Chapter Two: Sample No. 13

Leila awoke to the minty sting on her neck, bioelectrode patches clinging to her skin. Moonlight filtered through the stained glass of an abandoned church, casting a blood-red outline around the man turning a scalpel in front of her.

"Your pupils are oscillating at super frequency," the man's voice rasped like sandpaper over silk, his mechanical spider legs leaving scorch marks on the velvet chaise lounge. "Care to explain why you brought a modified T-virus to work?"

She abruptly reached for her collarbone—her wedding ring was intact, but the butterfly pendant was gone. Memories flashed back: The larvae's glowing tendrils wrapping around the necklace, and Aidan's autopsy image flickering with a 0.3-second unfamiliar scene across her retina.

"Give it back!" Leila lunged for the storage compartment at his waist, her fingers grazing his abs before freezing. Through a tear in his bulletproof vest, dark red scars were visibly regenerating cells.

The man chuckled, using a spider leg to lift her chin. "Miss Carter, your fiancé had thirteen crystals hidden in his stomach..." His spider leg suddenly turned towards the window. "For instance, the seventh one is currently melting at Brown Zoo."

An explosion and the roar of an elephant simultaneously tore through the night sky. Seizing the moment, Leila bit into his wrist; the metallic taste of blood exploded on her tongue just as the headline of a newspaper under a streetlamp three hundred meters away came into sharp focus—it was the New York Times from Aidan's funeral day.

"Surprised?" He tore off his mask, revealing the jawline she had glimpsed briefly last night at the coffee shop. "Your dynamic vision is devouring my DNA."

Sirens approached, growing louder. He pressed something cold into her palm—the sapphire pendant, its core now cracked with web-like patterns, reflecting the interface of a lab database. A voice she had never heard before, soft and tender, echoed in the background: "Survive, my butterfly."

As police cars surrounded the church, Leila noticed a silver scale embedded in her palm—a perfect match to the fragment left on the torn guard uniform shredded by Grey three days ago.