Chapter 7: A Second Skin

Chapter 7: A Second Skin

The ghost of the blinking webcam light lived in the corner of Lyra’s eye. Every shadow, every flicker of a reflection in her monitor, was a potential observer. The BSR wasn't just an external threat anymore; they were a phantom presence in her home, in her machine. Elara’s warning—You are the prize—had become a mantra, a prayer, a declaration of war. She couldn't afford to be prey. She had to become the predator.

Her room had transformed into a training ground. The target was the face in the mirror. Not her own, but Kael’s.

The first attempts were agonizing failures. She’d sit on the floor, eyes closed, chasing the memory of the “wrong shift.” It wasn't a thought; it was a physical sensation, a deep, cellular hum. She tried to replicate it, to pull on the invisible threads of her own “messy” code. The result was a nauseating, pulling sensation, like her skin was trying to crawl off her bones, followed by a splitting headache and the coppery taste of blood. Her power was a wild, untamed animal, and it refused to answer her call.

Frustrated, she replayed the moment in the basement over and over. The surge of lunar energy, the ritual’s raw power, Kael’s collapse… and the feeling of her own form dissolving. The key wasn’t just wanting it; it was knowing the template. She had lived a lifetime beside Kael. She knew the exact cadence of his breath when he was asleep, the precise knot of muscle in his shoulder from his training, the way he carried his weight with a restless, forward-leaning energy.

She had to do more than just picture him. She had to become him from the inside out.

On the fifth night of trying, something finally caught. She focused on his genetic sequence as she understood it from her studies, a fraternal twin to her own, yet fundamentally different. She visualized the slight variations, the markers that made him male, that gave him his strength. Then she layered the memories on top—the sound of his voice, the feel of his hand grabbing hers, the scent of his worn training hoodie.

A wave of vertigo washed over her. It felt like every cell in her body was being plunged into ice water. Her bones softened, her joints unlocked, and a wave of biological noise, a chaotic internal symphony, drowned out the world. It was the feeling of being deconstructed and reassembled simultaneously. She gritted her teeth against a scream, her vision blurring into a grey smear.

When the world snapped back into focus, she was looking down at hands that were not her own. Large, calloused, familiar. She stumbled to the mirror. Kael’s face stared back, his brown eyes wide with her terror and her triumph. Her breath came out in a shaky, deep-chested gasp. She had done it. It was controlled. It was hers.

The shift held for three minutes before her body rejected it. The snap back was just as violent as it had been in the alley, a full-body convulsion that left her retching and shivering on her bedroom floor, every muscle screaming in protest. The cost was immense, but she had a weapon.

The files from Elara’s chip gave her a target. A name. Dr. Aris Thorne. Not a relative, but a BSR geneticist who had signed off on Elara’s official cause of death: “Spontaneous Cellular Decay following an Uncontrolled Shift.” It was a lie, a bureaucratic fiction to cover a murder. According to a partially recovered personnel file, Thorne still worked for the BSR, stationed at the local Sector 7 precinct, a concrete monolith of bureaucratic dread downtown. And deep in the archives of that precinct was Elara’s physical case file, containing the original, untampered autopsy and lab reports.

Getting that file was impossible. Walking in as Lyra Thorne was a death sentence. But walking in as someone else…

Her hunt began. For two days, she staked out the precinct from a coffee shop across the street, a predator learning the patterns of the herd. She watched the BSR clerks come and go, their faces etched with the mundane boredom of cogs in a machine. She chose her target carefully: a mousy, perpetually stressed woman in her late thirties named Brenda Mills. Lyra watched her for hours, memorizing her slumped, hurried walk, the way she clutched her oversized purse like a shield, the nervous habit of pushing her glasses up her nose. She followed her to a nearby cafe, sitting two tables away, listening to her complain on the phone about her cat and the rising price of synth-milk.

Lyra absorbed every detail, building a new template in her mind. This was harder than shifting into Kael. Brenda was an alien system.

The next morning, in the cramped, grimy bathroom of a public transit station two blocks from the precinct, Lyra began the change. The shift into this new skin was more jarring, less stable. As Brenda’s form settled over her, she was hit by a wave of foreign emotions—a spike of anxiety about an overdue report, a flash of irritation at her supervisor, a pang of loneliness. It was a psychic bleed, the ghost of Brenda’s consciousness trying to assert itself in the body Lyra had stolen. She pushed it down, burying the other woman’s thoughts under a cold wall of her own focus.

Dressed in a drab pantsuit she’d bought from a thrift store, she walked into the BSR precinct. The air was cold and smelled of industrial cleaner and ozone. She felt a hundred pairs of eyes on her, every BSR agent a potential executioner. She kept her head down, mimicking Brenda’s hurried, invisible shuffle.

She swiped the ID card she’d painstakingly forged, her heart hammering against Brenda’s ribs. The light on the scanner blinked green. She was in.

Navigating the labyrinth of gray cubicles was a nightmare. Brenda’s anxieties kept bubbling up, making her hands tremble. A portly supervisor called out, “Mills, got that quarterly audit ready?”

Lyra’s blood ran cold. She forced a high, reedy tone that matched the voice she’d overheard. “Almost done, Marcus! Just grabbing the final requisition forms from archives.” The name came from a fragment of the phone call she’d overheard. It worked. The supervisor grunted and turned back to his screen.

The physical archives were in the sub-level, a cold, quiet room that smelled of old paper and dust. Rows upon rows of beige filing cabinets stood like tombstones. She found the section for “Anomalous Incidents, Deceased.” Her hands, Brenda’s hands with their neatly filed but unpolished nails, shook as she pulled open the drawer for her sister’s case year.

There it was. THORNE, ELARA.

She pulled the thin manila folder, her breath catching in her throat. Her mission was to steal it, but she knew that would trigger an immediate lockdown. Instead, she pulled out her phone, her fingers flying across the screen, photographing every page with practiced speed: the coroner’s private notes, scribbled in the margins; the initial genetic analysis, full of terrifying notations about “unprecedented cellular replication”; the toxicology report that listed a paralytic neurotoxin not found anywhere in nature.

She had what she came for.

She slid the folder back, closed the drawer, and walked out, her steps measured, betraying none of the screaming urgency inside her. She made it past the main desk, past the security turnstiles, and out into the gray light of the city.

She didn't stop until she was locked in the same transit station bathroom. Leaning against the cold, tiled wall, she let the transformation dissolve. The snap back was a brutal, full-body shudder. She fell to her knees, gasping, no longer Brenda the anxious clerk, but Lyra, the avenging sister.

She was exhausted, drained to her very marrow. The echo of Brenda's mundane life still rattled in her head. But in her hands, she held the proof. She had the ghost of her sister’s last moments captured on her phone. She had a name, a toxin, a trail to follow. She had taken her first real step onto the battlefield, wearing a dead woman’s face as her armor. The game had changed. She wasn't just hiding anymore. She was hunting.