The city was still half-asleep when Lena left Adrian's penthouse. Dawn painted the skyline in bruised pinks, but her mind was far from calm. Every sound—traffic, footsteps, wind—echoed inside her skull like fragments of a dream she couldn't wake from.
Her pulse felt strange. Too loud. Too fast. Too alive.
She reached the edge of the bridge that overlooked the lower district and pressed her hand to the rail. The metal was warm, but beneath her skin the faint silver glow pulsed again, brighter than before.
> "Stop," she whispered to herself. "Stop it."
The glow didn't stop. It spread, following her veins like living light.
Suddenly, flashes came—violent, unstoppable. A hallway engulfed in fire. A child crying. Adrian's voice calling her name through the smoke. And then a detail she had never seen before: a figure standing behind Marcus Blackwood during the experiment.
Not Victor.
Her.
The older version of herself.
---
She staggered back, gasping. The world around her blurred and bent for a heartbeat, as if reality itself had flinched. A nearby lamp post flickered, the light stuttering in rhythm with her racing heart.
"Lena!"
She turned. Adrian was there, breathless, rain-soaked, eyes wild from searching.
"You shouldn't have followed me," she said.
"You shouldn't be out here," he replied. "The serum's accelerating. If you don't stabilize soon—"
"I saw something," she interrupted. "Not a memory. A loop. I was there in the lab. Older. Watching myself."
Adrian's face paled. "Temporal bleed-through. The serum's linking neural recall with external perception—it's rewriting the physical timeline."
She blinked at him. "English, Adrian."
"It means the past isn't just replaying inside your head anymore," he said grimly. "It's reaching out."
---
The bridge shook as a distant explosion rumbled through the industrial quarter. Adrian's phone lit up: Safehouse 4 compromised.
"They found us again," he muttered.
"Maybe they didn't have to find us," Lena said quietly. "Maybe I'm leading them without realizing it."
He looked at her sharply. "Don't start blaming yourself."
"But it makes sense," she said. "Victor doesn't need trackers if I'm the beacon."
Before he could respond, another flash seized her mind. She dropped to her knees, clutching her head as the world dissolved into light.
---
Flash —
She stood in a sterile room bathed in blue glow. Marcus Blackwood and Victor Hale argued beside a containment chamber. Inside it, a girl—herself—lay unconscious.
Marcus shouted, "She's synchronizing! The serum's finding its source!"
Victor replied coldly, "Then finish it. End the experiment before she overwrites the data."
Marcus turned toward him. "You don't understand. If she stabilizes, she could rewrite everything we've done. Every lie we told."
Victor's reply was ice. "Then we make sure she never stabilizes."
The flash fractured; sound became fire, light became pain.
---
Reality snapped back.
Adrian held her, shouting her name, but his voice sounded far away. Blood trickled from her nose, glowing faintly silver before turning red again.
She forced the words out. "Victor… tried to kill me because I could undo the project. Marcus wanted me to survive."
Adrian's grip tightened. "That means whatever's inside you—whatever Phoenix is—it can rewrite more than memory."
"It can rewrite truth," she whispered.
---
Sirens wailed in the distance. Adrian pulled her up. "We have to move."
"Where?"
"To the one place Marcus never let Victor near—the original backup lab. If we can reach it, maybe we can control this before it controls you."
Lena wiped the blood from her face, trembling. "And if we can't?"
He met her gaze, eyes fierce and tender at once. "Then we burn it all before he gets his hands on you again."
She nodded, even though fear clawed at her chest. Together they ran toward his car, the sunrise cutting through the fog like fire through smoke.
Behind them, the air shimmered faintly where she'd fallen—an after-image of the moment that shouldn't exist.
Her own silhouette lingered in the light for a heartbeat too long, then dissolved into the wind.