He was still fighting her for almost ten seconds after she'd doped him. Military-grade artificial liver spec'ed for toxin metabolism, maybe, or just plain old-fashioned adrenaline. Hands clawed, incoherently. She slapped them away, grateful that he wasn't augged for combat, as he went limp on the gurney.

A sudden moment of stillness, around her, for heartbeats, in the eye of the storm. She found herself standing there, just breathing, for one half-second before she pulled herself back together. Turned to the nurse next to her.

"Get him out of here," she bawled at him, before shoving past. Behind her, she heard the gurney rattle away at high speed, flanked on all sides by nurses and IV equipment. She stalked across the endless line of triage cases and frantic nurses, and made it maybe two meters before another one flagged her down.

"Mid-30s, male, three stab wounds in the abdomen-"

"Get him clotted, then, and get him to a bed!"

"He's augged! He was seizing." For scattered moments, Vera's attention was pulled away by screaming behind her. Bereft of emotional subsystems long since exhausted, her analytical side pinned down the salient variables. Male, mid-twenties, left leg removed, femoral artery tourniqueted-

She forced her attention back onto her current patient.

"We think he has cranial-"

He seized again. Flailing movements, violent kicking as two nurses held his arms down. One was black ceramic and iron, and the hydraulic kick ripped the bed rail right out with only a glancing blow. Everything in her vision seemed to be in motion; it was her hearing that her attention turned towards. The steady peep-peep of the ECG, the shrill alarms that rode over it as it sputtered and finally halted.

He went limp. For a moment Vera forgot herself. She reached out with one gloved hand and squeezed the dead man's. Reflexively she looked for her time chip, in the corner of her vision, before belatedly remembering that she'd had it removed just two weeks ago.

That her bitter anger at Sarif had probably saved her from this.

She gestured at the nurse to her left. "Jon, take this one down to the morgue."

The morgue could easily have been full up by now, for all she knew. It had been that kind of night. Code Sevens-mass casualty incidents-were never exactly pretty. But she'd never seen anything this bad, not even in Poland.

Outside, the Akranes night swelled and bled, though Vera hadn't seen the outside of the emergency department in about ten hours now. It wasn't something that she tried to think about, at the moment. The first casualties had been inside the hospitals themselves. Maybe one in two doctors suddenly reduced to violent paranoid insanity. One of them had been Olaf, a diagnostician in his late fifties who had been one of her references when she'd transferred to Akranes Hospital. She'd held him down herself while they doped him, strapped him down onto a gurney before he could regain whatever approximation of consciousness he'd been mutilated down to and resume screaming. Many others had been surgeons, and some of those had been friends she'd worked with directly, learned to trust and depend on despite the occasional language barrier. Later, she would be grateful for the mental reflexes that had allowed her to focus through the day the world had gone mad, by shutting out anything that wasn't right in front of her.

Triage. The word had never had quite so ugly a ring to it as tonight. Vera had been one of the ones to take charge, organize intact security and nursing staff, get the hospital locked down and ready for what she knew would be coming. Best case, an endless line of trauma injuries. The worst case would resemble something from one of those insipid zombie movies she vaguely remembered from childhood.

Periodically another slew of ambulances would arrive and new patients would be dumped out. New patients were being left, usually strapped down, in the parking lot outside now that the Emergency ward was full up. And they were still coming in, by the dozen. The air was filled with the incoherence of the newly insane.

The mike on her collar squawked to life. The sound made her jump; she'd kept the volume at max to hear anything over the cacophony. "Dr Marcovic, we're running out of gloves in ward 3, over."

"Ward 3, Marcovic. Hospital admin took over an hour ago. Make your request to Dr Jolsson on channel 7, over."

She was weaving her way through another crowd of nurses and patients when it all stopped. The noise just stopped. For one frozen moment, the entire ward was silent as a tomb save the insistent interrupting machine squeals belonging to the life support machines. Even the staff were struck dumb by the strange end of the catastrophe, as sudden and inexplicable as it had started. One enraptured moment of silence in the ward.

And then, of course, it all ripped apart under its own weight. Vera found herself moving again as the pace resumed, though at a markedly different tempo. Most of her staff kept moving at the same pace they'd been at moments ago. A few without anything immediately critical actually stopped, looked around. Vera made sure they were pressed back into critical work immediately. She knew what would happen if they finally had time to think about what was happening. She was beginning to feel that way herself.

It would be several more hours before she'd allow herself to decompress. Almost all of her staff would have departed by then, leaving behind a skeleton day shift equipped with shellshocked staff and piecemeal reinforcements from nearby towns where the rural environment meant there'd been far fewer cases of aug madness.

"This is Eliza Cassan. Our top story tonight: The world is united in shock and grief. A recent general firmware update for augmented people was corrupted by Hugh Darrow, and resulted in widespread violent insanity. During his speech in Panchaea..."

It was in the break room. 3 AM, a rerun. Vera had seen other staff as they caught the news, but they hadn't spoken to her about it. The tightly-wired cadre of staff that she'd bundled together, mostly by taking advantage of the shared pressures of the world coming apart by giving them a plan to follow, had frayed and broken apart at the edges first. People had drifted away like something dissolving, pulled away towards their families or friends, desperately trying to find them in the rapidly-diminishing chaos outside. No one was going mad anymore, and save a few looters the city had retreated into itself and locked its doors.

Vera sat back, numb and tired, as Eliza went through it all. Some kind of corrupted firmware update. A trigger signal sent by Darrow of all people. From there the story became a spiderweb of intrigues that her fatigued mind could no longer follow. Panchaea was gone? Darrow hadn't been alone in doing this?

The Illuminati?

Vera couldn't help it. She began to laugh. Absent of the massive external pressures that had held her together over the past day, she even began to weep over the lives and futures lost. One, two tears. The rest never left her eyes.

She watched the rest of the newscast, feeling at best a vague sense of fascination. It was like a dream, or a movie. David Sarif even appeared momentarily on the screen, surrounded by cameras and mikes on all sides, barking out sound bite damage control.

Peripheral motion on her right side. Vera ignored it. In front of her, rerun drone footage of Panchaea collapsing into the ruined oceans.

"Doctor Marcovic, right? I got a patient for you."

Smoke ringed the gravesite. That was our cure, Vera thought absently. That was supposed to stop the waters from rising. He said they could stop the climate from changing.

"Come on, doc, haven't got all day here."

At least we can't wreck the ocean any more than we already have.

Panchaea had been built in one of the ocean's many and growing dead zones, a de-oxygenated husk of algae-infested water that hadn't harboured wildlife for years now.

Thank God for small mercies.

And then, without any warning apparent to her, there was a gun in her face, jabbing her nose. Vera forced herself back from insensate calm, looked up along the arm that held it, at the red and grey fatigues, marveling the whole time at her own total lack of available reaction.

"Move," spat the figure.

Vera got up, evaluated the newcomer. Female, Arabic descent if the eyes and nose were any kind of giveaway, maybe mid-thirties. Shaking slightly. I know this person, she thought. She could tell that more from the Sarif insignia on the suit than any real memory of the woman's face. But she'd met this person, once. What was her name? Her first name. The surname was stitched in capital letters along her shoulders.

The pilot grimaced, pressed forward. "Don't think I won't-"

"Farah? Is it Farah?"

The other woman stopped. "Far. Faridah. I. I didn't know you'd-"

Vera reached out gently and wrapped her hand around Faridah's wrist. "Ms Malik, please put the gun down."

Shaking now, Malik complied. Vera's reflexes, somehow work hardened rather than corroded away by the last several hours, took on their own inertia and guided her along like a train on steel rails. She got up. Malik offered her the pistol, but Vera shook her head.

"I'm afraid I never learned how to use guns. And there are still looters out there. Better for you to keep it, Faridah."

Malik nodded. Vera watched the woman's composure slip back over her, lock down over her like a cockpit canopy.

"You said you had a patient?"

"It's Jensen," said Malik.