shop got 'inspected' by officials who asked too many questions."
She fell silent. The van climbed higher, pine trees thickening along the road.
"I'm sorry," Kael said quietly.
"We're all sorry," Leila replied. "Sorry we're different. Sorry we scare people. Sorry we survived when others wouldn't have." She glanced at him. "You'll meet others with similar stories. A firefighter in Berlin who walked through flames. A diver in Okinawa who held his breath for forty minutes. A mother in Toronto who lifted a collapsed porch to save her neighbor."
The road narrowed to a single lane, gravel crunching beneath tires. Dawn broke proper now, painting the snowcaps pink and gold. Aris watched Kael as he took in the majesty. His face, which had been tense with fear, softened with wonder. She realized with a start that he might see a thousand more dawns in these mountains. The thought was equally beautiful and terrifying.
They drove for three hours, switching to an even smaller track that seemed to lead straight into wilderness. Finally, Leila pulled into a hidden clearing where two other vehicles were parked—a delivery truck and a beat-up SUV.
"We walk from here," she said, killing the engine.
The air was knife-cold, thin. Kael stepped out and immediately felt... better. Stronger. The altitude that should have left him breathless instead filled him with vibrant energy. He could smell pine resin, distant snow, the metallic tang of glacial water.
"Interesting," Aris murmured, watching him. "Your red blood cell production might be enhanced too. Or oxygen utilization."
"Or I'm just happy to be out of the city," he said, though he knew she was right. Everything felt sharper, more alive.
They shouldered packs and followed Leila up a trail that wasn't really a trail—more a scramble over rocks beside a rushing stream. After thirty minutes, Kael realized he wasn't tired. Aris, however, was breathing hard, her face pale.
"Here," he said, taking her pack.
"I can—"
"You can, but you don't have to." He slung it over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing. The two packs together felt lighter than his lunchbox used to.
Leila watched the exchange, her expression unreadable. "This way. Not much farther."
They rounded a cliff face and saw the camp.
It was nestled in a high meadow, a bowl of grass and wildflowers surrounded on three sides by granite walls. Tents dotted the area, but more interesting were the structures being built—not with tools, but with hands and sheer strength. A Longevo woman was stacking boulders into a wall, each stone weighing what Kael guessed was half a ton. A man was digging a trench with what appeared to be his bare hands, moving earth in great scoops.
People stopped working as they approached. Kael counted twenty, maybe thirty individuals. All ages, all ethnicities. A teenage boy with East Asian features was practicing what looked like parkour, leaping between rocks with impossible grace. An older Black man sat by a fire, staring into the flames as if reading something in them.
"Everyone," Leila called. "These are Kael and Dr. Thorne. Geneva."
Eyes studied them. Not hostile, but wary. The boulder-stacking woman approached first. She was Scandinavian-looking, with braided blonde hair and practical outdoor clothing.
"Erika," she said, offering a hand. Her grip was careful, controlled. "Stockholm. I was a gym teacher." She looked at Kael's arms. "You lifted the beam? Saw it on news before we went dark."
Kael nodded, suddenly self-conscious.
"Good. We need strong ones." She turned to Aris. "Doctor. Can you confirm what we are?"
"I can try," Aris said. "I have my portable sequencer, some samples..."
But the crowd was gathering now, and questions came like a wave:
"How long will we live?"
"Can we have children?"
"Will our children be like us?"
"Is it contagious?"
"Can it be reversed?"
"Why us?"
Aris held up her hands. "One at a time, please. I need to run tests, gather data..."
"Data." The word came from the older man by the fire. He stood, moving with a stiffness that seemed out of place among these superhumans. "We're not data. We're people."
"I know that," Aris said gently. "But understanding the science might help us."
"Will it help my daughter?" The man's voice broke. "They took her. Said I was a danger. She's eight. Her name is Chloe."
The meadow went quiet. The wind whistled through passes. In that silence, Kael understood what bound these people together wasn't just their abilities—it was loss.
Leila stepped forward. "We're working on finding family members. But first, we survive. Dr. Thorne, if you can tell us anything, now is the time."
Aris looked at the faces around her—hopeful, desperate, angry, scared. She set down her pack, withdrew her tablet and portable sequencer. "I need a volunteer for a full workup. Blood, tissue, cognitive tests."
"I'll do it." Kael sat on a nearby log.
As Aris prepared her equipment, the others gathered in a semicircle. Erika brought over a folding table. The teenage boy produced a surprisingly clean cloth from his pack. They were hungry for knowledge, for any thread of understanding.
Aris drew blood, the vial filling dark red. She placed a drop under the portable microscope, connected it to her tablet. The image projected—Kael's cells, magnified a thousand times.
"Look," she said softly.
The cells were... wrong. Or right, depending on perspective. They were denser, the membranes thicker. And there, in the nucleus, tiny structures glowed with faint bioluminescence.
"Mitochondria are hyper-efficient," Aris murmured, more to herself than anyone. "And these... these are new organelles. I've never seen anything like them."
She ran the sequencer, the machine humming softly. The crowd watched, barely breathing. After ten minutes, results began scrolling on her tablet.
"Telomerase activity off the charts," she read. "Myostatin production negligible. And this gene cluster..." She zoomed in. "It's a master regulator. It's not human. Not entirely."
"What is it then?" Leila asked.
"It's... everything. Reptilian regenerative pathways. Avian lung efficiency. Crustacean biomineralization. It's like a greatest hits album of durability from across the animal kingdom, spliced into our genome." She looked up, eyes wide. "This wasn't random mutation. This is designed. Or at least, directed."
The word hung in the thin mountain air.
"Directed by who?" Erika asked.
"Evolution doesn't have a designer," Aris said, but her voice lacked conviction. "But sometimes environmental pressure creates convergent solutions. Radiation? A virus? Something triggered this latent code in our DNA."
Kael flexed his hand, watching tendons move beneath skin. "Can you tell how long..."
"How long you'll live?" Aris scrolled through data. "The models are theoretical, but... if cellular decay is reduced by a factor of ten, and regeneration remains constant..." She did calculations in her head, her face going pale. "Four hundred years. Minimum."
A collective intake of breath. Some people sat down heavily. Others stared at their hands as if seeing them for the first time.
"Four hundred years," whispered the man who missed his daughter. "I'll outlive her grandchildren."
The tragedy of it hit Kael then—not the gift of years, but the burden of watching everything you love turn to dust. He thought of his mother in Madrid, already in her sixties. He would watch her age and die while he remained young. The thought was a physical pain.
Aris continued, voice clinical to mask her own awe. "Strength is harder to quantify, but based on muscle fiber density and neural efficiency..." She looked at Kael. "You could probably lift a small tank. Maybe a hundred tons with training."
Erika laughed, a short, sharp sound. "What do we do with that? Join a circus?"
"We survive," Leila said again, but her voice had changed. The reality was settling on all of them. "We learn. We adapt."
"And then?" asked the teenage boy. He had a French accent. "We hide in mountains forever?"
"No," Kael said. He hadn't meant to speak, but the word came out firm. "We build. We show them we're not monsters."
"Show who?" Erika gestured vaguely downhill, toward civilization. "The ones who want to lock us up? Study us? Fear us?"
"Yes," Kael said. "And anyone else who'll listen."
Aris watched him, seeing the construction worker transform into something else—a leader, or the seed of one. She thought of history, of how new branches of humanity had always been met with fear and violence. She thought of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and how only one remained.
Her tablet chimed. An alert she'd set up before leaving Geneva—a news aggregator for keywords. She opened it, and her blood ran cold.
"Everyone," she said quietly. "You need to see this."