Ray stared at the soldier Priya had brought forward, the man still wrapped in a blanket, hands shaking from whatever he had survived in the hours before his cure."Tell me exactly what you heard," Ray said."Wolfe briefed us himself," the soldier said. "Before we left for Kansas. He said a new name had surfaced in his intelligence reports. The First. He said it with your name in the same breath, like they were the same report, the same threat." The soldier swallowed hard. "He believes you have been building something beyond what we already knew about and he thinks the First is a title you gave yourself."Jane exchanged a stunned look with Ray. "He thinks you are the one gathering an army of coherent infected.""That is insane," Zoe said."It is also useful," Nichole said slowly, something calculating entering his exhausted voice. "If Wolfe believes the First and Ray are connected, every resource he commits to crushing the First's growing army might also be aimed at us. That buys

The blade came fast, aimed at Priya's stomach, and she barely twisted out of its path in time.Her shoulder slammed into the supply table hard enough to send vials scattering across the floor."Stay back," she shouted, scrambling backward, but the figure advanced with the same slow, deliberate movements it had entered with, patient even in attack.Her hand found the tray of prepared syringes by instinct alone, fingers closing around the nearest one, and when he lunged again, she drove the needle straight into his forearm and emptied the full dose into his bloodstream.The reaction was immediate and violent. He staggered back, with a guttural roar tearing from his throat as the serum burned through his system, his free hand clutching the injection site like it had set his veins on fire."What did you do to me?" he snarled, voice cracking between something human and something else entirely.Priya didn't answer. She grabbed the lamp stand and swung it hard, forcing him back another ste

Ray moved fast once the footage from New York settled in his mind, calling Jane back from Chicago by radio and pulling every available team toward a single objective before Wolfe could piece together what was happening in his own backyard."We go into New York," Ray said, addressing his inner circle inside the command tent. "Quietly. We find whoever we can reach from that crowd the First controlled, we cure them, and we bring them out before Wolfe even realizes we were there.""That is Wolfe's city," Jane said. "His soldiers, his checkpoints, his eyes everywhere.""His eyes are on the First right now," Ray said. "Not on us. That is the only reason this works."They slipped into the outer districts of New York three nights later, moving in small, disciplined groups, avoiding patrol routes that Mara had mapped from months of intercepted chatter.Priya's team worked fast once they located pockets of the controlled crowd still wandering in a dazed, half-aware state, administering the cure

Wolfe noticed the inconsistency first in a supply manifest, a shipment route Adam had recommended that led to a storage facility with no record in any official database. It was small and easy to miss. Wolfe did not miss things like that."Pull everything on him," Wolfe ordered his intelligence chief. "Every credential and every claim, every contact he has made since arriving."Three days later, the report landed on Wolfe's desk, and what it contained erased any warmth he had briefly extended toward the Greek scientist.*******No research institution in Athens had any record of an Adam Drakos. No published papers, no academic history, nothing beyond a carefully constructed cover that unraveled the moment someone bothered to dig deep enough."Fabricated," Wolfe said quietly, flipping through the file. "Entirely.""His communications also route through encrypted channels we cannot trace," the intelligence chief added. "Its not our network and not anyone we have identified."Wolfe c

The broadcast interrupted every signal still running across the country, radio, television, emergency frequencies, all of it hijacked at once by Wolfe's new command structure.His face appeared calm and composed before a backdrop that still bore the seal of the office he had stolen."People of this nation," Wolfe began, voice measured and steady. "The chaos you have lived through these past years ends now."Ray stood in the command tent, watching the broadcast alongside Jane, Priya, and Mara, his jaw tightening with every word."I will not pretend this transition comes without cost," Wolfe continued. "But order requires sacrifice and every city still standing will be brought under proper governance, cleansed of the disorder and infection that has spread unchecked since this crisis began. Cooperate, and you will be protected. But If you resist you will share the fate of those who resisted in Washington."The broadcast cut to brief, deliberate footage of the capital's fall, enough to