The tide of forbidden knowledge swept through the entire Life-and-Death Boundary.
Old Mo dismantled himself into parts, Eve preached with her festering body, and beyond these two torrents of madness, a third force was stirring.
It was neither at the abandoned altar outside the city nor in the streets and alleys within it, but in an abandoned factory in the eastern part of the city.
That factory had once been a steel mill.
Long ago, when this world still had industry, black smoke had billowed from its chimneys, molten iron had burned in its furnaces, and workers had shed sweat here.
Now, the chimneys had collapsed, the furnaces had gone cold, and the workers had become the living dead.
Most of the factory walls had fallen down. The iron gates hung crookedly, and the metal sheets on them were rusting away in flakes.
A huge hole had collapsed through the workshop roof, revealing the gray sky. The machines remained, but they had all rusted solid. The gears would not turn, the conveyor belts had rotted and snapped, the buttons on the control panels had shattered, and the screens had gone black.
Kane was in this factory.
He had not come here to take shelter or hide. He had come here to work.
His body was already horribly incomplete—his left arm had been severed clean off at the shoulder, the stump a mangled mess of flesh covered in dark scabs.
His right leg was missing below the knee. The stump was jagged, with bare white bone visible within.
A gash deep enough to expose bone cut across his neck, flesh peeled back to reveal a blackened windpipe. He had gouged out his own right eye, and pale red mucus flowed from the empty socket, running down his cheek and dripping onto