Fox Trott (First Book of the Shadow Series)

Chapter 1: Strangers

New places are always strange. They're filled with new people, new sights, and new smells. Sometimes, new thoughts invade the mind as a stranger treads down someone else's path. Although some places are strange, none are as strange as the ones filled with tourists. They take pictures of everything, visit the toilets where the president took a dump once, and take in every historical area like it's the place they had been lead to their entire lives. So the one time that a tourist doesn't take in every new thing like it's the last thing they'll ever see, people tend to notice.

The streets were noisy; the air shook with car horns and the non-stop babbling of urbanites as they walked fast, yet aimlessly. The door of a greyhound bus stopped on the side of the road swung open slowly. Only a single person looked out: a young girl in her early twenties. She stepped down from the bus gracefully, her eyes scanning the crowd like a nervous owl would search the ground for prey. When the strangely beautiful girl joined the mass and walked down the bustling streets, heads were bound to swivel her direction. Even though she moved down the street as everyone else did, she was alien to anyone and anything that took a moment to gaze at her.

Her long, fiery red hair hung past her thin shoulders, reaching for the ground like the roots of a tree begging for the cold soil in the boiling summer heat. Her piercing green eyes looked through everything and everyone as she searched for an escape from the crowd. As she walked past people—asking not unkindly for directions—many of them started at her firm, sing-song voice, their eyes wide as if they were deer caught in the headlights of a crashing plane.

She walked against the torrent of bodies at a quick pace, stopping for nothing except to ask questions. She slithered like a snake through the compact crowd as if she were the only one in the world with somewhere to be. She was taller than most of the mob surrounding her, which only made her high, jagged cheekbones and thin pale lips more visible in the sunlight.

As said before, she was bound to be noticed by the city-folk. Her hair alone flared through the grey of the city like a candle in a dark tunnel. But that was the least of her problems. The real trouble came from the location and time of her arrival. In the year 2187 in New York City, the last thing anyone wants is to be noticed. If anything, to be invisible in this world is to be safe.

For instance, being as invisible as the man staying two paces behind Ashlie as he watched her every move and kept an eye on her abnormally sharp nails, meant he was safe.