2025-08-21 15:03:56The night had slipped by, but Amsterdam was unlit. Rain had slowed to mist and curled itself about each stone, each rusting belt, each steel rail etching out across the city like veins. Morning light crept cold and gray, bleeding faintly through clouds that promised more rain. On the surface, patrols moved like clockwork, drones sweeping along alleys, checkpoint barriers constricting the city's beat into thin, controlled channels.
Here, Ken woke up slowly on the hard bench beside his workstation, neck cracked stiff, the chill of the tunnel encroaching into his bone marrow. He rose slowly, the tiny crack of joints defying his forty-two years. For an instant, he lingered in that limbo between dreams and dread. Dreams of white, antiseptic labs, of machinery whirring with precision, of colleagues who still listened to his knowledge. Fear of the dripping walls of the tunnel closing in day by day, of vials running, of his name on the lips of those who did not understand the price of disclosure.
The runner remained motionless on the cot, still taking shallow breaths, still muttered incoherent delirium rambles barely heard inside the room. Ken leaned forward, touched the bandage, smoothed the patient's brow—hot, but stable. It was enough.
Routine grounded him. He opened the battered book to the current page. He scribbled down vitals, symptoms, things utilized, the measured slow decline. The scratch of the pen soothed him, though he knew that the book was a confession and not a medical record. A record for someone who might one day be able to look back and say: here, this was where we began to know.
That's when he heard it—three rapid knocks on the metal grate at the far end of the tunnel.
Ken's hand flinched. It was suspended above the journal.
No one but couriers, smugglers, and the desperate were supposed to know where the grate was hidden unless they were familiar with the path—the covert sigils carved on a bridge piling along the Singel canal. Three knocks. Pause. Then two others, light and deliberate. Not random. A summons.
Ken stepped out quietly and walked over to the periscope threaded through a cluster of pipes. He pressed the fuzzy glass against his eye.
A dripping figure in gray. A girl—no, a young woman, perhaps twenty or even younger. She was thin, her coat dripping, hood adhering to her head in the rain. One hand held the bars, the other flapped at her hip. Black smudges ran across the skin of her wrist and forearm.
She rapped once more, this time softly. And then, in a voice: "I need help."
Ken's throat closed. A female voice behind the gate was strange enough. But need—need was currency and danger.
He kept his voice low. "How did you get here?"
Her chin lifted, facing the grate. Raindrops clung to her eyelashes. Her eyes—dark, pointed, unwinking—encountered the space where she must have sensed him watching. "They said. The one who heals is here.".
Ken closed his eyes for an instant. The smuggler's whisper echoed back: Someone's out there. Healing people. Someone like you.
Another rumor. Another thread in the web tightening around his neck.
"I don't treat everyone who knocks," he said.
She didn't even flinch. She rolled up her cuff and outstretched her arm. Even with the black periscope sight, he could see it clearly—the gash was deep, jagged, but clean in a way that it shouldn't have been. The edges were already beginning to heal. Infection should have set in. Fever should have begun. But none had.
"Just look," she told him.
Ken's heart leaped.
He unbolted the grill but did not unchain until he was certain that no patrol pursued her. Nothing but mist, water sound, sweep of distant drones across the sky. He released the chain and swung open the gate.
She stumbled in, mud smeared on her boots, water running down her hood. She smelled of wet stone and blood. Up close, he could see the injury more clearly, see how the skin struggled against rot.
"Sit," he ordered, pushing her towards the stool next to his desk.
She obeyed willingly, though her gaze flew quickly, taking in the room: jars and recovered vials lining the shelves, the smuggler softly moaning in the cot, the journal lying open on the desk. She had taken everything in, he was sure. Not just another frightened runaway.
"Your name is?" Ken asked as he unwrapped the lip of her sleeve.
"Sophia."
The name sat there, bare, open.
The wound was a day old at least. Razor wire had torn deep, way across the forearm. But the tissue showed no spreading lesion, no black veins radiating outward as it should have. The body was fighting—not fighting. Winning.
"How long?" he asked.
"Yesterday morning. Eastern checkpoint. Wire mesh got me in." She talked as if she were describing the weather, with detached calmness. "I thought it would kill me. But the fever never came."
Ken tended to the wound in a deliberate, practiced manner, his hands moving with the steadiness that had once controlled entire surgical teams. But his mind was racing. Dozens of patients had collapsed within hours from wounds half this size, he'd seen. And yet—
She sat upright. No tremble, no sweat, no ragged breaths. Impossible.
Sophia observed him as he worked. "You think I'm telling the truth," she whispered.
Ken didn't answer. He wrapped the bandage, pulling it tight, then stepped back.
"Why did you come here?" he asked.
Her gaze did not waver. "Because they say you are looking for answers. And maybe I can be one."
The words dropped like a stone into still water, sending ripples outward. Outside them, the smuggler coughed feverishly in sleep. Water dripped through the silence.
Ken heard the voice of the man he used to be—the scientist, the pioneer, the criminal. An immunity. A resistance. A possibility. The cure he had sought and could not seize might be sitting in front of him in flesh.
"Do you have an idea what you're saying?" His tone was nastier than he intended.
"Yes." Sophia's tone was controlled but adamant. "If I don't get sick, maybe others needn't."
Ken's heart tightened. Decades of failure hung over him. The tests, the humiliation, the exiling into pipes. And now this—hope, fragile and perilous, in his lab with water still dripping from her cowl.
But he also recognized the danger. If gossip of healing had already instituted checkpoints, what would the regime do if it learned of her? She wasn't merely an exception. She was tinder, and the city was full of accelerants.
Ken rubbed a hand over his face, grounding himself in the wet, the stone, the stench of rust. "You shouldn't be here," he growled.
Her face was resolute. "Where should I be? Out there? Lying in wait and letting them catch me? You know what they would do if they caught this." She raised her arm a little, the bandaged wound. "If they caught me.".
He looked at her then—not the wound, not the anomaly, but her. Young, defiant, carrying a weight she barely understood. He felt the old conflict churn inside him: duty to protect, fear of exposure, the hunger for knowledge.
She broke the silence first. “You’ve been hiding down here a long time.”
Ken stiffened.
"People talk," she continued. "Not of your name. But of a man who does not turn away the ill. Who fears not to touch them." She leaned forward closer. "They believe in you."
Ken sneered. "Faith makes the checkpoints worse."
Sophia nodded her head. "Or maybe it makes them inevitable."
He regarded her. She was no fool. She understood the risks, perhaps more than she had any right to at her age.
The smuggler groaned, thrashing weakly. Ken went to check him, pressing a hand to his chest, adjusting the bandage. His fever was rising. The infection had taken root.
Sophia watched quietly. “He’ll die?”
Ken didn’t answer.
“You’ve saved some, though.”
“I’ve delayed death,” Ken corrected. “That’s not the same thing.”
“Maybe it is, for now.”
Her words struck him with harsh precision. Delay meant another day, another chance for someone else to find them, another chance for him to keep looking.
When he turned back to Sophia, her eyes glimmered in the light of the lantern, unwinking. For the first time in years, Ken felt the weight of possibility more crushing than despondency.
But fear clamped itself around him like the wetness of the tunnel walls. She could be the answer. She could be devastated.
Ken breathed deeply. "If you stay here, you don't leave. Do you understand? The city can't know."
Sophia nodded once, calm as if she had expected nothing else. "Then show me what you're doing. Let me help."
Ken looked at her. A child, come forward and join his exile. But he saw through her eyes, beyond them, the stubborn glint of a spark already burned – one who had made her choice.
The lantern flared. The smuggler groaned in his fever. The
city above constricted its noose.
And deep in the tunnel, everything changed for Ken.
The impossible patient was there.
—
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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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