The water was the color of a fresh bruise, purple and grey in the dawnless time. Ken Ardent stood in the lee of a ruined bridge, a column of hard stone in the whirling mist. He was an outline of a man, a line drawn in hunger and in fatigue. His clothes clung to his skeletal frame, stiff with crusted canal muck and dried hard blood. Each breath was a conscious, careful action, a deal with the ache that had moved in with him inside his ribcage, his shoulder, the very bones. He was an outlaw in a city waking up slowly, enigmatically, around him.He watched. It was all he did any more. He was a spectator at his own revolution.The first light of dawn streamed over the canal, reluctant and pale, catching on water suspended in the air. It illuminated a familiar scene: the unbroken business of mourning, desperate and still, the secret gestures of those who moved in the state's blind places. But there was another quality to the hush this morning. It wasn't the hush of fear, but attention.Acr

Time was a thick, fluid thing in the iron cell, measured not in hours or days, but in the intervals between pain. It was a chamber dug out of the foundation stone of a 17th-century fortress, a place to store gunpowder and soldiers who had been misplaced. Now, it contains Ken Ardent.Air was a solid chunk of damp cold, so heavy it was akin to breathing through a wet woolen blanket. Water beaded on the rust-streaked iron walls, but didn't drip, clinging instead with a kind of stagnant despair. The only light leached from a single flickering LED strip behind a grille high on the ceiling, casting a sickly, pulsating glow that made the shadows seem to breathe. It was a light that revealed nothing, only existed to emphasize the darkness's profundity.They took him in cycles. There was no schedule, no cadence to disrupt and overpower, merely the sudden, terrible shriek of the bolt's withdrawal. Sometimes it was after what felt like minutes of quiet, his flesh still screaming from the last se

The new cell was a concrete sensory deprivation tank and silence. They had stripped everything—the grime, the rust, the whispering past in the stones. They had even stripped the flickering LED, leaving him in a darkness so total it was a weight upon his eyes. Time became meaningless. He was a mind afloat in a void moored to nothing but the pounding map of his body.Then the bolt retreated.The sound was a shriek in the silence. Corridor light speared his eyes, and he tightened, a reflexive, animalistic curl. Footsteps, crisp and alone, entered the cell. He didn't need to see to know it was De Vries. The man carried an aura that displaced the very air, pushing out the damp cold for something more incisive, more antiseptic.There was a soft click, and a handheld lantern flickered to life on the floor, its beam tilted upwards, putting the Inspector's face into sharp relief and giving depth to the shadows in the room. He placed a small, polished wooden chair in front of Ken's huddled form

The world up top was a different type of prison. Its walls weren't constructed of iron or concrete but light and air, both poisoned. The breathtaking gabled cityscapes of Amsterdam were now a tragic stage set, the beauty a mockery. The canals, once crowded with tour boats and flower barges buoying in the middle of the channel, now swept with crisp, silent skimmers that bristled with biometric scanners and bore mounted pulse-weapons. The hum was not the hum of life, but the omnipresent whine of surveillance drones, a harsh sound to seep into teeth and bone.Elara Veyne drew the soiled shawl closer around her head, her knuckles pale. Beside her, Sophia walked with a straight-backed air that made Elara's heart pound with a mix of pride and terror. The girl never stooped. She never tried to make herself smaller. She walked among the ruins of her city with a straight-backed dignity that was less defiant than a basic, unshakeable truth.They were ghosts of the machine of state, their existe

They seemed to materialize overnight, as if from a rain-swept fungal bloom. They stood in the morning with bullet-scarred walls and boarded windows, Amsterdam stripped clean. They stood the next morning plastered with the face of the future.The posters were severe, utilitarian, and painfully beautiful. A background in the Dutch national color, taken over and militarized now, garish orange. A strictly symmetrical double helix, in gleaming chrome, standing proudly in the center. And above it, in stark, sans-serif capitals that brooked no argument, were the words: HET GENEESMIDDEL BEHOORT TOT DE STAAT. The Cure Belongs to the State.Below, in smaller print: Stability. Purity. Order. Your Compliance Assures Distribution.Elara stood still in front of one stuck to the charred red brick face of an ancient bakery, her ration pack empty and hanging from her grasp. The paper was thick, waterproof. The print was flawless. This was no hastily issued broadsheet; this was a declaration of complet