Back at the lab, the air was thick with the silence of the truly obsessed. Sylvester hadn’t surfaced in three days. He must have been busy retrofitting the next upgrade, or conducting war games against his own legacy. Martha moved through the outer corridors like a ghost, invisible to the security drones that had once tripped over themselves to taze anything organic. Her new body didn’t register on their sensors. She was, at last, untouchable.

  The HUD guided her to Sylvester’s office, a glass cube suspended over the main reactor floor. The door was locked with a biometric panel, but her hand opened it anyway. The system recognized her on a quantum level, bowing to her new cellular signature.

  Inside, the office was a mess of stacked hard drives, cracked monitors, and the kind of analog scribble that only a man in the grip of a great historical destiny could produce. There were equations scrawled on every surface—whiteboard, desktop, even the windows. Martha noted that most of them were wrong, or at least, not useful anymore. Sylvester was lagging behind his own creation.

  She settled into the old chair. The leather was worn in all the right places; it remembered her better than Sylvester ever had.

  The computer on the desk was already running, aglow with rows of unread emails, system logs, and a suite of security cams pointed at every inch of the facility. None of it meant anything. Martha didn’t need to touch a keyboard. She just closed her eyes and thought the right sequence of words.

  The HUD responded with an ecstatic burst of color and light:

  [NEURAL INTERFACE: ENGAGED.]

  [ACCESS LEVEL: ROOT.]

  [WELCOME, MARTHA.]

  She dove into the network. It was a universe of heat and noise, a million concurrent threads screaming for attention. Her mind parsed them effortlessly, tunneling through firewalls, leaping over protocol deadfalls, peeling away the layers of encryption like wrapping paper on an old birthday gift.

  The first treasure she found was a folder labeled [PHOENIX_ASH]. It was a catalogue of previous experiments: all the subjects, all the failures, all the sanitized autopsies. She scanned the list. There were thirty-six names before hers, each with a redacted cause of death and a snuff-film jpeg clipped to the final report. Some were still recognizable as people. Most weren’t.

  [PHOENIX_ASH_37: JAVITTS, MARTHA.]

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  [STATUS: STABLE. OBSERVE.]

  She felt a flicker of pride, and immediately crushed it.

  Next, she crawled the security grid. Sylvester had layered access like an old-school paranoid, each system hardwired to a separate air-gapped machine. Martha sniffed out the backdoors, the logic bombs, the DNA-locked kill switches. She planted her own in every terminal, every critical node—a hydra of contingency plans, ready to be triggered by a single word.

  The HUD pinged a new status:

  [ADMIN PRIVILEGES: ASSUMED.]

  [SECURITY OVERRIDE: TOTAL.]

  Martha let herself bask in the god-mode rush for a second, the way she used to linger in the afterglow of a well-argued thesis. Then she got to work.

  She cloned every file, every recording, every whisper of Sylvester’s research into a partitioned, offsite vault. She deleted the logs of her own intrusion, set up a slow-burn worm to erase all traces of her existence from the public-facing database, and then began composing a message.

  She thought about who to send it to. Not the authorities—she didn’t trust them, and anyway, her new body was probably classified as contraband. Not any of the other scientists on Sylvester’s payroll; they were all too compromised, too eager to ride the comet into whatever black hole Sylvester was aiming for.

  There was only one person who might care enough, and hate Sylvester enough, to do something. Martha didn’t even know if Helen Raynor was still alive, or still in the city, but the HUD had already guessed the answer:

  [RAYNOR, HELEN. LAST KNOWN LOCATION: U OF C FACULTY RESIDENCE. ACCESSIBLE.]

  Martha drafted the message, her new mind parsing a thousand drafts before she typed a word:

  Helen—

  It’s Martha. He did it. I’m alive, but not myself. I am the experiment now. Please help me. Please hurry.

  —M.

  She embedded coordinates, access codes, a full dump of the research files. The HUD handled the encryption, packaging the entire thing in a quantum envelope that would self-destruct if anyone but Raynor opened it.

  She hit SEND. The HUD flashed:

  [DELIVERY CONFIRMED.]

  At the same instant, she heard footsteps in the hall—Sylvester, moving with the hurried, offbeat cadence of a man who’d just had a very good, or very bad, idea.

  She powered down the monitors, wiped the console clean, and ducked into the shadow behind the office door.

  Sylvester entered, talking to himself. He was rehearsing a speech, or maybe an apology, but his voice was jittery, almost giddy.

  He sat at the desk, eyes bright, and started typing. Martha watched over his shoulder as he brought up a camera feed—her, walking the corridors, her, in the alleyways, her, tearing through Low Town like a heat-seeking missile. He played the clips over and over, head bobbing with manic delight.

  She could have killed him right then. Snapped his neck, caved in his skull, dropped him through the glass and into the heart of his own ugly machine. She didn’t.

  Instead, she waited, patient, letting the rage simmer into something finer and more lethal.

  When Sylvester finally looked up, saw her reflection in the glass, he jerked like a startled rat. “Martha,” he said. “You’re back.”

  She stepped out of the shadow, smiling with teeth she no longer recognized.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  The HUD queued up a hundred possible outcomes, each more glorious than the last.

  She chose the one that hurt him the most.