Dr. Aris Thorne (the actual one, not Jax's virtual specter) was tormented by phantasms that he could not prove existed. In the busy infectious diseases ward of Milan's Royal University Hospital, he was a man of unobtrusive intensity, his white coat stark against the encroaching darkness of sickness everywhere. His fellow students worked their rotations with the black, hardened efficiency of troops in an endless war, but Aris observed. He was a diagnostician at heart, and in this moment the whole world was his patient, a fever of unknown contradictions.
It began with the Petrova boy, Matei. The case would have been simple, another sad statistic. A low-grade fever, a wasting child. And then that nurse—Lena, was it? —with an unseemly certainty. His lungs, she'd told him, her tone insistent i
