The triumph over the refugee camp cholera had been a silent, inner validation. The Trust Score had shone with a new, hardened luster. But triumph in Reuben's life was a temporary dividend, paid at once in the very next crisis. He was finding himself to learn to find a hard rhythm in it, a cycle of anticipation, intervention, and cautious leveling off.
This time, the System offered no prediction. It offered a verdict.
It happened when he verified supply manifests, the mundane task a reassuring familiarity. In a moment, the clinic walls dissolved into a sea of darkest space. The familiar National Map, its intimate pattern of red and green, was wiped away. In their place was a planet in darkness—his planet, but as depicted in the System's starkly precise data-visual.
It was a map of abando
