The tunnel smelled of rust and damp concrete. Water dripped somewhere far ahead, a slow, steady rhythm like a countdown.
Li An followed close behind Chen Yuze, every step echoing a little too loud in the dark.
"How far does this tunnel go?" she asked.
"All the way to Facility C," he said without turning,or what's left of it.
She stopped,"Are you taking me back to Sanyu?"
"No,beneath it." He glanced over his shoulder. "There's a data vault sealed under the original construction,most of the public thinks Sanyu started in 2024,the buried part goes back further."
"To what?"
"To when Virex was still just a theory."
They moved again,the path twisted, narrowed, then opened into a hollow chamber lined with abandoned lockers and rusted vents. Li An's flashlight beam swept across a faded emergency map,most of the ink had faded into ghost lines. She could barely make out the sector codes.
"You used to work there," she said.
"I was part of Protocol Echo,Bio-response behavior modeling." He paused, lowered his voice and said "I believed we could design a virus to control fear in hostile zones. Calm violence. Override trauma."
"But it didn't calm people," she said, "It rewired them."
He nodded, jaw tight,"It copied the things we didn't understand."
A silence stretched between them. The kind that only happens when both people realize the same truth at the same time but neither dares to say it aloud.
"They'll come after us, won't they?" she asked.
"They already are."
They moved again, deeper into the quiet. The farther they went, the colder it became. The air grew heavier,more static in her chest,her tablet buzzed softly in her pack.
A new file.
No source.
She opened it.
SUBJECT 0491: FINAL LOG
"They think I'm echoing them. But I'm not. I'm echoing what the virus learned from them. We're not sick. We're mirrors now. They look into us and see what they fear the most."
Li An swallowed hard. "This isn't a virus anymore," she whispered. "It's a feedback loop."
Chen Yuze stopped at a rusted service hatch.
"This is it," he said.
He punched in an old code. The panel beeped. Green.
The hatch creaked open into a room choked with dust and cabling,dead screens,hard drives sealed in vault boxes.
Chen moved with ease as he was familiar with the place, pulling open a drawer in the far wall. Inside: stacks of classified tapes, labeled only by color and code.
He handed her one.
Echo_VR12.
"This is the first time the virus responded on its own. Not to a test, not to a subject. It anticipated behavior. Altered its own delivery."
She stared at the tape. "This proves it's not just evolving. It's… choosing."
Chen met her eyes. "Now you understand why they want silence. It's not about infection. It's about control."
She suddenly felt cold. Not the kind of cold from tunnels or damp air but the kind that lives in your bones when you know the world won't be same again.
Above them, a dull rumble sounded,like footsteps,heavy,synchronized.
Chen's expression changed.
"They found us."
He reached into his jacket, pulled out a compact data shard, and pressed it into her palm.
"You need to run,get this to someone outside the cordon,anyone who can still transmit off grid."
"What about you?" she asked.
He smiled just a shadow of one.
"I'll give them something to chase."
He turned, heading toward the hatch,before he vanished through it, he looked back.
"I meant what I said,you're not alone."
Then he was gone.
She stood in the dark vault, the shard burning hot in her hand.
Above, the noise grew sharper. A mechanical voice echoed faintly through the vents: Unauthorized bio-signature detected. Tier 3 lockdown imminent.
Something heavy dropped into the tunnel above,then another,metal on metal. Quick steps.
She grabbed the shard, tucked it into the lining of her jacket, and turned toward a narrow crawlspace on the map labeled "Service 04-A."
Not meant for people. But it was open.
Heart racing, knees scraping, she crawled through darkness that grew tighter with each meter. Behind her, the noise followed,distant at first then closer. Then almost inside her chest.
Finally light.
She burst through a rusted hatch behind an abandoned metro line. Air, sharp and wet, slapped her face.
But she didn't stop.
Not now.
She ran.