The rain came down like knives.
It wasn't the clean kind of rain that children danced in or lovers kissed under. This rain stank—of metal, decay, and blood. The clouds above the decaying spires of New Aurora weren't clouds at all but smog-thick fumes that choked the light out of the sky. Acid hissed where it touched steel. Where it kissed skin, it seared.
And yet she ran through it.
Dr. Elara Vance didn't flinch as the droplets bit into her cheeks. Her bio-suit had ruptured back near the corpse pile, the polymer mesh slashed open by a feral's rusted blade. Her blood was mixing with the rain now, leaking warmth into the concrete as she bolted down the alley, pulse a brutal drumbeat in her ears.
Behind her, screams. Wet, crunching screams.
Elara didn't look back. She couldn't afford to—not when her thumb was wrapped tight around the glowing vial in her coat pocket.
Inside that vial was a flower.
Not a metaphorical flower, not some poetic emblem of hope. A real one. Bioluminescent petals glowing blue with soft pulses, like breath. Its stem had already fused with the polymer base, roots writhing in their containment gel, searching. Hungry.
It was the only one.
And it was alive.
She reached the edge of the district wall, a 200-foot high monstrosity of salvaged war metal and repurposed limbs, twitching still from the embedded neuro-wiring. The security interface was ancient, its retinal scanner smeared with something black and sticky.
She panted, nearly gagging on the chemical tang of blood and oxidized air. Her trembling fingers pulled out a fiber-cable and jammed it into the port behind her left ear. Data flickered.
A voice crackled in her skull. "Dr. Vance? Are you—"
"Shut up, Pax. Open the gate."
Pax hesitated. "Security protocols say—"
"There's a swarm behind me. You have five seconds."
A loud thump echoed down the alley. Then a second. Closer. Sloppy, like raw meat slapping concrete.
Elara turned just enough to see the first one emerge.
The feral's spine bent wrong, arching backward, its ribcage split and blooming with mold and fungal veins. Its face had once been human, maybe a child, now a twisted ruin of teeth and pulsating tumors. It hissed when it saw her, its jaw dislocating with a wet pop.
The gate groaned open.
Elara dove through just as three more ferals spilled into the alley behind her, their claws skittering across the slick ground.
The metal slammed shut, bisecting one of them. The top half twitched for a moment on the clean side of the wall before convulsing violently. Its insides burst like overripe fruit, splattering her in steaming gore.
She staggered, spat out bile, and finally collapsed onto her knees.
"We've got to destroy it."
Elara's head snapped up.
She was in the decon chamber now, stripped of her suit, scrubbing blood and spores from her skin until it bled. Across from her, Commander Greaves stared through the glass. Tall, scarred, unblinking.
She wanted to punch him.
"You don't even know what it is," she growled.
"Exactly."
"It's a living plant. A pure-breed, not mutated. It reacted to neural impulses. It can photosynthesize despite the atmospheric poison. It can grow in flesh."
"It wants to grow in flesh."
"Maybe it has to. So what? You think the ecosystem will fix itself while we sit around circle-jerking over what's natural and what's not? We engineered this extinction."
Greaves folded his arms. "You're too emotional."
"And you're too dead inside."
Before she returned to the lab, Elara paused in the hall and rested a hand on the cold, humming wall. She remembered the day she found the bloom. She hadn't told anyone the full story—not even Pax.
It was in Zone K, near the old nursery fields that had long since turned into toxin marshes. Most had written them off as barren, but she had a feeling—an ache, a kind of gravity pulling her toward that swamp of bones and oil.
She had waded through waist-deep sludge, corpses curled like roots in the muck, until she saw it: a shimmer of blue light beneath a rotting skull. Her hands had trembled when she pulled it free. The petals had curled toward her warmth. It hadn't just been alive.
It had chosen her.
Pax's voice pulled her from memory. "Dr. Vance, the specimen… it's changed."
She ran.
The lights flickered erratically, bio-filters sputtering. The containment tank holding the flower was no longer just glowing. It was throbbing.
Thick veins of root had ruptured the gel casing, threading through the table. One had snaked to the dead rat they'd left for nutrient sampling.
The rat was now standing.
Not twitching. Not convulsing.
Standing. Eyes open. Breathing.
Its belly was open, ribs splayed like a blooming chrysanthemum. Inside, petals fluttered, blue and alive. A second flower had sprouted where the heart should be, its glow matching the one in the tank.
Greaves stared, pale. "That's not revival. That's mimicry."
Elara whispered, "No… It's replication."
The rat turned its head slowly and looked at her. Not with animal instinct, but with purpose. The flower inside it pulsed. For a second, her heart skipped.
Then it lunged.
She stumbled back as Greaves discharged his pulse gun. The rat exploded midair, flinging petals and fragments across the chamber. One flower shard landed on her cheek. It sizzled, embedding before she could scream.
"Out! Get her out!" Greaves roared.
Techs flooded in, sealing her in another decon pod. Pax's voice whispered in her comms, terrified: "Elara… it connected to you."
That night, Elara sat alone in the sub-basement, hands trembling as she stared at the original vial. The flower inside had closed its petals, like it was sleeping.
She hadn't told them everything.
When she'd first found the bloom, it had pulsed in sync with her heartbeat. And when her blood had spilled on it—it had whispered.
Not words. Not exactly.
But she'd felt it.
Hunger.
Awareness.
Affection.
It hadn't just wanted to live.
It wanted her.
And she wasn't sure she wanted to say no.
In her dreams, it showed her visions—twisting roots claiming cities, petals opening in the hollow chests of corpses, whole forests made of flesh and bloom. The world reborn not in purity, but in monstrous beauty.
And she was always at the center.
Always blooming.
The next morning, the lower levels of New Aurora were quiet.
Too quiet.
Until the screaming started.
And then the bloom began to spread.