napalm.

Dr. Eva Victoria Lao has already reshaped modern chemistry by becoming the first Nobel laureate from the Philippines, hailed as a national treasure. But returning home from Germany doesn't mean rest. It means being buried alive in a secret military bunker, handed the keys to Project Lazarus.

The assignment: turn forgotten human beings into living weapons.

Not soldiers. Not volunteers. Disposable bodies-squatters, runaways, prostitutes, addicts. People yanked off Manila's midnight streets, their disappearances leaving no paper trail, no grieving families, no awkward questions. People no one would ever come looking for.

Eva is told it's for national security. That the enemy is coming, and the country needs an edge no conventional army can provide. She's given unlimited funding, state-of-the-art labs, and a simple directive: break the subjects, then rebuild them into instruments of war.

But the science starts working too well. The test subjects begin to fight back not just physically, but psychologically. They remember who they were. They whisper to each other in the dark. And one of them, a teenage girl with no name and a body that now runs hotter than napalm, starts calling Eva "Mother."

Now Eva faces a question more terrifying than any chemical equation: Is she engineering weapons-or forging a new kind of human being that will turn on its creators?

And when the first subject escapes into the streets of Manila, glowing faintly under the city lights, Project Lazarus becomes something else entirely.

A hunt. A reckoning. And for Eva, a choice between saving her nation and saving her soul.