The first thing that returned was the pain. Not the sharp, clean agony of a fresh wound, but the deep, cellular memory of annihilation. It was the phantom scream of every atom being torn apart, the ghost-heat of a fire hot enough to turn bone to vapor. Rika woke up screaming, a raw, guttural cry of defiance that had been her last sound in one life and her first in the next.
Which was embarrassing, because she had no lungs.
The scream was a silent, psychic convulsion, a violent shudder of a consciousness that had no business existing. There was no chest to heave, no throat to tear, no air to expel. There was only the *idea* of a scream, a desperate, primal command from a mind that refused to accept its own cessation. The memory of the white light was still a raw nerve ending, a silent, all-consuming roar in the void where her soul had been scattered. She remembered the final, fading sight of the shuttle vanishing into the toxic clouds, the faint, absurd hope for a rom-com, and then the ultimate, final silence.
And also because she was being held.
This was the second sensation. It was an affront. An invasion. Warmth, a gentle heat that seeped into her very being, a stark contrast to the perpetual chill of the ruined world she had inhabited. Softness, something plush and yielding cradling her, a sensation so alien it was almost painful. There was a rhythmic, rocking motion, a gentle sway that was nothing like the violent lurch of a collapsing building or the bone-jarring impact of dodging a mutant's swipe. It was a motion designed for comfort, for peace, for things that didn't have to constantly fight for survival.
A female voice was crying. The sound was thick, choked with a relief so profound it was almost pain. It was a melody of pure, unadulterated emotion, a sound so complex and layered that Rika's mind, honed to decipher threats in the slightest rustle of debris, struggled to process it. It wasn't a scream of terror or a sob of grief. It was… joy? A weeping, desperate joy.
With an effort that felt like lifting a collapsed support beam, Rika forced her eyes open.
The world was a blur of pastel colors and soft light. Her vision, once sharp enough to spot a sniper's glint from half a kilometer away, was a watery, unfocused mess. Shapes swam in a haze of gold and cream. She tried to push herself up, to scramble away from the confining warmth, to assume a defensive posture. Her arms, her trusted weapons, refused to obey. They felt heavy, weak, disconnected.
She looked down at her hands.
They were not her hands.
Her hands had been calloused weapons, the skin tough as leather, mapped with a roadmap of scars from blades, burns, and shrapnel. The knuckles had been permanently swollen, the nails short, broken, and perpetually rimmed with grease and grime that no amount of scrubbing could ever fully remove. These… these were ridiculous. They were tiny. Pink. Fat. Useless little sausages with dimpled knuckles and fingernails like tiny, translucent shells. They curled instinctively into fists that were soft and harmless.
…No. NO.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through the fog of her new senses. This was a nightmare. A hallucination in the final microsecond before her brain boiled away. She tried to speak, to snarl, to curse the universe for this final, cruel joke. She tried to form the words, "Get off me," or "Where am I?" or even a simple, guttural "No."
What came out was a wet, gurgling noise and a single, perfect bubble of spit that popped on her lower lip. The sheer indignity of it was staggering.
The woman holding her—a vision of silk and silver hair that slowly resolved into focus as Rika's eyes adjusted—sobbed harder, pulling the tiny, useless body closer. The scent of lavender and clean skin filled Rika's nostrils, a smell so overwhelmingly peaceful it felt like an attack. "My baby… my Ulrika…"
Ulrika?
Rika's brain, a finely honed weapon of survival and tactics that had calculated trajectories of falling debris and anticipated the movements of dozens of enemies at once, did a hard reboot. The name echoed in the vast, empty space of her new mind, a foreign designation that felt wrong on every level. Ulrika. It was a soft name, a noble name. It was not Rika.
She looked around, past the woman's shoulder, her tactical mind kicking in despite the absurdity of the situation. She needed to assess. She needed to understand. It was an elegant bedroom, absurdly clean. The sheer, impossible cleanliness of it was the first real shock. There was no layer of fine gray dust on every surface. No smell of mildew or rot. No jagged holes in the walls letting in the poisonous air.
Gold drapes, heavy and luxurious, hung from ceiling to floor, shimmering in the sunlight that streamed through a tall, arched window. The window was made of glass, whole and unblemished, not a scavenged pane of cracked plexiglass patched with tape and hope. The furniture was carved from pale, smooth wood, the lines elegant and flowing, not the brutal, functional scrap metal she was used to. The air, besides the cloying lavender, smelled of beeswax and something else… baking? Bread? The concept was so foreign it took her a moment to identify it.
No ash. No smoke. No distant, mournful howls of mutated creatures hunting in the ruins. No smell of rotting corpses or the metallic tang of blood. No constant, low-grade thrum of fear that had been the background music of her entire adult life.
Oh no.
The pieces clicked into place with the horrifying finality of a spring-loaded trap. She knew this place. Not personally, but from a stolen moment of peace she'd once found, huddled in a ruined library with a tattered, water-damaged romance novel. It was a foolish indulgence, a story she'd read aloud to a group of terrified children hiding in the basement, her voice raspy from smoke inhalation, trying to give them a world that wasn't made of concrete and sorrow. The story was called *Dreaming Kiss*.
The setting was unmistakable. The opulence, the specific style of the carved headboard depicting twining ivy and roses, the view of the manicured gardens from the window where peacocks strutted on immaculate lawns. This was the von Lichten estate. This was the bedroom of Lady Ulrika von Lichten.
She was inside *Dreaming Kiss*.
The realization hit her with the force of a physical blow, harder than any mutant's strike, more stunning than the shockwave of her own bomb. She was in the body of the titular character, Lady Ulrika, a beautiful, naive noblewoman whose primary function in the story was to suffer beautifully for three hundred pages before tragically dying of a mysterious, vaguely romantic illness, paving the way for the brooding Duke Kael to find happiness with some other plucky, less-doomed heroine.
She looked down at the fat, pink hands again. This was the body of a newborn. She was a baby. A helpless, drooling infant in a romance novel.
And she was on a three-year timer to a pathetic, plot-convenient death.
This had to be a joke. A very specific, very cruel form of hell. The universe, in its infinite, twisted wisdom, had granted her final wish. She'd wanted a peaceful, boring life. A garden that grew flowers instead of fungus. Tea in the mornings. Well, here it was. A world with no monsters, no explosions, no apocalyptic sky. A world so soft and clean it made her teeth ache. And it was a prison. A gilded, perfumed, storybook prison.
The woman, Lady Elara von Lichten, Ulrika's mother in the book, shifted her, pressing the infant's face against the soft silk of her dress. "Hush now, my sweet one," she cooed, her voice a melody Rika had never associated with a human throat. "You are safe. You are here. My little Ulrika."
Rika wanted to scream again. She was not Ulrika. She was Rika. She was the Queen of Blades. She had faced down hordes of mutated abominations and gone out with a detonation that had carved a crater into the earth. She had earned her scars, her mismatched boots, her constant, weary readiness. This… this was an insult. A cosmic demotion.
She tried to fight, to struggle, to break free of the suffocating embrace. Her new body betrayed her completely. Her legs kicked with the spastic, uncoordinated jerks of a newborn. Her arms flailed uselessly. The effort was monumental, yet accomplished nothing. It was the ultimate powerlessness. She was a prisoner in a cage of flesh and bone that wouldn't even follow the most basic commands.
A wet warmth spread from her lower body. A diaper. She was wearing a diaper. The humiliation was so profound it almost eclipsed the existential terror. Rika, who had once gone for three weeks without a proper latrine while holding a defensive position, had just pissed herself without a second thought.
Lady Elara didn't seem to mind. She just chuckled softly, a sound like bells, and shifted her again. "Oh, my little one. Already keeping me on my toes." She called out, her voice clear and carrying. "Nanna! The little mistress needs her changing!"
A door Rika hadn't noticed opened silently, and a stout, older woman with a kind face and a starched white apron entered. "Already, my lady? She's a vigorous one."
"She is," Elara said, her voice filled with a pride that made Rika's non-existent stomach turn. "Strong. Just like her father."
They handed her back and forth like a parcel of meat. The Nanna woman, whose hands were just as soft as Elara's, began the process of cleaning her. Rika lay there, seething, a silent volcano of rage and disgust trapped in a body that could only gurgle and drool. This was her reality now. To be cleaned, fed, and coddled. To be called 'Ulrika' and 'little mistress.'
As the Nanna worked, Rika forced herself to look, to truly see. She was on a changing table, padded with velvet. The ceiling was painted with frescoes of cherubs and clouds. The air was warm. There was no draft. No chill seeping into her bones. There was no hunger, not the real, gnawing hunger she was used to, but a gentle, satisfied fullness. This body had been fed recently. Warm milk, probably.
The sheer, unassailable safety of the room was the most terrifying part of all. There were no weak points in the walls. No potential ambush sites. No weapons within reach, not even a shard of glass or a heavy piece of metal she could use as a bludgeon. There was nothing. It was a perfectly designed nursery, and to Rika, it was a perfectly designed cell.
She had to escape. She had to get out. But how? She couldn't walk. Couldn't talk. Couldn't even hold her own head up for more than a few seconds at a time. Her body was a liability, a sack of useless instincts and fluids.
The Nanna finished and wrapped her in a fresh, swaddling cloth. It was soft, impossibly so, and smelled of clean linen. Rika fought the urge to scream again as her limbs were confined, rendering her even more helpless. She was placed back in a lavish crib, the bars carved into the shape of swans.
She lay there, staring up at the painted cherubs. They smiled down at her, their plump cheeks rosy, their eyes full of blissful ignorance. They had no idea what real monsters looked like. They had no idea what it cost to survive.
Three years.
That was the timeline. In three years, the Duke would arrive. There would be balls, and intrigue, and whispered confessions in moonlit gardens. And Ulrika would fall ill. It would be a delicate, beautiful cough at first, then a fetching pallor, then a tragic decline. She would waste away, becoming even more ethereal and lovely as she died, a perfect, tragic flower.
Rika had seen death. She had seen it messy and brutal and quick. She had seen men choke on their own blood, their intestines spilling onto the dirt. She had seen children waste away from radiation sickness, their skin peeling off, their hair falling out in clumps. There was nothing beautiful about it. And she would be damned if she let her second end be a pathetic, romantic performance for the amusement of some storybook audience.
She had to survive. Again. But the rules were different now. The enemy wasn't a horde of mutated flesh. The enemy was time. The enemy was a narrative. The enemy was a body that was fragile and useless and destined for a delicate, poetic death.
A new kind of resolve hardened within her, a cold, sharp diamond of purpose in the warm, soft mush of her new existence. She was Rika. She had survived the apocalypse. She had survived her own annihilation. She would survive this.
She would learn to control this ridiculous body. She would learn to walk, to talk, to manipulate this world of silk and smiles. She would find out what caused Ulrika's 'illness' and she would rip it out by the roots. She would not die for a man she'd never met. She would not be a tragic footnote in a stupid love story.
She had wanted a peaceful life. Well, she would make one. On her own terms. This world might look soft, but it had its own kind of teeth. Courtly intrigue could be just as deadly as a mutant's claw. A poisoned cup was just as final as a bomb.
She looked at her tiny, pink, fat hand again. She focused all her will, all the desperate, furious energy of the Queen of Blades, and she made it move. It wasn't a punch or a grab. It was a small, clumsy twitch. The finger curled, just a little.
It was a start.
In the crib, surrounded by opulence and safety, the infant known as Ulrika began the long, arduous process of taking back her life. Her eyes, which should have been the wide, innocent blue of a newborn, held a flicker of something else. A cold, calculating fire. The fire of a survivor who had looked into the heart of nothingness and refused to stay there.
She was in a romance novel. And she was going to burn it to the ground.