Adam Bishops is not like me.

Anthony knew it upon first sight of him. The way he walked and talked, they were only subtly different, but different enough for Anthony to tell. The way he seemed to fit in with whatever mundane situation or setting was at hand. Adam was simply…human.

And Anthony knew that he himself was not. The way wind excited his senses, the way he could imagine the trees talking to him – and they would. Sometimes he could see the whole of the universe laid out in front of him sometimes, like a three-dimensional map. And numbers. Numbers and statistics everywhere.

Anthony saw everything in numbers: the height of every tree in this park, the distance from the picnic table to the lake (forty-three feet). He had counted every blade of grass in a three-foot circle seven times over in the last ten minutes. Adam had 119,347 brown hairs on his head, while Anthony himself had just over 140,000 blond ones.