Chapter 2: The Green Goddess Revealed
The door swung inward, and Lewis stepped into the steam.
His silhouette was instantly framed by the cracked mirror behind her, his expression shifting from worried apology to pure, uncomprehending shock. His mouth, open to speak, went slack. His eyes, dark and usually so focused, darted from the shattered porcelain sink, to the discarded syringe, to the shreds of terry cloth on the floor, and finally, inevitably, up.
And up.
He had to crane his neck. The sight of it—him, tall and lean, having to look up at her—sent a thrilling current through Lia’s new nervous system.
For a long moment, there was only the drip of the showerhead and the ragged sound of her own breathing, which now filled the room like a bellows.
“Lia?” The word was a dry crackle, barely audible.
“Mostly,” she said. Her voice wasn’t hers. It was a low, resonant contralto that vibrated in the air, a sound felt in the bones as much as heard. It carried an unfamiliar warmth, a richness that felt both alien and intensely right.
Lewis flinched at the sound. His scientific brain seemed to reboot, his gaze snapping into clinical assessment. He didn’t run. He took a half-step closer, his hand rising unconsciously as if to touch her arm, then stopping mid-air. “The vial. You used it. You actually…” He blinked, shaking his head. “The somatic rewrite… it’s accelerated. The green pigmentation wasn’t… it wasn’t a predicted variable for Yuna’s profile.”
The name was a spark on dry tinder.
“Yuna,” Lia rumbled. She took a step forward. It was a single, deliberate motion, but her movement had a new, gravitational weight. The floorboard groaned in protest beneath the tile. Lewis stumbled back, hitting the door frame. “Right. Your special project. Your specific genetic markers.” She looked down at her own vast, jade-colored hand, flexing it. The obsidian nails caught the light. “What was it supposed to do for her? Make her taller? More… impressive?”
“It was a targeted somatic enhancement,” Lewis said rapidly, the words tumbling out in a defensive lecture. “A bio-customized catalyst. For her, it would have slowly modified osteoblasts and myocytes over six weeks, adding maybe four inches in height, a thirty percent increase in lean muscle density, all reversible with a suppressant. It was keyed to her DNA! It reads the base host and amplifies existing potentials. For you…” He finally looked at her face, truly looked, and his professional detachment cracked, revealing raw, bewildered fear. “For you, it didn’t find a blueprint for a slightly taller accountant. It found… something else.”
Lia moved past him, into the living room. She had to turn slightly to get her shoulders through the bathroom door. The sensation was extraordinary. The spacious, sunlit apartment now felt quaint, the ceiling lower. The sleek, low-slung couches looked like toys. She stood on the warm oak floor, the afternoon light from the floor-to-ceiling windows painting her skin in bands of gold and shadow.
She saw her reflection distorted in the dark glass of the coffee table—a colossal, emerald goddess amidst the neutral, tasteful decor.
“Something else,” she echoed, tasting the phrase. It felt true. The simmering jealousy, the restless energy, the confidence that sometimes tipped into recklessness—the serum hadn’t created a new her. It had grabbed those latent threads and spun them into her very flesh. It had taken her suspicion and made it physical power.
“It’s stabilizing,” Lewis whispered, creeping into the room as if approaching a wild animal. He was still analyzing, unable to stop. “The dermal saturation is uniform. The musculoskeletal integration looks… seamless. But the energy output must be immense. Can you feel your metabolic rate? Your core temperature?”
“I feel,” Lia said slowly, turning to face him fully, “like you’ve been lying to me for weeks. I feel like ‘file exchanges’ with Yuna were about turning her into a supermodel. I feel…” She stretched out an arm, examining the perfect, powerful curve of her bicep. “I feel fantastic.”
The contradiction hung in the air, sweet and dangerous.
Lewis ran a hand through his hair. “Lia, you have to understand. This isn’t a cosmetic kit. This is generation-one biomodification. It’s unstable. The feedback loops aren’t mapped. What it’s done to you… it’s permanent. The suppressant I made for Yuna won’t work. Your genome has been rewritten.”
Permanent. The word should have been a bucket of ice water. Instead, it landed with a strange, solid certainty. A door clicking shut. There was no going back to the woman who fretted over project proposals and suspicious texts. That woman was gone, shattered like the bathroom mirror.
A slow smile spread across Lia’s face. “Good.”
Lewis paled. “No, not good! This is catastrophic! Your cell regeneration, your endocrine system—I don’t have baseline data for you! I need to run tests, I need to monitor…”
“You should have thought of that before you left your science project on the dresser,” she said, her light-hearted tone a bizarre contrast to the depth of her voice. She took a step toward him, enjoying the way he held his ground through sheer will. “So Yuna was supposed to be your perfect, controllable test subject. And what am I? An accident?”
“You’re an anomaly,” he breathed, and there was a hint of awe beneath the terror. “A beautiful, impossible anomaly.”
The compliment, born of clinical obsession, landed oddly. Lia ignored it. Her gaze drifted to the floating glass coffee table. An idea, reckless and irresistible, bloomed in her mind. She needed to know. Not in theory, but in practice.
She crouched down. The movement was surprisingly fluid, a coil of immense potential energy. She slid her fingers under the edge of the thick glass top.
“Lia, what are you…”
She lifted.
It wasn’t a strain. It was an affirmation. The table, which had taken two delivery men to carefully position, came up as if it were balsa wood. She held it aloft with one hand, the muscles in her arm cording like smoothed stone. The late sun flashed through the pure glass, casting rainbow fractals across the white walls.
Lewis made a choked sound.
Lia looked at the table, then at Lewis’s stunned face. A laugh, that deep, booming sound, erupted from her. “You’re right,” she said, her green eyes gleaming with a mischief that was now a tangible force. “The energy output is pretty immense.”
She tossed the table. Not at him, but sideways, onto the deep, empty sofa.
It didn’t shatter. It landed on the cushions with a profound, soft whump, then slid to the floor with a heavy thud. The cashmere throw was pinned beneath it.
The casual display of impossible strength was more terrifying than any violent lunge. It was proof of a new reality.
Lewis stared at the displaced table, then back at her. His fear was morphing into something else—the desperate calculation of a scientist whose experiment has just breached containment. “You need to come with me to the lab. Right now. We need to contain this, understand it before… before something goes wrong.”
“Before what goes wrong?” Lia asked, straightening to her full, towering height. The top of her head nearly brushed the ceiling fan. “This feels pretty right to me.” She took a deep breath, the air filling her new, expanded lungs. The last traces of insecurity, of comparison to Yuna, felt like memories from another lifetime. She was no longer in her league. She was in a league of her own making.
She looked at Lewis, her boyfriend who was now a small, frantic man babbling about metabolic rates. The connection between them felt thin, stretched to breaking point. He was afraid of what she was. He was afraid for her. But he wasn’t seeing her.
“The lab,” he insisted, his voice tightening. “Now, Lia. This isn’t a game.”
Outside, the city glittered, a sprawling grid of possibilities. She felt the raw, untested power humming in every cell. Contain it? He didn’t understand. The genie wasn’t just out of the bottle. The genie was the bottle now.
She took a step toward the apartment’s front door, each footfall a soft earthquake on the polished floor.
“Where are you going?” Lewis demanded, a note of panic rising.
Lia didn’t answer immediately. She placed her hand on the door, her palm nearly covering the whole painted surface. She looked back at him over the impossible width of her shoulder, a ghost of her old, mischievous smile playing on her new, full lips.
“Out,” she said simply.