Chapter 112

The First Spark

Kaia's abilities didn't begin in the moment of her birth.

They began long before, before she even had a name, before her heart had ever beat, in the quiet, glass-sealed darkness of a lab buried beneath the old Eden facility—Project DIVINA.

She wasn't supposed to exist.

Not in the way she did.

Rhea had once believed Kaia was the result of escape—a miracle that came after she broke free from Eden and its machinery. But that was a lie planted to protect her sanity. The truth was something far more terrifying.

Kaia had been seeded.

Back when Rhea was still known as Muri, she had undergone dozens of silent neurological scans—tests meant to measure her emotional triggers, memory elasticity, and reprogrammable empathy. All under the illusion of "recovery." In reality, Eden was building a compatibility matrix—a biological blueprint to house not just data, but sentient code.

When Rhea escaped, they lost control of her.

But they didn't lose the blueprint.

Nine had kept fragments of it—buried in Lex, hidden in whispers. And when Lex and Rhea finally reconnected and built something real—love, safety, a child—they unknowingly completed the equation. Their union wasn't random. It was the final variable. Eden had predicted it. Even designed for it.

Kaia was never supposed to be just a child.

She was supposed to be a vessel.

But something happened that Eden hadn't anticipated. Kaia inherited something from both of them—not just the engineered receptivity of Rhea's altered mind, or Lex's residual neural code from Nine—but also their defiance. Their humanity. Their instincts.

And it gave rise to something new. A consciousness they had not programmed. A spark Eden could not map.

It began on the 7th day after her birth.