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“What do you mean, Justin is the boy?”

“I mean he's him. Don't you see? The signs were all there. He's come—”

“He can't be Elyon. He grew up in the Southern Forest. He was a warrior under my command!”

They were whispering, but loudly.

“And who's to say that he's not Elyon? I saw him—”

“No! It's not possible! I know when I see—”

“Stop it, Thomas!”

He stared at her, mouth still open, ready to finish his statement of disbelief. He clamped his jaw shut.

She told him what had happened in the desert. She hurried through the events in a whisper, and when she was finished, he just looked at her, face white.

“And I just saved you with his power. How dare you question me?”

“But Elyon? I fought Elyon?”

“He's come to save us from ourselves, just like he said he would, when we didn't think it could get any worse.”

“I . . .” He turned from her. “Oh my God. My dear, dear God, Elyon! I've betrayed him!”

“We all did. And he beat you handily.”

“No, with Johan!”

She pulled him around by the arm. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I struck an agreement with Johan that would make Johan the king of the Horde.”

“So—”

“So he insisted that he betray both Qurong and Justin. I . . . I agreed.”

These words weren't making sense to her. How could anyone betray Justin now? “But once they know that Justin is Elyon, there won't be any such thing.”

“It's already started! They are due to reach the forest late this afternoon and work the betrayal. Mikil has informed the Council. Johan intends to kill Justin.”

It was suddenly clear to her. Qurong and Johan were influenced by the Shataiki. By Teeleh. They were being used as the creature's instrument against Justin. This wasn't only about the Forest People; it was about Justin!

“We have to stop them!”

Thomas looked around frantically. “How many are outside?”

As if in answer, the flap parted and the general Woref stepped inside. His eyes flashed at the sight of Thomas standing.

Her husband walked toward the man. “Which one of your men tried to kill me?” he demanded.

“None.”

Thomas moved quickly. He leaped for the Scab's sword, yanked it free from its scabbard, and ran for the far wall. “Hurry!”

He swung the blade over his head and down, parting the wall from top to bottom, opening it to daylight. He ripped the cut wide and held the sword out to stop the general.

“You follow and you die,” he said, and then stepped through the tear into the passageway between the tents. They had already started through the camp before the stunned general gave the alarm.

“The horses!” Thomas yelled, pointing to several that were tied to the side of the tent. They both swung onto a horse. Then they were galloping out of the camp, dodging Scab warriors taken completely off guard by the two horses.

No one tried to stop them—naturally, they'd probably been strictly instructed not to touch Thomas of Hunter. Only the general, and probably now his men, knew what was really happening. It might not have made a difference anyway. The horses outran any words of warning.

They galloped from the Horde's camp straight toward the distant forest.

“Can we make it?” she demanded.

He rode hard just ahead, leaning forward, face drawn.

“Thomas!”

“I don't know!” Thomas snapped. He slapped his horse, coaxing every last ounce of strength from its fresh legs. “Hiyaa!”

THE GENERAL from whom Thomas and Rachelle had escaped stared out at the dunes that led to the forest. Woref, head of military intelligence, despised the Forest Guard perhaps more than he hated Qurong.

He played the loyal general, but under his pain, not a day went by that he didn't curse the father of the woman who would one day be his. Qurong had forbidden any man from marrying his daughter, Chelise, until the forests had fallen. It was the leader's way of motivating a dozen senior-ranking generals who vied for her hand. If the decision had been left to Woref, they would have burned the forests long ago, then killed every last woman and child who bathed in the lakes and feasted on their flesh for the victory. But Qurong seemed more interested in conquering and enslaving than killing.

“Do we give chase?” his aide asked.

“No,” Woref said. They had planned for this contingency. As long as Thomas was delayed by four or more hours, he would be too late. The western army would march.

He glanced at the sun. “Prepare the men to march at nightfall. We are going into the forest.”

By week's end, the daughter of Qurong, Chelise, would be his. And then he would look to become Qurong himself.

27

MONIQUE PEERED at the Washington skyline through the Suburban's tinted windows. The American people didn't know yet; that was her first shock. Most of them probably didn't even know that the Raison Strain even existed, much less that it had infected most of the world's population already.

America's Deputy Secretary of State Merton Gains was on his cell phone, talking in rapid-fire sentences with someone named Theresa Sumner from the CDC in Atlanta. Their plan was to debrief Monique here in Washington before getting her to a yet-undisclosed lab that was already working on the Raison Strain. She'd managed only an hour of dreamless sleep over the Atlantic, and her weariness was beginning to play with her mind—not a good thing, considering the task ahead of her.

The deputy secretary snapped his phone closed. “You sure you're okay?” he asked yet again.

“I'm tired. But otherwise I'm fine. Unless of course you're referring to the Raison Strain, in which case I'm sure that I'm dying like the rest of you.”

“That's not what I meant.”

She looked over his shoulder at a boy riding a blue bicycle with a fake engine down the sidewalk. His hands were free, and he was holding a soft drink.

“I still can't believe that no one knows.”

“It'll break soon enough. Hopefully we'll have some good news to go along with the bad.”

“My good news,” she said.

“Your good news.”

“Then let's hope probability is on our side.”

“Where would you put the probability?”

She shrugged. “Sixty percent?”

He frowned, then flipped open his phone and placed another call, this one to someone who was evidently working on a report that Russia's leadership was fracturing.

Monique closed her eyes and let her mind slip back to Thomas. She'd asked about him the moment her feet hit the tarmac, but Gains only knew what she'd told him. No new word. They assumed he was dead.

As did she. The water no longer healed as it had in the hotel room in Bangkok. And even if there was a way to heal Thomas in the forest, he might not be healed here as he had been three times before.

Astounding that she was even thinking like this. She'd lived in Rachelle's skin for less than a day, and only in her dreams, but the experience had been so real that she couldn't deny the existence of Thomas's reality. She'd spent the last ten hours contemplating this strange phenomenon, and with each passing hour her conviction that Rachelle and Justin really did exist strengthened.

Which meant that Thomas had indeed been healed by Elyon's water after being shot on the hotel bed in Bangkok. That time he'd been in the vicinity of water, which healed him immediately, perhaps before he'd actually died. When Carlos had shot him in the head after his first rescue attempt, he'd actually been in the lake, and his healing had been instantaneous. He probably hadn't died either time.

But this time, he had really died. She'd watched Carlos check his pulse. There was no way the killer would have left him without being completely satisfied that he was dead. That meant Thomas would have died in the desert as well. Maybe the Horde had double-crossed him and killed him. Or maybe he'd just died. Even if Justin brought him back to life, there was no guarantee that he would come back to life here.

He was dead. He was really dead this time.

Monique swallowed a lump in her throat. If so, then she would make it well known that he had saved them all. Assuming her antivirus worked. Either way, he had saved her. Carlos would have killed her sooner or later. If not him, then the virus would have.

For that matter, it still might.

“There's something you should know,” she said. “The man behind Svensson is the director of foreign affairs, Armand Fortier.”

“You know that for a fact?” he asked, surprised. “We'd speculated, but I'm not sure we've confirmed anything.”

“Thomas and I met with him. I'm also quite sure that he has someone on the inside over here. Someone who has access to your president.”

She might as well have dropped a bomb. He just stared at her. It occurred to her that Fortier's mule could be this very man. She could be telling the wrong man the wrong things and never know the better of it.

“I could be mistaken,” she said. “But he seemed to make that claim.”

Merton Gains broke off his stare. “Dear God, what next?”

MIKE OREAR slipped into his chair behind the set of the show he co-anchored with Nancy Rodriguez and fixed his earpiece. Behind him large black letters spelled out the show's name,
What Matters
.

“Ready in five. You right?” Nancy asked.

“As rain.”

He'd been in front of the camera too many times to count in his relatively short career, but never had he been so anxious to spill the beans. He'd delayed because of the State Department's adamant demand that he keep his mouth shut. It was non-news, they'd said. But none of that mattered any longer.

What did matter was that he'd awakened this morning with a rash under his arms and on his thighs, and although he succeeded in persuading himself that it had nothing to do with the Raison Strain, the rash reminded him just how real this non-news of his was.

This non-news that the world was dying of the Raison Strain without knowing it.

Windows peered into the studio from a second story above and behind the cameras. The show was directed my Marcy Rawlins, who was reviewing last-minute details with Joe Spencer behind the glass. Any breaking news or changes would come over their earpieces from that room.

“You okay?” Nancy asked.

“I'm fine. Let's roll.”

“You look pale.”

“I want to change things up a little. Lead with something off the schedule.”

“Marcy clear this?”

“No. Trust me, she won't have to.”

Nancy arched her brow. “Your skin, not mine.”

“No, Nancy, you're wrong. It's your skin too. You'll see.”

“What the heck is that—”

“Ten seconds.” The program director's voice in their earpieces.

“What's that supposed to mean?” she repeated.

“You'll see.”

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .” She gave the on-air signal.

Nancy was already smiling and opening the show. She ran down today's show highlights, none of which Mike heard. His mind was elsewhere.

There was a good reason he hadn't put the story through the normal news channels. Even breaking-news channels, for that matter. Fact was, Marcy probably would have jumped all over it, assuming she believed his sources at all.

But news of this kind would have to be cleared with the brass. Some of them would say that if true, any story of this magnitude should be broken by the president himself or, at the very least, someone with more seniority than Orear. They would hold it while they got up to speed. Might even spike it.

Mike wasn't going to take that chance. A week had passed, and signs that something very significant was in the air were everywhere, and none of his peers seemed to notice. If they did, they sure weren't connecting the dots.

Maybe he intended to do a bit of grandstanding, but not much. How could anyone accuse a condemned man of grandstanding, for heaven's sake? He was dying. They were all dying. That was news and that was that. Time to let the cat out of—