Rain had fallen for days, thin and stinging needles that hissed off the faces of Amsterdam's half-submerged streets. The swollen canals had merged with the roads themselves. The water splash below the weights of drones was a constant noise, the whine of their searchlights and hum of their hovering motors echoing off the slanted facades of the old city. Above the surface, existence was getting impossible—every foreigner labeled, every movement monitored, every cough a signal.The government's latest statement announced it in a straightforward manner. The curfews would begin two hours earlier now. The "red hours," as people called them, ran from sundown to sunrise. The screen flashing over Dam Square read the message in Dutch and abbreviated English: For your safety. For containment. For survival. But the slogan covered up a different truth: the city was clenching into its inhabitants like a fist.Ken leaned against the tunnel's central chamber darkness, hand on the moss-dark wall. The

The rhythmic droplets of poisoned water echoed down the underwater tunnel, a metallic tick for each drop on the rusting pipes—a countdown to calamity. Dr. Ken Ardent crouched in the knee-deep, stinking water, his surgical mask no protection in filtering out the stench of rot and chlorine. Overhead, through the grilled vents, the distant ululation of surveillance drones sounded louder. They stalked. Always stalked."Vitals falling—75 over 40! She's crashing! Elara Veyne's voice was a tense, wiry knife slicing through tension, her hands firm as she cranked up the IV line connected to the small, white child on the makeshift stretcher. The little girl—Lotte, eight at the most—had been smuggled into their underground system an hour earlier, her skin burning with the telltale scarlet rash of the Morrison Virus.".She was one of thousands, yet her fate had been selected as the battlefield for Ken's conscience."The serum, Ken. Now or never." Her gaze met his, a match for the dim, stuttering

The world was cold, black roar.Ken Ardent's consciousness returned in a nauseating rush, his body a cacophony of pain conducted by the cold water. He was pinned against the rusty service ladder, the power of the burst exhausted at last. The emergency lights went out, and the tunnel plunged into an absolute blackness relieved only partially by the faint, flickering green flash of a shattered glowstick, spinning in the churning current."Elara!" he gagged, the name a rough rasp against his throat. The water, chest-high now and eerily motionless, bore only the whisper of their battle—a med-kit bobbing on the surface, a tattered scrap of tarp.A faint cough replied to him, ten feet away. "Ken…? Here."He pushed through the water's drag, his strokes slow and heavy. His hands closed around her arm, then her face. She was leaning against a conduit box, shivering uncontrollably."Lotte?" he asked, the words hanging in the clouded air."I had her on a pipe ledge. She's stable. Okay." Elara so

The comm screen message throbbed in the alleyway, an electronic trap closing in on them."The investment requires insurance. We have the Van Dijk house under surveillance. Go. Wait to be picked up."Ken's hand trembled, not with fear, but with a clean, blinding anger. They were pawns on a board they had not even been conscious of playing on, moved by a player who viewed his daughter as merchandise and her cure as property. The ghost's offer was not an offer. It was an acquisition strategy."They're driving us out," Elara whispered, holding Lotte tight. The girl's eyes were wide with wonder, drinking in the terror in the adults' voices. "The Van Dijks… if someone's spying on them, they're not safe. We can't go there.""We have no option," growled Ken, his voice low and somber. He gazed at the symbol on the datastick from the jacket pocket of Markus—the fist around the helix. This was the true foe. Not the bludgeoning of De Vries's dictatorship, but a slick, surgical knife that had been

The armored transport was a mobile coffin. The air inside it was stale, thick with the acrid smell of sweat, ozone, and fear. Ken Ardent sat on the cold metal bench, wrists secured by reinforced polymer cuffs that hummed at low current, ready to send a paralyzing shock at the first hint of resistance. Across from him, Inspector De Vries seethed, granite-hard features a mask of suppressed fury. The data stream from the van's smashed comm unit had at last ceased, but its ghost lingered in the Inspector's eyes.“You think you’ve won,” De Vries said, his voice a low, dangerous thing in the confined space. The vehicle hit a pothole, jostling them. “You’ve unleashed a plague of anarchy. Unvetted, untested genetic code into the wild. The deaths that follow will be on your head, Ardent.”Ken turned to him, his own weariness overcome by a strange, hollow peace. "The only pestilence was the one you were trying to keep at bay. Now, people have a choice. Something you never wanted to give them."