2025-08-06 01:00:19The North End apartments were quiet in the late afternoon, the kind of place where people kept to themselves. Dan pulled his hood down as he approached Rico’s unit, the weight of the future pressing against his ribs.
He glanced over his shoulder, scanning the empty parking lot, the curtained windows of neighboring units. No black vans. No figures lurking in the shadows. Just the hum of a distant television and the occasional bark of a dog down the street.He knocked twice, firm but not urgent.Footsteps approached from inside—slow, cautious. The peephole darkened for a second before the door cracked open, held in place by a chain. A pair of sharp brown eyes studied him."Yeah?"Dan kept his hands visible. "Rico Vega?"The door didn’t open wider. "Who’s asking?""Dan Foster." He hesitated, then went with the simplest truth. "We were on the same train. The NovaTech one that crashed."There was a pau
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Chapter 20
The museum’s shadow stretched long across the empty street as Dan leaned against his motorcycle, the engine cold between his legs. He had been waiting for hours, his back pressed against the brick wall of a closed café, watching the entrance through the scope of a pair of stolen binoculars. The night air was thick with the scent of rain-soaked pavement and distant exhaust. He shouldn’t have been here. He should have been back at the hideout, helping Riley decrypt more files, or with Felix, tracking the other survivors. But something about Rico Vega had gnawed at him—the way the man had lied so smoothly, the way his fingers had twitched when Dan mentioned ‘things that don’t make sense’. So he followed him. Now, as the minutes turned into hours, doubt crept in. ‘What if I’m wrong?’ The thought was like a splinter under his skin. He exhaled, rubbing his hands together to ward off the chill. His gloves were fraying at the
Chapter 19
The hideout’s single bulb flickered as Felix slammed the newspaper onto the table, its brittle pages splayed open like a wound. Riley looked up from her monitors, Viktor from his weapon cleaning. The air smelled of burnt coffee and gun oil. "Explain," Viktor said, not looking at the headline yet. Felix’s hands shook. He had been holding the paper since the subway ride over, since he saw the date change. His reflection in the train window had looked like a ghost’s. Riley reached for it first. ARMAGEDDON AS ALIEN INVASION ROCKS SEAL CITY.The same words. The same photos of crumbling skyscrapers, of bodies in the streets. But the date— "November ninth," she whispered. Viktor’s chair screeched as he stood. "That’s—" "Three weeks sooner, yeah." Felix pulled out the piece of paper where he had written the initial date and showed it to them, ‘November thirtieth,’ a different date. The silence that followe
Chapter 18
The North End apartments were quiet in the late afternoon, the kind of place where people kept to themselves. Dan pulled his hood down as he approached Rico’s unit, the weight of the future pressing against his ribs. He glanced over his shoulder, scanning the empty parking lot, the curtained windows of neighboring units. No black vans. No figures lurking in the shadows. Just the hum of a distant television and the occasional bark of a dog down the street. He knocked twice, firm but not urgent. Footsteps approached from inside—slow, cautious. The peephole darkened for a second before the door cracked open, held in place by a chain. A pair of sharp brown eyes studied him. "Yeah?" Dan kept his hands visible. "Rico Vega?" The door didn’t open wider. "Who’s asking?" "Dan Foster." He hesitated, then went with the simplest truth. "We were on the same train. The NovaTech one that crashed." There was a pau
Chapter 17
The alien’s corpse still lay in the corner of the hideout, its obsidian carapace now dulled in death. Viktor had thrown a tarp over it—not out of respect, but because the smell of its blackened blood was making Felix gag. Three days had passed since the attack, and the air still carried the acrid tang of burnt wiring and spilled antiseptic. Riley hadn’t slept. She sat hunched over the decrypted NovaTech drive, her fingers tracing the same lines of code over and over, as if they might rearrange themselves into answers. The footage of Alisha Carr’s cold-eyed orders played on a loop in her mind: *The passengers will serve as test subjects.* Viktor emerged from the back room, his face freshly bandaged. He tossed a protein bar at Riley. It landed with a thud beside her keyboard. “Eat. You’re no use to anyone like this.” She caught it but didn’t open it. “We’re running out of time.” Across the room, Dan leaned against the wall, arms crossed. The
Chapter 16
The tunnels smelled of rust and damp concrete. Felix leaned heavily against Dan, his breath ragged from the gunshot wound in his side. Riley led the way, her flashlight cutting through the darkness as they navigated the labyrinth of forgotten maintenance shafts. "Almost there," she muttered, more to herself than to themThey reached a rusted grate tucked behind a collapsed service corridor. Riley knocked twice, paused, then knocked again—an old rhythm she had picked up from a dead forum thread months ago.There was silence.Dan adjusted his grip on Felix, whose face was pale with pain and said, “ he's not gonna shoot us on sight right? " It worked.The grate hissed open. A man in a patched jacket and rebreather mask gestured them inside. The room beyond was dimly lit, cluttered with soldered tech, cables, monitors blinking with scrambled static. One of the Collective’s hideouts.The man pulled off his mask—mid-fortie
Chapter 15
The tunnel air was thick with dust and echoes. Riley crouched beside Felix, checking his vitals while pretending her hands weren’t shaking. Across from her, Dan sat on a crumbling ledge, staring at his hands like they didn’t belong to him.They didn’t say much after what happened. After Dan lit half the tunnel with fire like a walking torch… and didn’t burn.But Riley’s silence wasn’t from shock. It was from recognition.Weeks ago, she’d picked up a faint digital trace while probing through the city’s underbelly — a tiny anomaly buried deep in encrypted data. It wasn’t just curiosity; she was following a lead that had slipped through every official channel, a whisper of something tied to a shadowy military contractor, Velis Defense Systems.Her gut told her this wasn’t just another dead end.This was about more than energy tests or ghost towns. It was about missing people—people like her mother, whose name had vanished from ever
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