The world fell apart in a whirlwind of splintered oak and wailing light. The centuries-thick old door did not just open; it shattered beneath the concentrated rage of a ram. Beyond the ripped opening, black-robed intruders poured in, moving with coordinated, lethal ballet, their faces obscured behind tactical headgear and gas masks. They were not police. They moved with the smooth, corporate drive that was unimaginably more terrifying than state-sanctioned violence.The first bullets weren't fired at them; they were feelers, stitching across the stone walls, shattering the remaining panes of the stained-glass saint into a thousand glittering shards that rained like crystallized blood and sapphire.Richard didn't think. He acted. He threw himself back, pulling Elizabeth down with him behind the unyielding bulk of the stone altar. It was their only cover."The System!" cried Elizabeth over the din. "Can it—"Before she was able to get the words out, a globe of power, appearing as a blin

The safe house was a vacant accountant's office above a shuttered bakery, the air still thick with the ghost of yeast and paper. For a week, it had been a sanctuary of frenetic, hopeful motion. The coded channels hummed with news from Healer cells all over Europe. It appeared, finally, that they were producing something that could not so easily be torched or shot out of the air.When the courier turned up, he was just another thread in that widening tapestry. A young, sincere-looking man named Leo—the very same Leo whose septic leg Richard had saved in the chapel—now worked as a runner for the London cell. He wore a closed cold-storage box and had his eyes aglow with pride.From Manchester, Professor," Leo said, putting the box down carefully on the improvised lab bench they used as a desk. "They've got a reproducible synthesis of the neuro-regenerative compound. They're estimating they've boosted the yield by twenty percent. They want you to verify it."Elizabeth accepted the box wit

The storm that had struck against the London skyscraper was more than meteorological; it was an appropriate backdrop for the tempest about to be unleashed inside. The Medicon information fortress, a glassy black spire piercing the bruised belly of the night sky, was believed impenetrable. Its security was a legend, a marriage of the latest technology and cold-blooded human muscle. To the world, it was the thumping heart of a benevolent giant of medicine. To Richard Clark, it was the dragon's den, and Elizabeth was stuck in its deepest dungeon.He was clinging to the roof of a nearby building, his coat flapping in the wind, rain pounding his face. He was not alone. His team was a reflection of his own transformation: a handful of men and women who once donned lab coats now brandished weapons of war. There was Anya, the Prague virologist, her gaze set in a hard mask as she configured a drone disruptor—a device that emitted a frequency that caused commercial drones to shudder and plummet

The world had tumbled back through the looking glass. The brief, glimmering instant of victory turned bad into a worse nightmare. Hospitals, which had begun to thin out, were once more packed. But with different kinds of crowding. These were not the hopeful ones, carrying in their near and dear ones to be provided a miracle. These were the betrayed, the already healed who came back with an illness that was a vile mockery of their cure.A man whose regrown skin from a burn now sloughed in weeping, necrotic ulcers. A child, once blind and now seeing, whose eyes opacified behind a milky, prion-killed veil. The Chimera virus did not infect the sick; it targeted the healthy. It was a predator that used the signature of their healing as a homing beacon.Panic was not something that happened; it was the state of the world. Airports became fortresses. Borders slammed shut. The very fabric of medicine was now at issue. Trust, the foundation upon which all healing had been built, had been shatt

The world had been healed in a quiet, communal sigh of relief, but the author of that healing was a ghost. Richard spent days inside the sterile environment of the safe house after the dismantling of the Chimera strain, an incandescent mystery finding the boundaries, or the lack of them, of his new life. He was a star lodged within plaster walls, his brightness a persistent, gentle pressure on the mundane world.But a star, by definition, must glow.An old restive desire, the one that had originally set him onto the rain-swept streets with a bag of pills, reasserted itself. He could feel the city around him not as buildings, but as a living thing—and it was still sick. Not with the manufactured horrors of Chimera, but with the old, familiar plagues of humanity: poverty, decay, and the insidious, grinding wear of a system that had long since ceased to look at its weakest."I have to go out," he said to Elizabeth, his voice the same low thrum.She looked up from work, her face darkening