Chapter 2 THE LUPOMORPH CODE

Early Riko closed the laboratory; her heart pounding and thoughts racing. She hurriedly erased her data logs and systems, so guaranteeing no evidence of her findings stayed behind. Still, her thoughts like a toxic fog the echoes of that gene fragment, the affirmation of her fear.

The city buzzed around her, oblivuous to the catastrophe gradually creeping under its skin as she passed along the sterile Skyplate sector corridors. Holo-signs cheerfully urged "BioUnity: The Future, Unmutated," and security drones glided past, Riko little paid little attention as they went about.

She soon engaged with the system back at her high-rise pod. Accessing her personal data, she retrieved her genetic history and her head sped. She examined her genome alongside the cryo-sample received. Her findings were conclusive: an exact match.

She whispered, browsing through her birth record, "How could I have missed this?" At birth, every citizen's genome was scanned, coded, catalogued. With these markers, she should have been flagged long ago. Still, here she was- untouched.

She found a post-natal scrub as she delved more. Maera Zhou, head of Bioethics and Anti-Deviancy Control, signed a mark on her genetic code. Why would someone like her-whose only mission was to observe and eradicate genetic defects-shield her?

It just didn't make sense.

Then it . The gene in question, WZ-219, was not simply a mutation. It was the code for something significantly more harmful.

Lupomorph. Designed to improve both physical and mental capacities, a military-grade gene is The men and women who received this gene line became more than humans; they were hunters created for survival in difficult post-crisis environments. Their sensitivity above anything the normal human mind could handle, their strength tremendous, and their reflexes heightened.

There was something else about them, though. The transformation. The shift. Werewolves. Before they vanished from history during the 2091 Purity Act, that was the name the public gave them. They were considered too hazardous to stay in the public eye. She also understood now that she was one of them.

But the issue still stood: why had they preserved her? And why had her genome remained undiscovered and unsearchable for so long?