The day after Patricia Rowan saved the world, a man named Elias Murphy brought a piece of her conscience home to roost. She hardly needed another one. Her tactical contacts already served up an endless stream of death and damage, numbers far too vague to qualify as estimates. It had only been sixteen hours; even orders of magnitude were barely more than guesses. But the machines kept trying to pin it down, this many million lives, that many trillion dollars, as if quantifying the apocalypse would somehow render it harmless. Maybe it would at that, she reflected. The scariest monsters always knew enough to disappear just before you turned.
