I don’t know how long I ran. Hours, maybe. The city’s underbelly was a maze of rust and shadows, a forgotten kingdom ruled by decay. The transformation had receded sometime during my panicked flight, leaving me shivering and human in my leather clothes. My stylish boots were gone, lost somewhere in the chaos, and my bare feet screamed with every step on the gritty pavement. Each step was a fresh reminder of how far I had fallen.

  The monster had receded, but a low growl still echoed in the back of my skull. It was a part of me now, humming in my veins. The skittering of a rat in a nearby wall sounded like nails on a chalkboard, and the air... I could smell the rust on a fence fifty feet away. It was too much, a constant flood that made the world tilt.

  I was alone. The thought of my parents, of the terror on Tessa and Cody’s faces—it was a physical pain, a blade twisting in my gut. I had to keep moving. If I stopped, the memories would catch up. If they caught up, they’d drown me.

  I finally stumbled into a zone of dead factories, their metal frames rusting against the polluted sky. This was the part of the city they didn't put on the travel brochures. This was where things came to die. Seemed fitting.

  One building seemed slightly less dead than the others. The door, a massive sheet of rusted steel, was ajar, hanging crooked on its hinges. Shelter. It wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity. The cold was starting to seep into my bones, and the animal part of my brain was screaming for a den, a place to hide.

  I slipped through the gap, my shoulder brushing against the cold, flaking metal. The inside was cavernous and dark, but it was quiet. The roar of the city muted to a distant hum. The air was stale, thick with the dust of decades.

  My eyes, still unnaturally sharp in the low light, slowly adjusted. This wasn't a factory floor. The vast space was cluttered with long tables and strange, silent equipment. Consoles with dark, dead screens. Racks of cracked glass beakers. Whiteboards covered in faded, complex equations that looked like a madman’s graffiti.

  A laboratory. Derelict and laboratory.

  My parents’ hushed voices. A containment issue. The words echoed in my head, and my skin went cold.

  I moved deeper into the lab, my bare feet silent on the dusty, concrete floor. The place was a mausoleum of dead technology. Wires snaked across the floor like metallic vines. A holographic projector lay on its side, its lens cracked. Whoever worked here had left in a hurry.

  In the center of the room was a large, metal desk, coated in a thick layer of grime. Papers were scattered across its surface, turned yellow and brittle with age. A faded, laminated ID card lay half-hidden under a pile of schematics. I picked it up, wiping the dust away with my thumb. The photo was of a man with kind eyes and a familiar, wry smile. Below the picture, a name: Dr. Finch Nova.

  My uncle.

  My heart seized in my chest. My mom’s brother. The brilliant scientist who worked for Pandora Corp. The uncle who used to sneak me candy and tell me terrible jokes. The uncle who had died in a ‘hover-car accident’ two years ago.

  What was his ID doing here?

  My eyes scanned the desk, no longer just looking, but searching. And then I saw it. Tucked away in a charging cradle, covered in dust but otherwise intact, was a wristband. It was an old piece of tech, bulky by modern standards, with a dark, rectangular screen and a single, flush button on the side. It looked like a relic, a forgotten piece of junk. But it was the only thing on the desk that didn't look broken.

  Driven by an impulse I didn't understand, I picked it up. The plastic was cool against my skin. It felt… important. I slipped it onto my wrist. It was a little loose, designed for a larger arm. My uncle’s arm.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I stared at the blank screen, my thumb hovering over the button. What was I expecting? Nothing. It was a dead piece of tech in a dead lab belonging to my dead uncle. But I had nothing else. I was out of options, out of hope.

  I pressed the button.

  For a second, nothing happened.

  Then, the screen flickered. A single pixel of blue light, struggling to life. It expanded, drawing a wavering line across the screen, followed by another, and another, forming a complex boot-up sequence that looked ancient.

  A low, electronic hum emanated from the device, and a tinny, synthesized voice crackled to life, startling me so badly I almost ripped it off my arm.

  “Powering on. System diagnostics… nominal. Chronometer reset required. Current hibernation cycle: two years, three months, and... change. A new record! Must've been one heck of a nap.”

  I stared at the wristband, my heart hammering against my ribs. It was an AI. An old one, judging by the voice synthesis, but it was working.

  “Hello? User? Is anyone out there?” the voice said, its tone relentlessly upbeat. “Or did the dust bunnies finally achieve sentience and I’m their prisoner now? Blink twice if you’re a dust bunny.”

  “I—I’m not a dust bunny,” I said, my voice raspy.

  “Oh, thank goodness! A real, live biological organism. Excellent. The name’s Handy, designated assistant for Dr. Finch Nova. But he’s probably not around, is he? Seeing as I’ve been asleep long enough to miss three generations of smartphone releases.”

  The AI’s cheeky tone was so jarringly out of place in the grim silence of the lab that I almost laughed. It was insane.

  “My uncle… he’s dead,” I said, the words feeling heavy and real on my tongue.

  There was a fractional pause. “Processing… Acknowledged. That is… suboptimal. My condolences, User. He was a good man. A terrible liar, and he hummed off-key, but a good man.”

  Another pause.

  “So,” Handy said, its chipper tone returning with a vengeance, “that would make you… let’s see… accessing Finch’s personal files… blonde hair, now white, blue eyes, now purple, tomboy edge, unnatural obsession with anti-gravity acrobatics… you must be Nikki Nova. His niece. He talked about you all the time. Said you were stubborn as a genetically-modified mule.”

  I sank down onto a dusty stool, my legs suddenly unable to support me. “How are you… what is this place?”

  “This place? This is Pandora Corp R&D Outpost Gamma,” Handy said casually. “Or, as your uncle liked to call it, ‘The Kennel.’ This is where the bad dogs were made.”

  My skin went cold. Bad dogs. “What... what do you mean?”

  “A little on-the-nose, I know,” Handy said. “He wasn’t great with codenames. This was the primary lab for Project Lycaon. Pandora’s illegal bioweapon project. Your uncle was the lead geneticist.”

  The floor seemed to drop out from under me. My uncle, Finch, who smelled like coffee and old books, was a bioweapons scientist? It didn't compute. "No," I said, shaking my head. "He made medicines."

  “‘Pharmaceuticals’ is a very generous term for what they were cooking up down here,” Handy’s voice was dry, the humor edged with something sharper. “He was a good man, like I said. He thought he was helping, at first. Pushing the boundaries of science. Then he saw what they were turning his science into. Weapons. Monsters. He tried to stop them. Tried to leak his research to the media.”

  My parents whispered. The 'containment issue.' My uncle's 'accident.' They weren't separate events. They were a sequence. A cover-up.

  "They killed him." The words were barely a breath.

  “Pandora has a very aggressive HR department,” Handy said, its voice softening for the first time. “He knew they were coming for him. That’s why he hid me here, loaded with all his research, all his evidence. A fail-safe. In case the worst happened.”

  I stared at the wristband, at the little blue light on its screen. This wasn't just a piece of old tech. It was my uncle's legacy. His last, desperate attempt to fight back. And I had just stumbled into it.

  A million questions swirled in my head, but one pushed its way to the front, raw and terrifying.

  “The creature,” I said, my voice shaking. “The one in the alleys. The one that’s been attacking people.”

  “Ah,” Handy said. “So you’ve met him. Subject-17. Unofficially nicknamed ‘Ravage’ by the lab techs. He was your uncle’s crowning achievement, and his greatest regret. The first and only ‘successful’ hybrid. The prototype for their new line of super-soldiers.”

  My breath hitched. My hand instinctively went to the bite mark on my arm.

  “He escaped during a containment breach about a month ago,” Handy said, its voice all business now. “Tore the place apart. Vanished into the city’s underbelly. Pandora has been trying to cover it up, but a creature like that… it has needs. It’s hungry. And it’s still out there, killing indiscriminately.”

  The final, terrifying piece of the puzzle slammed into place. The thing that bit me. The monster that had turned me into a monster. It was a Pandora creation. My uncle’s creation. And it was still hunting.

  I looked around the derelict lab, at the ghosts of my uncle’s work. I was no longer just a freak hiding in the shadows. I was a loose thread in a corporate conspiracy that had already killed my uncle. I was a product of the same poison that was now bleeding out into the city.

  Something far worse suddenly replaced the feeling of being alone. The feeling of being entangled. Hunted. The monster inside me, and the monster that created it, were both children of this dead, dusty room. And the weight of that knowledge, of my uncle’s failure and his legacy, settled onto my shoulders like a shroud. My trouble wasn't over. It was just beginning.