There was no ceremony for his dismissal. No ritual discharge, no final briefing. For Markus Hale, the end of his usefulness was a quiet, administrative procedure, as impersonal and cold as the state which he had served.It began with the silence of his comm. He was accustomed to the constant, low-level buzz of encrypted data—location checks, target skits, status queries—being a steady presence. The device on his wrist, which had vibrated with the cadence of his secret power, was a dead weight. He tapped it. He reset it. Nothing. The silence deafened.He went on to his billet, a neat small room in a converted office block on the Amstel, reserved for "consultants." The biometric lock did not take his fingerprint. He had to ring for entry. The guard who answered, a young man whose face Markus had seen a dozen times, looked through him as if he were smoke.Your clearance has been lifted," the guard declared, his face impassive. "You need to vacate the premises.""There has to be a mistake

The hunger was a jagged rat, gnawing at the remnants of his resolve. The fever had broken, and what it had left was a hollowed-out shell, cold and clear-headed in its despair. The visions had receded, not that he was forgiven, but that his mind did not have the energy for such complex torment. The fact was a bare, cold stone in his stomach now: he must eat, or die. And his death, here in the anonymous dark, would be as meaningless as his life had come to be.He had one thing left to sell. Not his loyalty—that currency was worthless, its mint broken. Not his skill—the state had no need of a biologist, and the resistance would sooner dissect him than hire him. What he had was memory. The fraught, poisonous knowledge of De Vries's machine. Safe house locations that were perhaps still live. Patrol routes. Communications codes that perhaps had not yet been changed. It did not take him long to understand that it was intelligence, and in a dying city, intelligence was sustenance.He found hi

The brewery was a cathedral of silence, whose vast copper kettles, once gleaming bright with the promise of fermentation, were now dull with dust and tarnish. The air, thick with the sweet, earthy scent of malt, was instead a chill tomb-breath of neglect and damp stone. It was a place of endings, a monument to a city that had known celebration.Elara Veyne stood on a platform cobbled together from empty barrels, a single hurricane lantern casting fragile, dancing light that pushed back against the oppressive dark. It found the determined set of her jaw, the new threads of silver in her hair, the weary intelligence of her eyes. She was no longer just a scientist in hiding; she was a general assembling the ghosts of her army.They came in ones and twos, slipping through a broken delivery chute that opened onto a forgotten canal. Scattered remnants, survivors of Poisoned Glass and the Border Burns: Liesel, the chemist, her hands still stained, her eyes haunted by Femke's death; a few of

Where once the brewery had been a source of rekindled hope, it felt now as if it was about to boil over. The air was thick not with the smell of yeast but with the acrid scent of fear and desperation. The ember she had coaxed back into life was now threatening to set the whole structure ablaze from the inside.It wasn't a sudden crack, but a fault line that grew insidiously with every report of a new state atrocity, with every fresh grave dug in the ruins. It was fed by the terrifying, miraculous stories of Sophia.Rik, the grizzled dockworker, stood on a crate, his voice a low, angry rumble that carried to the farthest corners of the vast hall. Around him were the fighters, the pragmatists, the ones who had lost the most and saw the world in the brutal calculus of survival.“We're hiding a goddess while our people die!” he thundered, his fist slamming into his palm. “They say a drop of her blood can save a dozen. A single vial from her could inoculate a whole sector! And we're hoardi

It began not with a manifesto or a battle cry but with a rotten tomato.The market, situated in the Nieuwmarkt and once a lively square filled with spices and flowers, was now only a state-controlled distribution point for the chalky nutrient blocks. The air, which should be rich with scents of herbs and fresh fish, was thick with despair and unwashed bodies. The queue was long, snaking around the square-a line of human misery kept in check by cold, watchful eyes of state guards and the silent hovering presence of a drone.An old woman, with her back bent like a question mark, reached the front of the line. The official was bored and imperious; he shoved one gray block across the table-they constituted her ration for two days. Her hands, knotted with arthritis, fumbled. The block slipped, tumbling to the filthy cobblestones and shattering."Please," she whispered, her voice like a dry leaf rustle. "My grandson… it's all we have."The official shrugged. “Carelessness is not the state’s