Every single gaze converged upon Lucas Hill.
On his screen, the lines of freshly extracted code were still dancing with their final characters before coming to a complete halt. Lucas Hill pushed the frame of his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his fingers still gliding across the keyboard as if he himself did not dare to believe what he had just touched.
"Within that pile of locked data..." Lucas Hill spoke, his voice deepening, "...there is an incredibly bizarre list, named Special Surveillance Subjects."
He maximized the file, and rows of stark white text appeared against the pitch-black background, all of them completely devoid of real names. There were only cold sequences of code numbers arranged in chronological order. The vast majority of the codes were accompanied by brief annotations: Processed, Transferred to Stage 4, Surveillance Ceased per Special Directive. However, there was a single, solitary line highlighted in glaring red.
"Guardian-17."
