The Oracle Movement's golden promise was a fragile bulwark against the stealthy, colorless horror of the Ghost Fever. Reuben and the newly revitalized HON had been fighting a holding action for weeks now, using the prototype test to detect and isolate contaminated blood units, limiting the outbreaks to small, horror-ridden pockets. They were excruciating, but they were limited. Contained.The first sign that the dam was failing was not a siren, but a soft, steady chime from the System. Reuben was reviewing the blueprints for a new, community-built clinic in the Philippines when he heard it. A sound he'd programmed for a specific, catastrophic threshold.He turned to the main world map. The screen, which had so recently been filled with the soft gold speckles of the Movement, was bleeding.A single, venous red blot pulsed in a hospital in northern Milan, Italy. Another in a private clinic in Montreal, Canada. A third in a blood bank in Osaka, Japan. They were unrelated, separated by oc