The world had shrunk to the size of a child’s hot brow, and Reuben Stone had become a keeper of small miracles. For three days, his existence had narrowed to the rhythm of Miriam’s breathing—each inhalation a fragile victory, each exhalation a prayer answered. He had been a ghost in his own clinic, moving through its familiar rooms with the detached precision of someone performing a ritual whose meaning had long since eclipsed its form. The System’s world map, that sprawling cartography of crisis and collapse, had been compressed to a muted thumbnail in the corner of his vision, its urgent pulsings reduced to the visual equivalent of distant thunder. Even the unrelenting red of the Karysia situation—that chronic hemorrhage he had monitored for weeks—faded into irrelevance, as insubstantial
