The attic room above the old bookbinder had been a miracle. It was warmed, at least a little, and most valuable of all, it had one hidden entrance, behind a false back in a wardrobe. For fourteen days it had been a refuge. For fourteen days they had slept at night, the raw edge of fear tamed.It was a dangerous thing, this feeling of safety.It makes you lower your defenses.It made you trust.Elara was patching a tear in Sophia's coat when she heard it. Not the faraway vibration, or the patter of rain, or the occasional cough from the alleyways below. This was different. A synchronized, rhythmic beat. Boots. Not the listless amble of patrols, but the measured, double-time tread of an assault group.Her needle froze. She met Sophia's gaze across the small room. The child was already standing, her head cocked, her body abnormally rigid. The notebook, full of her father's codes, was pinned in her grip."The wardrobe," Elara breathed, already moving, shoving their meager supplies into a

The black market had moved. It was no longer in the shadow of a downed bridge, a place of whispered transactions and hurried trades. That was for small things: batteries, information, cans of food. The new market, the one that dealt in the only currency that truly mattered, required a cathedral.It happened in the womb of the Central Station, in the vast, echoing space of the main concourse. The great, vaulted roof, a 19th-century miracle of ironwork, was a maze of shadows now, its glass panels shattered for the most part, letting in the perpetual drizzle. The destination boards were blank, their final, frozen departures a testament to a world that had bypassed it. Now the only arrivals and departures were measured in heartbeats.Elara was protesting. It was insane. A trap. But Sophia was insistent, her face set in that new, unyielding cast. "I need to see it," she'd said, her voice flat. "I need to know what they've done."They entered through a broken service tunnel, emerging onto a

Amsterdam was a stoppered flask, its valuable, volatile contents the obsession of a dying world. For months, the state propaganda machinery had represented the "Orange Dawn" as a purely domestic triumph, a testament to national endurance. But a miracle, even a fraudulent and blood-drenched one, cannot be hidden. Signals were intercepted. Satellite images, exposing the stark contrast between the cleaned, orderly "cured" zones and the festering wreckage of the rest, were studied in distant capitals. The rumors swirled to a clamor. The cure was real. And it was in the hands of a paranoid, unstable regime.The first sign of the outside world's desperate interest was the silence of the skies. The constant, nagging whine of the state's surveillance fleet was one day joined, then competed with, by a thinner, higher tone. Stealth aircraft, their forms arrowhead-like, painted contrails in the higher air. Unmarked, their origin unidentified, their intention was clear: they were watching. The ci

The rhythm of the city, a staccato staccato of coughs and breathless secrets, ground flat to a singular, steady drone. The rumble of the new patrols. Not the smooth skimmers of the surveillance flotilla, but the clank grumble of armored personnel carriers. They moved in pairs, heavy wheels crushing the cobblestones of the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht, the Prinsengracht, their mass a statement of purpose. This was no longer a police action. This was a conquest of a city by its government.The metamorphosis had taken place in a single, brutal twenty-four-hour cycle. The foreign intrusions, the shadow wars, the shattering resistance—it had all grown too much. The state's response was not to negotiate, not to adapt, but to clench its fist.Curfews, once a nighttime annoyance, were now a stranglehold. Between four in the afternoon and eight the next morning, the streets were to lie empty. The penalty for noncompliance was no longer imprisonment or fine. It was "lethal enforcement," a phr

The calmness that had followed Sophia's declaration at the Council of Smoke had not been one of harmony, but of deeply agitated waters. The commanders of the resistance had dispersed along the city's veins, each carrying back to their cells a varying reality of the girl: a prophet, a pawn, a plague. The fragile accord necessary for rebellion was now stretched tighter than ever.Inspector De Vries, in his antiseptic control center, watched the electronic phantasms of their uprising. The Council of Smoke had not been completely hidden. The state's acoustic probes, sensitive enough to pick up a heartbeat behind three feet of stone, had registered the muffled vibrations of their quarrel. They had no clear words, no names, but they had the sequence. They had the proof of a conclave. And for a mind like De Vries's, a confrontation was a weakness. It was a thorny lock, and he possessed the most general key: suspicion.His plan was not going to be one of crude strength. Crude strength had its