Rising From Ashes: The Betrayed Queen Returns

"Don't blame me, sweetheart. Gayla's body is just too weak. She needs this sequence more than you do."

The words sliced through the sterile air before Aislinn even opened her eyes.

A blinding, surgical white light seared her retinas the second her eyelids fluttered apart. She squeezed her eyes shut, her stomach dropping into a bottomless pit. She tried to raise her hand to block the glare, but her wrists wouldn't budge.

High-polymer restraint straps bit into her skin, pinning her limbs to the freezing metal of the operating table.

A tearing, agonizing pain ripped through her chest. It felt like someone had buried a jagged piece of glass under her ribs and twisted it. Aislinn forced her chin down. Just above her heart, a crudely sutured hole wept fresh blood onto the pristine white sheets.

The heart monitor next to her head screamed in a rapid, frantic rhythm. Beep. Beep. Beep. It was the sound of massive blood loss. The sound of her dying.

Her pupils dilated. The air in her lungs turned to liquid ice.

The memories hit her like a physical blow to the skull. The torture. The Emerald Spire Academy. The way they had bled her dry in her past life until her heart gave out. Her brain rewired the information in a fraction of a second.

She was back. She had woken up on the exact day they ripped the Phoenix gene sequence from her chest.

The heavy click of a thermal lock echoing through the massive underground lab snapped her focus back to the present.

Aislinn turned her head. Her neck muscles screamed in protest. Through the sterile glass partition, she locked eyes on Joi Rocha.

Joi stood at the main console. She was staring at a glowing blue cryogenic vial with a look of pure, sickening maternal devotion. That vial held Aislinn's stolen gene sequence.

Joi felt the weight of the stare. She turned and walked over to the operating table, her high heels clicking a steady, merciless rhythm against the metal floor. She looked down at Aislinn.

Joi reached out. She meticulously adjusted the cuff of her latex medical glove, a nervous habit she used to mask her cruelty, before brushing a damp strand of hair from Aislinn's sweating forehead.

The cold latex against her skin made bile rise in the back of Aislinn's throat. Her stomach violently contracted.

She didn't cry. She didn't scream why. She just stared dead into Joi's eyes, her lips pulling back into a slow, bloodless smile. It was a smile completely devoid of sanity.

Joi flinched. The absolute deadness in Aislinn's eyes sent a visible shudder down the older woman's spine. She snatched her hand back.

To cover her sudden unease, Joi turned her back to the table.

"Cut her pain inhibitors," Joi ordered the room's medical AI, her voice stripped of all fake warmth. "We don't want the drugs interfering with her cellular regeneration."

The AI chirped compliance.

Aislinn's back arched off the table. The pain multiplied by a thousand. It exploded from the hole in her chest and shot through every nerve ending in her body like liquid fire.

She bit down on her lower lip. She bit down until the copper taste of her own blood flooded her mouth, but she refused to make a single sound. Her chest heaved, pulling in jagged breaths of sterile air.

Joi picked up the thermal case holding the blue vial. She walked toward the lab's heavy vault door.

"If you survive the night," Joi threw the words over her shoulder without looking back, "the logistics department in the lower levels will find a mop for you."

The massive alloy door slammed shut. The locking mechanisms ground into place, sealing Aislinn inside the freezing tomb.

Aislinn gasped for air. Cold sweat dripped from her chin, pooling on the metal table. But her eyes were clearer than they had ever been. They were lethal.

She closed her eyes and forced her consciousness deep into the burning wreckage of her own body. She searched the empty void where her gene sequence used to be.

There.

Hidden in the biological wasteland of her chest, she found it. A single, microscopic spark of crimson energy. The residual core of the Phoenix gene.

Aislinn grit her teeth against the tearing of her nerves. She wrapped her sheer willpower around that tiny spark.

Above her, the lab's warning lights flared a harsh yellow. The AI detected an abnormal biological energy surge.

Aislinn's eyes snapped open. A feverish, manic resolve burned in her irises. She began to force her bio-electricity to flow backward.

The restraint straps groaned under the sudden, violent spasms of her muscles. Her veins bulged against her pale skin.

If you want it so badly, Aislinn thought, her heart hammering against her ribs, I'll give you a surprise that will burn you to ash.

She compressed the residual energy tighter and tighter. She pushed it right to the edge of a catastrophic physical explosion.