The victory over the mosquitoes was not marked with parade or feast but with a quiet, profound shift in mood in Riverside. The slums in the east, once a place of resigned terror, now hummed with new energy—purposeful, watchful, and warily hopeful. That incessant, maddening hum was silenced, replaced with kids playing and laughing in the cooler evening air without being overpowered, with women socializing outside their homes without constantly slapping their arms and necks.Reuben Stone felt the change as a stab of barometric pressure. It was in how other people viewed him. The fear and suspicion that had followed the miraculous return of the well were gone, replaced by a deep, uncomfortable reverence.It started with the children. They would see him walking between his institute and the clinic and would stop their play to watch him pass by, their eyes wide with a mixture of wonder and interest. Then a young woman carrying a baby in her arms approached and said hello to him in the mark

The warning of the disinformation hummed in Reuben's mind, a low, persistent amber beat beneath his normal routines. He found himself studying faces at the market, hearing the sound of a seeded lie in loose conversation. He saw the subtle signs: a woman with her friendly smile who would typically greet him now a grudging nod; a group of men dissolving too quickly as he passed by. The trust that he had built was a delicate equilibrium, and a poison was infusing its roots. He was preparing for a war of shadows and denials, a guerrilla war fought on the level of neighborhood meetings and open statistics.He was with Anna in the clinic, making arrangements for a public meeting to clear up the rumors about the nets, when the pressure shift caught up with him. It was not like before—more sudden, more insistent, pulling his mind away from Riverside with a physical force.Blue interface confronted him, but what flashed on it was a warning that did not pertain to his village. The location tag

The resolve that had maintained Reuben calm on the mission's rickety porch evaporated the moment he was out. It was easy to witness suffering in the tightly controlled setting of a clinic; another thing entirely to be amid the setting that created it.The smell was a physical entity, a warm, heavy blanket that stuck to the back of his nose and mouth. A rich, layered stink: the sweet, cloying stink of garbage dumped directly into the lagoon; the bitter, searing nip of ammonia from urine; the underlying, fundamentally wrong odor of raw, untreated sewage. His senses toughened to it in a few minutes, which was worse than the shock.Anna pulled him out of the comparative solidity of the mission, onto a lattice of rickety, narrow boardwalks that were streets. The boards were slick with algae and some other material he preferred not to consider. Beneath his feet, the black water churned.Makoko was a city of shadows and brutal, poignant contradictions. The vitality of a nation that would not

Air in Makoko was thick, pulpy poison, and within five days, Reuben felt it burrowing into his bones. It was not the smell of sewage and rot; it was the weight of the place, the unbelievable, endless size of its desperation. The frantic early energy that had propelled him from Riverside had drained away, leaving a lethargic, bone-weariness.They and Anna were automatons now. Their world had contracted to the little clinic, the endless queues of patients, the same SODIS technique, repeated endlessly, the dismal nightly tally of fresh cases on their paper map. The red pins were accumulating, an unstoppable, spreading blot. Their blue pins—the families adopting the sun-water treatment—were spreading, but so slowly that compared to the tide of disease, it seemed glacial.The System's typhoid alarm was a constant, throbbing hum in his brain, a countdown long since completed and now simply monitoring the accumulating catastrophe. ACTIVE CASES: 187. ESTIMATED FATALITIES: 4. The numbers were

The revolution in Makoko was not sudden, an alteration of the very climate. The general fear that had gripped the slum began to fade, not because the risk was over—the poisoned water continued to flow, the filth continued to bubble—but because power had been woven into the community. The rows of sun-kissed water bottles along the rooftops were no longer newsworthy; they were a statement of defiance. The mission clinic, once a last hope, thrummed with a sense of focused purpose, as Chiamaka and several other teens functioned as Reuben and Anna's unofficial public health corps.Reuben himself had changed. Guilt over the Johnson children was a wound that could not be healed, a block of hard lead in his stomach that he carried everywhere. But it no longer held him back. Instead, it fueled a relentless, almost grim efficacy. He slept in short, troubled intervals, nightmares illuminated by flashing red text. He moved through the slum with increased ferocity, his rationales sharper, his focu