How?” Anna demanded, and the single syllable carried the weight of everything she could not bring herself to say. Her voice cracked on the consonant, splintering into something raw and barely controlled. “You have no DP for a real intervention. No diagnostics, no countermeasures, no protective infrastructure. You’d be walking into an active outbreak zone with a first-aid kit and a target on your back.”
Reuben did not answer immediately. His mind was already three steps ahead, tracing the contours of a plan so desperate it barely qualified as coherent. The System’s projections scrolled across his peripheral vision, each new datapoint confirming what he already knew: that conventional intervention was impossible, that the resources required to contain this outbreak exceeded his remaining ca
