The Lotus's reluctant, metronomic creak was the sole indicator of time in the sweltering office. Each laborious turn stirred the thick, clammy air, doing little more than to move the odor of dust, discolored paper, and hopelessness from one side of the room to the other.Professor Reuben Stone, aged forty-six, knew the precise angle of the stain on the ceiling, the precise number of cracks in the plaster webbing off from the corner of the window frame. He'd mapped them all over the past three years, a silent cartography of his own decline. His finger traced a circle on the thin layer of grit on his desk around the date of the Harbor City Gazette. His pay was due again. Not just due—gone. For the second month running.A fly buzzed, kamikaze-diving into the hot glass of the lamp. Reuben did not swat it away. Its struggle was solidarity.Outside his open window, Riverside Village sounds ebbed and flowed: a goat's distant bleat, haggling vendors' shouted calls down at the market, children

The doubt was a serpent that burrowed deep within the heart of Reuben's new confidence.By the chill light of the third morning, the System's intervention hardly felt like a miracle but rather a symptom. Psychotic breaks are an elegant, clinical diagnosis. Mid-life crisis, professional despair, loneliness, and stress are a recipe from the textbook for a dissociative episode. The dreamed-up box of ORS packets? Fugue state. He had probably ordered them months ago and simply forgotten, his fractured mind now presenting them as a blessing from above.He stood before the small, cracked mirror in his office bathroom, studying his own face. The lines around his eyes seemed deeper, the grey at his temples more prominent. He looked like a man who'd seen a ghost. Or a man who was becoming one.The malaria control effort continued, a tangible connection to reality. On Anna's firm direction, teams had cleared a dozen significant breeding sites. The corner-of-his-eye progress bar—a tool he'd maste

A creepy quiet fell over Riverside Village. It was the quiet of a storm that had been seen on the horizon, expected, and somehow dissolved into nothingness without ever making landfall.For Reuben, the post-chlorine days were a ritual of contained anxiety. He took his routine—teaching his sparse roster of classes, seeing the three asymptomatic carriers at the clinic, going out to the well to watch Mister Adeyemi perform his everyday purple-strip ritual—but his mind was not there. It was tuned to a frequency accessible only to himself, waiting for an alarm never heard.He was searching for a relapse. A missed case. An incoming traveler with a novel strain. It was whack-a-mole with public health; you solve one problem and another one rears its head elsewhere. The System had informed him the precise mechanism of the threat, but years of experience had shown him precision did not always equate to control.But the forecasted cases never materialized.The children, Chijioke, Nneka, and Tund

The well was more than a source of water; it was a center of gravity. Life in Riverside Village began to revolve around the glittering pump. The old well-worn path to the well grew weeds in a week's time. The hours that had been lost in waiting and dragging were now invested in mending nets, tending gardens, or—to Reuben's immense pleasure—children attending school with cleaner faces and better-fed stomachs.The initial wonder had subsided into a deep, wordless gratitude. Reuben was no longer just "the professor" or "the man who sees sickness." Now he was "the one who brought the sweet water." Parents nodded to him with a new respect. Children would run up and touch his hand and then skip off laughing, as if he were a charm.But the clear and pure water from the well could not wash away the cynicism of the outside world.The news, of course, got out. It seeped out of Riverside through market traders and visiting relatives, a story so outlandish it couldn't help but be exaggerated. By

The well's success had ushered in a fragile peace. The gossip of witchcraft had faded as the true, mundane worth of clean, accessible water was revealed. Reuben Stone remained in a state of watchful alertness, though. The run-in with Mr. Abiodun and the threatening presence of Edward Collins had gone to remind him that his endeavors were now under scrutiny. Each step would be scrutinized, each mistake exaggerated. He spent his days with Anna Brooks, painstakingly building their case file, taking the miracle of the well and the contained cholera outbreak and transforming it into a dry, fact-based dossier upon which they hoped to base protection against bureaucratic attacks.It was in one of these meetings, on a day so humid that paper on Reuben's desk had gone limp, that the typical pressure shift announced the return of the System. The blue interface manifested, but this time it was colored differently. The warning was no soft chime of new objective, but a loud, insistent note that se