The fire started in the data vaults.
By the time the security systems registered the breach, it was too late.
Vault 7 ignited first—a heatwave that cracked steel doors and shattered reinforced glass. Then Vaults 2 and 3. Liquid nitrogen leaked into the circuits, causing explosions that rocked the northern wing of the facility. Emergency lights flickered. Sirens howled. But no one was coming to help.
The lab had been designed to hide its sins, not survive them.
AERIS VALE walked down the center corridor without looking back.
She wore a hospital gown, blood at the hem. Her bare feet were slick with ash and water. Around her, the world she was born into—the machines, the experiments, the cryotanks of failed children—was crumbling.
She didn't run.
She never would again.
Behind her, Dr. Celina Vale lay on the floor of her personal chamber, blood blooming from her throat like an orchid. The scalpel still glinted in her neck, handle gripped by cold, steady fingers.
The security feeds had been erased an hour earlier. All backups fried. Bio-recognition scanners overridden. No one would know what really happened—only that a fire broke out. That the legendary Dr. Vale died in the flames. That her daughter was lost.
And the world would move on.
Just as she intended.
---
In the east wing, in a hidden observation cell, a boy—barely ten, all ribs and ragged breath—pressed his hand to the glass.
He watched Aeris walk past the chamber where they used to keep him. Where they made him kill for approval. Where he first saw her—small, voiceless, hooked up to machines she never screamed against.
He watched her walk through the fire like it belonged to her.
Lucien. That was the name he'd chosen when he escaped later. But that night, he was only Subject K-09. The forgotten one.
And as he stared at her vanishing figure, a name burned into his mind forever:
Aeris Vale.
---
Above ground, smoke curled into the night sky.
News reports buzzed. The lab's coordinates were classified, and by the time fire response teams arrived, the ground had already collapsed into a molten tomb. Journalists speculated about a gas leak. Corporate PR blamed a rogue employee. No bodies were recovered.
The world believed the experiment was over.
But one girl survived.
And she took everything with her.
The patents. The tech. The classified archives. The neural enhancement prototypes.
And every blueprint for what came next.
---
Three weeks later.
A new executive board at ValeCorp was hastily assembled. The former child heiress was declared "missing" and presumed dead. Investors wept crocodile tears and moved on. The world forgot.
But in the shadows of digital infrastructure, a ghost identity was being built.
A name.
A cipher.
A construct wrapped in human skin, too brilliant to track, too terrifying to question.
Aeris Vale wasn't missing.
She was reprogramming the world.
And when she was ready, she would return.
Not as a victim. Not even as a survivor.
"As a monarch."