Fluorescent lights hummed like a lullaby that never ended.
The girl on the exam bed counted the flickers in the ceiling panel and tried to guess how many times it would buzz before the doctor sighed.
She got to seven.
"Subject F-315," said the man in the white coat.
"Florence," she replied, sweet as a razor.
A pause. Paper rustled on a clipboard.
"Vitals?"
"Alive, unfortunately." She swung her legs. "But don't fret, doctor, I'll try harder next time."
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile.
"Pulse is steady. Temperature… a little low." He clicked his pen. "You haven't been sleeping."
"Your lullabies are terrible."
He nodded toward the cuff on her wrist — smooth, silver, comfortably cruel.
"Let's begin."
Two assistants rolled the machine closer. It looked like a coffin taught to stand and write poetry — all smooth edges and pale blue light. The room's air thinned, a sterile cool that smelled like ethanol and old ghosts.
Florence tipped her head, white hair sliding over her shoulder like spilled milk. Cyan eyes traced the machine's seams until they found the mirrored lens above her, and she winked at her own reflection.
"New toy? You shouldn't have."
"Calibrated siphon array," the doctor said. "It will draw ambient Honkai radiation to your proximity, then measure absorption and neutralization rates."
"So you want me to breathe." She made a show of inhaling. "My rates are fabulous."
A different assistant — young, nervous — secured the leads to her collarbone and the soft spot at the crook of her elbow. When his hand shook, the adhesive slipped.
"Ow," he murmured as the edge nicked his finger. A bead of red rose and trembled.
Florence's gaze locked on it. Something old stirred inside her — a memory that wasn't a memory, a muscle she knew without knowing why. A nurse's voice? A scrubroom sink? The sound of a mask being tied?
Her hand moved before her head did.
"Here," she said lightly, catching his wrist.
His eyes widened. "Miss— Subject—"
"Shh," she breathed, and the world felt very quiet.
Heat coiled in her chest, then loosened into a cool bloom. A faint, luminous thread pulsed beneath her skin — white-gold, like sunlight filtered through frost. It prickled at her fingertips, gathered, and kissed the assistant's cut.
The blood brightened, then faded. The skin knit. The sting sighed out of the air.
He pulled back, startled. "It— It healed."
The doctor's pen stopped.
"Record it," he said, voice neutral.
Florence smirked and blew on her fingers as if cooling hot nail polish. The glow receded like a tide hiding pearls.
"Lucky you," she told the assistant. "First treatment's free. Tell your supervisor my bedside manner is to die for."
The doctor watched her closely. "Hemostatic response with localized purification. No residue. No thermal trauma." He clicked the pen again. "Your blood chemistry remains… unique."
"Iconic," she corrected.
His eyes flicked to her cuff. "Begin the draw."
The coffin-machine inhaled. The room's invisible weight shifted, as if something vast had leaned closer. A faint shimmer — ultraviolet dust — drifted from the corners of the ceiling toward the ring above Florence's sternum. Meters woke. Lines climbed. Numbers began to argue with each other.
She felt it enter her like an unwelcome memory — the thin, violet sting of Honkai in the air — and then felt the other sensation, older than the lab, older than her second life, older than the name they gave her.
A hush. A turning leaf.
Her body drank the sting and made of it something clean.
"Absorption steady," said the left assistant. "Neutralization at sixty-eight percent and rising."
"Seventy-six," said the right.
"Ninety-one," said Florence, eyelids fluttering. "Ninety-three… and you really should dust in here."
The doctor's pen stopped again.
"Increment output," he said.
The machine obliged. The air's pressure deepened into a soft, crushing embrace. The lights dimmed at the edges. Florence floated in her skin — not drowning, yet — and stared at the mirrored lens until her reflection blurred into someone else's hands gloving up. A thread of laughter, bright and reckless, cut across the sterile hush.
"More," she dared. "Come on. I bite back."
The doctor slid one dial higher. "Maintain synchronization."
It wasn't painful. Not at first. It was the sensation of too many breaths taken too quickly — the edge of a laugh becoming a cough. Deep inside, something vast stirred, like a cathedral waking. A pattern bloomed beneath her breastbone: three intersecting arcs, a geometry made of light and memory.
The monitors trembled.
"Doctor—" the nervous assistant said, eyes darting between lines that climbed as if trying to escape the screen. "We're approaching the last threshold."
The doctor watched Florence. "Hold."
She smiled at him upside down. "You'll owe me dessert."
The machine inhaled again — and the power cut.
Darkness took a single, shocked step into the room. The hum dropped to a heartbeat and came back ragged. Emergency strips lit the floor like runway lights in a bad dream.
"Grid blip," someone said over the intercom, tinny and strained. "We're rerouting. There's… a spike in external Honkai readings. Cross-checking with Schicksal net—"
The intercom died with a soft, embarrassed pop.
The doctor's jaw tightened. He reached for the manual override.
"Don't," Florence whispered.
He frowned. "Subject—"
"Listen." Her eyes were very blue in the dim.
At first, there was only the lab: breaths, fans, the feathered sound of paper being afraid. Then, faint and far away, like a storm the city had forgotten to predict, came a groan. The building shivered. Somewhere above, metal screamed.
The stillness that followed felt like the world inhaling.
The doctor exhaled, slow. "Seal the chamber. Secure the subject."
Florence laughed, sudden and bright. "Doctor, if I were a bird, would you keep me in a box?"
"Every precaution must be taken."
"Mm. Good answer. Wrong patient."
He pressed the override.
The siphon's ring flared — just once, a flash like old sunlight on a sword — and the monitors spiked so hard their beeps turned into shrieks. Energy that should have been outside roared inward, then turned to honey in Florence's veins.
The symbol beneath her breastbone burned cold. Not pain — a certainty.
Something in her blood remembered how to sing.
She sat up.
The cuff on her wrist hissed and locked tighter. The assistants stumbled back. The doctor had a hand on the call switch, but the lights flickered again, and this time they didn't all return.
"Subject F-315—"
"Florence," she said gently. "We've talked about this."
The floor moved. A quiet wave. Then a louder one. The ceiling grid rippled. A hairline crack walked across the mirrored lens like a spider deciding on a direction.
The nervous assistant whispered, "What's happening?"
Florence listened to the darkness beyond the walls. The storm was no longer far. It was at the door of the world, knocking with a thousand violet hands. Her skin prickled, every hair a tuning fork. In the noise, she heard a voice she did not know and somehow knew completely, made of gravity and grief.
A Herrscher has opened her eyes, said the silence.
"I think the sky is having an opinion," Florence said.
The doctor's composure frayed. "Release the secondary anchors and—"
The ceiling dropped a sentence onto the room.
Panels fell in glittering squares. A steel brace tore free and slammed into the machine with a sound like a choir cut in half. Florence moved without thinking — not away, but toward the falling shadow — and light erupted from under her skin.
White-gold. Clean as winter. Sharp as a prayer.
The brace hit the glow and skidded sideways, carving a molten line into the tile. The siphon's shell cracked; a shower of sparks spelled out brief constellations and died.
Florence stood in the soft ruin of her restraints, looking down at her hands. Her palms were veined with luminous threads. They faded, came back, faded again — as if the light were breath learning how to be lungs.
"Fascinating," the doctor breathed, and for once it wasn't clinical. It was human.
Sirens awakened somewhere far and too near. The lab doors buckled once and held their breath.
Florence flexed her fingers and shook out the last stinging shards. She smiled, fox-bright and almost kind.
"Doctor," she said, and her voice was a little softer, "we should go."
He blinked at her. "Go?"
"Evacuate. The ones upstairs will need help." She glanced at the assistant she'd healed. "You — grab the med kit on the wall. The good one, not the one with Band-Aids for grown-up feelings."
The assistant hesitated. "But protocol—"
"Protocols don't stop ceilings."
Another tremor ran through the bones of Babylon. This one had a voice — a distant split in the air, a laugh made of knives.
The doctor swallowed. "Subject— Florence. Can you… maintain that light?"
She looked at her hands again. The glow obeyed her like a cat that sometimes remembered its name.
"For a while," she said. Then she winked. "Buy me dessert after and I'll try harder."
The doors finally gave up pretending to be doors and decided to be a hole. Smoke pushed its way in, tasting of ozone and grief. Somewhere beyond, alarms braided with the animal sound of people running in the wrong shoes.
Florence stepped into the corridor, barefoot on cold tile, her hair a pale flag in the red pulse of emergency lights.
Behind her, the doctor hesitated — then followed. The assistants came after, clutching the med kit like a lifeline.
They moved through a hall of blinking throats. A scientist staggered from a side room, blood on his temple and panic shading his eyes violet. Honkai dust hung in the air like violets that had changed their minds about being flowers.
Florence's skin hummed. The white-gold threads in her hands brightened. The dust bowed and went out.
"Hold still," she told the bleeding man, and pressed her palm to his wound. "You're not allowed to die in front of me. It ruins my mood."
Light sank, then lifted, taking the wrongness with it. The man gasped and stared. "What are you?"
Florence tilted her head, smile lopsided.
"Complicated."
The corridor ahead ended in a door that had learned the word jam. Beyond it, through a narrow viewing pane, the stairwell swam in smoke. The building twitched again. Above the smoke, near the broken floodlights, something moved — white, small, purposeful.
A figure leaped the last few steps and hit the landing in a crouch, greatsword planted like a promise. Short. White-haired. Eyes that knew the cost of saving people and paid it anyway.
She looked through the window and saw them. Her gaze found Florence — found the light under her skin — and something like recognition flickered, then sharpened into resolve.
The figure straightened, lifted the sword one-handed, and pointed to the door.
"Stand back," she mouthed.
Florence grinned, delighted.
"Oh," she breathed. "Now this is interesting."
Steel sang.
The door lost an argument with a greatsword and fell into two agreeable pieces.
Cool air flooded the hall like the first line of a prayer. The newcomer stepped through the cut and only then spoke, voice calm in the firelight.
"Theresa Apocalypse," she said. "If you can walk, follow me."
Florence held her gaze for a heartbeat, her own light answering the stairwell's ash-gray glow.
"Florence," she said brightly. "Nice to meet you, Miss Apocalypse. I heal, I bite, and I'm very hard to keep in a box."
Theresa took in the doctor, the assistants, the flicker of white-gold at Florence's fingers. The building shuddered again. Somewhere far above, the world laughed like a Herrscher.
"Then don't let anyone put you in one," Theresa said, and turned, sword up, to lead them into the burning stairwell.
Florence followed — smiling, shining, complicated — as Babylon Labs began to fall.