Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Perfume On His Collar: Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 15

Chapter 11 – Ashes and EchoesThe world came back in pieces light, smoke, and the roar of her own heartbeat.Clara’s ears rang with a high, keening note that didn’t belong to anything real. The ground beneath her trembled, warm and slick with something she didn’t want to name. She opened her eyes to a ceiling torn open by fire. The night sky hung above, red and trembling.She coughed. The air was thick with dust and ash. Somewhere close, metal groaned the dying breath of the warehouse.“Rowen” Her voice cracked. She tried again. “Rowen!”Nothing. Just the crackle of flames and the slow hiss of something leaking nearby.Clara dragged herself up, her palms scraping across broken glass. The flash drive gone. The compass keychain still clenched in her fist. The needle spun wildly, trembling in the smoke.She forced herself to her feet. The world tilted sideways, blood rushing to her temples. Shapes blurred through the haze fragments of blueprint pages floating like dying birds, a collapse

Chapter 13 – The Hollow NetworkThe river glowed faintly under the fractured moon, its surface slick with oil and ash.Clara stood knee-deep in mud, staring at the tag in her hand. PHASE C – ACTIVE. The letters seemed to breathe, their etched grooves shimmering as if lit from within.Behind her, the city whispered distant sirens, power lines humming, the ghost of traffic that no longer moved. Every sound felt amplified, yet hollow, like an echo from somewhere that didn’t quite exist.She tucked the tag into her coat and followed the compass. The cracked needle twitched, locked north, toward the skyline where the tallest tower blinked red in the fog.Rowen’s voice lingered in her mind: Truth doesn’t save. It exposes.Now, Clara wondered if exposure was the point or the trap.By dawn, she reached the edge of the financial district.The air was thick with dust and static. Glass towers leaned like monuments to something half-forgotten. When she passed a shop window, her reflection flicker

Chapter 15 – The White RoomThe monitor screamed.A flat, piercing tone cut through the hum of the machines, slicing the air into jagged edges.Harris shouted something she couldn’t hear over the alarm. Shapes moved white coats, flashes of metal, the blur of hands pressing, voices counting. The world flickered between frames: light dark light.Then a rush like the whole room inhale and the sound collapsed into silence.For a moment there was nothing. No colour, no weight, no body. Just a thin thread of sound, a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.Beep.A pause.Beep.The world tilted.She was lying down, but it felt as though the bed itself floated in water. Every sound came wrapped in cotton. Someone said her name once, softly“Clara” and the syllables drifted away like smoke.Light pressed against her eyelids. Too white, too bright. She turned her head; the pillow whispered beneath her cheek. A rhythm ticked beside her steady, mechanical.The monitor.Clara opened her eyes.The ceiling above