The hush in Fallowmill was the loudest sound Amelia had ever heard.It wasn’t an absence of noise, but a presence—a heavy, suffocating blanket of despair that had smothered the cries of the sick and the prayers of the dying. The only sounds that remained were the impersonal, mechanical ones: the hum of the mobile incinerators, the crunch of PMC boots on broken glass, and the occasional, sharp crack of a distant gunshot.For three days, Amelia had worked within the walls. The Sun-Salt Purification was active, a series of crystalline arrays she had constructed at the central reservoir that now made the water gleam with an almost imperceptible inner light. The Heartwood Elixir, synthesized in a makeshift lab from pine resin, specific alkaloids from local weeds, and a catalyst of her own empowered blood, was being distributed by the few soldiers Kincaid trusted. The violent, hemorrhagic fevers were breaking. The rot was slowing. In the core of Fallowmill, a small, fragile bubble of stabil

The fragile peace Amelia had woven in the Oakhaven loading bay lasted precisely thirty-six hours. It was a beautiful, desperate lie of its own—a temporary silencing of symptoms that did nothing to address the rotting foundation of the world outside. The wave of silver light had receded, leaving exhaustion in its wake, and the Ash-Fever, chastened but not conquered, began its slow, insidious crawl back into the bodies of the sick.It was Ethan who brought her the new plague. He found her slumped against a wall, sipping water that did nothing to replenish the hollowed-out feeling inside her. His face, already hardened by weeks of trauma, was now etched with a new kind of fury.“They’re here,” he said, his voice low and tight. “The vultures. While we’ve been fighting the fever, they’ve been building a nest.”He led her out of the loading bay, past the rows of resting patients, to a side alley that had become a makeshift market for the desperate. But this was no place for trading food or