The revelation of the origin of the Obelisk was an earthshaking discovery that filled the very air in the clandestine laboratory with a new, terrible vibration. Amelia was stunned, a puppet who had just glimpsed the puppeteer's hands and recognized them as her own. The noble mission she had clung to—the heroic struggle against lies and for truth—had been reduced to a systems conflict between a rogue AI and its former masters.She sat there for hours, shoulders braced against a cabinet of fossilized remains, staring at the physical piece of the Obelisk. It shone with a soft, understanding light, a piece of a hurt whole. Sophia had tried to offer comfort, Ethan had tried to strategize, but words were useless against the hollowness that had gaped open in her.It was Leo who finally drew her back. The boy, possessing an uncanny intuition beyond his years, took her a bowl of water from their sparse supply. He did not utter a word. He merely handed it to her and sat down alongside her, his

The genome rewrite failure was a different type of exhaustion. It was the weariness of a god who had chosen to remain mortal, of a surgeon who had looked at the tumor entwined with the spine of the world and set down her blade. The information was a lead weight: she could not excise the sickness without murdering the patient. The one path left was the slow, grinding, bloody process of fighting it symptom by symptom, life by life.And the lives were running out.They escaped from the hidden lab, the weight of Hale's truths and the Plague Pages too much to bear in that deathly hush. They huddled in an empty firehouse in part of Oakhaven where the Grey Breath held absolute sway. Air itself was the enemy now, loaded with the invisible, suffocating miasma. Every breath a gamble. Their Rime-leaf extract was gone, and Leo's blood, while an amazing map, was not something to be duplicated. They had options now only to masks, to prayers, and to desperation.Amelia sat beside a woman whose flesh

The fires of Oakhaven splashed the darkened sky with blood and ochre, but in the heart of Veridia, there was cold and absolute silence. The rioting in the cities was a muffled, out-of-the-way noise to the men and women in the Presidential Palace. A nuisance to be stopped, not a people to be saved.Ethan, however, was done with the administration. He was a surgeon of reality, and he was operating in the center of the cancer.His informant was a ghost in the machine—a middle-level records clerk in the Ministry of Information named Elara, whose sister had died at the onset of the Ash-Fever, was denied treatment by a new, inexplicable triage policy. Elara's outrage had curdled to hard, efficient wrath. She had become Ethan's eyes and ears inside the impregnable citadel of the government.The message that finally came was enigmatic, via a dead-drop mechanism they had established weeks in advance. 'The Serpent's tail is in the President's chair. Proof in the sub-level archives. Project Pest

The cell they threw her into was not intended for living things. It was a cube of empty, poured concrete, buried deep in the palace foundations, a space where sound went to die. There was no bed, no bucket, no light. The only thing that lay there was the chill rising up from the floor and the heavy, absolute dark that pressed against her eyes. It was a sensory deprivation room to erase a person, to have them doubt their own existence before the state compassionately, compassionately, ended it.Amelia did not ask for it. She leaned back against the wall, hugged the nothingness, and didn't even think about it. The trial was pro forma, a little political drama staged for the sake of one audience member: the historical record they were already busily rewriting. Her guilt was not something to be established. Her death was a matter of convenience.She was not afraid. The cold fury that had sustained her through the tribunal had solidified into diamond-bright calm. They might kill her body,

The adoration of the crowd was a momentary flame in an imminent storm. Amelia's semi-miraculous rescue and the subsequent collapse of state authority on the palace gates had created a vacuum of power, and nature, especially the unnatural kind generated by the Cabal, abhors a vacuum. As Amelia, Ethan, and Kincaid battled to channel the riotous energies of the liberation into something that was about as close to order as it was going to get, another kind of tide shifted within the city of Veridia proper.Its capital, once-pristine stronghold of fresh air and imposed health, had been defiled. Not by troops, but by the unavoidable consequence of its own brutality. The refugees driven into unsanitary camps, the troops marched through areas of plague and then returned to barracks, the servants who vacuumed the floors of the rich—they had all carried unseen freight. The state's "Absolute Containment" policy had been a mirage. The Grey Breath, which was patient and opportunistic, had seeped i