Chapter 45: The Wager
Author: Clare Felix
last update2025-09-06 04:50:26
The state lab break room was a lesson in enforced sterility. The re-circulating air smelled of oxygen and the lingering, sweet zip of the nutrient paste from the wall dispenser. It was a space of biological need, not comfort, a decompression chamber between shifts in the high-pressure world of enforced discovery. Ken Ardent sat at a small white table, staring into a cup of synthetic coffee that was cold to the point of abstraction. The black fluid was nothing, and he was slipping into it, his face a thin, haunted shadow of the man he once had been. All the lines on his face appeared to be etched by the constant, low-grade fear of recent weeks.

The whir of machinery, soft and mechanical, heralded Markus Hale's coming. The clank of his leg braces was the metronome marking Ken's failure. Markus lowered himself into the chair across from him with a groan of pain, the machines that supported the splintered bones in his knees hissing softly as they adjusted to his weight.

"They've got her on
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