The cell had been excavated into the foundations of the Citadel. No window, no bed, nor even straw to lie on. The ground was damp, dripping a steady, cold sweat onto the stone. There was only a sickly yellow slit of light that crept beneath the iron-banded door from a torch in the corridor. The air was thick with the smell of mold and the soft metallic sting of dried blood. This was not a place for prisoners who had a future.This was a waiting room for the pyre. Amelia curled on the ground, back against the chill, rough wall. The cuffs still had been removed from her wrists and ankles, fastening her to a huge iron ring which was screwed into the stone. The weight was enormous, an unceasing, savage reminder of her powerlessness. The bravado she had shown at the trial, the defiant calm she had known as the flames circled around her, had collapsed in the utter darkness of the dungeon. Here, there was no crowd to witness, no spectacle to make her.There was merely the silence, the cold,

The murmur that had begun as a cell-secret had widened into a current, then a tide, then a hurricane. The mood of the dungeon had altered no longer merely in character but in degree. The constant, wretched coughing which had been the soundtrack to desolation had been followed by another noise: speech. Low, bemused speech between prisoners who had believed themselves hours from death, and were now astonishingly, bewilderingly themselves.The first patient Amelia had healed, Jorgen, was now recovered enough to bang on his door, his raw but angry bellow."She cured me! The witch they're afraid of cured the Blight in my lungs! They're burning a saint! They're burning our only hope!"His cry was seconded by the woman whose son slept soundly now. "My boy lives due to her! Are we going to let them murder her?"Hope, if sown in absolute darkness, does not bloom as a gentle flower. It explodes as a fissure in a dam. It starts as a hairline crack of possibility. It grows and the pressure behin

The universe had narrowed to a single, hard purpose: the fight against the Cult's biological horror. Amelia, Sophia, and the threadbare web of volunteers were stretched thinner than paper. Every vial of serum was a treasure, every clean bandage a victory. They operated out of a new, constantly shifting base—a dusty bookbinder's shop whose owner had died in the Blight—and the air was thick with boiling herbs and despondence.It was there, in darkness on a rain-beaten night, that a ghost appeared at their doorway.Amelia was counting out their dwindling supplies, the Obelisk's carvings on her arms aglow with a warm, spent light as she worked out dosages in her head and guessed at mortality. The knock was neither the frantic pounding of a beggar nor the heavy crash of the Ashen. It was a hesitant, shy tap.Ethan, ever the suspect, crept to the door, a blunt metal ruler gripped tightly in his fist. "Who's there?"A voice, cracked and gravelly, came from the other side. "It's… it's Marcus

There was a lull in the destroyed bakery that was tangible. It was the silence of a city waiting for the final, fatal breath. Amelia stood against the cooled oven, its cold rough brick a contrast to the otherworldly heat that had once abided there. In her hand was a sole, exhausted vial that contained the remnants of the crude serum. I was exhausted. The hope it had offered appeared like a dream, lost to the icy glow of a catastrophic dawn.Ethan was outside, foraging for food that no longer existed, for information that was ever only bad. Sophia slept a few feet from him, her breathing calm, evidence of the strength of the serum, but also of its shortcomings. She had managed to store a few handfuls. The city was killing itself by the thousand.Hope was no longer a feeling; it was the oxygen she breathed. The Obelisk's cold calculation echoed in her mind: Projected population loss: 87%. The numbers were cold, but the reality was in the bitter odor of pyre smoke that now hung over the

The transmission of the cure did not bring peace. It brought reckoning.Weeks had elapsed since the serum had been a quiet revolution, an underground wave of hope that flowed through the rotting streets of the city. But hope, once it has accumulated its critical mass, does not stay quiet. It explodes. The knowledge that life was possible, survival not a privilege granted by the strong but a right to be seized by the lowest hand, was a firebomb. The match was lit when a Council patrol, keen to regain an eroding power, tried to storm Mother Agatha's make-shift clinic.They crested the hill with the sun, expecting to find a cowering old lady and a couple of jugs of contraband. What they found was a street lined with garbage and with furious men and women armed with cleavers, rusty blades, and with months of seething rage. The patrol was overwhelmed not with skill, but with raw righteous numbers. The news spread quicker than the Blight ever had: The citizens are resisting. And they are su