The wind changed. It had blown for days from the east, bearing only silence. It turned to the north now, and bore another message, one written in smoke and ash.At first, it was a faint smudge on the horizon, a greyness on the light morning sky. Within hours, the smudge had become a column, and soon it was a steady, dirty cloud that covered the sun. By noon, filtered into the city was a yellowish orange light that seemed sickly, creating long, spiraling shadows that writhed with a life of their own. The atmosphere developed a new taste, a cloying, heavy sweetness that coated the back of the throat—the smell of smoldering pine pitch and something else, something richly organic and wrong.The pyres had been lit.The Council's decree, born of cold calculation and raw fear, had been swift. Filling the cemeteries and the earth too hard to dig large mass graves, the bodies would be burned. Not in the city squares, where the stench and the horror would undermine what morale remained, but out

The clinic basement was a charnel of discarded things. Dusty shelves groaned under jars of pickled specimens from years ago—tumors preserved in cloudy solution, parasitic worms coiled up in torpor for all eternity. It was here, in this earthy-smelling room filled with the odor of formaldehyde, that Amelia built her secret sanctuary. There stood concealed behind a wall of crates fashioned by her and Sophia the children—Lyss, Ben, and the three others—their sanctuary with stolen blankets and a single, shuttered storm lantern.They were silent as spirits, these kids. They had learned the language of survival, and its first rule was silence. They consumed the food Amelia brought with the wild, effective movement of scavengers, never taking their eyes off her. Trust was a language none of them spoke anymore.Lyss was the protector. Each evening, as Amelia descended the creaking stairs, the girl would go first, her wiry body a barrier between the doctor and the others. Her eyes would run ov

The bell tower was no sanctuary, only a temporary reprieve. Down below, the chase continued. The guards' screams had merged into a systematic sweep, a net closing on the district. Torch flame flickered in the streets, making long, outstretched shadows that seemed to crawl up walls. Amelia heard the baying of the hounds now, something that sent shivers down her blood. They had picked up her track. It was a matter of when they chose to come looking up.Her mind spun, calculating frantic angles of descent. The roof was a trap. The streets were a trap. She was trapped. The resolve she had possessed mere seconds before seemed now a pathetic illusion. The Obelisk's grim solace—that she was now a "mobile variable"—meant nothing in the face of cold metal and snapping jaws. She was a doctor, not a spy. Her hands were apt for scalpels, not climbing-rope or fighting.The clomping of boots on the tiles shook her into sheer fright. They stood on the roof beside the bell tower. A beam of light from

The Citadel Archives were not a library. They were a word-graveyard. Tucked away in the blackest, most forgotten corner of the Council's fortress, they were a labyrinth of decaying shelves, their contents slowly surrendering to dust, moisture, and the rat-like rodent teeth of time. Three nights now, he'd made it his haven, sneaking by guards who had grown careless and sluggish, their vigilance dulled by the larger terror outside. For three nights, he returned to the crypt with armloads of stolen history: books of accounts, personal diaries, and scroll cases closed for centuries.Amelia's world contracted to the pool of moving light from their single, dark lantern. The floor of the crypt was a blanket of dry, crinkling parchment. She handled each sheet with a respect verging on awe, her bandaged fingers light on pages that disintegrated beneath her touch. Sophia helped, sorting the jumble into chronological and thematic order in her pragmatic head, and Ethan, journalist's eye trained,

The sewers were no longer a refuge. They were a cell, and the walls were made of the same unanswerable question, echoing with every drop of contaminated water. The Prophet's words had reached even this underworld kingdom, carried on the whispers of the desperate who used the tunnels to move unseen. Purge the healer. Welcome the purge. Amelia could still feel the intensity of the mob's hatred, a psychic burn worse than any fever.But that external threat had still been a welcome respite after the internal threat. That was a recognizable enemy. The choice that haunted her in the silent, radiant blackness of the bone-crypt was infinitely worse.The truth, now fully understood, was a sword she dared not grasp. The children's blood was not merely a potential antidote; it was the antidote. The vision of the Obelisk had been clear. Their bodies bore the specific, adapted antibody, the exact key to the Blight's lock, a legacy from the Pale Stranger. From their plasma, a serum could inoculate