The sheltering had cast a cloud of uneasy silence over the survivors. The one vial of Sophia's blood, locked in a portable fridge, was a silent, screaming confirmation of their brokenness. Ken lingered in the tunnels like a ghost, his presence a reminder of a moral line crossed, his authority now overshadowed by Markus's rising, pragmatic star. Elara was now the tense, watchful connection between them, caught between her love for Ken and her black acknowledgment that Markus's calculating cruelty was, at this moment, keeping them alive.It was while guards were changing at the Gamma-9 portal—a camouflaged, thin crack in one of their final links with the old escape channels—that it happened. The breakdown was a weakness, a brief moment when the set pattern was disrupted. It was the kind of detail De Vries's planners would have caught, a thread in the weave of their defense that had unraveled.Elara was there in person, not napping, her arm still aching in its sling. She was reviewing th

The echo of De Vries's words had not yet faded; it had turned foul, congesting the air of the cavern into poison. The protests raged, a terror-stricken din of shattered loyalty. Ken stood in the middle, a man publicly drawn and quartered by two mutually exclusive passions. His visage was a battlefield, scarred by the trenches of an unwinnable war.Then, amidst the din of sounds, a noise cut through. Not a scream, not a screaming cry. A solitary, loud crack.Sophia had bashed her hand against the crate-table, the one that held the microscope and the damned vial of her own blood. The glass of the slide trembled. It was a small noise, but it had a finality that stunned the room. Everyone stared at her.The quiet archivist was gone. The calm, almost mystical presence who had walked through bullets no longer existed. In her place was a young woman seething with anger. Her hands were clenched, her shoulders twisted. The strange glow that sometimes attended her now leapt up from within, a co

The cave had become a ghost parliament. The passionate dust-sketches of rescue routes, penned by the young and hopeful, had been trampled under frightened feet. Sophia's fiery words remained suspended in the air, a challenge that had split the community in two. But the initial fervour of revolutionising zeal had been dissipating, to be followed by the cold, hard breath of reality.They were short on time. De Vries was not going to wait indefinitely. Every minute of argumentation equated to one minute Elara spent in a cell, and one minute De Vries's followers narrowed the noose.Ken stood before them, but he was no longer a leader addressing his people. He was a man on a scaffold looking out over the faces of his executioners. The roles he had played his whole life—Father, Scientist, Leader—were no longer parts of a system that worked together, a system where they all connected somehow. They were belligerent forces devouring him from inside."We must decide," Rhy's voice boomed, shatte

Elara's absence was not a vacuum; it was a living, corrosive thing. It was the silence where her peaceful, rational voice should have been booming out. It was the runaway argument that degenerated into a shouting match. It was the tactical decision made without her careful consideration, the moral line crossed without her gentle, consistent reminder of who they needed to be.He missed her as a phantom limb. He would turn to catch her counsel in the middle of a crisis and find only hollow air. He would listen to the rising hysteria in an argument and wait for her to cut it down with one biting question, only to find the chaos would now run unchallenged. Her moderating presence had been the keystone of the arch of his regime, and with it absent, the entire structure was groaning, shedding fragments of itself into the darkness.His grip was loosening. It revealed itself in the small stuff first. A request for a patrol schedule would receive a delayed, spaced-out response. A question abou

At the heart of their sanctuary was an abandoned municipal cistern, a brickwork arch cavern that wept a constant, slow saline tear. The air was thick with damp concrete, recycled air, and the distant, antiseptic zip of ethanol. In the innermost recesses of a city that once celebrated him, Dr. Ken Ardent prowled ghost-like among make-shift laboratory benches, his footfalls economical, his face set into an expression of controlled weariness.The child by the checkpoint was the trigger. A small girl, her cheeks aflame with the telltale burning flush of the Crimson Sorrow, coughing up bloody phlegm onto her mother's scarf. Ken had risen from behind a rusted grille in the square, his scientist's mind observing the symptoms, his father's heart tightening in his chest. He'd caught sight of Elara's hand tightening on his arm, a wordless supplication. Don't. He did. The single vial of unpolluted serum, delivered down a drainpipe by a steel-nerved messenger, had saved the girl. It had also attr