MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

Over the next week, Elias moved through the sterile corridors of Aethel in a state of controlled paranoia. Every security camera felt like an eye tracking his every move. Every casual conversation with his colleagues felt like an interrogation, a test of his composure. He maintained his routine with painstaking precision, arriving at his lab at precisely 0800, taking his lunch break at exactly 1200, and leaving at 1700. On the surface, he was the same dedicated, slightly obsessive researcher. Beneath, his mind worked feverishly on the plan, a complex and dangerous equation that would either save him or kill him.

His privileged position as a senior researcher gave him access to resources that would be invaluable in the Outlands. Aethel's medical technology was generations ahead of anything that had existed before the collapse, all of it miniaturized and robustly designed for efficiency. He began taking a quiet inventory, carefully noting what he could steal without raising immediate alarms. He requisitioned nano-sutures that could seal deep wounds in seconds, broad-spectrum antibiotics that worked against nearly any infection, and diagnostic scanners small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He added pain suppressors, stimulants, and anti-radiation compounds to his growing list.

Each item he requisitioned, he logged carefully in the official system, always with a plausible, if slightly complex, research justification. The beauty of being a trusted, brilliant researcher was that no one questioned his supply requests. Not yet, anyway.

The encrypted tablet was his most important tool, his ark. It contained his entire research archive, the decoded Project Seraphim data, and every medical reference database he could compress into its hardened memory. If everything else failed, if he died in the Outlands, maybe someone would find it. Maybe the information would survive him.

Physical preparation was a far more difficult challenge. Elias had never been athletic. His body was soft, perfectly adapted to Aethel's carefully controlled, low-gravity environment where no one ever had to run or climb. He began a secret and grueling regimen. He started taking longer routes between his lab and his quarters, using the emergency stairwells instead of the lifts, pushing himself until his muscles burned with an unfamiliar fire. He did push-ups in his small quarters late at night, his breath fogging the cool air, until his arms shook with exhaustion. It was not enough. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him, that it was not nearly enough. But it was all he could do.

He studied maps obsessively. Aethel’s original construction blueprints were classified at the highest level, but as a researcher in a key sector, he had access to maintenance documentation. The city was built around a massive central tower, ringed by residential and industrial sectors, all of it enclosed within walls that were thirty meters high and five meters thick. Those walls were the problem.

The main gates were biometric checkpoints, impossible to bypass without an authorization that Elias would never receive. But Aethel was a living city, a complex machine that required constant maintenance. There had to be other ways out, access points for repair crews, ventilation shafts, or power conduits. There had to be weaknesses.

He found what he was looking for in a maintenance schematic dated fifteen years prior. It detailed an external ladder on the northern wall's maintenance sector, one that had been installed for emergency access to the upper atmospheric sensors. The documentation noted that the automated defense systems in that specific sector had been permanently deactivated due to their interference with the delicate sensor array. It was a small oversight, a tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect system. It was his way out. Probably. Maybe.

The nights were the hardest. Elias would lie in his sleeping pod, staring at the ceiling, his mind a whirlwind of everything that could go wrong. The climb could kill him. The surveillance systems could catch him before he even reached the tunnels. The Outlands, he knew, could kill him in a thousand different ways he could not even begin to imagine. But the alternative, staying in Aethel, living with the knowledge that he could have found a cure and instead chose comfort and safety, that would kill him more slowly, but just as surely.

On the seventh day, he assembled his final kit. The medical supplies went into a compact tactical pack he had requisitioned under the guise of "field research equipment." He added water purification tablets, high-calorie ration bars, and a basic camping set. The tablet went into a waterproof, shock-absorbent case at the very bottom of the pack, protected by three layers of cushioning material. He had a map. He had supplies. He had a plan. He had absolutely no idea what he was truly doing.

That night, Elias stood in his quarters and looked at himself in the small mirror above his sink. The man staring back at him was pale and thin, his eyes wide with a terror he could not conceal. He was not a hero. He was not an adventurer. He was just a scientist who had stumbled onto something too important to ignore.

"You can do this," he whispered to his reflection, his voice hoarse. His reflection did not look convinced.

But it did not matter. The alternative, living in ignorance and complicity in the Warden's lies, was worse than the prospect of death.

Elias began to dress in the most practical clothing he owned. They were dark synthetic fabrics, reinforced at the knees and elbows, designed for lab work but sturdy enough for rough terrain. He laced up boots with thick, gripping soles. Finally, he pulled on a hooded jacket that would help shield his face from Aethel's cameras. He was ready. As ready as he would ever be.

Tomorrow night, he would leave the only home he had ever known. Tomorrow night, he would step into a world he had only read about in sanitized, fear-mongering reports. Tomorrow night, Dr. Elias Houston would become a fugitive.