ReGenesis Pharmaceuticals — Microbiology Wing, 2:03 PM
Aria pressed her palm to the biometric scanner. The door to Lab 7C opened with a soft hiss, welcoming her into a chilled, gleaming space that felt more spaceship than workplace.
Her breath fogged faintly in the air. Everything here was stainless steel and precision. Temperature-controlled centrifuges blinked patiently. Shelves were lined with glass flasks, pipettes, agar plates stacked like coins.
This was it.
This was her church.
She moved to her station, unpacking her lab journal with reverence. Pages full of scribbled dreams. Hypotheses penned at 3 AM. Doodles of Gram-positive bacteria in sunglasses.
> "Okay, nerd, you're officially home," she whispered.
"You talk to yourself too?" Yusuf grinned, sliding into the adjacent bench.
Aria smiled, shaking off her nerves. "Only when I think the Petri dishes are judging me."
"Fair. Mine are plotting my death."
Meilin swept into the lab with a stack of samples and exactly zero patience.
"Time trials are starting in thirty minutes," she said. "We're doing parallel plate incubation with a new compound—coded RX-317. First to record colony inhibition gets brownie points. Metaphorically. We don't do sugar here."
"Because you're secretly made of it?" Ezra muttered from across the room, nose-deep in a spectrophotometer.
Meilin ignored him.
Yusuf leaned toward Aria. "RX-317 is a new synthetic derivative of a postbiotic peptide. Rumor is, it came straight from corporate's private vault."
She blinked. "Corporate has a vault?"
He wiggled his eyebrows. "And a crypt. And a penthouse. All of which we are too poor to ever see."
She laughed, but her fingers tingled. The kind of tingling that happened when instinct whispered: This matters.
Executive Floor — 10th Level
Behind a glass partition etched with the company's helix insignia, Lucian watched the live lab feed from a private screen.
Aria. In her element.
Her voice—soft, animated. Her hands—steady, sure.
She looked exactly like her mother. But moved like herself.
Unaware.
Unburdened.
He clenched the pen in his hand. A part of him wished he hadn't seen her at all. Another part—older, lonelier, crueler—watched her the way a man watches a painting he once loved but could never own.
His assistant entered quietly. "There's a board meeting at five. You're expected to present the RX-317 expansion proposal."
Lucian nodded once. "Prepare the slides."
The screen flickered.
Aria looked up from her microscope and smiled at something Yusuf said.
Lucian's hand hovered over the controls.
Then—
He shut the feed off.
---
Lab 7C — Later That Evening
Aria was the last one left. Her colleagues had filtered out slowly, one by one, after Meilin called the trial complete.
She lingered, noting the microbial bloom forming a delicate, translucent arc across her dish. A partial inhibition zone.
Not quite success. Not quite failure.
She jotted it down anyway.
Colony retraction incomplete. Possible lag phase interference. Further testing needed.
Conclusion: The compound is stubborn. I like it.
She rubbed her thumb against the edge of her mother's ring, the broken pendant cool against her skin.
Somewhere, the building creaked softly, like it too was holding its breath.
Aria looked up at the ceiling, unaware of the eyes that had once lingered behind the steel beams and glass.
"See, Mom?" she whispered. "I'm not just surviving anymore."
She didn't see the small envelope tucked under her microscope's stand.
White. No stamp. No name.
Just one line, handwritten in an old, angular script she hadn't seen in over a decade:
>Happy first day, Firefly.