01 / The Story
Mina had spent her entire life believing there was an explanation for everything. Then she became the one thing she couldn't explain.
Deep beneath the Earth, inside the classified world of Project Monarch, Mina is chosen to study something that shouldn't exist: four-stranded DNA that behaves less like a biological sample and more like something alive.
And somehow, it knows her.
Beside her is Atlas—the brilliant, impossibly beautiful scientist she has spent years trying not to want. Whatever exists between them has always lived quietly beneath the surface, hidden inside lingering glances, almost-touches, and all the things neither of them has been brave enough to say.
Until they finally stop pretending.
But just as Mina begins to understand what Atlas means to her, the sample leads her somewhere neither of them was prepared to go.
Into an ancient chamber.
Into the hands of a being who seems to know exactly what she is.
And eventually, into a reality Atlas cannot follow.
Separated from the man she can't seem to forget, Mina is forced to explore every part of herself she has spent a lifetime containing—her desire, her power, her curiosity, and the terrifying possibility that her connection to the sample began long before she ever stepped inside Monarch.
While Mina searches for the truth about who she is, Atlas searches for her.
And the farther apart they are pulled, the harder it becomes to ignore the one thing neither science, distance, nor another world seems capable of breaking:
Whatever exists between them.
"They were never studying the four-stranded DNA. They were waiting for her."
