The rain over Amsterdam was a grey, weeping curtain, casting the city's famous gabled roofs as a miserable mosaic of damp tiles and shattered reflections. It was a watercolour painting left to rot, its beauty drowned in a monochrome misery. Inspector Thom De Vries waited in the lee of a battered boathouse on the Keizersgracht, the collar of his long coat turned against the damp. The water in the canal was a black, oily plate, its surface broken only by the ripples of the steady rain and the occasional, sinister glide of a patrol drone.He checked his chronometer. The contact was late. It was always so with rats. They operated on their own timetables, afraid of the light and the dark. De Vries did not experience expectation, only a cold, professional impatience. This was not a dialogue of minds, but a sale. He was purchasing a key, and he had no concern for the grime on the metal, only that it fit the lock.A figure emerged from the darker shadows of a nearby bridge, moving with a skul

The hush was the first thing that was wrong. It was not the silence of sleep or security, but a thick, muffled silence, as if the tunnels themselves were waiting with bated breath. The steady drip-drip of seepage from the cistern's ceiling echoed slower, more labored, a dying heartbeat. The generators' muted thrum, a sound so constant it had become the underworld's own blood-pressure, now stumbled with a faint, irregular catch that set Ken's teeth on edge.He was in the middle room, paralyzed, listening. He could distinguish the faint, rhythmic scritch of Sophia's pencil in their lab, the soft clink of glassware from the two scientists who were still obstinately working the night shift. Normal sounds. But the other sounds—the distant, reassuring murmur of voices from the living quarters, the heavy tread of Jorge on his patrol rounds, the occasional burst of static from the old radio receiver—were absent. It was as if the sanctuary were slowly being emptied of its life, one decibel at

The quiet of the cistern had become a tomb, and Markus Hale its most watchful guardian. He moved unseen through the rooms with funeral grace, his face a carefully constructed mask of concerned weariness. Inside, however, a chill, bitter conviction was singing. It was the anthem of survival, a refrain long since drowned out the clashing notes of duty, friendship, and guilt.He went about his job with mechanical exactness. He helped Lena run a final, unsuccessful test on the protein synthesizer, sitting quietly as she mourned the inexplicable drop in yield. He stood with Jorge for an hour at the main flood door, sharing a friendly silence which was, on Markus's behalf, an Herculean exercise in acting. He even checked on Ken, finding him slumped over a holoscreen in the lab, Sophia sleeping fitfully in the alcove behind him.“Get some rest, Ken,” Markus had said, his voice the very picture of weary camaraderie. “You’re no good to anyone like this.”Ken had simply waved a hand of dismissa

The world had been narrowed down to one stark, cruel equation: the harsh, mathematic crack of bullets into the chaotic, screamed cries of his people. Ken's shoulder was a numb, heavy weight where the stun-pulse had struck, but the rest of him was a live wire of rage and adrenaline. Sophia was gone, ripped from him, but the fight wasn't over yet. It had been reconfigured into a final, angry burning of what little remained."Fall back to the lab corridor!" he shouted, his voice hoarse. "Collar-point defense! Now!"It was a term of past emergency drills, an ultimate-stand plan to create a killing choke point within the tightening corridor to their center. Jorge, a brute of fury, already occupied it, his large pistol spitting. Every shot was a point of his betrayed honor. A trooper who penetrated too far into the corridor was sent stumbling backward, his armor broken.But for every one who died, two others seemed to come in his place. The drones were to blame. They crept around the edges

The stillness that followed the storm was the worst noise Ken Ardent had ever experienced.It wasn't quiet. It was a tapestry woven of disintegrating yarn: the last, wet burp of a burst water pipe, the intermittent, dying hiss of an electric fire dying, the pitiful groan of an injured man who'd exhausted his wails. It was the sound of a dying world.Smoke hung over the cavernous cistern like a pall, acrid and thick, stinging his eyes and coating his tongue with the charred plastic, burned protein, and blood. The emergency lights, functional ones, emitted a queasy, spasmodic glow, illuminating a world of utter desolation. Lab tables, overturned, were biers of death. The algal vats of glimmering glass were smashed, their rich slurry blending with floor water into a vile, green-black broth.And the bodies. They were everywhere. Not as intact, recognizable people, but as broken things in the wild light. A hand here, clutching around a tool it would never be able to use. A pair of glasses,