Derecho

Prologue

PROLOGUE

One singular, inescapable thought dominated Special Constable Daisy Mori’s failing mind…That she had burnt down the home and terrorised the parents of the person who was responsible for what would happen to her next. — The person who was standing over her now, clutching a scalpel and studying a data stream on her Ktab.

The inevitable decay had finally caught up with her. The slow creeping death that had begun the very first time she had donned her experimental Quantum Sub-Locker suit.

The QSL suits had been a stroke of unparalleled genius, the pinnacle of a technology which would have seemed miraculous just a few years earlier.

… No, that wasn’t quite true. They weren’t the pinnacle — that had come later. She hadn’t been good enough for that. Her brain wouldn’t work with the more advanced COBRA suits the way it had with the QSL suit. That might have saved her... She might have had what they had. But there was no more time for what might have been.

Mori smiled; she’d won... in a way…She’d outlasted all the others who had worn the QSL suits. One by one, each of them had fallen prey to the wretched decline which ate away at you from the inside from the moment the suit first connected to your thoughts. She’d beaten them all, she’d lived the longest — and now she was going beat death too.

PART I