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Chapter 200: The Silent Cure
The water was the color of a fresh bruise, purple and grey in the dawnless time. Ken Ardent stood in the lee of a ruined bridge, a column of hard stone in the whirling mist. He was an outline of a man, a line drawn in hunger and in fatigue. His clothes clung to his skeletal frame, stiff with crusted canal muck and dried hard blood. Each breath was a conscious, careful action, a deal with the ache that had moved in with him inside his ribcage, his shoulder, the very bones. He was an outlaw in a city waking up slowly, enigmatically, around him.He watched. It was all he did any more. He was a spectator at his own revolution.The first light of dawn streamed over the canal, reluctant and pale, catching on water suspended in the air. It illuminated a familiar scene: the unbroken business of mourning, desperate and still, the secret gestures of those who moved in the state's blind places. But there was another quality to the hush this morning. It wasn't the hush of fear, but attention.Acr
Chapter 199. A World Listening
The world had shrunk to the size of a wound. For the inhabitants of Camp Pieter, a filthy, putrid camp on the waterlogged Dutch-Belgian frontier, existence was measured by the widening death-rings in sight, the endless, damp cold, and the daily count of the deceased, carried on makeshift biers to the pyres that never dwindled. The Crimson Sorrow did not select; it fed in the mud and misery, the ultimate, macabre joke on those who had lost all already.Anya, whose youth had been stolen from her by a decade of fleeing, crouched in the mire beside her son, Lukas. He was eight, or maybe nine. Years meant nothing. His breathing was a shallow rasp, each breath a battle he was losing. The telltale red flowers had bloomed on his chest and spread to his throat. She wrapped his hand, her own hard and cracked, in hers and sang a lullaby her mother had sung, the words a hollow comfort to the hideous reality.Hope was not something people had here. It was a gamble, a fool's gamble, a precursor to
Chapter 198. The River of Lies
The voice of the state was a hammer and every morning it pounded home the same nails into the collective unconscious. It roared from elderly loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, crackled across the few approved radio stations, rolled in large, unbeatable lettering on public display screens.".the so-called 'resistance' has been crushed. Its leader, the bio-terrorist Ken Ardent, is officially dead in the demolition of the network.".The voice was firm, assured, an ointment of calm in troubled times. It told of a triumph, a danger dissipated. The state's version was that the Crimson Sorrow was a fire that they were striving to keep under control, and the rebels had been adding gasoline to it. Now, the firebugs were out of the question.Due to the heroic efforts of Inspector De Vries and the Health Security Force, the quarantine zone has been stable. Citizens are reminded once more that compliance with health orders is the fastest route to total recovery. Believe in the system. The crisis
Chapter 197. The First Transmission
The Noordzeekanaal's fog was a grey mantle, consuming sound and sight. It was a threshold location, this destroyed boathouse on the city's distant west side, where Amsterdam's rational terror oozed into the empty, flooded polders. The air was chillier here, tasting of salt, rot, and thin, anguished hope.Within, the universe was reduced to the pool of light from the single battery-operated lamp. It illuminated a scene that was both sacred and secular. Dr. Henrik Visser, a man whose countenance was a map of the plague's toll—pale complexion, sunken eyes bordered with the aura of exhaustion and loss—stood with hands that would not stop their trembling. He was a decent internist from one of Haarlem's hospitals, now a fugitive in his own country, running an underground clinic out of a borrowed cellar. The word had reached him in a series of whispers, a whisper of a ghost in the canals with a miracle.The ghost was there.Ken Ardent stood opposite him, looking less like a man and more like
Chapter 196. The Canal of Smoke
The world outside was dead, and Ken a maggot tunneling through its veins. He moved through Amsterdam's night-darkened streets, a ghost among ghosts. The air, once clean with the scent of the sea, was a stinking broth of smoke, decay, and the nauseating sweetness of charred flesh. Pyres were set alight in the big squares, their orange light casting hellish shadows on the gabled fronts, the final warmth gone from the world.He lurked in the shadows, a hunched, limping figure in a stolen, pungent fisherman's coat. Every step was a bargain with agony. Elara's sutures pulled tight in his side, a constant searing reminder of his frailty. His breath caught, not in the smell, but in the effort of staying on his feet. He was a clockwork man, wound too tight, his gears shrieking at each other.The streets were filled with the dead. They weren't piled up; they were where they had fallen, crumpled in doorways, hunched over empty market stalls, their bodies secreted in the intense shadow. The stat
Chapter 195. The Last Decision
The church crypt was a sanctuary of bone and dust. The atmosphere was chill and still, heavy with the gravity of centuries of quiet, a sickening contrast to the bellowing liquid chaos they had escaped. It was a location of conclusions. And now, it has to be the location of a start.Ken slumped on a stone coffin, his physique a topography of agony. Every breath was a shallow, flame-tipped pin in his ribs. The adrenaline which had carried him out of the flood had been burned away, leaving him with only the stark, shuddering reality of his injuries. Elara worked beside him in the light of one precisely set lamp, her face set in a mask of concentration as she scrubbed and stitched the worst of his injuries with a field medkit. There were no anesthetics left. He clenched his teeth against the sting of the needle and the tug of the thread, his jaw working so hard that it ached.Sophia sat beside him, watching, her knees to her chest. She held the padded case, still sealed, across her lap. I
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