Time, which had been stretched to a shrieking tightness, now broke. The attention of the entire room, which had been riveted on the conflict between Sophia's rebellious spirit and De Vries's glacial authority, narrowed to a point: Markus's trembling hand.The command hung suspended, more confining than any chain. Prove your loyalty. The words were not a request; they were a final judgment on his soul. De Vries had not commanded him to fight, or to kill. He had commanded him to commit the ultimate act of desecration. To become the physical instrument of the betrayal Sophia had just rejected with her entire being.Markus's eyes were open, unwinking, fixed upon the wreckage that covered the cold storage unit. He did not notice rock and twisted metal, but the ghost of the vial he had dropped, the one that had contained his cursed and redemptive future. Somewhere under that pile, others like it must have survived. His mind, a usually frantic whirlwind of calculation, was an appalling blank

The air within the archive tunnel was thick with dust and the acrid metallic tang of fear. The survivors—some wounded, traumatized people—huddled together against the cold rock, their world reduced to the faint glow of a single emergency light and the echoing noise of slaughter from the room they had left behind. Elara's breath came in small, painful gasps as she tightened the makeshift bandage on her arm. Ken leaned against the wall, his face a grimy mask of despair, the weight of all the dead lives bearing down upon him.The gunfire in the principal chamber had ceased. The silence that followed was worse than the noise. It was the silence of a job done. The deliberate footsteps that now approached their barricaded archway were the footsteps of janitors who had arrived to clean up the last, small mess.Sophia stood somewhat apart from the others. She was not weeping. She was not trembling. She was listening to something inside herself, a vibration that had started when the first need

The stillness after the final soldier fell weighed heavier than the shots which had run to meet it. It was a silence heavy with smoke, sweat, and the coppery stench of blood. The survivors stood there panting, their makeshift guns heavy in their hands, their bodies trembling with adrenaline and exhaustion. The immediate threat was motionless, but the air vibrated with a new, deeper threat.Inspector De Vries was not caught up in the desperate scramble. As Ken's insurgents had dispersed his pinned-down unit, he had pulled back as a master strategist does when the board suddenly turned on him: quietly and deliberately. There was no panic withdrawal, no wild rout. It was a deliberate, unhurried step back into the boiling cloud of the main corridor, his greys blending with shadows like a ghost.But his own voice, cold and bright, cut back across the chamber once more, an offering cast over his shoulder like a blade."This doesn't matter, Miss Ardent," he yelled, his tone not even angry, b

The cave-lab was no longer a place of scientific debate. It was now a battlefield, and the atmosphere stank with the acrid smoke of a different kind of war. The early, starry-eyed excitement at the possibilities of the cure had turned sour into a cold, hard stalemate of ethics. Anya and Rhy, and a handful of others, were now the face of bitter necessity. Ken, stuck in the infernal limbo between his vow and his passion, was being gradually squeezed by the pressure.He had tried to delay the debate, to stall, but time was something this on-its-last-breath world could not afford. Every hour they were in seclusion was an hour another community was potentially dying of the Grey Lung or the X-12 strain. The weight of every potential death weighed against his shoulders, wearing him down.We can't just do nothing about this," Rhy said, his anger and sadness not showing in his soft voice. He had his arms crossed, a hulk of muscle and misery. "We have a duty."."Our responsibility is to each ot

The cave was a tomb sealed by Sophia's words. Her self-sacrifice had not brought peace; it had delivered a ghastly, wordless judgment. Ken was like a man who had been physically drained, his face a mask of sorrowful paralysis. Elara was stiff at the entrance, her rebellion turned inward now into a seethe of guilt and impotent rage. The rest were statues, caught between wonder and fear, the weight of the choice they had made now settling on them.It was Markus who broke the silence. He'd sat in the shadows, endured the entire disastrous exchange, his own conscience a well-worn coat he kept on second after second. But while the others remained frozen by the moral enormity of what they'd just seen, his mind, the engineer's mind that had wrought such devastation, began to function. Not on masterplots or betrayals, but on a problem. A ghastly, pathetic problem that needed to be solved.He cleared his throat, the harsh noise so alien. All eyes, mixed amounts of hatred and suspicion-laden, t