It began as not a planned march, but as a hemorrhage. A slow, then rapid, bleeding away of people from the festering wound that Cairo had become. They streamed out of the slums and charred suburbs, not in the hopeless chaos of the riots, but in a grim, directed movement that was somehow more terrifying. They were the carriers. The living, breathing incubators of the Dawud Effect.
From his hard platform, Dawud watched the flight on the data-slate, displaying a mosaic of satellite photographs and lunatic dispatches. Long, tattered streams of humans streamed down the desert highways east and south, a slow river of humanity under the brutal sun. They carried their lives on their shoulders, in carts, in their arms. And they carried something else, not visible to the eye but shrieking from the
