The news was delivered by the mouth of an urchin, a tiny, soot-faced girl-child named Pip who was one of Ethan's most reliable runners. She found Amelia huddled in a new, temporary sanctuary—a stinking little place behind a working tannery that reeked of urine and decay, a good hideout for a fugitive."The clinic, miss," Pip gasped, her eyes wide with a fear that wasn't for herself. "The blue-cloaks… they've come with torches!"Amelia's blood went cold. The clinic. It was more than just a building; it was the physical embodiment of her life's work. Each bottle of tonic, each sterile bandage, each scratch on the floorboards from cots dragged across them spoke of a battle waged, a life respected. It was her haven, and Sophia's. And Pip said there were patients still left inside. The feeble ones who couldn't be moved, the ones Sophia had been hiding from the Council's "cleanse and burn" squads.She did not think. She did not scheme. A primitive compulsion, lower than fear, took charge. S

The world had drawn down to the size of a hurt. Amelia moved through the city's decaying underbelly like a specter, her body a metronome of agony conducted by the fire. Every movement of the burlap she'd tied on her seared hands sent lightning rods shooting up her arms. Every breath was a gritty struggle, her lungs now raw from constantly being near the smoke. The blisters on her face pulled tight with every feeling, which was none. Her face was an ash mask and a dried-up serum.She found shelter not in a crypt or tunnel, but in a place so abandoned it did not remember life at all: the kiln of a derelict brickworks. The great round oven, cold for four decades, was a dome of burned clay, its mouth a dark hole opening out into a rubbish tip of broken tiles. It was a suitable tomb for what she had become. A vessel burned and unnecessary.She lay there for two days, not moving. She drank condensation from the clay walls and let the pain bind her to a reality superior to one within her min

The kiln at the back of the brickworks was no longer an ossuary. It was a laboratory. A frantic, sacrilegious taunt, but an experiment nonetheless. The pain of Amelia's burns had been her constant, churning shadow, but it had lessened to a scream and then to a low rumble, a murmur beneath the hysteria of her mind. Crushing as the Obelisk's revelation had been—that the plague had been a purposeful weapon—it had not dazed her into paralysis. It had honed her. The enemy was smart. So, the remedy had to be smarter, rather than just strong.But master plans required a birth. And the only birth left was the end of her previous life: the ashes of her clinic.She returned disguised by a drizzle that painted the world grey and muted sounds. The ruins steamed, water striking fiery spots deep in the rubble. The vision was a new wound, yet she approached it now not as one who wept, but as a scavenger. She had a surgical purpose: to go looking for the seeds of a solution in the aftermath of destru

Hope, once lit, is a more contagious fire than any plague. No poisoned wells, no fits of coughing, are needed to spread it. It spreads on whispers, on glances, on the mere, indisputable fact of a life renewed.Cooper lived through it, too. He walked. It took Amelia's desperate injection three days to take effect, but the hollownecked skeleton of a man who had been on the edge of the pyre stood unsteadily on his legs and, with Ethan's help, staggered out of the derelict stable. He wasn't a miracle man. He was starved, hollownecked, and he moved with the tentative slowness of a newborn foal. But he stood. He breathed. And he was seen.Sophia's recovery was a slower, more intimate miracle, yet one that was the groundwork on which the public one was built. Ethan, keeper of the word, took the threads of truth and spun them into a fabric that could not be silenced. His rewritten pamphlets did not dispute his theory or assertion. They testified in simple, irrefutable fact."Cooper lives. Cur

The great hall of the Citadel was no justice hall. It was a theatre of power. Sunlight, reddened by the stained glass of great windows, threw its bloody light upon a sea of faces. The rich, the fearful, the Council's loyalists—packed onto the benches, gazing wide-eyed in a mixture of horror and gaping fascination. At the far end, seated on a raised dais, the Council sat, Councillor Thorpe at the head of it. To his right-hand side the High Inquisitor stood, a black smear against the marble. And to his left, a new, chill presence: the Prophet, his bog-oak mask serene, his carved arms folded. The alliance of state and extremism was complete.In the midst of the hall, manacled wrists and ankles, stood Amelia. They had taken away her dirty cloak and put her in a simple, coarse-woven shift. The uniform of a common offender. But they were not able to take that stance from her. She stood tall, her shoulders back, chin high. Her facial burns had healed, but in the theatrical light, they looked