Returning home to Riverside should have been a triumph. They'd conquered an unknown pathogen and won. The Trust Score gain echoed in the recesses of Reuben's mind, a hard, firm affirmation of their new strategy. And yet, as their canoe paddled back into familiar waters hugging the side of the village, an unpleasant tension curled in his stomach. It was the terror of a man returning to a place that had known him as one thing and finding that it now knew him as another.
The initial sign was the children. A throng of them, who would usually shriek "Professor! Professor!" and struggled to get a glimpse of his new "tool," instead fell into an awed, speechless silence as he emerged. One little girl, the child of the woman whose dysentery he'd cured months earlier, jabbed a little finger and whi
