Read Chapter 28: New Sky

The main hall had become a cathedral of silence. Elias stood at the edge of it, still smelling the damp copper of the comm room on his clothes, watching the huddled clusters of residents stare up at the enormous screen that showed the surface feed. Or what remained of it.

The feed was static now. Snow. A grainy, hissing nothing that had been, three hours ago, a live satellite image of the Alps. The asteroid had hit somewhere beyond the ridgeline—exactly where Moreau’s calculations had predicted, give or take a few kilometers—and the shockwave had traveled through rock like a pulse through a vein. The bunker had shuddered. Cracks had opened. Dust had come.

But the surface feed was gone because the satellites themselves were dying. One by one, the consortium’s orbital assets were winking out, their optics seared by the plume of ejecta that now rose into the stratosphere like a black flower blooming over Europe.

Elias knew what that meant. Everyone in this room would learn soon enough.

“Mr. Vogt.”

He turned. Silva stood two meters behind him, her arms crossed, her face unreadable. She’d traded her usual pressed blouse for a utilitarian jacket with the bunker’s maintenance crest on the shoulder. She looked like she’d been sleeping in it.

“The director wants a status report on air scrubbers and water reserves,” she said. “Now that the shaking’s stopped.”

Elias nodded, already moving toward the maintenance corridor. “The scrubbers are holding, but the dust load is going to spike. The crack in section C is letting in particulates faster than the filtration can handle. I need to seal it from the inside or—” He stopped. “Or we lose the lower habitat levels within forty-eight hours. The dust will coat the exchangers and everything dies.”

“Forty-eight hours,” Silva repeated. She matched his pace, walking alongside him. “And the water leak?”

“Backlogged. Containment valves are holding. For now.”

They reached the maintenance door. Elias palmed the reader—his biometrics still worked, still granted him access to every locked system in this place, a privilege that now felt less like a key and more like a target painted on his back. The door slid open, and the hum of the ventilation system hit him, louder than before, carrying a faint grit that he could taste on his tongue.

“It’s already coming through,” he said, running his fingers along the ductwork. A fine grey powder clung to his fingertips. “The outer shell’s compromised. The dust is going to settle in the lungs of everyone here if I don’t get the filtration cascade running at full capacity. But I can’t do that without drawing down the power reserves, and the director won’t sign off on that unless I can promise him the lights stay on for the rich folks upstairs.”

Silva’s jaw tightened. “You have authorization to make that call yourself.”

“I have authorization to *recommend* it. The director’s been clear about who gets final say on resource allocation.” Elias wiped his fingers on his coveralls. “And I’m not the one who decides who breathes easy and who doesn’t.”

They emerged into the main corridor, and the argument reached them before they turned the corner. Voices, layered, shouting over each other. The meeting in the main hall had dissolved into something uglier.

“—paying members have priority. That was the agreement—”

“The agreement was that we’d all survive. If you’d told us the capacity was half what you claimed—”

“Capacity isn’t the issue. The issue is air. Clean air. And we don’t have enough filtration capacity for everyone if the scrubbers keep running at this load.”

Elias stepped into the hall. Visser stood on the low platform where the director usually addressed the residents, flanked by two men Elias didn’t recognize—new arrivals, maybe, from the upper merchant tier, judging by their tailored coats and unmarked faces. Visser’s voice was calm, almost soothing, but his eyes were scanning the crowd like he was tallying heads.

“The asteroid has struck,” Visser said, raising a hand for silence. The room quieted, slowly, reluctantly. “What that means for the surface is still unclear. What it means for us is simple. We are sealed in. We have resources—food, water, air—but they are not infinite. They were never meant to be infinite. They were meant for the people who prepared for this moment.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd. Elias watched the faces—families, workers, technicians, some of the wealthier residents who’d bought their way in at the last minute. The divide was visible now, in how they stood: the paying residents at the front, the staff and lower-tier workers pressed against the back walls.

“The director is currently assessing our filtration capacity,” Visser went on. “In the meantime, I’m asking for patience. And I’m asking for volunteers to assist with rationing and air-quality checks. Anyone with technical experience, please report to Section B.”

Elias caught Silva’s eye. She gave him a small nod. He knew what she meant. *They’re going to decide who lives. And they’re not going to ask you for your opinion.*

He turned and walked toward Section B.

The air scrubbers were housed in a long, low-ceilinged room that smelled of ozone and industrial lubricant. The main unit was a massive steel cylinder, humming at a pitch that Elias felt in his molars. He ran a diagnostic sweep, checked the particulate load in the incoming airflow, and swore under his breath.

The dust was thickening. Faster than he’d estimated. The cracks in the outer shell were allowing a steady influx of micronized rock and ash, and the scrubbers were clogging in real time. He had maybe twenty hours before the filtration efficiency dropped below minimum safe levels. Thirty, if he rerouted through the backup exchangers.

But the backup exchangers were powered by the same grid that fed the upper habitat levels. The levels where Visser and the top donors—and, presumably, the director—had their quarters.

Elias keyed his comm. “Silva. I need the director’s authorization to reroute power from habitat to filtration. If I don’t, we start losing scrubber capacity within the hour.”

“He’s in a meeting with Visser and the donor council,” Silva said. “They’ve sequestered themselves in the east conference room.”

“Then interrupt them.”

A pause. “I can’t. They’ve locked the door. No entry without a biometric match from the director or Visser.”

Elias stared at the scrubber’s control panel, the red emergency override light blinking at him. His own biometrics could open that door. His own biometrics could open almost any door in this bunker.

But doing so would make him an even bigger target. Kruger was dead, but his men were still here, still loyal to someone—perhaps Baumgartner, perhaps Visser, perhaps no one at all. And Elias’s failsafe—the only key to the deactivation code—was a secret he’d kept alive exactly as long as Kruger had stayed dead.

He made his decision.

“I’m rerouting the power myself,” he said. “If anyone asks, tell them the system did it automatically as part of the post-impact safety protocol.”

“Elias, that’s a lie the director will see through in minutes.”

“Then I’ll have minutes.” He flipped the override switches, one by one, feeling the faint vibration shift through the floor as the grid recalibrated. “The alternative is we all die of dust inhalation while they debate who deserves to live.”

Silva didn’t answer. But she didn’t argue either.

Elias finished the reroute, wiped the grit from his face, and headed back toward the main hall to report. But as he rounded the corner, the east conference room door slid open, and Visser stepped out, alone.

Their eyes met.

Visser smiled—a thin, practiced expression that didn’t reach his eyes. “Mr. Vogt. Just the man I was looking for.”

Elias stopped. “I was about to give the director an update on filtration.”

“The director has other priorities at the moment.” Visser stepped closer, lowering his voice. “The satellite feed is dead. The orbital strike you arranged—the one you sent to NATO—we have no confirmation it succeeded. For all we know, the asteroid fragment that struck the surface is only the beginning. More may be coming.”

Elias said nothing.

“Which means our timeline has changed,” Visser continued. “The council has decided to accelerate the final manifest selection. The three names on the Meridian list will be confirmed before nightfall. And you, Mr. Vogt, are going to help us choose who they are.”

The air in Elias’s lungs felt suddenly heavier, full of the dust he was trying to keep out.

“I don’t choose who lives,” he said.

“No,” Visser agreed. “But you have the access codes to the habitat systems. You can control which sections remain pressurized, which corridors stay open, which doors stay closed.”

“You’re asking me to kill people.”

“I’m asking you to help us manage a survivable population. A resource allocation decision. The same decision you just made with the power grid.” Visser’s smile widened, a millimeter, no more. “You already chose who gets air, Mr. Vogt. You just chose them without knowing it.”

The doors behind Visser slid shut. The lock clicked. And Elias stood in the corridor, the weight of his own biometric key—his own death warrant, his own godhood—pressing down on the inside of his chest.