The success with Tariq had been a cusp, a turn of a lock Dawud had not even known existed. The Pathogen Rewrite had been one thing—a reversal, a wiping away of a foreign invader. But the "Phoenix Protocol" had been something else again. It had been an act of creation, an act of forcing the body to not only heal, but to reconstruct beyond its own capacity. The System's divergence warning was a cold splash of terror, but beneath the terror, an ember of terrible, wondrous curiosity flared.
He could cure sickness. But could he cure scarcity? Could he cure the grinding, creeping poverty of the body itself?
The hunger of the camp was a plague of another kind. It wasn't an infectious virus with a simple genetic code to delete. It was systemic breakdown, a continuing, insidious deficit. He saw i
