"What drug."
Vane answered before Noah could, cold as a blade laid flat. "The combat enhancers. Every Fenris soldier took them. Stronger, faster, no fear, no pain."
Noah nodded once. "Used long enough, they rot the mind. And they pass through the blood. Soldier to soldier. Parent to child. Ban the drug and you stop making new carriers, but you can't pull it back out of the bloodlines it's already poisoned."
His eyes found mine. "It went quiet for a few generations. Thinned out. Then it found enough fuel and woke up."
"Your world calls it a virus," he said, "because by the time it reached you, that's what it had become. Nobody left alive remembered it ever had a maker."
My stomach dropped straight through the floor. The apocalypse, the thing that turned civilization into rubble, starte
