The Hidden Manna
The judgments have begun to fall — on the very order Beacon helped enthrone. Sores no one can register to treat. A grid browning out. The kind voice on every screen beginning, at last, to fail. The system's promised heaven is becoming its own hell, on its own terms.
Erin Brandt has stopped trying to expose the lie. Her work now is bread — a hidden supply line threaded through the marble corridors she once had a pass for, carried to the marked and the unmarked alike.
The temptation left to her is not the one she refused. It is the defector's cold righteousness — to let the people who chose this rot inside it.
She will not. And when word reaches her that her father has gone quiet in his own church, she searches herself for the triumph she has earned, and cannot find it.
