The white turning to stone mist didn’t scatter under the winter wind. It possessed an abnormal, bio-aetheric thickness that caused it to cling to the earth like spilled liquid silver.
From the breach, the cloud was expanding northward at six miles per hour. It rolled through the low-lying drainage canals and sunken heavy-duty alleys that led directly into the densely populated tenement blocks of Ward 9. If the fine mist reached the narrow, stuffy streets where twenty thousand commoner refugees were huddled in basements and factory cellars, Sector 7 would become a silent, underground necropolis before noon. Every man, woman, and child breathing that stale air would experience acute laryngeal turning to stone. Their throat cords turned to solid limestone while their lungs starved for oxygen.
Arthur stood on the low roof wall of Trench 3. His Zeiss magnifying glass tracked the heat slope of the advancing fog. The mist was cold—barely five degrees above freezing—but it was charged with latent bio-live spark charge.
Beside him, Pip was perched on the sandbag stone retaining wall, his sharp talons digging through the coarse burlap. The raptor’s golden-black plumage was shaking with high-hum agitation. His amber eyes tracked the creeping white line with fierce, hungry irritation. Pip despised the cold. To an avian entity born of solar core lineages, damp sulfur fog was a personal insult.
