The blackness stretched into infinity, then shattered to the sound of roaring thunder.

Rain poured down from the black sky over the outskirts of Washington, D. C.

Seventeen-year-old Eliza Wyatt was soaked to the bone. She pressed her trembling back against a brick wall covered in gang graffiti.

Her younger sister, Jeri Wyatt, stood at the top of the concrete stairs. Jeri held an expensive black umbrella, looking down with a cold, mocking smile.

Jeri kicked a puddle of dirty water with the tip of her designer stiletto. The muddy water splashed directly onto Eliza's pale face.

Jeri sneered. She called Eliza a useless piece of trash who brought nothing but shame to the Wyatt military family. She announced that tonight was the night Eliza would finally disappear.

Three street thugs, covered in cheap tattoos, stepped forward. Spike, the leader, flipped open a switchblade. They moved closer, trapping Eliza in the narrow stairwell.

Eliza cried out. She begged Jeri to remember they were sisters, pleading for her life.

Jeri's eyes turned venomous. She ordered Spike to take good care of the Wyatt family's eldest daughter.

Jeri turned around. Her heels clicked elegantly against the concrete as she walked away, the sound fading into the heavy rain.

Spike laughed, a disgusting, wet sound. He lunged at Eliza, his rough hands grabbing for the collar of her soaked dress.

Survival instinct flared in Eliza's chest. She shoved Spike's chest with both hands and bolted down the stairs.

The other two thugs, Cletus and Dwayne, immediately flanked her, cutting off the sides of the stairwell.

Eliza panicked. Her foot slipped on the moss-covered concrete step. Her ankle twisted with a sharp pop.

She slammed face-first onto the stairs. The rough concrete tore the skin off her knees. Blood mixed with the rain.

Spike caught up. He grabbed a handful of Eliza's long, wet hair and yanked her backward.

Eliza screamed in pain. Her hands clawed blindly at the ground, her fingernails scraping bloody lines into the cement.

She thrashed wildly. She sank her teeth into the back of Spike's hand.

Spike cursed loudly. He threw her off with a violent shove.

The shove sent Eliza reeling. Her vision exploded with white stars as she lost her balance completely.

She fell backward. She tumbled down the steep, unrailed staircase, her body hitting the edges of the steps.

Her head struck a rusted iron pipe protruding from the wall. A sickening thud echoed in the alley.

Her body hit the bottom landing like a broken doll. Blood rapidly pooled around her head, washing away in the rain.

Spike stood at the top of the stairs. He peered down into the darkness, spat into the puddle, and assumed she was dead.

Eliza's pupils dilated. Her heartbeat stopped entirely beneath the roar of the storm.

In that exact fraction of a second, a massive, freezing current of consciousness violently forced its way into the empty shell.

The dead heart contracted with a violent, explosive beat.

Shattered neurons fired wildly. Deep within her consciousness, a fragmented memory of "Project Chimera"—a disbanded black-ops military program—exploded, its residual energy beginning to forcibly reconstruct her dying brain pathways.

The girl on the ground twitched her fingers. A drop of bloody water splashed.

Eliza's eyes snapped open. The cowardly, terrified look was completely gone. In its place was a gaze of absolute, freezing depths.

Lin, the top commander of Project Chimera, had officially awakened inside this broken body.

Eliza tried to move her right arm. A sharp, stabbing pain shot through her shoulder. The bone was fractured.

A massive wave of foreign memories crashed into her brain. Jeri's fake smile, the cold stares of the Wyatt family, the humiliation at school. The images flashed like a high-speed projector.

Eliza clenched her jaw. She forced the dizziness down, compartmentalizing the memories of the original owner. She looked down at her pale, trembling hands—hands that had never held a gun or snapped a neck. For a brief, surreal second, the name 'Lin' echoed like a ghost from a past life, distant and unreal. The top commander was dead. But in this fragile, bleeding shell, Eliza Wyatt was very much alive.

At the top of the stairs, Spike lit a cigarette. He jerked his chin at Cletus, ordering him to go down and strip the corpse of anything valuable.

Cletus splashed down the wet steps, muttering curses under his breath. He stopped next to Eliza's body.

He crouched down. He reached out his dirty hand to rip the silver necklace from Eliza's throat.

The moment his fingers brushed her cold skin, the dead girl moved.

Eliza's uninjured left hand shot out like a striking viper. Her fingers locked onto Cletus's wrist, pressing perfectly on the pulse point to numb his arm. He was off-balance, crouching, expecting a corpse—not a counterattack. His body was already in the worst possible position to defend himself.

Cletus froze. Before he could even open his mouth to yell, Eliza used his arm as leverage and thrust her hips upward.

She wrapped both her legs tightly around Cletus's neck. Using the dead weight of her own body, she twisted violently to the right. It was a textbook ground-fighting submission, executed with the precision of someone who had drilled it ten thousand times.

A crisp, sickening crack echoed in the stairwell. Cletus's cervical spine snapped. He collapsed onto her, dead before he hit the ground.

Spike and Dwayne heard the noise from above. They yelled Cletus's name, their voices tight with sudden panic.

Eliza shoved the heavy corpse off her. She reached into Cletus's pocket and pulled out his switchblade. She flicked it open with her thumb.

She couldn't outrun them with a broken ankle and fractured ribs. She couldn't overpower two armed men with one working arm. So she wouldn't fight. She would ambush.

She ignored the screaming pain in her ribs and her broken arm. She pressed her back flat against the concrete load-bearing pillar beneath the stairs, merging with the shadows.

Spike drew his knife. He and Dwayne crept down the stairs, their eyes wide with fear.

They saw Cletus's body lying in the bloody water. Both men gasped, cursing and looking wildly around the empty landing.

Dwayne turned his back to the pillar. Eliza launched herself from the darkness like a hunting leopard.

She clamped her left hand over Dwayne's mouth. Her right hand drove the switchblade across his throat without a millisecond of hesitation.

Hot blood sprayed over her hand. Eliza coldly shoved Dwayne's dying body forward, sending him crashing into Spike to block his line of sight.

Spike lost his mind with terror. He swung his knife wildly in the air, screaming.

Eliza dropped into a low slide, dodging the frantic blade. She slammed the heavy handle of her switchblade directly into the side of Spike's knee joint.

Spike shrieked and dropped to his knees.

Eliza flipped her knife in a reverse grip. She slashed upward, cleanly severing the tendons in his right wrist. His knife clattered to the concrete.

Spike clutched his bleeding wrist, howling in the rain. He looked up at Eliza as if he were staring at a demon from hell.

Eliza stood up. She looked down at him. There was zero human warmth in her eyes, only the cold calculation of a soldier.

She ripped the dry jacket off Cletus's corpse. She used her teeth and her left hand to tie her fractured right arm tightly against her torso, immobilizing the shattered shoulder.

The faint wail of police sirens drifted through the storm. Someone in the nearby apartments had called the cops.

Eliza knew this weak body was failing. She had to evacuate immediately.

She stepped over Spike's trembling body. She walked out into the freezing rain without looking back.

The rain washed the blood from her pale face. She looked up at the winding mountain road in the distance. The fire of revenge burned quietly in her chest.

Eliza clawed her way up the muddy slope. Black dirt packed tightly beneath her fingernails.

She leaned against the rough bark of an oak tree, gasping for air. Her lungs burned as if she were breathing in broken glass.

She closed her eyes. She tried to focus her mind, attempting to awaken the biological enhancement abilities from Project Chimera.

A faint resonance hummed deep in her consciousness. But the cardiovascular system of this normal, broken girl could not handle the energy surge.

Eliza suffered a sharp, agonizing spasm that tore through her chest, forcing a wet, ragged cough from her throat. The enhancement activation failed.

She let out a low, bitter laugh. She accepted the reality that she had to rely solely on this fragile, mortal shell for now.

She ripped a strip of fabric from her ruined dress. She tied it tightly around a deep gash on her thigh to stop the bleeding.

Suddenly, a low, guttural roar tore through the silence of the rainy mountain.

It was the distinct sound of high-octane fuel burning inside a V12 engine.

Eliza's eyes sharpened, her tactical mind instantly calculating the distance and direction. A vehicle meant a way out. She couldn't wander aimlessly; she had to actively secure transport. It was her only chance to survive the night.

She forced her broken body to move, tracking the acoustic signature of the engines, gritting her teeth against the pain as she crawled over the ridge.

She actively pushed aside the dense, wet bushes, seeking her extraction point. Down in the canyon, a stretch of asphalt was lit up as bright as day.

Dozens of heavily modified supercars lined up behind a starting line. Floodlights cut through the rain.

Scantily clad grid girls and frantic, wealthy heirs partied in the downpour. This was an illegal underground street race, a playground for the elite.

In the center of the crowd stood Duval Estrada. He wore a custom-tailored black dress shirt. He held a black umbrella, his expression entirely bored.

His friend, Griffin Fletcher, pointed excitedly at a modified red Ferrari. Griffin laughed loudly, taunting Duval.

Griffin bet that Duval wouldn't dare race his stock Aston Martin against a car tuned specifically for canyon runs.

Jules Mcintosh, the son of a prominent politician, pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up his nose. He smiled and added five hundred thousand dollars to the pot.

Duval exhaled a thick cloud of cigar smoke. His eyes were dead, showing no interest in the money or the thrill.

A racer covered in neck tattoos walked over. He arrogantly flipped his middle finger right in Duval's face.

Duval's eyes instantly turned to ice. He looked at the tattooed man as if looking at a corpse.

He turned his head slightly and snapped his fingers at his special assistant, Rook Valis.

Rook immediately stepped forward. He handed over a black card. Duval spoke two words, his voice devoid of emotion: "Two million."

The crowd erupted into screams. The stakes had just hit an insane level.

Duval dropped his cigar into a puddle and crushed it beneath his leather shoe. He walked toward the pitch-black Aston Martin.

Halfway up the mountain, Eliza calmly watched the scene unfold. Her eyes locked onto the black car.

Her brain processed the information like a tactical computer. She analyzed the layout of the canyon track and the performance specs of the vehicles.

She knew her body would shut down before she walked out of these woods. She had to get in that car.

Eliza hooked her left arm into a thick vine. She slid down the steep rock face, a desperate, one-sided scramble.

She slipped into the thick brush just before the first hairpin turn of the track-the most dangerous blind spot on the mountain.