Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу автора  Echo of the Rift. 9 march 2239 Year

Zohar Leo Palffy de Erdod

Contents

Dear readers!

You are holding in your hands a story about the fragility of our world, about dreamers who, striving to change reality, found themselves on the brink of it. This book is not just a story about heroism or struggle. It is about people, their fears, losses, hopes, and desperate desire to survive, no matter what. I would like you, as you immerse yourself in this world, to feel like you are part of this team — their anxieties, their pain, and the paradoxes of their choices.

But most of all, I want this story to remind you of the most important thing: even in the darkest abyss, there is always room for light — in inner strength, in trust in each other, in the desire for redemption.

Thank you for joining the characters on this dangerous journey to discover the truth about the limits of existence and what makes us human.

When I first picked up this book, I couldn’t have imagined how deeply it would touch my soul. This is a story about a world that collapsed under the weight of its own mistakes, about people whose lives were torn apart but who still found the strength to move forward. It is a story about loss, guilt, hope, and, above all, how we can find light even in the darkest corners of our hearts.

The characters in this book — Kyle, Eva, Lina, and Drake — became something more than just fictional characters to me. They are a reflection of our fears, our regrets, our most secret dreams. Their journey through a broken world, through Rifts that tear not only reality but also souls, is a journey toward acceptance, toward understanding that even in chaos there is room for redemption.

I sincerely hope that this story will touch your hearts as it touched mine. May it serve as a reminder that even in the darkest times, there is strength within us — the strength to fight, to love, and to believe, carrying within us the echoes of those we have lost and the hope for a new dawn.

With warmth and faith,

Zohar Leo Palffy de Erdod

Table of Contents

Prologue: “The Rift”

March 9, 2239. Quantum Dawn Laboratory, Sector 17.

Kyle loved mornings in the station’s living module. Ella, his little sunshine, often woke up before Maria and put on a “morning concert” — singing her simple songs while her toy robot, creaky and well-worn, marched across the table. At such moments, the laboratory — this buzzing hive of cutting-edge technology and hidden risks — seemed like a distant, almost unreal world. Their tiny family idyll was as if outside of time. Illusory — because the tension of the impending experiment was already in the air, like a storm wave that they tried not to notice.

The air trembled. Not from heat or cold — from something deeper, something that was born in the very depths of the reactor. It seemed as if reality itself was stretched like the string of an ancient, out-of-tune instrument, ready to snap with a deafening dissonance. Kyle Rain stood at the control panel; his fingers, usually flitting confidently across the sensors, froze over the screen, and his dilated pupils reflected the pale, disturbing light of the indicators.

“We’re on the brink, Kyle,” Eva Carter’s voice cracked with metallic notes over the communicator. Even through the interference, he could sense his colleague’s fear mixed with her usual steely determination. “If we don’t activate the stabilizer now, everything will collapse. Do you hear me? The energy is getting out of control! We’re losing it!”

In the small holographic window in the corner of the panel, his wife Maria smiled demurely. But in her eyes, so familiar and beloved, there was a flicker of anxiety that she was desperately trying to hide from Ella. That smile cut Kyle’s heart sharper than any shard.

“Dad, hold on!” Ella shouted into the camera. Her clear voice cut through the hum of the laboratory like a bright stream. The girl held up her card, covered with cheap but precious glitter, to the screen. “But you promised! You promised you’d be back for dinner!”

Those words, innocent and demanding, echoed in Kyle’s mind, intertwining with Eva’s cry. Promises… They now carried not just a burden, but a red-hot chain of remorse.

He heard her. But he couldn’t take his eyes off that window — a tiny portal to a life still alive. They were so close — just three hundred meters away in a straight line, behind armored glass and layers of protective barriers that now seemed thinner than cobwebs. Five-year-old Ella, with her funny, tightly braided pigtails that always got messy by evening, held a card with a crooked but sincere inscription: “Daddy is a hero.” He promised to be with them in an hour — after the final, triumphant test. An hour that was supposed to change the world.

“Kyle!” Eva yelled. Her voice was almost drowned out by the growing wail of sirens. “The reactor is at 112%! Damn it, Arden was wrong! That initial fluctuation… it’s not a problem! We should have…”

The voice vanished, drowned out by a low, vibrating hum rising from the very heart of the laboratory — from within their ambitions and mistakes. The floor shook so violently that Kyle could barely stand, and at that moment, the central screen flashed a blinding red:

CRITICAL ANOMALY. SPATIAL RUPTURE INEVITABLE.

Cold sweat rolled down his temple. This wasn’t supposed to happen. They had calculated everything down to the smallest detail. Quantum energy — their brainchild, their hope — was supposed to be the salvation of a dying planet. Its endless source. But they had overlooked something fundamental. Perhaps that very “insignificant interference” that Eva had been shouting about.

And then — silence. Absolute, deafening, as if the world had forgotten what sound was for a moment. A moment of eternity. And then — an explosion. Not a sound. Not a flash. But a rift in existence itself. As if the fabric of reality had burst, split in two, revealing something ancient and monstrously alien.

Kyle fell to his knees. The glass in front of him — armored, reliable — cracked, covered with a network of silver spiderwebs, and shattered into a myriad of fragments. Behind him, in the living module, he saw space bending. The walls distorted in waves, as if made of water, colors mixed into a nauseating cacophony, and then began to tear like old fabric, revealing a dark, pulsating void glowing from within. The Rift. The First Rift. He saw Maria, his Maria, grab Ella and pull her close. He saw her lips silently scream his name — silently, because sound no longer had any power. The void swallowed them — slowly, like in a nightmare — pulling them into its black, insatiable maw. Only an echo remained — low, vibrating, humming right inside his skull, inside his soul.

“Nooo…” His voice broke into an animalistic growl. He crawled toward the broken glass, not noticing how the sharp edges cut his palms, leaving bloody trails on the metal floor. “Maria! Ella!”

But where their cozy module had been, there was now only a gaping crack in reality. It glowed with a ghostly, unearthly light — a crack in the world, in his life. Kyle stared blankly at it, at this wound on the body of the world, until deafening sirens drowned out his thoughts and the laboratory — their temple of science and hope — began to collapse, burying not only his family but the entire world as he knew it under the rubble.

It was the end.

And the beginning of an endless nightmare.

Chapter 1: “The Last Bastion”

2247. The fortified city of “The Last Bastion,” Zone 3.

Kyle Rain woke up to the sound of a siren, piercing and familiar, like his own breathing. The sound cut through the damp, heavy air of the metal box that, here in the Last Bastion, was proudly called a living room. He lay on a narrow, creaky bunk with a worn-out mattress. The ceiling, covered with rust like dried blood, flickered with the dim, uneven light of a single lamp that seemed to be held together by a promise and a pair of bare wires. The pervasive smell of dampness, old iron, and indestructible human despair was a constant companion in the Last Bastion, a city built by a handful of survivors from the ruins of the old world to shelter from the horror that reigned outside.

The Last Bastion towered like a cyclopean fortress on the edge of an abyss — a chaotic, multi-level labyrinth of rusty steel plates, the remains of broken military equipment, and cracked concrete structures. The lights, powered by dying, coughing generators, emitted a flickering amber glow — like the sick eyes of a beast lurking in the darkness. There was no place for hope here — it had died along with the old world, leaving behind only a bitter aftertaste. There weren’t even proper streets here — just low, narrow corridors covered in graffiti of despair and announcements about missing residents, which over time had become like the city’s inflamed nerves. In these arteries, there were quiet whispers about shadows dancing on the edge of the Wasteland, about voices calling from the Fractures. The oily, acrid smell of old fuel and rotting plastic ate into clothes, skin, and lungs. There was no room for dreams here — only survival, an animalistic struggle for every breath of air, for every ration of tasteless food. Sometimes, in rare moments of calm, Kyle heard rumors of strange cults emerging in the darkest corners of the Bastion. People driven mad sought meaning in the Rifts, worshipping the Shadows, trying to make unthinkable deals with them.

He didn’t know what sleep was. He hadn’t truly slept in eight long, endless years. Dreams, if they dared to come, were worse than reality — endless, agonizing repetitions of the day when everything collapsed. Maria. Ella. Their faces, beloved, distorted with horror, disappearing into the insatiable womb of the Rift. Kyle ran a trembling hand over his unshaven, gaunt face, trying to erase these images, but they were burned into his memory like a brand.

“Hey, Rain! Are you alive in there, or has the Shadow already taken your lost soul?” A rough, smoke-filled voice broke through the thin metal wall, accompanied by a dull thud. “The Council is waiting. They say they have a special assignment for you. Don’t make them nervous, or they’ll cut off your rations again, and you’ll be eating rust off the walls.”

Kyle smiled crookedly. Garrett, an old mechanic and a gray-haired grumbler with golden hands and a sharp tongue, was one of the few who still spoke to him without open contempt. Most people in Bastion avoided him. Some out of primitive fear — it was possible that he had brought something with him from Quantum Dawn — others out of hatred. “The scientist who killed the world,” they whispered behind his back when they thought he couldn’t hear them. He didn’t argue. Maybe they were right. Guilt was his constant companion, his shadow.

He pulled on his worn, patched jacket and mechanically checked to see if his old neurointerface was still in place — the bracelet that once connected him to the heart of the laboratory, but was now just a painful reminder of the past. Of the days when he believed he could change the world. Then he stepped out into a narrow, dimly lit corridor where the air was even heavier — with the smell of burnt fuel, stale food, and concentrated despair. Above ‘s head, behind the cloudy, scratched protective dome, cracks in reality itself were visible — Fractures. Their glowing, pulsating edges flickered like living, hungry wounds. They were everywhere. Some were small, like scratches from the claws of an unknown beast. Others were huge, gaping holes from which anomalies sometimes flowed: temporary glitches that distorted perception, gravitational traps capable of flattening a person into a pancake, or moving shadows that exuded a grave chill.

Kyle made his way through the sparse morning crowd in the central zone, where people — exhausted, silent, with dull eyes — were already lining up for their daily rations. Children, too thin and serious for their age, with an unchildlike longing in their eyes, stared at him with empty eyes. He looked away. He had nothing to comfort them with. Their future was as gray and hopeless as the sky beyond the dome.

The Council building, if you could call this gloomy conglomerate of concrete and steel that, was located in the heart of the Bastion — a former military bunker, now surrounded by several rows of makeshift barricades and silent, tense guards.

This bunker was one of the few surviving structures of the Shelter XXI Program, once an ambitious project to create autonomous shelters in case of a global catastrophe. It was designed for five hundred people and could exist without external supplies for at least ten years. The multi-level structure went deep underground: the upper tiers served as administrative and technical areas, below were warehouses, water treatment plants, reservoirs, and the lowest levels, according to rumors, were closed even before the catastrophe — automatically blocked after an incident that no one spoke about openly.

It was said that the plan was to preserve not only bodies, but civilization itself — the server rooms stored digital archives of culture and science, the laboratories contained frozen incubators with embryos, and in a closed sector, artificial intelligence created to “preserve human heritage” slumbered. But no one knew if it was still active… or if it had become part of the Void itself.

After the Rift in 2239 and the ensuing collapse, the military — the surviving units of the Northern Alliance — were the first to arrive here. They founded the Council and became the new authority, relying on weapons, fear, and discipline. Over time, they were joined by surviving scientists, engineers, hunters, and fugitives. Some brought technology with them. Some brought curses.

Now the bunker resembled a rehashed legend: on the outside, a rough, time-worn monolith; on the inside, a noisy hive where life clung to rust and gray hope. People did not live here — they existed. Damp air, mold in the joints between the slabs, the eternal hum of generators, murky water, and tasteless food — all of this was normal. Children were born right in the medical wards, among IVs and sirens. The elderly disappeared without a trace: some died, some left for the Wasteland voluntarily, unable to endure.

But despite everything, the bunker held. It became a fortress. The heart of the Bastion. The last place where people still tried to call themselves human.

Kyle passed through the vibrating scanner, ignoring the cold, appraising gaze of the guard, and entered the dimly lit hall where five people sat at a long, roughly hewn table. The Council — the last, self-proclaimed remnants of authority in this dying, agonizing world. At the head of the table sat Commander Riva Stern, a woman with a face carved from granite and eyes that had seen too much death and too little hope. Her cropped gray hair and austere military jacket only emphasized her iron will.

“Rein,” her voice cut through like static on an old, worn-out communicator. Sharp, dry, devoid of emotion. “We’ve discovered a new Rift. Code name: Echo-7. Data from the drones, the few that returned, shows that there may be a stable energy source inside. Perhaps even one capable of closing these damn cracks. Once and for all.”

Kyle froze. His heart, which usually beat steadily and wearily, skipped a beat and then began to pound harder than usual, driving blood to his temples. Close the Rifts. For this, he had dragged out his miserable existence for all these eight years. A ghostly, almost insane hope that kept him from drowning completely in the abyss of guilt. But he knew: the Council didn’t call him for no reason. Their voices, their glances — always with subtext. Always with a hidden price.

“So what?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady and indifferent, even though everything inside him was screaming. “Do you want me to analyze the data? Or… do you have another suicidal plan?”

“No,” Riva interrupted. Her gaze, sharp as a blade, pierced him. “We want you to lead the expedition. Inside Echo-7.”

He flinched. Echo. That word had haunted him for eight years — like the echo of his daughter’s voice, like the hollow echo of his own ruined life. Now it was coming back as a chance to redeem everything — or to lose what was left of himself for good.

“You have a week to prepare the team,” Stern continued, not giving him time to recover. “If you refuse, we’ll find someone else. But you know that no one but you, you damn genius, understands the nature of these Fractures better. You created them — you figure them out.”

Kyle clenched his fists under the table so hard that his nails dug into his palms. Inside. Where reality breaks down. Where the mind becomes your worst enemy. Where shadows take on flesh. He knew what happened to those who returned from the Fractures — if they returned at all. Empty shells. Burnt-out souls. But deep in his consciousness, behind thick layers of pain, guilt, and despair, a tiny, poisonous shadow of hope stirred. What if, in this new Echo, he could find them? Not just echoes of their voices, but traces. Traces of Maria and Ella.

“I agree,” he said quietly. Almost in a whisper. But in that whisper there was steel, forged by years of suffering. “Give me everything you have on Echo-7. All the data, all the resources. And I’ll find your source. Or die trying.”

Riva Stern nodded. Slowly. And for a moment, something flashed in her stony eyes… something like deep-seated pity. Or maybe it was a warning. Kyle didn’t know which was worse. And, to be honest, he didn’t care anymore.

Chapter 2: “Shards of Trust”

2247. Fortified city “Last Bastion,” Zone 5,

training sector.

Kyle Rain stood at the edge of the training ground — a huge, echoing space that had once been part of a military warehouse and had now been converted into an arena for honing survival skills. Rusty metal walls, pockmarked with dents from stray shots and energy discharges, closed in overhead, creating the feeling of a closed cage. The air here was thick, saturated with the acrid smell of sweat, ingrained machine oil, and burnt plastic — reminiscent of the endless shooting at improvised targets that Bastion soldiers tirelessly fired at. Somewhere in the corner, something crackled, as if the very space here was slowly burning from within. Above his head, beyond the murky, dirty dome of the protective field, the deadly blue light of the Fractures pulsed ominously — a reminder that any sense of security here was illusory. Temporary. Fragile. Kyle clenched his jaw, his gaze fixed on the three figures standing at the far edge. The Council had appointed them without warning, without discussion. They had simply presented him with a fait accompli. They were his team. His only chance. And, perhaps, his death sentence.

The first was a woman standing slightly apart, her arms crossed defiantly across her chest. Eva Carter. Her face, crisscrossed with a fine network of premature wrinkles, made her look older than her thirty-something years. A long, old scar stretching from her temple to her chin gave her the look of someone who had not only seen too much, but paid for it with her own blood.

The scar pulsed faintly when she frowned. Kyle couldn’t help but remember that day at Quantum Dawn, when a fragment from the exploded panel had left that mark… or was it something else? Something she never talked about? She was an engineer — one of the best in Bastion, according to her sparse file. But Kyle had known her long before the disaster. They had worked together, side by side, on a project that was supposed to save the world. And in the end, it destroyed it. In her cold, appraising gaze, he saw more than just professional interest. There was a shadow of the past. Hidden resentment. Unspoken accusations. Eva knew he blamed himself. And she undoubtedly blamed him too. Although perhaps not only him.

“Reyn,” her voice cut through like static on a broken radio — every sound precise and measured. “I hope you don’t think this is going to be a fun trip through the Wasteland. I’ve seen what the Fractures do to people. And to technology. If you’re not ready to go all the way, if you have even a shred of doubt left in you, tell me now. I’ll find someone else. Someone who won’t be a burden.”

“I’m ready,” Kyle replied, suppressing the irritation that always rose in him whenever he spoke to her. Her directness bordered on cruelty. “What about you? You were there too, Eva, when it all started. Aren’t you afraid that the past will come back to haunt you? That your own “echoes” will be louder than mine?

Her cold steel-colored eyes narrowed for a moment. The corner of her mouth, untouched by the scar, twitched imperceptibly. She remained silent, and in that silence, everything was said. A warning. A reminder. Kyle looked away, feeling something heavy, like a lump of cold, tighten in his chest again. Eva was a problem — a complex, multi-layered one. But without her unique knowledge of quantum systems and her ability to squeeze the most out of even a pile of rust… They wouldn’t last a day in the Rift.

Next to her, contrasting with her toughness, stood a girl — almost a child against the backdrop of Bastion’s emaciated, Wasteland-scorched faces. Lina Cyrus. Medic. Barely twenty-five, though she looked even younger. Strands of light hair peeked out from under her medical bandana — her usual careless ponytail had come undone. Her huge gray eyes were open, almost naive, alien to this world of rust, despair, and eternal struggle. She held a worn tablet in her hands; diagrams flickered on the screen — probably medical data on survival in anomalous zones or patient records. When Kyle looked at her, Lina smiled — faintly, but sincerely. The smile, like a ray of sunshine in a musty cell, pierced him with unexpected warmth and… made him feel awkward. He had long since grown unaccustomed to such unclouded human gestures. To such simplicity. And for a moment, he remembered Ella, her equally open, warm smile… Kyle quickly pushed the memory away. Not now.

“Dr. Reine,” her voice was soft, almost melodic, but there was an unexpected firmness in it. “I’m glad to be working with you. I… I’ve read your early work. Before… well, before all this.” Your theories on spatial fluctuations… they were brilliant. If we really find the energy source in Echo-7, it could save thousands of lives. I believe we have a chance. We have to.

Kyle just nodded briefly, unable to find the strength to respond. Her unwavering bright faith, optimism, trust in him — someone most people had long considered a monster — were like a sharp blade digging into an old, unhealed wound. He didn’t want hope. Hope made the pain unbearable when everything fell apart again. But Lina didn’t seem to notice his silence or his gloomy gaze. She continued to type quickly on her tablet, as if the world were not on the brink of total collapse and they were not about to step into the jaws of a monster.

The last was a man sitting imposingly on the edge of a metal bench. With lazy, almost predatory grace, he twirled a combat knife — sharp as a razor—, carving something intricate on a piece of old plastic. Drake Holt. A former special forces soldier, according to rumors. Now a mercenary whose reputation in Bastion was a potent mix of animal fear and poorly concealed disgust. Tall, muscular, with short-cropped dark hair and a tattoo of a grinning skull encircled by a crown of thorns on his powerful neck, he looked as if he wasn’t just accustomed to chaos, but fed on it. Lived in it. He enjoyed every manifestation of it. When Kyle met his gaze, Drake grinned predatorily, revealing a row of even teeth like a shark’s. One of them flashed with a metal implant.

“Well, scientist,” he drawled, his voice low and hoarse, like metal scraping against glass. “They say you’re the guy who pressed the big red button and brought us all this merry apocalypse.”

He narrowed his eyes, still playing with the knife like a cat with a dying mouse.

“Maybe you could enlighten us amateurs on how to drag our asses into this ‘Echo’ of yours and, more importantly, get them back out again? Or are you one of those god-complex psychos looking for a nice place to die… and taking a bunch of people with you? I’ve seen types like that. It always ends badly — for themselves and for those around them.

He leaned forward slightly, lowering his voice to an almost intimate whisper:

“Or maybe you’re looking for something there… or someone you lost?” Drake added more quietly, his smirk widening until it was almost caricatured. A sharp, piercing glint flashed in his eyes, as if he had picked up on something important. Kyle didn’t answer. But the muscles in his jaw gave him away.

“Is that all you’re here for? To be sarcastic?” Eva interrupted sharply, almost breaking down. Her hands clenched so tightly across her chest that her knuckles turned white. The scar on her face seemed to darken. “You think this is a game, Holt? That we were just shoved into Echo 7 for someone’s amusement? Or to see how quickly we’d tear each other’s throats out?

“I don’t think any of us will get out of there alive, sweetheart,” Drake snapped. His voice was sharp as a blow to metal, and his gaze was icy, without a hint of a smile, when he turned it on Eva. “And you know what pisses me off? It’s not your constant distrust. It’s the way you stare at that scientist, as if you’re just waiting for him to screw up again.

He leaned forward slightly, slowly, menacingly.

“So here’s the thing. I’d worry less about trust… and more about the consequences. One mistake, Carter, and we’ll all be scattered across the Wasteland. And I’m not about to become fertilizer because of someone’s damn ghosts from the past.”

Kyle felt the blood rush to his face — a hot wave of anger, old pain, and irritation. But he held back, taking a deep breath. Control. Drake was a provocateur — that had been clear from the first minute. And yet, judging by the reports in the Council’s dossier, his combat skills were impressive: survivability, reaction, tactical acumen. Fractures do not forgive weakness and mistakes, and if anyone could survive inside this primal horror that awaited them inside, it was him. The problem was elsewhere. Kyle felt it more and more keenly: Drake was not just a weapon. He himself was a living anomaly, unpredictable and dangerous.

“I’m not looking for death, Holt,” he said, coldly and evenly, but with a ring of steel in his voice. “And I’m not hunting ghosts. I’m looking for a way to fix what I once destroyed.”

He took a step forward, and his gaze became as firm as his tone.

“But if you continue to engage in cheap provocations instead of listening and following orders, you will meet your demise. Sooner than you think.”

Drake laughed — a sharp, hoarse, unpleasant laugh, like the bark of a jackal. The laughter was devoid of joy, saturated with poison. He put down the knife and rose lazily. His figure loomed over Kyle like a predator ready to pounce. But Kyle did not back down. Not an inch. He looked him straight in the eye. Their gazes locked, the tension between them almost palpable — like the rumbling of static electricity before a lightning strike.

“Enough!” Eva’s voice cut through the space between them, sharp and commanding. Her tone brooked no argument. She stepped forward, placing herself between the men, and her small frame suddenly exuded authority, as if the entire Bastion stood behind her. “If we’re really going to survive this hell,” she continued, without looking away, “we need to at least pretend we’re a team, not a pack of rabid dogs ready to tear each other’s throats out. Rain, do you have a plan? Or has the Council really abandoned us to our fate, hoping for a miracle?”

Kyle took a deep breath, feeling the acrid air scratch his throat. He took his old, trusty neurointerface out of his pocket, connected it to the worn projector on the warehouse wall, and brought up a three-dimensional map compiled by drones. The Echo-7 Rift flickered on the shaky hologram, ominous and pulsing a hundred kilometers north of Bastion, in an area with a particularly unstable and torn fabric of reality. The glowing crack, surrounded by a ring of gravitational and temporal anomalies, resembled an unhealed, festering wound on the body of a mutilated world.

“This is our target,” he pointed to the flickering center of the image. “Echo-7. The data shows that there is a powerful and stable energy signal inside, which, theoretically, could be the key to closing the Rifts. But getting to it won’t be easy. The drones are detecting extreme temporal distortions, gravitational traps, and… something else. Something they couldn’t classify. Something that destroyed three of the five reconnaissance probes before they could transmit their data.

“Shadows?” Lina’s voice trembled, and her fingers nervously clenched the tablet. “I’ve heard stories… from those who returned. They say there are creatures there that cannot be seen, but they move. And voices — whispers from the void. Is that true, Dr. Rain?”

Kyle froze, sinking into memories for a moment. He had seen those shadows — in the first, most terrifying years after the disaster, when the world was falling apart and he was desperately trying to understand what had happened, what he had created. These creatures were like living shards of a broken mirror, their presence evoking a primal cold that chilled him to the bone and paralyzed his will. He knew that telling Lina now would only frighten her more, breed fear. Her faith, fragile as it was, might prove stronger than the horror itself.

“Maybe,” he replied evasively. “The wasteland is full of illusions, Lina. Our minds are easily deceived, especially there. But our task is not to study these deceptions, but to find the source. We go there, take what we need, and come back. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll be back here in a week, and maybe the world will be a little safer. If not…” He didn’t finish, but the meaning was clear without words. In the Wasteland, “if not” meant only one thing.

Drake grinned predatorily again, his eyes shining with some kind of unhealthy, greedy anticipation. Eva, without taking her eyes off the map, clenched her hand tightly into a fist, and the tension seemed to sparkle in her every movement. Her face remained impenetrable, like a mask. Lina, on the other hand, seemed even more determined, although her hands trembled slightly as she carefully put the tablet away in her bag.

“Then let’s get to work,” Kyle said, turning off the projector. The room was plunged into semi-darkness, with only a thin stream of dim street