Morgan spent the next three days obsessively following the spread. Anyone who saw him would have been worried, but luckily, most people were too busy dealing with their panic to notice a teenager hunched over his laptop. Reports kept coming in on the news feeds, and he was trying to figure out what they all meant before they took over everything.
The second wave hit seventy-two hours after Claire's brother changed. It was worse than the first time. There were more cases this time, and they were all over the world, like someone had thrown seeds from the sky.
But the changes were also happening more quickly. People used to have to wait hours to change, but now it only takes a few minutes. It looked like the Syndrome was learning, changing, and getting better at what it did because their bodies were changing so quickly.
Morgan had turned his room into a temporary command center. He had maps on the walls with red dots marking each confirmed case, timelines written in the margins, and notes all over the place.
Claire had helped him in ways he didn't expect. Her grief had turned into a fierce determination that reminded him of soldiers he had known in a past life. She had been using social media to get information and write reports on things that the mainstream news either didn't want to cover or didn't have.
They had put together a much better picture of the outbreak than what the authorities had. Morgan was scared by that picture because it didn't look like what she remembered from the original timeline.
In his past life, the Syndrome spread in waves that were easy to see over the course of months. People had time to respond, change, and build the infrastructure that would eventually support Murphy's church.
But this time, everything was rushed and crammed together, like someone had hit fast-forward on the end of the world. Morgan could already feel the being that would become the Almighty in the air. He had learned to recognize this kind of pressure too late last time.
It shouldn't have started to come together for at least six more months. He was beginning to see how his regression had changed the variables, but he wouldn't be able to stop what was coming if he couldn't figure out what those changes meant.
Claire knocked on his door shortly after midnight. One hand held a paper bag that smelled like cheap coffee, and the other held her laptop. She had started coming over at odd times, usually when she couldn't sleep because she was so sad and needed something to do other than look at her brother's empty room across the hall from hers.
She put down the coffee and opened her laptop on Morgan's desk right away. "Got something," she said. "The transformation cases show a pattern that doesn't fit with random distribution."
"Check this out."
She opened a map that had groups of red dots on it. Each dot stood for a confirmed case of the syndrome.
At first, it looked like a mess, but Claire had put some kind of grid system on top of it that showed Morgan something he had missed in his analysis. The cases weren't random at all; they were making geometric patterns and clusters that had to do with something deeper than just travel routes or population density.
"What am I looking at?" Morgan asked, leaning in to get a better look at the screen.
"Maybe ley lines? I don't know what to call them, but these areas of high concentration don't fit into any normal pattern of disease spread." Claire looked at a group of cases in rural Montana that didn't seem to have anything to do with each other.
"These people had never met or been to the same places before, and the only thing they had in common was that they all changed in six hours."
"It looks like the Syndrome is targeting certain areas instead of spreading through contact."
Morgan felt something cold settle in his stomach. He thought the Syndrome spread through some way he didn't understand, but if Claire was right and it was only targeting certain places, that showed a level of intelligence and purpose he hadn't fully understood even in his previous life. The machine at the center of everything wasn't just taking faith away; it was growing it by planting seeds in the best soil and waiting for them to bloom.
"Can you compare these groups to past data?" Morgan asked, his mind already racing ahead. "Places of worship, religious sites, or anywhere that has had a lot of people believe the same thing over time?"
Claire's fingers flew over the keyboard, bringing up databases and adding new information to her map. Both of them went quiet when the results came up because the connection was clear. Every major cluster of Syndrome cases lined up almost perfectly with places that had been important to religion, from ancient temples to modern megachurches, from places where thousands had gathered to pray to lonely shrines cared for by a few dedicated believers.
The Syndrome didn't happen by accident. It was feeding on faith itself, going after the places where people's need to believe had made the biggest differences in the world.
Claire said in a soft voice, "Your father needs to see this," but Morgan was already shaking his head before she was done.
"No. Not yet." He couldn't tell her why without giving her too much information.
He couldn't say that Murphy already knew or that his father had been getting ready for this exact situation because he had somehow known what was going to happen before it happened. "We need to know more first. We need to be absolutely sure before we give this information to anyone who could use it in a bad way."
Claire looked at him with those eyes that were too old, the ones that had seen her brother die and knew Morgan was hiding something, but she didn't say anything. That was what made her valuable, and she knew when questions would get in the way of important answers.
...
Morgan made his move after she had left. He quietly left his room, like someone who had been hiding for years.
Murphy was still at the church, where he was holding what he called "late night counseling sessions" for scared churchgoers. His mother was sleeping in the master bedroom. Morgan had to hurry because he only had about an hour before his dad got back.
Murphy's research room was on the first floor. Morgan had never been allowed to go in there as a child because of vague reasons about important church documents and the need for privacy. Morgan had followed those rules once because he was young, trusting, and dumb. But those days were long gone, even if his body didn't remember them.
He learned how to pick locks from a survivor who had broken into empty buildings to look for supplies. He used a piece of wire that he bent into the right shape to do it. He then quietly slipped inside.
"Okay, I'm in..."