Author:
Anna Mantovani is an author, blogger and songwriter based in Turin, Italy. She has a degree in Media Engineering and works in the railway sector. With her sister Maria Carla, also a science-fiction writer, she manages the blog “The Mantovanis”, which focuses on independent speculative fiction and geek culture. With her husband Dario (and sometimes their two kids as guest stars) she plays in the electropop duo “Sedona”. Find out more at: www.themantovanis.blog.

The story is set in the fictional city of Europa, in Central Europe, the last city left after a nuclear war that made most of the Earth uninhabitable and woke up dragons - prehistorical creatures that caused an mass outbreak of a lethal disease that decimated the population and turned the survivors into scale-covered, violent mutants that rebel against the government.

Sophie, a young doctor working for her boss Amanda Solarin in a medical facility, accidentally meets an elderly woman, Emma, who miraculously recovered from the dragon plague, and whose blood could be the key to a vaccine. Saving Emma from government persecution, Sophie goes on the run with her.

Meanwhile, Erik Persson, a police officer, sets out to track Sophie and Emma, while suspecting that a mole might be hiding in the ranks of the police.

Sophie and Emma hide in the slums and after almost getting caught by the police several times they finally fall in the hands of the rebels; in her captivity, Sophie discovers that the plague survivors are not as irrational and violent as the press portrays them and agrees to work with them to develop a vaccine. She also discovers that some of the survivors have the ability to communicate telepathically with a dragon.

She meets the General, the leader of the rebels, whose name is Cain, and despite her fear for his terrifying looks and enigmatic personality, she is strangely attracted to him.

The Dragon Plague

After about a month, Sophie found herself to be the more or less official doctor of the island. She wasnt sure how it happened. 


Maybe Nadia had talked about how she had stitched up her back, or maybe James had been secretly encouraging the whole thing. In any case, a few days after the incident with Nadia and Karla, a number of people began to show up at James' house asking for medical help or advice. There were some who had had small accidents by working in the fields or with animals; others had some minor medical issue (those involving stomach and teeth were especially frequent; respiratory ailments seemed to be less common among the plague survivors).


At first Sophie could not say she was enthusiastic about this trend. She tried to send some of them away, saying that she couldnt help them, that she didnt know the way their bodies worked, that she didnt feel like it... it was useless. People just kept showing up.


Chapter 43