When black rain sweeps across Melbourne, emergency crews respond to a containment scene under a freeway overpass where runoff clings to gloves and masks in pale, filament-like threads. Dr Anika Rao, a mycologist known for precision and scepticism, is brought in to identify the organism and advise on containment. What she finds does not fit any known fungal lineage, and it behaves less like a random outbreak and more like a system unfolding. As patients flood hospitals with brutal respiratory symptoms and strange residues that seem to connect rather than simply grow, Anika pushes for transparency and proper chain of custody. Instead, she meets locked doors, missing samples, rewritten reports, and briefings that contradict field observations. Quarantine measures tighten, but the science is shaped behind closed doors. Anika begins to suspect that containment is only one goal, and that powerful interests are trying to steer what the spores become. With the city sealed and panic rising, Anika must follow the evidence into places where facts are treated as property and truth is managed like a liability. The organism is adapting. The human response is fracturing. And if she cannot get the real story out, Melbourne may become the proving ground for something far worse than an outbreak.
