by Mr. Quillwing
In 2052, a radioactive virus unlike anything the world has seen begins spreading across the globe — but not like any plague before it. It doesn't kill. It dissolves. Skin, bone, hair, nails, teeth — everything on the outside of a human body evaporates, layer by layer, while the organs inside remain perfectly intact. Perfectly conscious. Perfectly aware of every single thing happening to them. Adrian Gray is seventeen years old when it happens to him. He spends four minutes dissolving in his hallway in Bogotá while his mother screams. He spends twelve years screaming in a dark blue void that exists somewhere between death and whatever comes after it. When he opens his eyes, he is lying on a tree branch in an abandoned park in the United States, inside a body that does not belong to him, wearing clothes he has never owned, with twenty dollars in his pocket and no memory of how he got there. Three figures follow him out of the dark — an old man in a black trench coat, a girl with straight black hair, and a small boy whose face Adrian has never seen. He does not know who they are. He does not know what he has become. But something in the dark already knows him. And it has been waiting for a very long time.
