The Invisible Entente, Tome 0,5

Chapter 1

The Introduction

How would you react if you found yourself trapped in a small, dimly lit room with a group of strangers?

Seven people, three men and four women, found themselves facing this question one previously uneventful Thursday evening. A moment earlier, they had each been engaged in their regular routines — work, homework, watching television — and then the world had changed without warning.

In a bright flash of light, they’d been teleported into a room with no doors or windows, unnaturally bright under the light of a half-dozen candles in wall sconces. The walls were brown stone, the floor just as drab, and the air stank of dampness and disuse.

“—extra fries…” one man said, caught mid-sentence, and then trailed off. He craned his neck to gauge the room — his gaze, hidden behind a pair of reflective, round sunglasses, lingered on the wooden round table in the middle of the room and the seven chairs set around it — and appeared more confused than alarmed by his situation. “Okay?”

He stood around six foot two, tall by most standards, but four inches shorter than the tallest man present. Broad-shouldered and tanned, with an easy smile, a smooth jaw line, and thick brown hair, he was the sort to stand out in a crowd. In the few moments since the group had appeared in the room, he had already drawn the attention of a heart-stopping woman in a curve-hugging green dress. Her brown eyes flashed gold as she widened her lips in a smile that showed off even white teeth. She had popped into the room mid-stride, but adjusted to the change of scenery with the ease of one accustomed to the extraordinary.

“Not the nicest view,” she said. Her smile faded as her gaze landed on a man in a gray tailored suit standing across from her. The man shared her honey-hued complexion, her thick gold-touched brown hair, and her delicate construction of fine nose and high cheekbones. Although his presence had lured the eye of another woman with short blond hair, who had tumbled to the floor on her entrance, his powers of attraction apparently had the opposite effect on the woman in the green dress. “Or the greatest company.”

“I couldn’t say,” another woman said, this one hardly more than sixteen years old, her blond curls unruly and tied into two wild pigtails. She wore jeans and a plain black T-shirt with a red-and-white plaid shirt over top. Curved white plastic stretched from behind her ears to transmitters implanted on the sides of her head, and she stared blankly into the shadows through square brown-tinted sunglasses. She’d appeared in the room on her stomach, as though she’d been lying down at her previous location. Cautiously, she crept her fingers along the uneven stone tiles and slowly rose to her feet. Unseeing, she tilted her head toward the sound of a scowling man shifting on his feet beside her, this one wide and hulking, standing at least six foot six with angry red scars down the right side of his face, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.