Chapter 1 DRIFT ABOVE THE WASTELAND

New Kyoto floated like a fantasy above a dying planet.

Lifted above most of its inhabitants, magnetic arrays older than most of them hold a tangle of arc-light towers and sweeping terraces aloft in the sulfur-laced stratosphere. Below, the once-blue Earth is sprawled in ruin, fractured, overrun by nature too strange to name. Riko Ayane stared down from the Skyplate sector balcony of her lab with the chilly indifference of a person taught to view a world in data points rather than dust.

She said, seeing the brown clouds whirling like bruises, blackened gusts swaying upward, turning the skies to ash. Still, from up here it felt like a long-ago memory-nature's fury at what mankind had done. She could sense the storm even if it was far away. Her bioglass flashed silent warnings, showing the system. Still, it was just another day.

She faced away from the view, the shadows thrown by the jagged horizon stretching over the cold white walls of her laboratory.

Her communication tab chimed. Her concentration was interrupted by the soft hum of the device, and she looked down at the arriving message.

SUBJECT DELIVERY: Cryo Batch #48B Cleared for gene probe testing.

She frowned. The name rang a bell. Though this one was unusual, cryo batch samples usually come out rather routinely. The genetic material was ancient, retrieved from the ruins of the pre-Collapse era, the old world.

She slid her gloves on and headed to the main table where a tiny, frost-coated case lay waiting, held by two floating drones. Riko's caught her breath in her throat. She knew that code. It was a rare specimen-a biological relic intended for the most profound research.

She saw a glass vial containing thick amber liquid inside as the case opened, and a cold wave of air followed. Suspended like a ghost in mid-flight, a strand of fragmented yet clearly intact DNA was within the fluid.

Riko zoomed in and changed her bioglass.

"Too intact," she whispered, hardly audible. "Where did they haul you up?"

The sample arrived with no origin information-only a series of numbers indicating coordinates in the Mongolian Wastes, a desolate area unaltered since the geothermal rupture of 2118.

Running a battery of diagnostic scans, Riko's fingertips raced over the terminal. The findings flashed on screen-first unstable, then stable. Her inhalation gasped in disbelief.

This ... this was not just a usual ancient gene. It was a mirror match to something she believed had disappeared long ago.

Her heart rate rose as she double-checked the DNA strand. A dormant, unlisted line buried in her genetic data-hidden, unnoticed-is Gene WZ-219. She then came to understand what it meant.

She was not considering a historical artefact. She was observing her own reflection in an old mirror.

"How...?" she murmured, her voice shaky.

As she gripped the vial, her fingers shook. Her body's reaction-and the data-did not lie. This was the gene present in her own cells.

No. This couldn't be real. But Riko came to one awful reality as the truth sank upon her. She had only found the gene guiding a lineage of superior humans long ago erased from history. The Lupomorphs.