Milena bent over a steel tray beneath the lab lights. The severed hand rested there, fingers curled unnaturally, dark blood dried along the wrist stump. Tiny surgical seams snaked across the skin and faint glimmers of embedded filaments peeked through torn muscle. The door snapped open. Williams stepped inside and froze. “That’s not what I expected when you called me down here.”

  “Welcome to my nightmare,” Milena said without looking up. “Try not to puke on my floor.”

  Williams swallowed hard, his eyes were fixed on the hand. “The yard lookes like a battlefield. I figured bruises, maybe broken bones, but not… this.”

  Milena lifted the hand, turning it so the light catches the faint lines of surgical alteration.

  “Look at this. Synthetic fibers laced through the tendons. Someone rebuilt her from the inside. But this isn’t a clean prosthetic job, this is field engineering, designed to survive a fight.”

  Williams looked at the severed hand. “Synthetic fibers? What is she? A cyborg or something? This looks like a bad sci-fi movie.”

  “We need to find out what exactly they do, but you may not be far off.”

  She peels off one glove, grabs a vial, and uses a swab to collect a tissue sample.

  “I need you to run this DNA through your databases. Off the record. No paper trail.”

  Williams took the vial, his voice low. “And if it hits?”

  “Then we’ll finally know who we’re up against.”

  Williams pockets the vial, glancing once more at the grotesque hand before leaving. Milena remains, staring down at the half human, half engineered nightmare.

  ***

  Glassware clinks under the fluorescent lights as Milena and Liz run another round of tests. The spectrometer hums, reading the severed hand’s tissue sample.

  “These stabilizers…” Liza frowned. “They’re familiar.”

  “Stabilizers, yes,” Milena said grimly. “But look at the markers. That’s our serum. Diluted, modified… but it’s ours.”

  Liza’s throat tightened. “Oh, boy… Somebody’s using your formula?”

  The phone rang. Liza answered, then glanced at Milena. “Williams just came. He wants us upstairs. He has some news.”

  “So do we,” Milena said.

  Williams and the other girls were already in the briefing room. His face had concern written all over it.

  "I've got a DNA match. A fourteen-year-old girl. Parents were being deported. She disappeared right before the flight. The case went nowhere.”

  Silence. Liza’s face crumples as she forces the emotion down. Trella folds her arms, her voice sharp but low. “So she was abducted. Turned into a weapon.”

  Williams looked down. “Just like you.”

  “Not like us,” Trella replied. “We were given a second chance. Her life was stolen.”

  Williams nods quietly.

  Milena exhales slowly, her expression was unreadable for a heartbeat. “We′ve found traces of our serum in her blood.”

  That hit like a bomb. The whole room went silent. Williams stepped closer. “You’re saying someone kept your research alive?”

  “More like stole enough pieces to start over. This one wasn’t ours. She came after everything burned down. But—” Her voice hardened. “—it’s still our formula. Our failure. They twisted what was left and kept killing children. We have to end this. All of it.”

  Trella folded her hands and looked up. “We don’t wait for them. We find them first. Quietly.”

  Milena handed over a tablet. “DNA matches a missing immigrant girl. Chinese origin. Blood chemistry shows traces of a serum similar to the one used on us, but modified. It’s weaker, like the one Maya has. Different metabolites, faster breakdown. I can’t tell if that’s deliberate or just a different batch. There are also odd microfibers embedded in the wound. Material I have never seen before. That’s all I can say for now.”

  Michelle leaned forward, cross-referencing everything. “Talia and I picked up faint signals during the encounters. Nothing concrete, just a low-power carrier. We couldn’t localize it with the normal gear. Could be nothing, could be something.”

  Talia spoke up, already thinking in hardware. “I can retrofit a drone to sweep for that signature, push the receivers into a sensitive, low-power band. But drones need a mobile ops base for range - like the van. I’ll need a driver that would also act as a spotter on the ground. Drones by themselves aren’t good at long distance.”

  Maya rolled her sleeves. “I can run the van. Tail from the ground if it gets hot. No confrontations. Eyes only.”

  “We’re damaged,” Katya said with a low voice. “We can’t go for a frontal assault. If we get an RF lock or a physical trail, we decide the next steps.”

  Samira nodded, hands already restless. “I can prep a few charges and I can help Talia with the drones.”

  Trella closed the briefing. “All right. Rules are clear, no direct engagement. No amateur heroics. Cipher coordinates; Talia runs the sweep; Maya is the driver and ground spotter, Samira, you are back up. If anyone spots a force bigger than the three of you can handle, pull out.”

  Nobody smiled. The plan was cautious, surgical, exactly what they needed. Michelle clipped her headset on and keyed a map marker. “Talia, feed me live. Keep the comms secure. Everyone else, get rest.”

  They dispersed to their roles. The resolution in the room felt like a promise. Reconnaissance first, answers second. No recklessness. No revenge — at least not yet.

  ***

  The van breathed quietly through the dark suburbs. Low roof, blacked windows, two silhouettes hunched over screens. Up above the sky was a lattice of drone LEDs, three little points patrolling an invisible grid. Talia’s fingers hovered on the tablet, thumbs dancing through the console. Maya kept eyes on the road and the rearview like a hawk.

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  They drove where people didn’t live much. Warehouse rows, old service roads, industrial lots. Talia’s interface painted a ghost-map: weak RF blips, sensor noise, an electronic ocean. Most of it was chatter and dead air. Then, like a stone dropped into still water, a faint ripple answered.

  “There! Three degrees east of the overpass. It’s faint, like it’s trying not to be found. I’m boosting the sensitivity. Hold it steady.”

  Maya eased the van off the main road and into a shadowed turnout. The drones folded tighter, altitudes dropping a few meters to listen. A hush passed through the cab; both girls moved on muscle memory and trained rhythms. Talia’s voice was both thrilled and clinical. “Signal lock. Not strong, but consistent. Multiple carriers on the same low band. It’s coming from that warehouse cluster, unit B-12. There’s no other hit for two miles. Jackpot.”

  Maya didn’t grin. She watched Talia’s screen. A squat building with a corrugated facade, a single flickering security light, and two vehicles that looked like they had been parked for the purpose of looking casual.

  “You see any movement from above?”

  Samira scrolled the live drone feed, zooming the grayscale video until the grain matched the pixels on the map. “Two sedans out front. No obvious guards in the lot. Minimal foot traffic. One rooftop vent. Someone’s awake inside. The signal’s strongest by the east door. It’s definitely their transmitter.”

  Maya flexed her fingers against the steering wheel. “We don’t go door-knocking. We confirm and vanish. Relay the geo, I hold the van 500 meters west. If anything moves, we pull. Cipher gets the feed.”

  “I′m already feeding her. I’m tagging the signal signature and dropping a beacon on its carrier. If they shift, we’ll know.”

  For ten minutes they watched like statues. Through the van windows the warehouse looked like any anonymous industrial building except for the undercurrent: the faint sound of a low-frequency carrier on Talia’s headset and the small thermal flare that suggested human bodies moving in choreographed patterns.

  “Cipher, we have a confirmed activity at warehouse B-12. No heavy foot traffic, two vehicles, one rooftop thermal. Awaiting orders.”

  Michelle’s reply was a single, measured line over the encrypted channel. “Hold and report. Maintain distance.”

  Maya let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and looked to Talia. “We found the safehouse.”

  Talia’s grin was small and fierce. They folded the drones up a few degrees and slipped back into the dark lane to keep watch. The warehouse sat like a secret waiting to be opened and for the first time the Fangs had a tangible lead.

  On a third-floor ledge of an adjacent building, Talia and Samira set the little hexagonal drone on its rubber feet and checked the feed one more time. Battery green, link stable, transmit set to a narrowband the neighborhood routers wouldn’t pick up. Talia breathed out, half laugh, half prayer. “Ready.”

  Inside the orphanage control room, Michelle had her hands folded on the table like a conductor. The monitors were a patchwork of greys — alleyways, a cracked parking lot, the warped reflection of windows, but one frame was a bright pin: Talia’s drone, hovering ten storeys above the warehouse block, seeing what no one on the street could.

  Michelle’s voice was steady. “Keep it under thirty meters. Don’t get over the power lines. I want a full sweep. Thermal, then optical. Record everything. Talia, if anything moves, mark and hold. Don’t follow unless it goes mobile.

  Talia’s fingers danced on the control ring. “Copy. Thermal sweep starting… now.”

  On the screen, three faint smudges resolved into human silhouettes. They were walking a careful pattern, stopping at intervals, examining everything. “Good feed,” Michelle said. “Zoom left to the fence line. I want to see entry points.”

  They watched for over an hour.

  “We have two choices. We can make this the moment. We roll in at dusk or we keep watching and wait for them to give us a window.”

  Milena, who’d been quiet, clicked her pen and said… ”If they realize they’ve been watched, they’ll change location. They’ll either withdraw or they’ll bait. We want them to commit a single predictable action if possible.”

  Michelle looked at each face around the table. She’d been the one to call the earlier gambit that put Maya on the trail; she’d also been the one to advise caution. “We can take the rooftop camera live and do one more sweep. Plant remote smoke bombs, then return home. Depending on what we see, we will strike tomorrow.”

  ***

  The girls were in position and vans parked in a safe distance. At 19:50 the drone crawled low, watching shadows lengthen against the warehouse walls. The ground bird’s audio picked up a radio ping. A soft signal, not the clumsy burst of cheap handsets but something near-surgical, a tone that cut through the street noise and vanished. Talia froze the feed. It is confirmed. The cyborgs were inside. Till now they were the ones attacking. Now it′s time to see how they handle an ambush.

  Michelle gives out instructions. “We start at 20:00. Talia, you first - set off the smoke bomb and lure them out. Mark on my go. Three… two… one… go.”

  At twenty-zero-zero a small puff of white rose at the west corner of the lot. A precise smoke canister suffused with a pepper blend meant to obscure and irritate. The men moved toward it, one crossing the yard with a long, purposeful stride.

  The safehouse erupted into chaos the moment the Fangs breached from multiple angles. The cyborgs responded instantly, silent, cold, and terrifyingly fast. Amelie swung her new scythe in a brutal arc, its blade carving a deep groove in the concrete floor as one of the augmented girls sidestepped with inhuman reflexes. Aya’s grenade launcher thumped, filling corners with smoke and dust, but the cyborgs darted through it. Aiko blurred past, her katana whistling, but a single black-suited arm blocked her slash, metal on metal sparking. These weren’t ordinary enhanced fighters. They pressed the Fangs hard, forcing Trella’s squad to bunch up and fight for every step.

  Amelie took a glancing blow to her ribs, grunting as she stumbled before recovering with a brutal backswing that clipped the cyborg’s shoulder hard enough to splinter bone.

  Cherry Bomb barely rolled under a flying kick that shattered a steel crate. Trella’s shotgun blast forced one opponent to retreat for a heartbeat, but the cyborgs adjusted instantly, their movements coordinated without a word.

  Talia’s voice crackled in the comms. “Jamming signal up… counterfrequency running… They’re not even flinching!”

  Katya, positioned on an upper platform, scanned for an opening through her rifle’s scope. Down below, Samira ducked a punch, then another before the feral precision of their enemies began to overwhelm her. Suddenly, one cyborg seized Amelie’s scythe mid-swing, twisted, and sent her sprawling. Amelie hit the floor hard, her weapon skittering away.A sliver of movement caught Katya’s eye: one cyborg turned her head just enough for a glint of metal behind her ear to show between strands of black hair. The weak point?

  Katya exhaled, steadying her aim. “Now or never… “

  She pulled the trigger. The shot rang out, and a chunk of the device exploded off the cyborg’s skull in a shower of sparks and blood. For a second, the girl froze. Then she screamed. A raw, guttural sound and she completely lost control.

  She grabbed a nearby crate and hurled it across the room. It smashed through another stack, splinters and debris raining down. Another box flew wildly, clipping one of the other cyborgs in the leg and sending her staggering.

  The berserk one whirled, eyes wild, saliva at her lips, no longer differentiated friend or foe. She caught sight of Samira and lunged.

  Samira fired from her Glock, but the bullets only slowed the charging girl. The cyborg slammed a fist into Samira’s chest with a thunderous impact, sending her flying several meters into a wall. She collapsed, gasping, air knocked out of her lungs. The cyborg was on her in a heartbeat, one hand clamping viciously around her throat, lifting her clean off the ground. Samira’s feet kicked helplessly, her face reddening as she clawed at the iron grip.

  “Cherry!” Trella shouts.

  She rushes forward, but the berserk girl swung Samira’s dangling body toward her like a weapon, forcing Trella to dive aside. Aya charged from the flank, but a feral backhand nearly knocked her down. For a moment, it looked hopeless, until a silver flash cut the air.

  Amelie, bruised but furious, recovered her scythe, sprinted, and with a grunt of effort, cleaved through the cyborg’s forearm. The severed hand dropped, releasing Samira, who crumpled to the floor coughing blood and wheezing. The cyborg didn’t even flinch at her missing limb.

  But the damage was done. The two uninjured cyborgs exchanged a brief, silent glance, then abruptly retreated toward the shadows. They didn’t even attempt to recover their feral sister.

  The berserk cyborg swung wildly smashing anything near. She charged again, hands outstretched, but the Fangs swarmed her. The blades cut deep, the SMGa rattled her. Finally, Trella’s point-blank shotgun barrage to the chest dropped her for good. Her body collapsed in a broken heap, blood pooling beneath.

  The warehouse suddenly fell silent. Samira sat slumped against a crate, holding her bruised chest, while Amelie leaned heavily on her scythe. The war had only just revealed its shape