Elena Vargas POV´s
"Left!" I screamed, the word tearing out of my throat just as the high-pitched whine of the drone pierced the air behind us.
I didn't wait for a consensus. I grabbed Julián's tactical vest and threw my weight against him. He was burning—radiating heat like a furnace door left ajar—but he didn't resist. We tumbled off the slick concrete ledge together, plunging into the roaring black throat of the storm artery.
The impact was a sledgehammer.
It wasn't just water; it was liquid ice, mountain runoff channeled directly from the high Andes peaks, unpolluted by the city's warmth until this very moment. It hit me with the violence of a physical assault, driving the air from my lungs and seizing my muscles in an instant, agonizing cramp.
My vision went white, then black. The roar of the current swallowed the world. I thrashed, my heavy boots acting as anchors dragging me down, but my hand remained locked in a death grip on the strap of the sample box. The cure. Don't lose the cure.
Something slammed into me—a body. Sofía. We tumbled over each other in the chaotic churn, spinning in the darkness.
"Up!" I choked on a mouthful of freezing, metallic-tasting water. "Swim up!"
I kicked, breaking the surface just as a beam of searing white light sliced through the darkness above us.
The drone.
It hovered at the junction we had just leaped from, its mechanical eye sweeping the water. The red laser grid scanned the surface, hunting for thermal signatures.
"Under!" Sofía's hiss was barely audible over the rushing water.
She grabbed Miguel, who was flailing in a panic, and dunked him. I took a massive gasp of air and pulled myself down, dragging the heavy lead box with me. The weight, a curse moments ago, became a blessing, anchoring me against the buoyancy of my fear.
Underwater, the sound changed. The roar became a deep, resonant vibration that rattled my ribcage. I opened my eyes. The water was murky, churning with silt, but I could see the faint, refracted beams of the drone's searchlights cutting through the surface like lightsabers.
And I saw Julián.
He was drifting a few meters away, suspended in the current like an astronaut in space. But it was his veins that arrested me. The bioluminescence—that sickly violet light that had been consuming his arm—was reacting to the cold. It wasn't glowing steadily anymore. It was pulsing, violent and erratic, warring with the freezing temperature. The cold was a shock to the viral protein coat; I could almost see the biology retreating, the glowing lines shrinking back toward his core.
We drifted like debris, ghosts beneath the machine's gaze, until the current swept us around a sharp bend in the tunnel, pulling us out of the light and into the absolute, crushing dark.
Julián 'El Capi' Herrera POV´s
Pain. Beautiful, clarifying pain.
The heat that had been eating his mind, the static that had drowned out his own thoughts—it was all shattered by the cold. It felt as if someone had driven a spike of ice directly into his spine.
He broke the surface, gasping, the air stinging his throat. He wasn't thinking about eating Miguel anymore. He wasn't seeing fractals. He was just freezing.
"Bank! Left bank!" Sofía's voice was a command, not a question.
Julián reached out, his fingers numb and clumsy, clawing at the slimy brickwork of the tunnel wall. His muscles felt sluggish, not from the virus, but from the hypothermia setting in with terrifying speed. He found a rusted rebar rung and hauled himself up, his wet boots skidding on the algae.
He rolled onto the concrete ledge, coughing up water. He lay there for a moment, shivering so violently his teeth clacked together like stones.
"Sound... off," he stammered. His voice was his own again. Rough, weak, but human.
"Here," Elena wheezed, dragging the black box up beside him. "Got... Miguel," Sofía grunted, hauling the younger man out of the water like a sack of wet flour. "Camila?"
"Here," came a small voice from further down the ledge.
They were alive.
Julián looked at his left arm. In the pitch black of the tunnel, he expected to see the glow. But it was dim—barely a faint, dying ember deep beneath the skin. The cold had forced the passenger into dormancy.
"It stopped," he whispered, staring at his hand. He clenched a fist. It obeyed him. "Elena... it stopped."
"It's stalled," Elena corrected, her teeth chattering as she huddled over the sample box, checking the seals. "The viral load is dormant because your core temp dropped... probably to near thirty-four degrees. But you're borderline hypothermic. We all are."
Sofía cracked another chem-light. The green glow revealed them: four drowned rats huddled on a meter-wide walkway in a tunnel that stretched endlessly into the dark. The walls here were older, hand-laid brick from the colonial era, slick with centuries of damp.
"We lost the drone," Sofía said, wringing out her hair. She checked her machete; the carbon steel was spotless, washed clean by the mountain water. "But we also lost our location. I have no idea where this artery dumps out."
"It flows to the river," Miguel said, hugging his knees. He was turning blue. "Eventually. But that could be miles."
"We can't stay here," Julián said. He tried to stand and stumbled. His equilibrium was shot. "If we stop moving, the cold kills us instead of the virus."
"Look," Camila pointed to the wall opposite the water.
etched into the brickwork, barely visible under the grime, was a symbol. It wasn't graffiti. It was a carving—a crude eye inside a triangle, with an arrow pointing upward toward a rusted, heavy iron door set into the tunnel wall.
"The Syndicate," Sofía murmured, running her hand over the symbol. "Smugglers used these storm drains in the 80s to move product without the police seeing. That mark means a safe house... or a stash."
"Or a trap," Julián added.
"It implies a way out," Elena said, looking at the iron door. "Or at least a way up. Away from the water."
"But up is where the heat is," Julián reminded her. "Up is where I get sick again."
"Stay here, we freeze," Sofía said bluntly. "Go up, we risk the infection waking up. But that door might lead to a basement, a maintenance sub-level. Somewhere we can dry off, maybe find weapons."
Julián looked at the rushing black water that had saved his humanity, then at the iron door that promised warmth. He could feel the virus waiting in his marrow, coiled like a sleeping snake, waiting for the first touch of fever to strike again.