The endless highway had been his atonement, an empty gray ocean of pavement and grief in which the only things that lingered were the rain, the tremble in his hand, and the System's merciless tally of saved and lost. Reuben was a phantom in his own network, a peripatetic node of desperate intervention, dodging the shadow of his daughter's tear in the only thing he had any idea how to do: pursue after others he could potentially save. The void was now a part of him, an empty chamber where his heart used to be, occupied by nothing but the hard calculus of the greater good.
He stood in a makeshift HON staging area next to the ruined border of the ancient Eastern Marches, overseeing the deployment of the first mass-produced batches of the Ghost Fever antiviral. The mission was laborious going
