Rising From Ashes: The Betrayed Queen Returns

"Don't blame me, sweetheart. Gayla's body is just too weak. She needs this sequence more than you do."

The words sliced through the sterile air before Aislinn even opened her eyes.

A blinding, surgical white light seared her retinas the second her eyelids fluttered apart. She squeezed her eyes shut, her stomach dropping into a bottomless pit. She tried to raise her hand to block the glare, but her wrists wouldn't budge.

High-polymer restraint straps bit into her skin, pinning her limbs to the freezing metal of the operating table.

A tearing, agonizing pain ripped through her chest. It felt like someone had buried a jagged piece of glass under her ribs and twisted it. Aislinn forced her chin down. Just above her heart, a crudely sutured hole wept fresh blood onto the pristine white sheets.

The heart monitor next to her head screamed in a rapid, frantic rhythm. Beep. Beep. Beep. It was the sound of massive blood loss. The sound of her dying.

Her pupils dilated. The air in her lungs turned to liquid ice.

The memories hit her like a physical blow to the skull. The torture. The Emerald Spire Academy. The way they had bled her dry in her past life until her heart gave out. Her brain rewired the information in a fraction of a second.

She was back. She had woken up on the exact day they ripped the Phoenix gene sequence from her chest.

The heavy click of a thermal lock echoing through the massive underground lab snapped her focus back to the present.

Aislinn turned her head. Her neck muscles screamed in protest. Through the sterile glass partition, she locked eyes on Joi Rocha.

Joi stood at the main console. She was staring at a glowing blue cryogenic vial with a look of pure, sickening maternal devotion. That vial held Aislinn's stolen gene sequence.

Joi felt the weight of the stare. She turned and walked over to the operating table, her high heels clicking a steady, merciless rhythm against the metal floor. She looked down at Aislinn.

Joi reached out. She meticulously adjusted the cuff of her latex medical glove, a nervous habit she used to mask her cruelty, before brushing a damp strand of hair from Aislinn's sweating forehead.

The cold latex against her skin made bile rise in the back of Aislinn's throat. Her stomach violently contracted.

She didn't cry. She didn't scream why. She just stared dead into Joi's eyes, her lips pulling back into a slow, bloodless smile. It was a smile completely devoid of sanity.

Joi flinched. The absolute deadness in Aislinn's eyes sent a visible shudder down the older woman's spine. She snatched her hand back.

To cover her sudden unease, Joi turned her back to the table.

"Cut her pain inhibitors," Joi ordered the room's medical AI, her voice stripped of all fake warmth. "We don't want the drugs interfering with her cellular regeneration."

The AI chirped compliance.

Aislinn's back arched off the table. The pain multiplied by a thousand. It exploded from the hole in her chest and shot through every nerve ending in her body like liquid fire.

She bit down on her lower lip. She bit down until the copper taste of her own blood flooded her mouth, but she refused to make a single sound. Her chest heaved, pulling in jagged breaths of sterile air.

Joi picked up the thermal case holding the blue vial. She walked toward the lab's heavy vault door.

"If you survive the night," Joi threw the words over her shoulder without looking back, "the logistics department in the lower levels will find a mop for you."

The massive alloy door slammed shut. The locking mechanisms ground into place, sealing Aislinn inside the freezing tomb.

Aislinn gasped for air. Cold sweat dripped from her chin, pooling on the metal table. But her eyes were clearer than they had ever been. They were lethal.

She closed her eyes and forced her consciousness deep into the burning wreckage of her own body. She searched the empty void where her gene sequence used to be.

There.

Hidden in the biological wasteland of her chest, she found it. A single, microscopic spark of crimson energy. The residual core of the Phoenix gene.

Aislinn grit her teeth against the tearing of her nerves. She wrapped her sheer willpower around that tiny spark.

Above her, the lab's warning lights flared a harsh yellow. The AI detected an abnormal biological energy surge.

Aislinn's eyes snapped open. A feverish, manic resolve burned in her irises. She began to force her bio-electricity to flow backward.

The restraint straps groaned under the sudden, violent spasms of her muscles. Her veins bulged against her pale skin.

If you want it so badly, Aislinn thought, her heart hammering against her ribs, I'll give you a surprise that will burn you to ash.

She compressed the residual energy tighter and tighter. She pushed it right to the edge of a catastrophic physical explosion.

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.