There are moments in life when dignity has to wait its turn. Standing naked in an abandoned underground laboratory while an enraged psychic spider organism drained the power keeping itself imprisoned was one of them.
The Black Widow serum had finished the worst of its work, but my body still felt newly assembled, as if every part of me had been tightened with tools and nobody had bothered checking whether the bolts were comfortable afterward. My legs trembled whenever I put too much weight on them. Four additional limbs kept making tiny corrections behind me without permission, tapping against the floor or walls whenever my balance shifted. My skin felt overly sensitive, my mouth still carried the bitter metallic trace of fresh venom production, and the electrical activity inside Arcadia pressed against my new senses from every direction.
I was also extremely, unmistakably naked. That fact had been low on my list of concerns while my skeleton was changing shape. Now that I could stand again, it climbed the rankings very quickly.
Leona: "Clothes."
Spider Six looked up at me from beside the laboratory bench.
Leona: "Immediate strategic priority."
I crossed one arm over my chest before realizing that this left everything else uncovered, which made the gesture feel rather pointless. My four new limbs twitched behind me as if offering suggestions.
Leona: "None of you are allowed opinions."
Six continued looking at me. I turned away from it.
Yes, it was a machine. No, it was not intelligent. Yes, I still felt judged.
That particular habit would become significantly more complicated later in my life.
I found the remains of my old clothes first. Calling them clothes was generous. My shirt had torn into several pieces during the growth phase, and the trousers had split so badly that one leg was almost entirely separated from the rest. The armor was worse. It had been designed around a body barely one meter tall, and I had grown far enough beyond it that several straps had snapped while others had been physically torn out of their mounting points.
Useful as scrap. Useless for modesty.
I sighed and looked down at myself properly for the first time. The serum had done what I asked.
Human proportions. Adult proportions. My skin was pale beneath streaks of dried blood, and my body looked unnervingly familiar after a month of seeing something else in mirrors. My waist, hips, legs and chest had returned to roughly the shape I'd had before the accident, except that there was far more strength hidden underneath now. The feline-derived muscle hadn't made me bulky. It had simply packed the structure tighter, giving my limbs a firmness that didn't match how ordinary they looked.
My breasts had come back too. Medium. Just like before.
I stared down at them. There was perhaps a two-second period of profound scientific disappointment.
Leona: "Really?"
The serum had rewritten half my body, grown four new limbs, built venom glands, electrical organs and a regeneration system, but apparently increasing my cup size had been beyond its ambitions.
I had never admitted this to Kira, and I certainly wasn't going to admit it to Mom. Both of them had always been considerably more generously equipped than me, and yes, sometime during those frantic hours of designing my supposedly perfect body, a very small and deeply unserious part of my brain had hoped the genetic lottery might finally correct what nature had apparently considered sufficient.
It hadn't.
Leona: "Fine. Great. Very optimized."
Spider Six's optic turned.
Leona: "I swear to God."
At least my hair had turned out properly. Blonde.
That had been one of the phenotype changes I'd intentionally restored. It fell in a messy curtain around my shoulders, sticky with sweat and blood but recognizably mine. My eyes were blue again too, although the color had changed slightly with the new sensory architecture. They looked human in the reflection of a dark monitor, but when the electrical perception became active there was a faint brightness behind them that didn't belong to ordinary eyes.
I could live with that. The larger problem remained pants.
Arcadia had staff facilities on Sub-Level One. I remembered seeing them on the map. That meant lockers, and lockers meant abandoned clothing.
Hopefully.
I gathered the ruined pieces of my armor, grabbed Dad's bent staff and started toward the corridor. My first three steps were terrible. My brain still expected rabbit proportions and tried to place my feet far too close together, while my longer stride made the floor arrive in places I wasn't anticipating. The fourth step was better. By the tenth, my new reflexes were correcting faster than I could consciously notice the mistakes.
The spider limbs helped.
I kept them mostly retracted at first, or tried to. Folding them back into the reinforced structures along my spine was an experience I preferred not to analyze too carefully. It didn't hurt much anymore, but feeling four large appendages collapse into spaces against my own back was going to require psychological adjustment.
I found the staff changing room after several minutes. Most lockers were open and empty. Of course. Arcadia personnel had evacuated deliberately, and they'd taken personal belongings, uniforms and equipment where they could.
But not everything.
One locker still contained maintenance coveralls. Another had an old laboratory coat. A third had a pair of gray utility trousers, several shirts and boots far too large for me.
I held up the trousers. Possibly.
The shirt was easier. I put it on immediately, and being covered from the waist upward improved civilization dramatically.
The trousers required tightening with a belt I found hanging inside another locker, but they stayed up. The legs were slightly too long, so I rolled them at the ankles. The boots were hopeless, which meant I kept my own feet bare for the moment.
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I looked down. Old gray work shirt. Oversized utility pants. No shoes. Blood in my hair. Four retractable spider limbs.
Leona: "Fashion."
Six had followed me.
Leona: "Don't laugh."
Silence.
Leona: "Good."
I returned to the laboratory and started inventory. That calmed me. Inventory was civilized. Inventory involved numbers, and numbers generally did not enter your mind telepathically.
My backpack had survived because I'd left it away from the serum table. The laptop inside was intact. Tablet intact, although one corner of the casing had cracked when I dropped it. Dad's staff was bent but usable. Utility knife. Basic medical kit. Repair tools. Two spare drone battery packs. Water. Very little food. Several chemical sample containers I'd taken from Arcadia.
Then the spiders.
Spider One was still outside, operational although one leg had been damaged in the coyote fight. Spider Two was dead for practical purposes, its chassis crushed badly enough that field repair wasn't realistic, though I still had it because the processor and several components could probably be salvaged.
Spider Three had reached the lower containment ventilation system and was now effectively trapped there. That was becoming a concern. Spider Four remained functional. Spider Five had significant damage and was still strapped to the backpack.
Spider Six stood beside me, watching the entire accounting process with the solemn dedication of a machine that had absolutely no idea it was being included in a family census.
Leona: "So... three good enough, one limping, one wounded, one mostly corpse."
Six rotated its optic.
Leona: "I've had better evenings."
I connected the laptop to Arcadia's terminal and began copying everything related to the Black Widow serum. Not just the final formulation. Everything.
My simulations. The sequence selections. Regenerative safeguards. Rejected variants. Arcadia's source research. Compatibility calculations. The Chimera records I'd used for comparison. Tissue models. Neural integration tables. Every modification I'd made during the final minutes before synthesis.
If the laboratory died, I wanted the work with me. More importantly, if I died, I wanted there to be a record of what I'd done.
That thought lingered longer than I liked.
I created three copies: one on the laptop, one on the tablet and one on an external drive. Redundancy. Dad would have approved.
Then I added my own file.
BLACK_WIDOW_SERUM_LEONA_VOSS_FINAL.
I stared at the name. Final was optimistic.
I changed it.
BLACK_WIDOW_SERUM_V1.
Much more realistic.
Leona: "There. Science."
The terminal beeped behind me. I didn't want to look.
I looked.
AUXILIARY CONTAINMENT RESERVE: 10%
CONTAINMENT LOAD: CRITICAL
EMITTER BANK 03-B: DEGRADED
EMITTER BANK 04-A: DEGRADED
Ten percent.
I leaned back in the chair. Containment fields sound more impressive than they are.
People hear field and imagine an invisible wall from old science fiction, some glowing sheet of energy that politely refuses to let monsters through. Arcadia's system was uglier and much more practical. The chamber below was surrounded by arrays of high-output emitters, conductive reinforcement grids and energized barriers built into the walls, doors and access corridors. The system created overlapping zones that punished anything attempting to cross them with enormous electrical and electromagnetic discharge while specialized dampening systems interfered with the Matriarch's biological and psychic activity.
It wasn't one wall. It was layers.
That was why the system had lasted so long. If one emitter died, neighboring units compensated. If a section weakened, the field redistributed power. Mechanical barriers behind it provided another obstacle, then another energized section after that.
Beautiful engineering, really. Except every redundant system had been running for almost three decades, and redundancy only works until enough things fail at once.
The Matriarch had figured that out.
I watched the lower-level power graph. Each time she pressed against one section, the system redirected energy there. The other sectors weakened temporarily. Then her Progeny tested those weaker areas.
She wasn't simply attacking. She was learning.
Leona: "That's bad."
Six said nothing.
Leona: "Thank you for your technical contribution."
The psychic pressure brushed my mind again, lighter this time. Almost playful.
I hated that more than the rage.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feeling of my own body. My heartbeat. My breathing. The faint electric rhythm of my nervous system. Things that belonged to me.
The pressure retreated. Then the monitor changed.
Nine percent.
Leona: "Oh, fuck you."
I pulled up the facility map. The main hatch was no longer a viable exit. Kira and the Authority were there.
Even if they were still busy moving her, I couldn't simply walk out wearing stolen Arcadia pants and introduce myself as a completely different hybrid five minutes after they entered looking for a rabbit. Also, I was fairly certain showing them my new back would lead to paperwork.
Potentially gunfire. Possibly both.
The vehicle entrance was sealed under meters of concrete. Surface receiving was collapsed. Two emergency exits existed on the old map, but one terminated in a section marked STRUCTURAL FAILURE and the other appeared to connect to a drainage and maintenance network somewhere west of the main facility.
That interested me.
I zoomed in. The route began near Sub-Level Two, crossed an old utility corridor and climbed toward a surface service outlet several hundred meters from the primary entrance.
Possibly intact. Possibly collapsed. Possibly full of something with too many legs.
At this point, my standards had deteriorated.
Leona: "Six."
The drone looked up.
Leona: "We're going to find another door."
I sent Spider Four toward the western utility corridor. Six stayed with me. Spider One remained outside to monitor the Authority. Three was still near containment, which made my stomach tighten every time I thought about it.
The laptop chimed. Copy complete.
I disconnected it, packed the drives and pulled the backpack over my shoulders. That caused another new sensation. The spider-limb cavities shifted around the straps.
I stopped, removed the backpack, adjusted the straps and tried again.
Better.
Leona: "New body problem number... whatever."
The monitor sounded another warning.
Eight percent.
Too fast. Much too fast.
I turned toward the containment display. The Matriarch was drawing more power every time she tested the field, and something in the lower sections had begun forcing the system to maintain several barriers simultaneously.
The graph spiked.
Seven percent.
My mouth went dry.
Leona: "No."
A vibration moved through the floor. Not an explosion. Something heavier.
A long mechanical groan rolled upward through Arcadia. Then a new warning appeared.
CONTAINMENT FIELD SECTOR 04:
PARTIAL FAILURE
SECONDARY BARRIER:
ACTIVE
AUXILIARY CONTAINMENT RESERVE: 7%
One layer had failed. Not containment. Not yet. But one of the layers.
The Matriarch pressed against my mind again, and this time the emotion was unmistakable.
Satisfaction.
I stared toward the floor.
Leona: "You knew."
The presence remained.
She had been testing the system, finding the weak parts. Maybe for years. Maybe she'd simply never had a reason to hurry before.
Then I arrived.
Something about that possibility made my skin crawl.
Spider Four transmitted from the western utility corridor.
ROUTE OPEN.
For approximately sixty meters. Then uncertain. Collapsed debris farther ahead. Potential airflow.
Airflow meant surface connection.
I smiled despite myself.
Leona: "Good spider."
Six looked at me.
Leona: "You too."
I took Dad's staff in one hand, checked the laptop in the backpack and looked around the laboratory one last time.
This place had given me a body. A weapon. A chance.
It had also given me a psychic nightmare with seven percent battery remaining. Fair trade was debatable.
I started toward the western corridor. Then Spider One transmitted an alert from outside.
Movement near the entrance. Authority personnel. And one very large orange thermal signature being moved away from the hatch.
Kira.
They were finally clearing her. My exit clock had just gotten shorter.
Below me, Arcadia's containment reserve dropped to six percent.
I tightened my grip on Dad's staff.
Leona: "Come on, Six."
The little drone fell into step beside me.
For the first time that night, I wasn't running west because I had nowhere else to go. I had a body I had chosen, data worth protecting, a sister somewhere above me who had gotten herself tranquilized into unconsciousness for my sake, and a monster beneath my feet that was rapidly running out of patience.
That was enough direction for one morning.