I spent three days stuck in it, wallowing in the hopelessness, refreshing news sites over and over and watching the death count climb while I did nothing useful. Seventeen became nineteen. Nineteen became twenty-two. Every new report felt like another failure, another person I hadn’t saved because I hadn’t known in time.
Then, on the fourth day, something shifted. The despair hardened into something else, something sharper. I was done being reactive, done waiting for bodies to pile up while I tracked patterns that led nowhere.
If the Whisperer was pure consciousness jumping between hosts, then maybe I could sense it while it was actually possessing someone. Not after it had moved on, not when the damage was already done, but in the moment when it was actively corrupting a mind.
I needed
