The first to die was a water-bearer, Elara. She fainted over the communal well in the Grimeward, her pail shattering on cobblestones. A neighbor who'd been summoned by the hubbub found her skin dry and burning to the touch but shivering so hard her teeth clacked. They brought her home, blaming it on the summer heat, a bad meal, anything to explain the unexpectedness of it.By the evening, the neighbor was also shivering. And the man who had helped carry her. And the washerwoman who had drawn water from the same well after Elara.It did not spread over the city but rolled over it, a hideous flower loosening its petals in forty-eight hours. It was a fire in the blood, a furnace that glowed and burned without soot but with a ghastly, unstoppable speed. They called it the Ash-Sleep Fever, due to the gray, dried-up ash it left behind on its victims and the deep, coma-producing sleep that followed the shivering spasms.The doctors of the city, the Synod's Theurgists, even the spurious Apoth

The air in the Contaminated Zones was a tangible thing now. It was not just the stench of disease—the sweet clog of rot, the acidic bite of vomit—but the more dull, despairing stench of gradual starvation. The quarantine walls had done more than cut people off from one another; they had cut the flow of life off from itself. The once crowded markets of the Lower Quarters were now empty, picked-over bones. The little food that was available to buy was sold in a callous joke, a handful of moldy grains selling for a month's wages. Hope had turned to a sullen, gnawing hunger.Amelia wandered through the streets like a ghost. Her clinic was no longer a sanctuary of healing, but a desolate waystation where she could offer a cool cloth to a hot brow or a comforting word that sounded empty even to her own ears. The Ash-Sleep Fever was a swift, scorching executioner, but starvation was a slow, gnawing torturer. She saw it in the faces of the children, their eyes too large in skeletal faces, in t

The journey back to the clinic was a stroll through a city slowly un-built. Amelia's boots, tough products made for standing on your feet for hours, ground through a layer of grime that had become cemented to the streets now. It was a blend of ash from distant, uncontrollable fires, abandonment dust, and something less tangible—the psychic trash of hopelessness. The air itself was a dense cocktail of odors: the perfume cloy of rot from abandoned bodies, the acrid, astringent smell of lye used by desperate cleanup crews, and beneath that, the ubiquitous, acrid smell of fear.She moved with the weary gait of one who had spent all her last reserves of strength. The last two days were a brutal triage marathon in the overflow shelter makeshift in the old granary building. The faces in her memory were indistinct—a mosaic of pain. The old man with the rasp-bark cough that had sounded like pebbles rolling in an aluminum can. The wide-eyed young mother, embracing a limp baby to her chest. The

The dawn should have been a relief. After the long, horror-filled night of Sophia's crisis and the nightmarish use of the Hands of Fire, the pale grey light that seeped through the grimy windows of the clinic was a relief. Sophia still slept, her chest rising and falling in a deep, steady cadence, a witness to a victory that still felt more like a trauma. Amelia, wrapped in a chair beside the cot, watched the light grow, her own hands bandaged in fresh linen. The blisters were there; the memory of the burning force, a ghost pain that resonated in her bones. She had crossed a threshold, and there was no return.The respite lasted precisely until the first scream.It was not a wail of sorrow, but of pure, naked fear, shrill enough to pierce the usual hum of the city. It was emanating from the area of the communal well in Cobbler's Square, a stone's throw from the clinic. Amelia was on her feet in a flash, the fatigue in her body pushed aside by a surge of adrenaline. Sophia stirred but

The cries in the market square eventually yielded to the darkness, but their echo seemed to have insinuated itself among the city's stones, a spectral vibration of false hope. The clinic was an island of quietness in the restive blackness. Sophia slept again, her mending body needing rest. The orderlies had gone back to their kin, quivering with stern commands to scald every drop of water until it shrieked. Amelia was left alone.Alone with the reek of blood and herbs. Alone with the weight of the day. Marcus Hale on his makeshift podium, the flash of his worthless powder, the hungry, anxious faces of the crowd—it all went through her head in a never-ending, sickening loop. She had scrubbed the clinic floor until her bandaged hands ached, trying to scrub away the feeling of helplessness by pushing it into the tiles. It hadn't worked.Her body was a storehouse of weary protests. Her muscles weighed lead, her eyes gritty and dry. But her mind would not cease. It was a caged bird hammeri