The lounge security door hissed. Dr. Haider and Stacy walked back in. They’d brought friends.

  A small armed retinue streamed in behind Haider and Stacy. Kelly scanned their EQ levels at a glance—a spread from a low 3, to decent 8, up to a rigid 32. Professional muscle. They flanked a woman who was talking. Everyone else was just listening. Nodding. As if everyone walking was listening to a natural disaster explaining the weather.

  She was obviously a high EQ. Kelly didn’t need to ping her stats to check her level; beyond 60, likely a peak-Elite, or maybe even a real-life Demigod. Her appearance was superhuman, almost perfect. Flawless skin, athletic poise, movement so graceful it looked edited. The only flaw was a single visible seam running from beneath her left eye down her neck. A modification line. Not an injury. A choice.

  She looked slightly older than Kelly, but only by a few years. Her real age, however, was anyone’s guess.

  Her hair was black, styled in a severe, expensive trend. This slightly older lady carried an eerie inhuman elegance, like a heavenly being who’d decided to slum it with mammals. Unlike Kelly’s team, she had style. Actual style. She wore a tailored jacket that probably cost more than a light armored vehicle, dark pants that allowed full tactical movement, and boots that looked both expensive and functional. She carried a pair of designer glasses in one hand. The moment she stepped into the room, she put them on.

  Glasses. A strange fashion choice. Her eyes were clearly perfect. She’d never seen a glassed city or breathed toxic air in her life. She could afford gene corrections, lens implants, and any optical upgrade on the market. The way she wore them—a careful, deliberate gesture—suggested that, like most people on this elevated plateau, she’d never actually needed glasses before. They were a prop. A power move.

  It felt like seeing a fairy in Levi genes.

  Kelly couldn’t explain why, but she had a bad feeling about this woman. Mostly because Dr. Haider, Stacy, and Reggie suddenly looked like marionettes on a tight string whenever she spoke—and even Manuel, usually as chill as a lava lamp, went full “don’t breathe wrong” mode at the sight of her.

  Kelly looked back at her cards, reshuffling without care. “Okay,” she said. “The welcome committee. Did we order a corporate goddess? I don’t remember ordering one.”

  Manuel grunted, his eyes on the cards as he shuffled. “That’s because you don’t pay the bills.”

  The woman’s gaze swept the room. It passed over the scorch mark on the floor, the disarrayed chair from the wolf’s crash landing. It lingered on Kelly for a half-second longer than necessary. Her expression didn’t change. She was clearly used to being the most dangerous thing in any room.

  The mad scientist’s eyes flicked past the corporate goddess. She landed on the bodyguard to her left. Tall, a posture more rigid than functional, a face that had become something carved from granite and left in bad weather.

  She recognized him.

  He was one of the men from Simon’s barricade—the suicide squad, not Simon’s idiots—back when the first troll had smashed through the street, and back when she was still dying her way through that particular chain of events. He’d been in covert suits and light body armor then, part of a team that tried to net and bag the first troll. He’d failed. The troll had used his partner as a toothpick.

  This time, he had changed. He wore heavy gear—a reinforced uniform, tactical plating at the joints, a helmet with a retracted visor. The gear was something rather than corporate sleek. It was military surplus, modified. The gear was more than protection; it was a statement. The kind that could stop a high-caliber round at the cost of making you move like a refrigerator with legs. In his hands, he carried a large gun-shaped box. A sealed metal crate with a handle and the silhouette of a heavy weapon.

  The rest of the retinue, she hadn't met in this restart. New faces. New muscle. Likely higher pay grade. Definitely duller conversation.

  The last time she’d seen him, his helmet had come loose, knocked aside as he’d tried to lasso a troll with reinforced rope. That didn’t work out. Was the box an improvement, or just a fancier way to get eaten?

  She nodded at the bodyguard.

  The bodyguard’s eyes shifted toward her. His expression had changed. It held no recognition or even irritation. It was a flat, professional assessment. He was working, and she was background noise.

  The corporate goddess paused her conversation with Haider. She glanced at Kelly, then at her bodyguard. A slight, almost imperceptible tilt of her head that said, ‘Ignore her.’

  The bodyguard’s gaze snapped back to scanning the room’s corners.

  “Yeah,” the mad scientist muttered, throwing a card on the table that Manuel completely failed to notice, distracted as he was. “Definitely an improvement. Big scary box. I hope for his sake it’s not a sandwich.”

  The corporate goddess and her retinue moved, passing by Kelly and Manuel on their way to the center of the room. Kelly caught a rushed conversation about 'securing the specimen', 'a premium for live capture', 'containment protocols must be absolute,’ and 'no one must know its importance'. The woman stopped abruptly when she noticed Kelly.

  “You.”

  The woman’s voice was deeper than Kelly had expected, a voice very used to immediate obedience.

  “Me?” Kelly pointed a finger at herself.

  “What are you?” she asked. Her sharp eyes, magnified and framed by the glasses, examined Kelly with a slow, invasive focus. The lenses flashed with a soft internal light. Kelly saw the faintest scroll of text and numeric strings projected onto the glass. The device was doing more than offering a better look. It was cataloging. Assessing. The feeling was standing in an open field while a satellite calculated your thermal signature.

  Somehow, it felt like locking eyes with a scope.

  The elite, or possible member of the upper echelon, stared at Kelly and posed her an existential question. ‘What are you?’ She waited for an answer with the gaze of a patient sniper, one that had already decided on the angle of your throat.

  Kelly stared back, her own expression flat. “A guest.”

  The woman held her gaze. The lenses over her eyes continued their data scroll. “That is not what I asked.” Everyone held their breath as she repeated her question, as if forcing her to repeat anything was usually bad for the answerer's health. “What. Are you?”

  “Good question.” Kelly smiled and gave a small wave. It was the smile of someone admitting to a parking ticket, not a cosmic secret. “I’m a baby time-god. It’s a whole thing. Contract work. Very hush-hush. Don’t tell Genecorp. They get jealous.”

  “No one can control time.” The woman’s mouth curved, something vaguely amused and entirely cold. “I hope to achieve what you have, however. The way you interact with it is… interesting.”

  Then she turned. She walked away with her escort. The conversation had ended. The room’s focus moved with her.

  Kelly watched them go and wondered which one of her many awesome qualities the glasses had exposed. She also wondered why she hadn’t had to kill anyone to protect those qualities. That part was unusual. Usually, someone would have tried to dissect her by now. This was practically impolite.

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  Manuel dealt another card onto the table. The sound was sharp in the quiet.

  “Baby time-god,” he said, his voice flat.

  “You got a better title for it?” Kelly asked, picking up her new hand. “ ‘Chronologically Challenged’ was already taken.”

  “You’re strange, you know that?” He grunted. “You just put yourself in the world’s worst crosshairs without a care. I mean it—she’s bad news. Well, it was nice knowing you, time-nut. I won’t grieve your passing.”

  “I’d be disappointed if you did,” Kelly said, examining her cards. She didn’t look up. “Grief’s a waste of good adrenaline. Save it for someone who stays dead.”

  Manuel shook his head—once, sharp, like he was cutting the thought off before it could finish forming. “You think this is funny,” he spoke, low and flat. “Like I’m exaggerating,” he said. His mouth pulled tight at one corner, not a smirk and not quite a frown, just strained, “… Shit,”

  He leaned back against the chair and crossed his arms, eyes never leaving the place the retinue had left from. “I’m telling you straight: you better hope you never see her again. Not at the bar, not in the street, not by accident six months from now when you think this whole thing’s blown over.” He paused, letting it sit. “And if you do—if she shows up and recognizes you—you better already have your will written.”

  “Who is she?” Kelly asked. Dangerous people were her favorite category of person.

  Dr. Haider returned just in time to hear Kelly’s question. “That’s Venus. ‘Venus S. Vaughn.’ The real Venus, not the double that plays pretend on the news. Gideon Vaughn’s daughter, and one of our primary employers. His youngest. She’s a partner,” Dr. Haider said as he regrouped, clearly visibly worried, his features taut. “When he sends her, people tend to disappear.”

  Kelly had seen a file once. A rumor. A security feed showing the aftermath of Venus Vaughn’s ‘enforcement’. All she had seen was shrapnel and blood vapor.

  Kelly’s expression was one of pure, clinical interest. "How efficient is her crew's cleanup? Do they bill by the hour or by the body?"

  Haider grimaced. "There is no crew. There is only her. And the report filed after."

  “Daughter? I thought he only had sons. Wasn’t that kind of his whole thing?” Reggie, who up until this point had been doing a pretty convincing impression of a statue holding its breath, asked. Apparently, he’d held assumptions about the most powerful man in humanity—Kelly wondered how Reggie could’ve missed such an important interplanetary detail. “The youngest? Why her? Wouldn’t Vladimir Vaughn have made more sense? That guy’s insane.”

  Dr. Haider shrugged. “She stays out of the public eye. I believe they had a genetic proclivity towards male scions.” He glanced at Kelly and altered his language. “From what I understand, the family’s tendency to produce male heirs may be a side effect of all the genetic modifications done to him over the centuries. Or maybe it’s just a powerful mutation, if the rumors are to be believed.”

  Manuel relaxed once the underboss was out of sight, nodding in agreement. “She’s the third born. Her… whatever it is that makes someone get born, it must have been resistant as all hell.”

  One might wonder why the most powerful man in the systems would bother building a potential rival. Maybe he was lonely. Kelly understood the sentiment. She absolutely could not relate to the staggering lack of foresight the whole endeavor screamed. Being special was pretty great. It came with a great view and zero credible competition.

  Vaughn was a freak of nature—a long-lived being among billions of lessers, a biological dead end who had decided to live forever. His cells, his one-in-a-billion mutation—the source of all his unassailable power—were utterly useless for making more of him. They were poison to any other life form. So the few children he and entire armies of reproductive embryologists had managed to scrape together over the centuries were drawn from scattered sources across star systems—a desperate, ongoing search for more winning lottery tickets in a universe that had already cashed his.

  It wasn’t exactly easy to find a match when your biology came with a ‘do not replicate’ warning label. Being a one-in-a-billion mutation had its perks, like eternal life, unlimited power… and zero dating options.

  Vladimir. Venus.

  Vladimir meant “ruler of the world.” Also the name of Vlad the Impaler, a historical figure famous for staking people and inspiring legends about vampires. Who looked at a baby and thought, ‘You know what this needs? A legacy of mass murder and nocturnal blood-drinking.’

  And ‘Venus S. Vaughn’. The ‘S’ stood for ‘Samedi.’

  In Roman mythology, Venus was the goddess of fertility. In Haitian Voodoo, Samedi was the god of the dead and resurrection. Sure, other parents gave their kids middle names like Grace or Marie… Gideon went for ‘Wake the Dead.’

  Kelly appreciated the cultural reference. If Vaughn wasn’t a giant piece of shit who’d destroyed her world, perhaps they could have been friends.

  “Love + Death + Resurrection… because apparently ‘Lisa’ wasn’t edgy enough.” She turned to face Dr. Haider. “Venus Vaughn. What’s her deal exactly?”

  “She’s like Gideon… or at least, we think she is,” Dr. Haider said, his voice low, measured. “She inherited whatever mutation makes him… different. As far as we know, there’s no upper limit to what she can do—she can augment herself indefinitely.” His eyes darkened. “She could kill you without even trying.”

  “As in what, she’s a 100-EQ A-rank and vaporizes you with laser eyes—”

  “No.” Dr. Haider’s voice cut through, sharp. It held an edge of something more than caution and a little closer to fear. “A literal flick of her finger could end you. Forget warning. Forget fighting back. Nothing you own or know will stop it. If she or Vaughn wants you dead, you die. Any action you take is just a delay. A short one.”

  Stacy nodded, her nanoswarm form stilling to a perfect, attentive statue. “We think she isn’t as strong as him. As her dad. Gideon Vaughn. And since we still have enemies walking around, even with her partnership, her current power must have limits. But we don’t know them. We don’t know where the line is. She keeps… incrementing.”

  This only made the mad scientist more interested. What kind of augments did you install in a person who showed no overclocking limits? How did the systems even interact without burning out the host? It was obvious she would have technology no one else had ever seen. Proprietary hardware. Experimental wetware. Kelly made a mental note to check it. One loop. Just to see the specs.

  Manuel, however, wanted actionable intelligence. His focus was on the immediate deviation. “Why is she early?” he asked, his voice low and direct. He looked at Dr. Haider. “You said she wouldn’t be here until Thursday. Once you had built the cage for the teleporting Man-dog. The wolf.”

  “She’s here for Dad’s stabilizers, and to meet Ren,” Stacy cut in. Her voice was bright and pointed, a deliberate announcement.

  Manuel looked at her. “The old man? He’s up? Already recovered from surgery?”

  Dr. Haider nodded. The tension drained from his shoulders. “He’s up. Ate an hour ago. He’s in the back, going over what happened with the wolf.”

  Manuel exhaled—a visible wave of relief at the mention of Ren. His stance softened from a fighter’s crouch to something solid, ready.

  The mad scientist watched closely. One name—Ren—shifted the room’s atmosphere. The looming presence of a potential peak elite, or a potential corporate demigod, was suddenly no longer a threat, just a guest with business.

  That made Kelly’s curiosity peak. Who was this ‘Ren’? And why did his presence—awake, eating, working—elicit such relief in the face of a walking apocalypse? How could it make a catastrophe feel almost like a scheduling conflict?

  “Good. Either way, I see my teleporting protégé of style is safe despite the corporate goddess of impregnation, sex, death, and murder visiting,” Kelly said. The relief was real. The poor bastard from the outskirts—the one whose body and psyche had been fused with a portal monster—got to live another day.

  “Yeah, for now,” Dr. Haider said. “You said you were trying to get stronger? I would say that’s not like you, but given the current state of the world…” He looked past her, out the window. A pair of giant winged lizards were trying to wrench an aircraft out of the sky. The craft fired back, rounds going wide, vaporizing chunks of a nearby tower. “I guess it’s understandable.” He paused, turning back to Kelly. “If you want to get stronger, you should meet Ren. It’ll be good for your depression, and you’ll get to hit something. And try to avoid upsetting our guest, we wouldn’t want you to have a disagreement.”

  Kelly translated ‘disagreement’ instantly. An organizational euphemism for being murdered so thoroughly a reset might feel like a courtesy. She smiled, intrigued.

  “Alright, I'll take you to him. A few rules about how to address Venus,” Dr Haider told Kelly, as they stood before the metal gates. “Don’t make jokes about her glasses, and for the love of God, don’t mention her dad unless she mentions him first.”

  Why was he being so nice to her? Even more than usual. Dr Haider could always be relied on and had always helped her. Sure they had history and sure, they had a good relationship, but this felt… special. Was this a recruitment bid? Was he trying to upgrade her and welcome her into the fold?

  Kelly had no interest in either. She had no desire to join his organization. But she did want access to a few of the resources it held.

  Kelly nodded and followed him past living spaces and a storeroom filled with broken and questionably legal augments. One of the rumors about Dr. Haider had always circulated, and now she could see it for herself. He was an expert in exploiting augment law loopholes and capable of creating technology that violated humanitarian laws and war crime statutes. His criminal connections, his genius, and his inventions combined to make him nearly untouchable, and any sentence levied against him existed only as a formality.

  She followed him with the intensity of a cat stalking a laser pointer, fascinated by the gadgets and gizmos that let him operate above the law. Kelly, secretly hoping to swipe a “how-to-ignore-the-rules” manual, practically fell into step behind him, trying very hard not to trip over her own curiosity.

  Whatever he had? She was going to make it hers.

  They reached a set of double doors. Dr. Haider opened them, revealing an opulent lift waiting inside.

  Kelly stepped inside.