Chapter 6

The space warped, and Aislinn dropped perfectly onto the dusty floor of her D-Block dorm room.

She glanced down at the terminal on her wrist. Only three days had passed in the real world.

Aislinn walked over to the cracked mirror in the corner. She wiped the grime away with her thumb and stared at her reflection.

The girl looking back had skin like porcelain. The scars from the gene extraction, the sickly pallor of her past life-all of it was gone.

She slowly clenched her right hand into a fist. She could feel the dark matter and Genesis particles surging through her veins, a terrifying, heavy power waiting to be unleashed.

A faint, desperate hiss came from the shadows near the floorboards.

Aislinn's eyes snapped to the corner. Her body dropped into a flawless combat stance instantly. She locked onto a pile of scrap metal beneath the air vent.

She walked over and grabbed the edge of a hundred-pound steel plate. She flipped it over with one hand, not even straining a muscle.

Coiled underneath was a bio-synthetic viper. Its scales were a deep, luminescent blue, but they were torn and bleeding. It wasn't a stray. It was a rare, lethal assassination specimen, secretly planted in this abandoned room by Gayla's cronies to finish the job if the surgery didn't kill her. But the harsh environment of the D-Block had degraded its synthetic organs, and it was dying.

The viper felt the sudden exposure. It reared back, baring its dripping fangs, ready to strike in a final act of defiance.

Aislinn didn't flinch. She extended her index finger. She forced a single drop of her own blood-thick with golden Genesis particles-to bead on her fingertip.

The viper froze mid-strike. Its biological instincts screamed at the overwhelming, intoxicating power radiating from that single drop of blood.

It slowly lowered its fangs. It slithered forward, its tongue flicking out to gently lick the golden blood from her skin.

The reaction was instantaneous. The viper's torn scales shed, replaced by flawless, armored blue plates. Its vertical slit eyes sparked with a new, terrifying intelligence.

The snake slithered up Aislinn's arm, wrapping securely around her wrist, nuzzling her pulse point. The biological contract was sealed.

Aislinn's lips curved into a cold smile. She stroked the smooth scales. "I'll call you Phantom."

BANG.

The heavy metal door of her dorm room buckled inward with a deafening crash.

The biometric scanner flashed a frantic red. The security alarm started screaming.

Aislinn's eyes went dead. Phantom instantly flattened itself, shifting its color to mimic a dull blue metal bracelet around her wrist.

BOOM.

A high-frequency kinetic blade sliced straight through the center of the reinforced door. The metal shrieked as the blade carved a massive hole.

The door collapsed inward in a cloud of dust. Sterling Prescott-Vaughn stepped through the wreckage. He gripped the vibrating kinetic blade, his face twisted in pure, hateful rage.

Sterling looked up and saw Aislinn standing there, completely unharmed. His eyes widened in absolute shock. "You're not dead?"

Aislinn looked at the humming blade in his hand. Her eyes filled with mocking pity. "I designed that blade for your birthday last year. And you use it to cut down my door?"

Sterling bared his teeth, raising the weapon. "You vicious bitch! You almost killed Gayla!"

He lunged forward with a roar. He swung the kinetic blade in a vicious arc, aiming straight for Aislinn's collarbone. The high-frequency vibrations screamed through the air.

A split second before the metal touched her skin, Aislinn raised her right hand.

She didn't activate a shield. She didn't dodge. She simply reached out and pinched the air right around the blade with her bare index and middle fingers. A concentrated, localized bio-electromagnetic field erupted from her fingertips. The intense pulse instantly inverted the weapon's frequency.

Sterling's eyes nearly bulged out of his skull.

The kinetic vibrations violently clashed against her invisible resonance field, burning out the internal motor. The blade stopped dead in her grip, letting out a pathetic whine before falling completely silent.