2025-09-20 13:54:43
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Chapter 220: The Epicenter
The hush was the first to be shattered. Not the silence of the city—that had been broken for days by war—but the silence of the digital world. The state's hold on the realm of information had been total, a single monolithic wall of carefully groomed news and choreographed terror. All broadcasts, all public frequencies, a mouthpiece for the regime.Until it wasn't.It began as a flicker. A ghost in the machine. A fleeting, momentary burst of static on a state television channel, showing a smiling, restored family, that appeared for a single frame into the burnt-out shell of the Oudemanhuispoort. And then it disappeared.Hundreds of individuals saw it in a crowded, nervous apartment in Jordaan. They stared at each other, confused. A malfunction.Then it happened on a street news terminal in a loyalist neighborhood. The display of De Vries's latest address on "final pacification" dissolved into a torrent of genetic code. A, C, T, G, streaming too fast to read, but unmistakably biochemica
Chapter 219: The Border Burns
The concept of "Amsterdam" was gone. There remained only an archipelago of walled islands in a sea of anarchy, each canal no ribbon of beauty but a moat of fire. The state lockdown, intended to assert complete control, had instead provided a template for the world's hostile forces. The bridges were now the borders, and all borders were burning.It began over the Blauwbrug, the lovely Amstel bridge. An advance party of Pan-American "advisors," clad in unmarked grey armor, had secured the eastern terminus. Their mission: establish a beachhead for a full diplomatic and medical convoy proceeding into the Grachtengordel. From the west, a state rapid-action team, backed by loyalist militias wearing orange armbands, took shelter. They saw no humanitarian mission, but an invasion.A single shot—its origin forever suspect—exploded across the water. The response was instant and devastating.The Americans showered with a hail of suppressive fire, their modern rifles chattering, bringing the elab
Chapter 218: The Poisoned Glass
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
Chapter 217: The Council of Smoke
The pub didn't exist on any map. It was suspended in mid-air between a wrecked brewery and a submerged warehouse, its door a soaked doorway that descended into a cellar which should by rights have been drowned. A complex system of pumps and one-way valves, manned by erstwhile civil engineer Bram, kept the water out, an island of stale, breathable air that reeked of wet rot, old yeast, and abject hope. This was the Council of Smoke.It was here that the last, frayed threads of the resistance had gathered. Not the Lambs, nor the Surgeons, but the worn pragmatists, the cell organizers who had survived the purges, the betrayals, and the recent, savage lockdown. They were duty-bound ghosts, their faces worn by the struggle to preserve their small, cowering enclaves of humanity.Elara stood in front of them, the light from one carbide lamp throwing her pinched, anxious face into relief. Jabari stood stiff at her elbow, a threat of violence should this not work in silence. And between them,
Chapter 216: The Silent March
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
Chapter 215: The City of Knives
The safe house of the African Alliance was a crypt. Not a metaphorical one—a genuine, bone-strewn crypt beneath the floor of a deconsecrated church in Jordaan. The odor of ancient stone, damp soil, and a seeping, chilling cold that no makeshift heater could dispel hung thick in the air. It was a place of terminations, and to Sophia, it represented another kind of prison, its bars fashioned from the desperate hopes of others.Their rescuer, the man who had led them through the crossfire, was a man called Jabari. He was a pragmatist, his loyalty not to a flag, but to the simple, giant idea that a cure should not be a weapon. He treated Sophia not as a messiah or a prize, but as a dangerous piece of important ordnance that needed careful handling and deployment.But the world outside the crypt was less sane. The state's grip was disintegrating under the pressure of foreign attacks and its own contradictions. In the power vacuum, the underground, long thought pulverized, was stirring. But
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