Chapter 1: Forbidden Injection
The bathroom air was cool and smelled of her grapefruit shower gel, but Lia’s skin was prickling with heat. She leaned against the matte black countertop, the vial rolling between her fingers. It was warm, like it had its own pulse. The liquid inside wasn’t just iridescent; it moved. Swirls of sapphire and emerald coiled around each other, fighting against the glass as if trying to escape.
From the other room, her phone buzzed against the coffee table for the third time. Lewis. It would be Lewis.
“Seeing Yuna for a quick work thing,” he’d said that morning, not meeting her eyes. “Just some files to exchange.”
Files. Right. Lia had seen them two days ago in the building’s atrium, heads bent so close their temples almost touched, speaking in whispers that died the second she rounded the corner. Yuna, from accounting, with her perfect sheet of black hair and a smile that never quite reached her eyes when she looked at Lia.
The jealousy was a sour, familiar lump in her throat. But beneath it, thrumming harder, was curiosity. What was so important it needed that many secret meetings? What was in the locked case Lewis now carried everywhere?
She’d found the vial in that case, which he’d foolishly left on his dresser while he showered. A single dose, nestled in black foam beside a terrifyingly normal-looking hypodermic needle. A post-it note in his tight script was stuck to the inside of the lid: DO NOT TOUCH. Yuna – Prototype 9. Catastrophic somatic rewrite.
A laugh, sharp and brittle, escaped her. Catastrophic. He’d used that word last week when she’d asked about his overtime. “It would be catastrophic if this project leaked, Lia. You can’t tell anyone. You can’t ask.”
Well, she was asking now.
She held the vial up to the LED strip light, watching the colors dance. They cast shifting patterns on the flawless, floor-to-ceiling mirror. Her own reflection looked back—auburn hair piled in a messy bun, green eyes narrowed, a tight line where her mouth usually smiled. Just Lia. Predictable, office-Lia, who got passed over for the Thompson account, who maybe wasn’t exciting enough to keep her boyfriend from having “file exchanges” with a human spreadsheet.
“Screw it,” she whispered to the silence.
Her voice seemed to activate the substance. It glittered violently. The surface of the mirror behind her reflection shimmered, not from steam, but like the surface of a pond disturbed by a stone. The glass itself seemed to inhale.
She didn’t hesitate. Not anymore. With a practiced motion she’d seen in a dozen medical dramas, she drew the liquid into the needle. A tiny, swirling universe sat in the syringe. She tied the black silk belt from her robe around her bicep, made a fist. The vein popped up, a blue-green road map to somewhere new.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” she muttered, the cliché feeling brave in her mouth.
The needle was cold. The initial pinch was nothing.
Then the world exploded.
It was fire and ice racing up her vein, a thunderclap inside her marrow. She gasped, the syringe clattering into the sink. Her body arched backward, every muscle seizing at once. A ragged scream tore from her throat, swallowed by the humid bathroom air.
Bones. Something was happening to her bones. A deep, resonant crack echoed from her spine, followed by a series of rapid, popping pulses along her limbs—not breaks, but expansions, like stretching dough. She watched, horrified and mesmerized, as her forearm lengthened, her fingers thickening, nails darkening to a deep, obsidian black.
Her skin burned. The faint sprinkle of freckles across her shoulders erupted in a wave of color, a vibrant, glowing green spreading like wildfire from her core to her extremities. It wasn’t a sickly hue, but a deep, luscious jade, smooth and impossibly solid. She watched it consume her, the pale Lia she knew disappearing under a new, unknown canvas.
The pain crested, a white-hot wave of pure sensation, and then it mutated into something else. Power. A raw, surging flood of it. Her muscles swelled, definition carving itself into her thighs, her abdomen, her arms. Her frame widened, shoulders broadening with a heavy, dense strength. The familiar, fit curves of her body amplified, reshaping into a powerfully voluptuous, monumental form. Her robe tore at the seams with soft, sighing rips, falling away in scraps of terry cloth.
She gripped the edge of the sink for stability. The porcelain cracked under her newfound grip with a sound like a gunshot. She let go, stumbling back.
Her breathing was loud, ragged bellows in the quiet room. She looked down at herself, at the vast landscape of powerful green thighs, the heavy curve of her chest, the arms that looked capable of bending steel.
Slowly, trembling, she turned to the mirror.
The glass was webbed with fractures, radiating from the center where her reflection now lived. A giant looked back at her. Seven feet tall if she was an inch. Hair like a raging auburn fire. Eyes that still glowed her familiar green, but now shone with an unearthly, furious light. The woman in the mirror was a goddess of wrath and vitality. She was terrifying. She was magnificent.
She lifted a massive, jade-colored hand, and the reflection did the same. She watched the muscles in the forearm shift and coil.
A wild, disbelieving laugh bubbled up from her chest. It was a deep, resonant sound, rich and new. The laughter died as her eyes focused past her own reflection, on the bathroom door. The ordinary, white-painted door with its standard brass knob.
From the living room, a key scratched in the lock.
“Lia?” Lewis’s voice, laced with a worry that sounded an awful lot like guilt, called out. “You home? We need to talk about Yuna, I think you’re getting the wrong—”
He stopped. He’d seen the light under the door. He’d heard the porcelain break.
Lia stood very still in the wreckage of her bathroom, in the wreckage of her old self. The electric hum in the air had settled into a low, potent thrum in her very cells. She felt a smile, slow and alien, curve her new, fuller lips.
Let him see, she thought, the curiosity and jealousy she’d felt now forged into something much, much heavier. Let him try to explain this.
The door handle began to turn.