All Chapters of The Silent Cure: The cure for humanity lies in the one man i: Chapter 181
- Chapter 190
301 chapters
Chapter 181. Ashes in the Air
The air had been powdered. With each breath Ken took, it was a small death, a mouthful of rocky dust, vaporized electronics, and fine particulate ash of incinerated dreams. It rolled on the tongue, covered the throat, and caused black tears to fall from the eyes. The great cistern was a tomb, and this was the dust of the dead.The stench was worse. Beneath the acrid cloud of smoke, the sickly sweetness of charred protein from the ruined algae tanks and beneath that, something blacker, coppier, which everyone kept thinking about but no one spoke of. It was the scent of the network's dying gasp.Ken stumbled through the wreckage in a daze, his body following some ancient, residual script that had outlasted his spirit. His broken arm dangled useless in an improvised sling made from a torn lab coat, but his other hand was ferociously effective. He straightened a burned worktable in one relatively intact corner, sheltered from the main chamber by a fallen archway. He wiped the surface clea
Chapter 182. A Father's Alchemy
The light was a traitor. A single battery-powered lamp, stolen from the corpse of a dead trooper's backpack, flickered on the makeshift lab bench. Each quiver of the filament made shadows dance like mocking specters on the scorched brick walls. In the moments of virtual darkness, Ken's hands would freeze, held poised above the delicate glassware, his heart held captive until the light doggedly held its own. It was not the darkness that frightened him, but the mistake that might lie in its temporary dominion.The activity was an act of sacrilege, in a quaking, guilty sheen. He was at the final, most vulnerable stage: isolating the precise, destroying antibodies from Sophia's plasma. It was something he had performed a thousand times in a universe of sterile white coats and thrumming, reliable machinery. Here, in this shrine of broken illusions, it was an act of desecration.His own trembling hands, usually so rock-steady they could pipette a nanoliter alone without a shudder, shook. No
Chapter 183. The First Drop
The lull in their sector of the ruins was a thick, vibrant presence. It was not quiet, but taut, the gasping hush of a confessional. The swinging beam of the lamp cast its quivering shadows, and in the lopsided, unstable gleam, Sophia sat on a turned-over crate, her little fists set upon her knees. She was pale, the bones of her face sharp against her face, but her eyes were set, her gaze fixed on her father.Ken knelt before her, the ritual spread out on a white sheet between them. An alcohol swab, its pungent fresh odor a fiction in the poisonous atmosphere. A tourniquet. A vacuum-sealed hypodermic needle, its sterility a poor defense against the decay that surrounded them. It was the same equipment he'd used to take samples a hundred times before. But this wasn't the same. This wasn't to analyze. This was to harvest.We don't have to do this, Soph," he breathed quietly, his voice sounding like dry-graveled gravel. "We can still run. We can take the last vial and run."He was giving
Chapter 184. Smoke and Pursuit
The flash of triumph, the brief shining moment of belief in the impossible, was extinguished by the crunch of a boot against stone. Not distant, but near, deliberate, from the central chamber of the cistern.The pursuit was no longer closing in on them. It had reached them.Ken's head snapped up, the scientist replaced at once by the fugitive. The glowing vial in his hand was no longer a marvel; it was a warning. He jammed it, along with the auto-injector, into the padded pouch, his movements swift and furtive."Lena," he breathed.She was already at the edge of their alcove, bracing herself against the brickwork, staring into the shadows. She needn't have spoken. The stiff set of her shoulders was answer enough.From above, a new sound was added to the hesitant footsteps—a high, insectoid whine. Drones. Not the killer-hunters of the raid, but slimmer, lighter reconnaissance models. They threaded through holes blasted in the cistern roof like silvery minnows, their multi-spectral sens
Chapter 185. The Disguise of Death
The effluent pipe was a stone gullet, swallowing them whole. The air was thick with the reek of rot and standing water, a tangible presence that coated the tongue and lungs. Ken felt his way and by memory, one hand tracing the cold, slimy wall, the other wrapped around Sophia to hold her close against his chest. Her breathing was a shallow flutter against the side of his neck, a discordant counterpoint to the wild pound of his own heart.They could not just run. De Vries was a bloodhound. A trail, however faint, was a confession. In order to escape, they cannot be. They are ghosts, and ghosts do not leave traces. They left only the trace of their devastation.He found what he was looking for a hundred meters along: a smaller, drier side tunnel, a deserted artery to a chamber that at one time had contained a pumping station for a deserted canal. It was a dead end. An ideal tomb.Cautiously, he laid Sophia down on a relatively dry patch of stone. "Just remain here. Do not move. Do not m
Chapter 186. The Price of Creation
The world tilted on its axis, a slow, sickening slant that bore no relation to the hard tunnel floor. Ken's eyes went out of focus, the glowing vial in his hand doubling into two pictures before steadying itself into one, accusing the point of light. The dizziness was hot and swift, sweeping up over him. His knees, which had held him together through fear and battle, simply gave way.He didn't fall so much as collapsed, a marionette whose strings had been cut. His injured shoulder struck the damp stone first, and a lance of searing white pain lanced through his whole body. A grunt was torn from his lips, a slack, pathetic one in the heavy hush."Dad!"Sophia's voice was a sharp sound of raw terror. He felt her little hands on his face, his chest, slapping him as if to rev up a failing engine. Her skin was chilled, cold against the searing heat he could feel coming off his own body.“I’m… I’m alright,” he slurred, the lie tasting like ash. He tried to push himself up, but his good arm
Chapter 187. The Hollow Rescue
The world was a box of white pain and silence. Time no longer mattered to Elara Veyne, only in the interval between interrogation and the slow numbness of the icy walls of her compartment. De Vries's questions were needles, pricking at vulnerabilities in the cistern's defenses, in the mind-set of its commander. She had given them nothing but name, rank, and stubborn silence for which she had earned a bruised face and cracked ribs.And then the world exploded.It started with a distant, muffled crump, and then another. Alarms, in contrast to the regular drills, howled in a wild, frantic rhythm. Shouting resounded, curt and confused, followed by the familiar, drum-like beat of machine guns. It was not the measured, cadenced fire of government troops. It was raw, wild, and coming from inside the dry dock.Her container rattled as heavy something slammed into the wall beyond. She protected her head and curled up into a ball, expecting the door to be blown open, expecting the final, libera
Chapter 188. The Weight of Betrayal
The news was not brought by wire or by wave. It was diffused like a spore on the wet, rank air of the underworld, carrying on whispers and shuffle-clothed footsteps of the bereft. It was an ectoplasmic legend heard in the murk of stolen candlelight, a new mythopoeia of their collapse.In the flooded basement near the Amstel, Lena huddled with two others—Piotr, the engineer who had gazed at his hands, and a young messenger named Finn who had made it through the first cycle by sheer luck. The water was ankle deep, and the only sound was the incessant drip from a burst pipe. Lena's face was carved into hard planes in the blackness.It was Markus, she said, the tone flat, absolute. "I saw him. Standing with them. Giving orders.".Piotr shook his head, a weary, slow movement. "You read what the smoke told you, Lena. Panic. Fear. Markus. He was stubborn, yes. He and Ken argued. But to take them on? To do. that?" He gestured loosely in the direction of the cistern, the unspoken horrors hangi
Chapter 189. The Man Left Behind
The universe had been condensed to a single, shuddering tunnel. The air, thick with powdered rock and the acrid sting of expended explosives, was a mass that must be hacked through. Ken's lungs burned with every spastic breath. Sophia clung astride his shoulders, thin arms wrapped loosely around his neck, head folded forward against him. She was dead weight, unconscious or too exhausted to cling. The precious case, the fruits of his terrible, feverish labor, was strapped to his chest, rigid, accusatory swell above his heart.He had pushed too hard. The handful of shots were still intact, neatly stuffed into their foam holders, a slender arsenal of hope. But it had cost him what little strength he had left. Bleeding from his shoulder, a slow steady trickle, leeched the warmth and clarity from the world. The edge of his vision grayed, and a shriek of high whine had taken up residence in his ears.They stood in the ancient freight tunnel, a route he had determined as their greatest chanc
Chapter 190. The Hidden Fire
The world didn't go out in a bang, but in the dust settling. Elara was immobile, her hand pressed against her mouth as if silencing a scream that had been gathering force within her for years. The collapse faded from sound, and instead there came a silence that was more alive, more complete. A mountain of broken stone and rubble blocked her path to the freight tunnel completely. Back in the stone wall was Ken. Or at least what was left of him.The image was burned into the back of her eyelids: his bruised face, his eyes meeting hers for that terrible instant of recognition before the jerking hands of the state troops yanked him away into the devouring flames of the collapse. He was lost. Truly lost. Not simply taken, but snuffed out. The last flicker of the man she had followed, argued with, and idolized above all others, had been stamped out.A wave of dizziness so powerful it threatened to bring her to her knees rolled over her. The grief was a vacuum, sucking the breath from her bo