The main laboratory of the Licht des Lebens had become a stage, and Sophia Cohen was giving the performance of her life.
She stood before a holographic display, her shoulders slumped, her face a carefully constructed mask of weary defeat. Before her, Professor Brandt and the other senior members of the resistance listened, their own expressions a mixture of concern and disappointment.
"The baseline genetic sample is fundamentally flawed," she said, her voice hollow, gesturing to the complex protein model on the screen. "Every simulation I run based on this data results in a catastrophic cellular rejection cascade. The phage I designed... it's a key for the wrong lock. Without a pure, untainted sample of Anna's original DNA, I've hit a wall. I can't move forward."
She let the lie hang in the sterile air, a perfectly crafted illusion of scientific despair. She saw the shared, sympathetic glances between the other scientists. She saw the genuine sorrow in Professor Brandt's eyes. The performance was working. The mole, whoever they were, would report back to their military handlers that the cure was a dead end. It would buy her time.
That night, long after the others had retired to their quarters, the real work began.
Sophia sealed herself in her private lab, a smaller, soundproofed annex. The public project, "Phage," was put on hold. She opened a new, triple-encrypted, and offline project file, one that existed only on her personal terminal. She named it "Artemis." The huntress.
She pulled up the corrupted data file of Anna's genome again. She didn't have the original, but she had something better. She had a memory of her sister's laughter, a perfect, unblemished image of her life force. She had the echo of the golden light that now lived within her own cells.
She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind, not with the cold logic of a scientist, but with the intuitive, empathic sense of her Awakened power. She didn't just look at the lines of genetic code. She felt them. She felt the single, transposed protein marker not as a data error, but as a discordant, jarring note in a beautiful symphony. It was a note of sickness, of a lie.
Guided by an instinct that defied all her years of training, her fingers began to move across the holographic interface. She didn't calculate the correction. She felt it. She moved the marker, and the discordant note in her mind resolved into a perfect, harmonious chord. It felt... right. It felt like Anna.
She had her pure sample. Now, for the trap.
She created a new file, a carefully constructed decoy. She filled it with a flawed, but incredibly convincing, version of her cure's formula—one that would appear to be a breakthrough to anyone but a top-level bio-geneticist. It was the perfect bait. She named it CURE_FORMULA_FINAL_THEORETICAL.dat.
Then, with a few lines of elegant, malicious code, she wrapped the file in a digital tripwire. It was not a bomb or a virus. It was a whisper. The moment the file was accessed, copied, or transmitted from any terminal other than her own, it would send a single, silent, untraceable alert to the private datapad she kept with her at all times. It wouldn't trigger any of the base's main alarms. Only she would know the viper had struck.
She placed the file in a shared, high-level research directory, a digital watering hole for the project's lead scientists. The trap was set.
Sophia leaned back in her chair, the cool light of the screen illuminating her tired but determined face. The lab was no longer a sanctuary. It was a spider's web. And she was no longer just the doctor looking for a cure. She was the hunter, and she had just laid the perfect bait.