The crystals growing from Elara's cheekbone pulsed in time with the emergency lights. She pressed a petri dish against her face, wincing as blue shards clinked into the container. Under the microscope, the crystalline structures rearranged themselves into fractal patterns matching the Black Rose vines from Patient Zero's pod.
"Nanotech hybridized with organic matter," she whispered, throat constricting when the lab's automated disinfection system activated. The UV lights made her new "infection" glow like neon sapphires. Her stolen hazmat suit lay in tatters, revealing skin mapped with luminous veins converging toward her heart.
The bone-conduction headset suddenly screamed at 137Hz. Elara tore it off, but the frequency kept playing inside her skull. Zombie shadows crowded the corridor windows—not the mindless horde from before, but organized ranks moving with military precision. Their decaying fingers scratched equations on bulletproof glass:
∇⋅E=ρ/ε₀
Maxwell's equations. The foundation of electromagnetic theory. Her dead father's favorite teaching tool.
"Computer, lockdown Protocol Theta!" she ordered, backing toward the emergency elevator. The AI remained silent. All screens displayed a single pulsating symbol—a black rose encasing a double helix.
The ventilation system exhaled frost. Elara's breath crystallized mid-air as the temperature plummeted. Behind her, a voice colder than liquid nitrogen cut through the chaos:
"Your diagnostic approach lacks imagination, Dr. Sinclair."
Damien Cross stood framed in the emergency exit, tailored wool coat dusted with snow that shouldn't exist in July. His augmented right eye whirred faintly as it scanned her bioluminescent veins. Elara's stolen clearance card flew from her pocket, suspended in the -40°C air between them.
"You'll need Tier-11 authorization to survive the next containment breach," he said, frost patterns forming Celtic knots at his feet. "Fortunately, I enjoy sponsoring... curious minds."
Elara's military-issue flashlight swung toward his face. The beam refracted through his cryogenic aura, projecting prismatic equations across collapsing containment fields. She noted three critical details in the frozen heartbeat before the zombies breached:
1. Damien didn't breathe.
2. His shadow moved independently.
3. The Black Rose symbol pulsed in his left pupil.
Shattering glass drowned her response. A dozen enhanced zombies clad in tattered lab coats stormed through windows, their mutated claws scraping sparks from steel floors. Elara's body moved before her brain caught up—she grabbed the 137Hz emitter and smashed it against the wall.
The resulting sonic wave should have liquefied unenhanced zombies. These specimens simply staggered, then laughed in distorted human voices. Their leader removed its cracked goggles, revealing Damien's exact ice-blue eyes.
"Phase Two test subjects," Damien remarked, examining his gold pocket watch. "Crude but effective."
Elara's crystalline infection flared when the clone-zombies charged. Her vision split into multiple spectra—infrared showing their overheating bio-cores, ultraviolet exposing artificial tendons, and a terrifying new wavelength where Damien glowed like a neutron star.
She barely dodged a claw swipe that carved five parallel grooves in titanium walls. The clone's breath smelled of frozen blood and burnt circuitry. Elara's back hit a cryo-tank containing mutated rat corpses, their frozen faces twisted in human-like terror.
Damien sighed. "Observe."
He snapped his fingers.
Every clone-zombie simultaneously clutched their heads, ice crystals erupting from eye sockets. Elara's enhanced hearing caught the subsonic command—a frequency beyond 137Hz, transmitted through their implanted Black Rose chips. The clones collapsed into frostbitten marionettes, limbs snapping off like dead branches.
"Your resonance theory has merit," Damien said, stepping over the twitching remains. "But you're playing preschool physics in a quantum playground."
Elara's crystal-studded fist swung at his jaw. Damien caught her wrist effortlessly, his touch spreading frost patterns across her bioluminescent veins. The contact triggered a psychic avalanche—
A younger Damien screaming as scientists injected Black Rose nanites into his spine.
A nuclear reactor core blooming metallic roses.
Her own face reflected in a cryo-pod's window, three years prior.
Elara wrenched free, crashing into a specimen cabinet. Shattered vials of zombie marrow fused with her crystals, creating glowing amber armor across her bleeding arm. Damien's shadow elongated unnaturally, pinning her against the wall.
"Fascinating," he murmured, watching her makeshift exoskeleton self-repair. "The X-23 strain interacts with your biohacker implants in ways even I didn't predict."
The building shuddered. From the sublevel reactor core, a metallic roar shook dust from the ceiling. Damien's augmented eye flickered as he calculated structural integrity.
"12 minutes until collapse," he stated, tossing her a frost-covered keycard. "My underground lab has superior containment facilities. And answers about your father's final project."
Elara's blood turned to ice water. Her father's name had been erased from all databases after the "accidental" lab fire. She opened her mouth to demand answers when the floor disintegrated.
Black Rose vines exploded upward, swallowing equipment and corpses alike. Damien pulled her into the emergency elevator as the world dissolved into chaos. His leather gloves left frostbite patterns on her wrist where shadows shouldn't exist.
As the elevator descended to B23, Elara noticed three things:
1. The keycard's serial number matched her childhood home address.
2. Damien's reflection showed his skeleton glowing with the same biotech as the clones.
3. Her crystal infection was rewriting the elevator's quantum-lock code.
The doors opened to a cathedral of ice and steel. Cryo-pods lined the walls containing humanoid figures with Elara's eyes and Damien's bone structure. At the chamber's heart floated a miniature sun—a contained fusion reactor feeding energy to a massive Black Rose crystal.
"Welcome to the Garden," Damien said, his breath forming frozen roses in the air. "Where we'll cultivate humanity's evolution."
Elara's crystals resonated with the central reactor, projecting holograms of her father adjusting Damien's neural implants. The date stamp froze her blood—six months after his supposed death.
A proximity alert shattered the revelation. The elevator shaft above collapsed, releasing a tsunami of reactor-coolant mixed with zombie remains. Damien's shadow wrapped around Elara like liquid armor as the flood hit.
"Choose, Doctor," he whispered, frost forming a crown around her head. "Drown in humanity's failures, or walk with me through fire and ice."
Her crystals chose first. They grew rapidly into a protective exoskeleton, filtering the toxic sludge. Through the amber haze, Elara saw Damien walking unscathed through the radioactive deluge, his body disassembling and reforming at the molecular level.
As the coolant drained, a frozen rose grew where their shadows had touched. Damien crushed it under his Oxfords, revealing a hidden passage glowing with stolen sunlight.
"Next lesson begins now," he said, ice-blue eyes reflecting Elara's mutated form. "Try to keep up."