2025-08-21 15:02:21Night had barely let go of Amsterdam. Rainwater dripped down through the stone alleys and collected in shallowness that reflected the yellow light of electric lamps. The hum of surveillance drones seemed out into the rain, their lanterns zigzagging from building to building like crazed insects. Underground, where the city buried its secrets, Dr. Ken Ardent leaned over his patient.
His operating room was a stinking tunnel filled with rust and mold. Dripping regularly through holes in the ceiling, each water drop was a metronome patient marking time. A semiconscious smuggler lay on a salvaged cot, his ragged breathing rattling with pain. Clothes clung to his skin like second skin, torn and sodden, revealing patches of raw, reddened lesions across his ribcage.
Ken's gloves were tattered, the wear-and-tear latex faded. He drew them up his wrists while he managed his breath. The infection was spreading too quickly. The smuggler had come into the tunnel two hours earlier, accompanied by one of the street couriers who knew the whispered code phrases that led him to Ken's secret practice. "Only hope left," they'd growled as they left him on the cot. Then they were away before drones could follow them here.
Ken applied the swab to the wound, and the man bucked. The cutting edge of flesh struggled against antiseptic like fire against oil. "Be still," Ken urged. His voice contained none of the bedside manner's gentleness—no play-acting was possible in this lost corner. But beneath the abrupt tone, his hands were firm, eschewing jagging pain.
The eyes of the man opened, slit-like and unsteady. "They… tightening," he rasped.
Ken narrowed an eyebrow. "Tightening what?"
The smuggler wheezed, spitting out a blood clot into the bucket Ken had placed beside the cot. "Checkpoints. Drones at all street intersections now. Guards… men and dogs. Nobody moves without papers. Not even food sellers." His head canted weakly. "They're hunting harder.".
Ken inserted a gauze pad into the wound, his fingers feeling the throb of fever beneath. He had heard rumors of more stringent controls, but to receive confirmation from one who patrolled the fringes of the city was evidence enough. The regime was drawing its net tighter. His underground work had always relied on lapses between patrols, lost tunnels, the pace of inattentive officers. Without the gaps closing, his network would choke.
The smuggler pinched Ken's sleeve with a shock of sudden strength, the pointed fingernails digging through his clothing. "They say… someone's out there. Repairing people. Someone… like you."
Ken froze, eyes meeting fever-crazy eyes. "Rumors go faster than fact," he replied softly, trying to shake the hand loose.
The smuggler wheezed out a laugh that degenerated into another bout of coughing. "Doesn't matter. They believe it. And belief… makes the checkpoints worse."
Ken went back to the gear he'd salvaged from abandoned clinics years ago. The scalpel blade picked up the faint blue glow of a busted lantern. He cleaned it off and started to prepare the abscess forming near the lesion. But the words taunted him. Belief makes the checkpoints worse. If the city had even a whisper of his presence, the search atop would no longer be random.
He pushed the blade slowly. Pus and blood welled up, thick and foul-smelling, spattering the basin. The man groaned, arching back against the cot. Ken's jaw hardened, but he pushed on, sucking out what poison he could. He knew this treatment would not cure the underlying disease infecting the man's blood—only delay it. There was no cure, yet.
Once the worst of it was spent, Ken packed the wound with clumps of antiseptic-dipped cloth, binding them tightly. The smuggler eased back, his forehead beaded with sweat. His breathing eased, if only slightly.
Ken leaned back against the metal stool and ripped off his gloves. He rubbed his temples. The drips of water into the tunnel provided the only sound in the silence.
"Why… you risk it?" the smuggler hissed, half-veiling his eyes.
Ken didn't answer. He stared at the dim light overhead, a bulb powered by stolen current drawn from a hijacked power line. The truths were tangled: guilt, resistance, obsession. But what he answered was simple. "Because someone has to."
The smuggler chuckled softly, lips cracking with the motion. "That'll kill you."
Ken leaned forward, elbows resting on knees. "Not if I keep this place hidden."
The man coughed again, but more weakly now. "Roadblocks create difficulty in concealment." His voice faded into a whisper. "And rumors… spread like fire."
A few minutes passed before his body succumbed to restless sleep. Ken restyled the bandages one last time, then got up. The cot appeared smaller now that it supported its load, the smuggler's chest heaving raspingly.
Ken made his way to the tunnel's rear where shelves of supplies sloped drunkenly against the damp wall. The inventory was thin as usual—half-full vials, running out of bandages, and one pilfered case of antibiotics he had been dispensing drop by drop. With checkpoints converging, it was nearly impossible to hit another depot. But if he didn't… patients like the smuggler would come and come, each one nearer to death.
He rested his elbows on the cold of the brick wall. Above, the city throbbed through the stones, drone's hum a low but persistent note. He imagined the checkpoints, the guards, the white-scanning lights. His own face appeared in his mind—what then, if his own name were actually called out across Amsterdam? What if Inspector De Vries, sharp-eyed custodian of state order, learned of his whereabouts?
Ken shut his eyes. Already, the smuggler's words had planted something in him: unease, and a spark of fear. The web was closing, and soon it would catch more than smugglers.
A loud scrape sounded behind him in the tunnel. Ken turned, his heart pounding. But it was merely a rat scurrying over a piece of dropped pipe, its damp fur shining under the light from the lantern. Yet he was on edge, the scalpel still clutched in his hand though he hadn't realized he was holding it.
When he finally sat back in the desk chair, he opened the battered journal in which he recorded each case. His pen scratched across the paper: Male, late 30s, infection going quickly downhill. Lesions as Stage 3. Treated with drainage and antiseptic. Supplies used: 2 gauze, 1 vial (antibiotic). Prognosis uncertain.
He stopped on the line below, then wrote slowly: Patient reports more checkpoints, drones at all crossing points. Rumor making the rounds of someone healing in the city. Whisper directs to me. Dangerous escalation.
Ken closed the book with a snap and shot the lantern with a hostile look. Its weak glow groped for the shadows. The tunnel was narrower than ever, stifling in its secrecy. Above, the city shut itself up, wall by wall. And in the damp quiet, he knew: his work could no longer keep hidden forever.
The patient rolled in sleep, cursing senselessly. Ken rose from his seat, checked the bandages again, then extinguished the lantern. The tunnel was engulfed in darkness, with only the noise of water and the distant hum to break the silence.
Somewhere overhead, Amsterdam breathed deeply, ready to strangle the underground lifelines he had drawn.
And Ken knew—the whispers had already started their hunt.
---
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Chapter 225: A Shadowed Choice
The apple was a universe in his palm. He did not devour it. He ate it with a slowness so near ritual, each bite a deliberate, pained act of remembrance. The crisp, sweet flesh was a memory of a world before the rot, a taste of sun and earth that mocked the damp reality of the parking garage. The act of eating, of accepting sustenance offered without price or condition, was more blasphemous than all his betrayals.Abel's pity had not been a balm. It had been an acid, eating away at the last layers of his self-pity. The old man had not shown him a path to redemption. That was a myth, a luxury for a world that still had clean slates. This world had only ash and blood, and Abel had simply pointed out to him that even in the ash, a different kind of seed could be planted.He lay in the darkness hours after the apple had been eaten, the core grasped in his hand. The pain of his beating was a grounding pain, a map of his current existence. Every throbbing bruise, every burning sting of a cut
Chapter 224: Bargain of the Dead
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
Chapter 223: The Broken Mirror
The fever was no longer physical. It had entered his mind, a toxic gas that dissolved the wall between memory and reality, between the world of the living and the one he had sought to fill with the dead. The sewers were no longer just stone and filth tunnels; they were a catacomb of his own making, and the faces he had sent there were its eternal residents.At first, they were whispers in the drip-drip-drip of the water. The cadence would shift, forming names he hadn't allowed himself to think about in months. Anya. Flick. The Jansen twins. The water-taxi pilot who knew the secret routes. The old forger who could make anyone laugh. The children he'd never met, whose parents he'd nonetheless named for De Vries's cleansings.Then he began to see them in the shadows.He'd round a corner and there'd be a figure standing there, a silhouette in front of a distant grate-light. Not a solid shape, but a suggestion, a trick of light and his own crumbling mind. A woman with Anya's regal posture,
Chapter 221: Ash Without Flame
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
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
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