The universe was a devastating, brutal pendulum swing. One moment, the crushing pressure of rock and the crash of the fall. Then, a tearing pull back, away from the pouring debris and into a tenuous bubble of air, a pocket of survival trapped by the same fall that should have been fatal to them. Ken was knocked to the ground, the shock jarring through his broken body with fresh, burning agony.He lay back on the wet, chilled stone, panting, each breath a harsh, tortured effort. Dust plugged his nose and mouth. He felt the heat of a fire nearby, the acrid smell of ozone from wiring that had burned out, mixed with the metallic flavor of his own blood. He was in a half-overturned room, part of the derelict freight line where he had been partially protected by a fallen steel support beam. A makeshift jail.Rough hands heaved him up onto his knees. His wrists were bound behind his back with a vicious polymer zip-tie that bit into his skin. His eyes blurred, swimming around the faces of the

The world was a symphony of pain, one composed by the heavy, thunderous throes of the tunnels crashing down. With each new explosion was a clash of cymbals that rattled Ken's broken ribs, each scream from the troopers a staccato beat on his throbbing head. He was held prisoner in the midst of the cacophony, kneeling in the stale water now churning at his knees, his wrists ablaze of grazed skin behind him.The troopers had relaxed. With the tunnel system flooding and charges going off all around them, their concern had shifted away from their prized captive to survival themselves. They crouched at the entrance to the half-fallen room, yelling back at command over a sparking comms circuit regarding extraction points. The Ghost of the Tunnels was battered, bound, and drowning. What damage could he do?Ken had his head hung low, the very picture of broken submission, but his eyes, behind their lank, matted blood, were not. They wandered over the broken floor, the stinking water, searching

The quietness of the flooded tunnel was a thing to be felt, broken only by the lap of black water against rock and the jagged edge of Elara's breathing. She moved with the ease of a hunter, her body a whip-thin coil of tension, every sense drawn to its sharp edge. The glow-stick she carried cast a sickly green pallor, illuminating the swirling water with the curve of liquid absinthe. She sought an escape route, a path out of this water tomb. Her mind was a map of introspection and purpose: find higher ground, seek a way of protecting the girl, prevent the fire in her pocket from being extinguished.She did not search for another ember, nearly drowned.A pale figure, formless as a drowned corpse, half on, half off a thin limestone ledge. Her breath came short. Another victim of the state's tide of purification, another ghost to haunt her. And then she noticed it—the subtle, virtually undetectable rise and fall of his chest. A quiver, a flicker of life tenaciously clinging to a broken v

The world outside was dead, and Ken a maggot tunneling through its veins. He moved through Amsterdam's night-darkened streets, a ghost among ghosts. The air, once clean with the scent of the sea, was a stinking broth of smoke, decay, and the nauseating sweetness of charred flesh. Pyres were set alight in the big squares, their orange light casting hellish shadows on the gabled fronts, the final warmth gone from the world.He lurked in the shadows, a hunched, limping figure in a stolen, pungent fisherman's coat. Every step was a bargain with agony. Elara's sutures pulled tight in his side, a constant searing reminder of his frailty. His breath caught, not in the smell, but in the effort of staying on his feet. He was a clockwork man, wound too tight, his gears shrieking at each other.The streets were filled with the dead. They weren't piled up; they were where they had fallen, crumpled in doorways, hunched over empty market stalls, their bodies secreted in the intense shadow. The stat

The voice of the state was a hammer and every morning it pounded home the same nails into the collective unconscious. It roared from elderly loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, crackled across the few approved radio stations, rolled in large, unbeatable lettering on public display screens.".the so-called 'resistance' has been crushed. Its leader, the bio-terrorist Ken Ardent, is officially dead in the demolition of the network.".The voice was firm, assured, an ointment of calm in troubled times. It told of a triumph, a danger dissipated. The state's version was that the Crimson Sorrow was a fire that they were striving to keep under control, and the rebels had been adding gasoline to it. Now, the firebugs were out of the question.Due to the heroic efforts of Inspector De Vries and the Health Security Force, the quarantine zone has been stable. Citizens are reminded once more that compliance with health orders is the fastest route to total recovery. Believe in the system. The crisis