The Oracle Movement's golden promise was a fragile bulwark against the stealthy, colorless horror of the Ghost Fever. Reuben and the newly revitalized HON had been fighting a holding action for weeks now, using the prototype test to detect and isolate contaminated blood units, limiting the outbreaks to small, horror-ridden pockets. They were excruciating, but they were limited. Contained.
The first sign that the dam was failing was not a siren, but a soft, steady chime from the System. Reuben was reviewing the blueprints for a new, community-built clinic in the Philippines when he heard it. A sound he'd programmed for a specific, catastrophic threshold.
He turned to the main world map. The screen, which had so recently been filled with the soft gold speckles of the Movement, was bleeding
