Chapter 21: The Contagion Blooms
The blast door let out a tooth-aching screech of tearing metal. A hinge snapped. Pale hands squeezed through the gap, fingernails shrieking against the steel. No battle cries. Just the suffocating, wet friction of tens of thousands of bodies crushing together. "Fall back!" Adrian leveled the pulse rifle, the shattered carbon-fiber strut of his left arm barely bracing the barrel. He went to pull the trigger. His finger didn't move. Not a choice. The neural signal was severed by an invisible wall of ice the millisecond it hit his knuckles. *Click.* Adrian looked down. The skin on the back of his right hand was turning ashen gray at a visible rate. Not necrosis. Microscopic, geometric silicon crystals were proliferating under his dermis, devouring his veins and muscle. "The memory
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