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Chapter 40: The Cost of Doing Business
Ken's cell was a white cube. No toilet. No cot. Just a smooth, padded floor and walls, illuminated by a sourceless, shadowless light that never wavered. The air was climate-controlled, odorless. It was sensory deprivation that was not designed to soothe, but to intensify thought. To possess all regret, all fear, resonate infinitely in the vacuum.He lay on the floor, effects of sedative fading, with a throbbing headache and nausea born of utter helplessness. He replayed every moment, every decision that led them to this moment. His faith in Markus, his raid failure, failure to protect his daughter. The images cycled through repeatedly: Liese's death, Markus's lie, the needle going into Sophia's vein.Hours passed. There was no way of telling the time but by the growing agony of thirst and the contraction of his muscles.Finally the door hissed open. Not De Vries. Two guards. They motionless hauled him to his feet and marched him down another clinical corridor.They brought him, not to
Chapter 39: The Hollow Prize
The journey to Directorate HQ was a blur of harsh light and cold metal. Ken, Elara, and Sophia were shoved into the rear of an armored truck, their wrists locked by smart-cuffs that hummed with a barely sufficient charge. The truck's interior was bare and stank of ozone and fear.Sophia was silent now, numbness paralyzing her sobs. She crouched between Ken and Elara, shuddering in a small body. Ken kept his head bent low, his mind racing over De Vries's furious words. *The drive is empty.* Elara's caution was the only glimmer of hope in the crushing darkness. She had saved the research. But she had made their immediate future infinitely worse.The vehicle skidded to a halt. The back doors exploded open and the cold, brutalist mass of a Directorate interrogation block towered over them. They were pulled in and marched through shining, antiseptic-white corridors, past cells whose walls were energy fields instead of bars.De Vries sat waiting for them in a bright, white observation room
Chapter 38: The Judas Kiss
The laboratory was a scene of desperation. The decision had been made. They were abandoning ship. The group of four—Ken, Elara, Sophia, and Markus—would flee down the Prinsengracht freight tunnel. The rest would fan out into the deeper, unmapped corridors, their chances slim.There was no grand sendoff. Only somber, unspoken goodbyes and the trade of vital equipment. The water-resistant data drive was stashed in Ken's backpack. Sophia traveled in his hip, her small bag of personal belongings grasped in her hand, her face pale with fear and exhaustion.Elara administered Liese a final, heavy dose of sedative. "It's kind," she panted, her own eyes filled with tears. "She won't know anything." Leaving her was the hardest thing any of them had ever done."Ready?" Markus asked, slinging his own pack across his shoulder. His locator beacon pulsed, a tiny thudding heart of betrayal against his own.Ken glanced back at the lab, where they'd lived, where they'd been safe, where they'd been tra
Chapter 37: The Weight of Lies
Markus entered through the service pipe and a man was torn. Outside, he remained the same duty-conscious lieutenant: stoic, tired, fretful. Within him, a chilling new heart of deceit had already begun to rev.He found Ken staring at a blank screen, his shoulders slumping in discouragement."Any change?" Markus inquired, his voice diplomatically neutral.Ken shook his head but didn't get up. "The cold bath is lowering the fever. It's not killing it. It's just… giving her a nicer death." He turned to him, his own eyes bloodshot from exhaustion and guilt. "You were right, Markus. It was a suicide flight. I killed people for nothing."This was the start. The crack in Ken's shield. De Vries's instructions had been clear: *Isolate him. Play on his uncertainties. Leave him exposed.*"We were all wrong," Markus stated, placing his hand against the console to Ken's side. A gesture of solidarity. A lie. "We thought we could fight this as a war. Maybe… maybe we need to start thinking about survi
Chapter 36: The Bitter Pill
The lab was a tomb to lose hope. The triumphant homecoming had turned sour into a motionless, hopeless dread. Liese's breathing was a shallow, wet rasp, every one a torment ticking away. The pile of medical supplies on the center bench—a king's ransom of antibiotics, painkillers, and run-of-the-mill vaccines—mocked them. Everything they had risked their lives for was for nothing.Elara sat next to Liese, wiping away with a wet rag a brow dripping with sweat, her own face a mask of professional placidity drawn taut over desperation. "Her body's eating itself up. The fever's burning away her muscle tissue. We need to lower her core temperature, or her heart will fail.".Ken stared at the useless gear, his mind a wild, foaming nothing. All thoughts, all desperate hopes, had led them here. To a slow, agonizing watch.Markus stood by the back wall, arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the woman dying. His jaw's usual stubborn determination had given way to vacuous blankness. "I told you so," he
Chapter 35: The Offering
Time became strange and tight in the lab. The air was clean, the equipment whirred like machinery, but the mood was denser than the poisoned water outside the windows. Lieze stood silently vigilant, a statue of gleaming potential, as Elara ministered to a stunned, rage-filled Markus."Tapped into my nervous system," Markus groaned, slapping his own chest where she had touched him. "Full-system reboot. I've never had anything like it." He stared at Liese with venom. "We need to put her down. She's a tool.""She's Liese," Ken growled, though he was fighting the same revulsion. "She's sick. We just don't know the disease yet.""That's not a disease, Ken. That's conquest.".Her reply was cut off by Liese. She didn't move, but the main monitor flickered. It showed a map of Amsterdam superimposed with thick, live streams of the spread of the Morrison Virus. Death tolls. Quarantine breaches. Red was strangling the city."The pathogen increases. Efficiency is decreasing." she declared, her vo
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