Nana couldn't stop crying.
She stood in front of the glass cylinder—Version 05, the one that held the Zayne she remembered most. The one who had smiled at her while she guided the blade to his heart. The one who had told her she wasn't killing him, she was setting him free.
His face was peaceful in the amber liquid. Eyes closed. Expression calm. Like he was sleeping. Like if she could just find the right way to open the cylinder, he might wake up and look at her with those hazel eyes and ask why she was crying.
But he wouldn't. He was dead. Had been dead for over a year. Preserved like a specimen in a jar while the version of him that still breathed walked the surface above, oblivious to everything happening beneath his feet.
Nana's tears fell silently, dripping off her chin and onto the cold concrete floor. She didn't bother wiping them. Didn't have the energy.
Behind her, footsteps. Measured. Unhurried.
Her parents.
She didn't turn around. Couldn't bring herself to look at them. Not right now. Not while the evidence of everything they'd done was floating in glass cylinders all around her.
"You're showing an elevated emotional response to the preserved specimens," her mother observed. Her voice carried that same clinical detachment—the tone of a researcher noting an anomaly in her data. "Particularly Version 05. The attachment bond appears stronger than projected."
"Of course it's stronger than projected," Nana said, her voice raw and broken. "You put me in a hell where the only person who ever made me feel safe kept dying in front of me. Over and over. And you WATCHED."
"The repeated attachment cycles were intentional," her mother replied, as though this were a reasonable explanation. As though engineering someone's heart to break repeatedly was simply another variable in an experiment. "We needed to understand how the specimen's aether core responded to sustained emotional trauma. The data was invaluable."
Nana finally turned.
Her mother stood there with her tablet, her white coat pristine, her expression as calm and composed as it had been at breakfast last week when she'd kissed Nana's forehead and told her to be careful.
Her father stood beside her, hands clasped behind his back. Watching. Evaluating. The way he always watched—like everything in front of him was a problem to be solved, an equation to be balanced.
Two people Nana had called Mom and Dad for twenty-one years. Two people she had trusted completely. Two people who had tucked her in at night and made her lunch and cheered at her hunter graduation ceremony.
Two people who had spent those same twenty-one years monitoring the weapon they'd built inside her body.
"Why?" The word came out as barely a whisper, but it carried everything. Every birthday. Every bedtime story. Every moment she'd believed she was loved by the people who had raised her. "Why did you make this? Why are you DOING this?"
Her father spoke. His voice was measured, controlled—the voice of a man who had rehearsed this explanation many times, who had considered every possible reaction and prepared for each one.
"The Wanderers are growing stronger," he said. "Every year, their numbers increase. Every year, they become more difficult to contain. The current hunter force—skilled as they are—will not be sufficient to protect the civilian population when the next major incursion occurs. And it will occur. The data is clear."
He paused, letting the weight of that settle.
"Standard humans cannot fight what's coming. Not effectively. Not sustainably. We need something more. Something that can survive what would kill a normal person. Something that can fight at a level no amount of training could achieve." His gaze fixed on Nana with the same evaluative intensity she'd seen a thousand times before—but now she understood what it meant. "Something like you."
"So you created me," Nana said flatly.
"We enhanced you. The base was human—your genetics are fundamentally human. But we added capabilities that no natural human could possess. The skeletal reinforcement. The metabolic enhancement. The accelerated cellular regeneration. The aether core."
"And Avalon was the test."
"Avalon was the proving ground," her mother corrected, making another note on her tablet. "We needed to observe how the enhancements performed under genuine survival pressure. Controlled laboratory conditions couldn't replicate the kind of stress that produces meaningful data. The subjects needed to truly believe their lives were at stake. Needed to truly fight for survival."
"People DIED."
"People die every day from Wanderer attacks," her father said, and there was no guilt in his voice. None. Just the cold pragmatism of a man who had weighed the cost and found it acceptable. "At least their deaths served a purpose. Their suffering generated the data that will eventually protect millions."
Nana stared at them. At the two people who had raised her. Who had pretended to love her. Who had built a hell and thrown innocent people into it and called it science.
"You want to make more specimens," she said. The words tasted like bile. "Like me. But better."
Her mother nodded, completely unbothered by the horror in Nana's expression. "The program requires expansion. You are a single specimen. Effective, certainly—our most successful creation by a significant margin. But a single specimen is not a sustainable force. We need multiple enhanced individuals. Male specimens, preferably. Taller. Stronger in raw physical terms. And intellectually superior—capable of strategic thinking during combat, not just reactive fighting."
She glanced at the glass cylinders behind Nana. At the five versions of Zayne floating in their amber suspension.
"Dr. Li represents an ideal genetic baseline for the next generation of specimens," her mother continued. "His natural combat instincts, his ice evol capability, his cognitive function under extreme stress—all exceptional. Combined with the enhancement protocols we developed for you, the resulting specimen would be—"
Nana's blood ignited.
She moved before the sentence was finished. Before anyone in the room had time to register the shift from broken grief to absolute, white-hot fury.
Her target was the first cylinder—Version 01. The Zayne frozen mid-vampire transformation, his body mottled with grey-white discoloration, preserved at the exact moment of his first death.
Nana's foot connected with the glass at full aether core output.
The cylinder shattered.
Not cracked. Not fractured. Shattered—exploding outward in a spray of glass and amber liquid that drenched everyone within three meters. The force of the impact sent a visible shockwave rippling through the chamber, cracking the concrete floor and rattling the equipment mounted on nearby walls.
For one frozen second, absolute silence.
Then the vampire moved.
Version 01 of Zayne—the one that had been frozen mid-transformation, its body caught between human and monster—uncurled from the shattered remains of its cylinder. The amber liquid that had preserved it dripped from its body as it rose. Its eyes opened.
Red. Completely, utterly red. No hazel. No warmth. Just the predatory hunger of a creature that had been trapped in suspended animation for over a year and was now, suddenly, free.
It moved like the vampires Nana remembered from Avalon—fast, fluid, utterly lethal. Its first strike took out the nearest soldier before anyone had time to draw a weapon. The man went down with a sound that suggested his throat had been opened.
Chaos erupted.
Alarms blared. Red emergency lights flooded the chamber, painting everything in pulsing crimson. Soldiers surged forward with weapons drawn—evol-dampening rounds, stun devices, the specialized ammunition designed to handle creatures exactly like this.
The vampire ignored them all.
It was faster than anything they'd trained for. Faster than anything they'd expected from a preserved specimen. The enhancement protocols that Nana's parents had spent decades perfecting—the accelerated regeneration, the heightened physical capabilities—had been passed on to the rebirth cycle's creatures as well. Version 01 wasn't just a vampire. It was an enhanced vampire. A weapon turned loose.
A second soldier went down. Then a third. The vampire moved through the chamber like water through cracks, finding every gap in the soldiers' formation and exploiting it with brutal efficiency.
Two of the soldiers managed to grab Nana—pulling her back from the chaos, restraining her before she could shatter another cylinder. She fought them on instinct but her attention was fixed on the vampire, watching it tear through the facility's security forces with a detached, cold satisfaction.
*Good,* something inside her thought. *Let it burn.*
The vampire killed ten soldiers before the specialized team brought it down—a coordinated strike from six shooters with evol-dampening rounds that finally destabilized the creature's energy enough for it to dissolve.
The chamber fell silent again. The alarm continued to blare, but no one moved to silence it. Everyone was staring at the aftermath—at the bodies, at the shattered cylinder, at the small hunter woman being held by two soldiers who looked genuinely terrified of her.
Nana met their eyes without flinching.
"One kick," she said quietly. "That's all it took. One kick and your glass prison broke like it was made of paper."
The soldiers tightened their grip but said nothing.
Around the chamber, the remaining scientists and soldiers exchanged looks that carried a new kind of fear. They had always known Specimen 21 was strong. Had documented her capabilities extensively, had designed containment protocols specifically for her enhanced physiology.
But seeing it demonstrated—seeing a single strike shatter reinforced containment glass that was supposed to hold creatures far more powerful than any human—that was different. That was the kind of data that changed threat assessments.
That was the kind of data that made people afraid.
The soldiers dragged Nana back toward the observation rooms. She went without fighting this time—not because she'd given up, but because she was already thinking ahead. Already calculating. Already planning.
As they passed through the corridors, she began banging on the walls. Not trying to break through—the walls were solid stone reinforced with dampening fields. Just banging. Rhythmically. Persistently. Making noise. Making herself impossible to ignore.
"Shut her up," one of the soldiers said to the other.
"How? We can't sedate her—the dampening field isn't strong enough to—"
"Then just get her to the rooms. Faster."
They moved quickly, half-dragging her through the corridor. Behind them, the facility buzzed with the aftermath of the vampire incident—cleanup crews, damage assessments, revised security protocols being shouted down hallways.
And in the control room, Captain Jenna watched it all on her monitors.
Watched the vampire tear through her soldiers. Watched Nana's cold fury as she'd shattered the cylinder. Watched the scientists scramble to reassess their containment protocols.
And on another screen—the external surveillance feed from the forest above—she watched something else entirely.
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.
Zayne stood at the edge of the forest where the hiking trail began.
Frost was spreading beneath his feet.
He couldn't stop it. Hadn't been able to stop it since he'd driven here—since the moment he'd realized Nana wasn't answering, wasn't at home, wasn't anywhere he could find her. The ice evol that had first manifested during their kiss months ago was responding to his emotional state with an intensity that terrified him.
The ground around his boots was white. A thin layer of frost that crunched with each step, spreading outward in crystalline patterns that followed the moisture in the earth. His breath came out in visible clouds despite the mild evening temperature.
He was panicking. He knew he was panicking—could feel it in the way his thoughts kept fragmenting, in the way his hands shook, in the way the ice kept spreading no matter how hard he tried to breathe through it.
Nana was missing. Had been missing for hours. Had gone into this forest—this specific forest that he knew was full of surveillance cameras—and hadn't come back.
Something had happened to her.
Something connected to the cameras. To the surveillance network. To whatever had been watching her fight in this exact location for months.
Zayne moved deeper into the forest, following the same path they'd taken together. His footsteps left frost in his wake—a trail of white spreading across the dark earth like a wound.
He didn't have a plan. Didn't know what he was looking for. Just knew that Nana was here somewhere, or had been here, and that standing at the hospital waiting for information he wasn't going to get was not something he could do anymore.
The forest was dark. Evening had fallen while he'd been driving, searching, calling, trying desperately to find any trace of the woman he loved. The canopy above blocked what little moonlight existed, leaving him navigating by the faint glow of his phone's flashlight and the blue-white light of the frost spreading from his own body.
He found the first camera easily now—he knew what to look for. The tiny lens, camouflaged against the bark, its indicator light blinking in the darkness.
Zayne looked at it for a long moment.
Someone on the other end of that camera was watching him right now. Could see him standing in the forest, covered in frost, searching for the woman he loved.
Could see the way his hands were shaking.
Could see the fear in his eyes.
Zayne stared directly into the lens. Held its gaze the way he'd hold a patient's gaze during a difficult diagnosis—steady, direct, refusing to look away.
Then he raised his hand.
Ice crystallized in his palm—not the uncontrolled frost that had been spreading from his body since he'd arrived. This was deliberate. Focused. A sharp, lethal shape that formed with the precision of someone who had been unknowingly practicing this his entire life, guided by instincts that his conscious mind couldn't explain.
An arrow. Made entirely of ice. Its point razor-sharp, its shaft solid enough to fly true.
Zayne aimed at the camera.
The arrow left his hand with a speed that surprised even him—launching from his palm like it had been fired from a weapon, crossing the distance in less than a second.
It struck the camera dead center.
The lens shattered. The small device sparked once, twice, and went dark. Destroyed.
On the monitoring screen inside the facility, Captain Jenna watched the feed go black.
She didn't move for a long moment. Just stared at the dead screen, her expression unreadable.
Then she turned to the scientist beside her—one of the younger ones, the woman with sharp eyes who had been cataloguing Nana's emotional responses.
"The doctor," Jenna said quietly. "He just destroyed one of our surveillance units."
"With an ice evol," the scientist confirmed, her eyes wide. "That level of precision and power output—Captain, his readings are off the charts. The evol manifestation alone—"
"I know what it means." Jenna's voice was flat. Final.
She turned back to the bank of monitors—the ones still showing feeds from other cameras in the forest. Zayne was already moving toward the next one, another ice arrow forming in his hand, frost still spreading from his boots with every step.
He was coming.
And he was looking for a way in.
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To be continued.