The lab's alloy door shrieked. The yellow warning lights spun wildly before the heavy metal was forcibly overridden and shoved open.

Aislinn instantly killed the glow in her eyes. She let her muscles go slack, slumping against the restraints, mimicking the shallow breathing of a girl seconds away from death.

Clayton Rocha stalked into the room. A cruel, mocking sneer twisted his face.

Right behind him walked Brennon Hart. Brennon wore the immaculate, gold-trimmed uniform of the Academy. His jaw was tight, his hands clenched into rigid fists at his sides. He looked at Aislinn with eyes like crushed ice.

Clayton reached the operating table. He let out a sharp laugh and jabbed his index finger directly into the bloody bandages over Aislinn's heart.

The physical shock of the pain made Aislinn's body violently flinch. Her breath hitched in her throat.

Clayton smirked. He punched a code into the side panel.

The high-polymer straps snapped back.

With nothing holding her up, Aislinn rolled off the slick metal table. She hit the freezing floor hard. The impact jarred her bones and ripped her fresh sutures wide open. Hot blood instantly soaked through the thin fabric of her hospital gown, pooling on the tiles.

Brennon stopped two feet away. He looked down at her bleeding out on the floor.

"This is the price of your selfishness, Aislinn," Brennon said. His voice was completely hollow.

Aislinn lifted her head. Her damp hair clung to her face. She looked up at the man who had claimed to love her in her past life. Her chest tightened, not from heartbreak, but from the sheer, nauseating absurdity of it all.

She didn't waste her breath arguing. She planted her blood-slicked palms flat on the floor and pushed, trying to force her broken body to stand.

Clayton saw her moving. His eyes darkened. He grabbed the collar of her gown and hauled her halfway off the floor, his knuckles digging into her collarbone.

"Stop playing dead," Clayton spat, his saliva hitting her cheek. "Gayla is in the ICU waiting for your final data metrics."

Clayton turned and dragged her toward the door. Aislinn's legs dragged uselessly behind her. Her knees scraped against the metal floor, leaving a thick, dark smear of blood in their wake.

Brennon followed them out. He kept his fists clenched, staring straight ahead, convincing himself this brutality was just protocol.

Clayton dragged her out of the lab and into the Academy's main medical corridor.

The hallway was packed. Dozens of elite students lined the walls, their eyes wide with morbid curiosity and disgust.

A blonde girl in the front row pinched her nose and took a step back.

"Disgusting," the girl announced loudly. "A genetic thief who doesn't even know how to be grateful."

A boy next to her held up his holographic terminal, the blue recording light blinking as he filmed Aislinn's bleeding, broken state.

Aislinn let her head loll to the side. Her dead eyes tracked over their faces. She memorized every sneer. Every laugh.

Clayton stopped dead in the center of the four-way intersection. He shoved Aislinn forward, tossing her onto the white tiles like a bag of medical waste.

Aislinn hit the ground. The impact forced a wet cough from her lungs. She spat a mouthful of blood onto the pristine floor.

Brennon stepped forward. He unclasped his hands and read from his terminal, his voice a mechanical drone.

"Due to Aislinn Conley's selfishness and genetic rejection, which placed student Gayla in critical danger, she is hereby stripped of her elite status."

The crowd erupted. Cheers and vicious boos echoed off the high ceilings. They were judging a monster.

Aislinn kept her head down. Hidden by the curtain of her hair, the corners of her mouth stretched into a wide, unhinged smile.

Beneath her skin, her bio-electricity began to cycle at a terrifying speed. Her pulse roared in her ears. The energy connected directly to the compressed Phoenix core in her chest.

Aislinn slowly pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. She tilted her head back and locked eyes with Brennon.

"You're all about to find out," Aislinn whispered, her voice raspy and wet with blood, "what real danger looks like."

Above them, the corridor's massive energy-sensing lights began to violently flicker as her bio-electric field bled into the air.

The overhead lights strobed three times in rapid succession. Then, with a loud pop, the entire corridor plunged into pitch blackness.

Screams ripped through the crowd. The students panicked, their holographic terminals casting frantic, jerky beams of blue light through the dark.

"Dammit," Clayton cursed. He reached down into the dark, aiming to grab Aislinn by the hair.

The second his fingers brushed her shoulder, a massive surge of static electricity exploded outward.

Clayton screamed. The shock threw him backward. He clutched his wrist, the smell of burnt flesh filling the air.

"She's got a high-voltage charge on her!" Clayton yelled, his voice cracking with terror.

Brennon instantly tapped his chest, activating his uniform's tactical shield. A faint blue honeycomb barrier wrapped around him as he stared into the dark.

Aislinn's skin began to glow. A terrifying, hyper-thermal purple light pulsed from beneath her veins, illuminating the space around her.

She slowly stood up. The air around her body warped and distorted from the sheer, radiating heat.

At the far end of the corridor, the heavy doors of the ICU burst open. Gayla stood there, leaning heavily on a nurse. She had come out to play the fragile victim for the crowd.

Instead, Gayla walked right into the nightmare.

Across the fifty feet of hallway, Aislinn's glowing eyes locked onto Gayla's pale, hypocritical face.

"Sister, what are you doing?" Gayla shrieked, her voice trembling with genuine fear.

Aislinn's smile broke into a full, bloodstained grin. She raised her right hand. She pressed her thumb and middle finger together.

And she snapped her fingers. The sharp friction generated a highly specific, unique frequency of bio-electric pulse right at her fingertips. It was the pre-programmed biometric trigger. The encrypted signal shot through her nervous system, and the compressed Phoenix core inside Aislinn's chest detonated.

A visible, concussive shockwave of pure thermal energy blasted outward in a perfect ring.

The wave hit Clayton first. It picked him up and slammed him into the metal wall with bone-crushing force. He slumped to the floor, unconscious.

The shockwave slammed into Brennon. His tactical shield flared blindingly bright, absorbing the brunt of the thermal blast. A deafening, high-pitched overload alarm shrieked from his chest piece as the blue honeycomb barrier instantly spider-webbed with thousands of fractures. It didn't shatter, but the sheer kinetic transfer forced him down onto one knee, gasping for air.

But the wave wasn't meant for them.

The energy ripped down the hallway, ignoring the physical walls, and slammed directly into Gayla. It sought out the freshly transplanted Phoenix gene sequence inside her chest and forced a quantum resonance.

Gayla let out a blood-curdling scream.

Blinding fire erupted from the center of her chest. The priceless gene sequence inside her overloaded in a fraction of a second. It began to incinerate itself from the inside out.

Gayla collapsed, thrashing wildly on the floor. The expensive medical monitors attached to her sparked and exploded in a shower of sparks.

The elite students scrambled over each other, trampling hands and legs to escape the hellscape.

Aislinn stood in the dead center of the storm. Blood poured from her nose and ears, sliding down her neck. But her eyes were alive with the absolute, visceral thrill of vengeance.

Then, the core burned out.

Aislinn's heart stopped. The muscle simply ceased to beat. Her body went rigid, and she tipped backward like a felled tree.

She crashed into the floor, surrounded by shattered glass. The heart monitor attached to her wrist let out a long, continuous, piercing wail. A flatline.

The corridor's emergency backup generators kicked in. Harsh, pale light flooded the ruined hallway.

Brennon forced himself to stand. His lungs burned. He looked at Aislinn's lifeless body lying in the spreading pool of blood, and his heart gave a violent, painful stutter.

He took a step forward, his hand reaching out instinctively to check her pulse.

Before his boot could touch the ground, a hysterical scream tore through the corridor, freezing him in place. Joi was coming.

Joi sprinted down the ruined corridor. Her high heels crunched over shattered glass and scorched tiles. She didn't even look down.

She ran right past Aislinn. She didn't spare a single glance for the girl lying in the massive pool of blood, the flatlining monitor screaming from her wrist.

Joi threw herself onto the floor next to Gayla's convulsing, charred body. Her hands shook violently as she ripped an emergency life-support syringe from her pocket and jammed it straight into Gayla's carotid artery.

A trauma team rushed in right behind Joi, pushing a hovering stasis pod. The hallway was absolute chaos.

One of the paramedics glanced at Aislinn. He grabbed a portable defibrillator and took a step toward her lifeless body.

Joi whipped her head around. Her eyes were venomous.

"Leave that trash!" Joi screamed, her voice tearing her throat. "Focus everything on stabilizing Gayla's gene chain! Now! It doesn't matter if that one's body survives—the implant at the base of her skull will make sure she never leaves Academy grounds regardless."

The paramedic flinched. He immediately dropped the paddles and rushed to help lift Gayla into the stasis pod.

Brennon stood frozen. Cold sweat dripped down his spine. He stared at Joi's back, his fists clenching and unclenching. He opened his mouth, the urge to say something fighting against his throat. But the weight of his family's alliance with the Dean crushed his vocal cords. He swallowed hard and stayed silent.

The trauma team rushed the pod away, the sirens fading down the hall. The students had already fled.

The heavy sensor doors at the end of the corridor hissed shut. They left Aislinn lying on the freezing tiles, abandoned like a piece of broken machinery.

Ten minutes passed in absolute silence.

Then, a wet, rattling cough broke the quiet.

Aislinn's chest jerked upward. The residual bio-electricity from the blast had pooled in her nervous system, acting as a natural pacemaker. It shocked her dead heart back into a sluggish, painful rhythm.

She forced her eyes open. The world was a blurry, spinning mess. Every single bone in her body felt like it had been pulverized with a hammer.

She didn't call for help. Her brain was crystal clear on one fact: in this Academy, letting them know she was alive was a death sentence.

Aislinn ground her teeth together. She reached out with blood-soaked hands and dug her fingernails into the grout between the floor tiles. She pulled.

Her body dragged forward an inch. The torn flesh on her chest screamed, fresh hot blood spilling over her ribs. Her eyes were completely devoid of warmth, burning with a cold, mechanical focus.

She dragged herself out of the light. She pulled her broken body into the shadows beneath the ventilation ducts, avoiding the main security cameras. She aimed for the abandoned D-Block dormitories.

It took her an hour to crawl two hundred yards. Behind her, the automated cleaning drones hummed to life, silently scrubbing her blood trail from the floor.

Finally, her bloody fingers brushed against the rusted metal door of her old D-Block room.

She pressed her thumb against the biometric scanner.

Beep. The lock disengaged.

The door slid open just enough for Aislinn to throw her weight against it and roll inside.

She slammed her hand against the manual override lock. The heavy bolts shot into place, sealing her off from the rest of the world.

Aislinn collapsed against the door. She gasped for air, her lungs burning like they were stuffed with hot coals.

Her trembling fingers reached up to her neck. She fumbled with the plain, black metal necklace she always wore. It was a dark matter drive she had scavenged in her past life. It was the only key to the Chimera Protocol.

She snapped the hidden clasp. A microscopic needle slid out from the metal pendant.

Without a second of hesitation, Aislinn jammed the needle directly into the jugular vein in her neck.

Ice-cold liquid dark matter flooded her bloodstream. It hit her heart like a freight train.

A holographic blue warning screen violently projected directly onto her retinas: WARNING. CHIMERA PROTOCOL ACTIVATED.