The world had started to hum. By the time Siya and Marks returned to Cape Town, the sky itself was vibrating, low, constant, everywhere. Streetlights flickered in rhythm, the pulse running through the city’s veins like blood. Radios blared static shaped into faint melodies, voices whispering from behind the interference.News feeds were useless. Every global broadcast was looping fragments of corrupted footage, emergency anchors speaking in voices that warped mid-sentence, faces blurring in concentric rings. Satellites bled spiral artifacts across the atmosphere.The hum had gone planetary. Groote Schuur loomed like a skeleton on the hill, its windows black, its walls faintly alive with the same inner pulse. Siya stood in the courtyard beside Marks, both of them watching the hospital’s outer structure ripple as though breathing.“Power grid’s dead,” Marks muttered, scanning the horizon. “City’s in partial blackout from here to the harbor. We’re running on backup.”Siya barely heard hi

The world had begun to hum. By dawn, every city on the continent was vibrating at measurable decibel ranges. The air itself trembled. Windows quivered without wind. Dogs wailed for no reason. Static bled through every radio frequency, forming faint, recurring tones, the same harmonic signature Siya had been tracking for months. Only now, it wasn’t confined to Groote Schuur. It was everywhere.Siya sat in the back of the military convoy speeding through an evacuated Cape Town. The city was a mosaic of distortion, sirens bending mid-tone, streetlights pulsing in slow rhythm. The hum wasn’t just sound anymore; it had become architecture, a living infrastructure.Rautenbach, pale and sleepless, monitored the readings from a handheld scanner. “It’s happening globally,” he said. “The frequencies are synchronized between major metropolitan nodes. Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Cairo, all producing the same waveform.”Marks glanced out the window. “So you’re saying the whole damn continent’s singi

The world had not ended, not exactly, but by dawn, it had cracked. Cape Town lay in fractured resonance zones, streets where voices warped mid-sentence, intersections where the air shimmered like heat over tar. The dead hummed beneath the ground, a low vibration that shook sewer grates and rippled through storm drains like something restless trying to sing its way back up. Siya moved through what had once been the hospital perimeter, now a jagged border of collapsed concrete and twisted railings. Groote Schuur’s ruins no longer stood still. Shingles trembled. Steel beams quivered as if straining toward an unheard note. The entire structure was listening. “Don’t go ahead of me,” Marks whispered behind her. His voice vibrated in two tones, his own and a faint harmonic shadow. “This zone’s unstable.” Everything was unstable. Everything was singing. Siya reached out and touched a broken wall. It vibrated under her palm, slow and steady, like a mechanical heartbeat. Not sound, intenti

The stairwell vibrated beneath Siya’s shoes. A low tremor rolled up the concrete steps as though something massive exhaled beneath the hospital. Siya steadied herself with one hand on the wall, the brass plate still warm in her other palm.Marks checked the landing door ahead, his hand hovering over his gun. “We need to get topside. Whatever that thing is doing down there, it’s accelerating.”Siya swallowed the metallic tang in her mouth. “It knows us. It knows me.”“And we’re leaving before it decides to use you as a microphone again.” His voice was firm, but his eyes betrayed the same dread pulsing in her chest.They pushed into the corridor.It was empty, not even the distant shuffle of nurses or the rolling wheels of gurneys echoed through the hall. Just the lingering vibration that made the ceiling lights tremble in their mounts.A sound cut through the hallway, not loud or violent, but rhythmic.Lub-dub.Lub-dub.Lub-dub.Siya froze mid-step.“Marks… do you hear that?”He frowne

For a long moment, Siya drifted in weightless darkness. No sound. No breath. No pain. Then, something cold brushed the back of her neck.A tone. Not a noise, not a hum, a tone, pure and impossibly sharp, like a thin blade made of singing metal. It sliced through the darkness, and the world around her cracked open.Light bled through the fractures.She blinked, and found herself standing in a vast, hollow version of Groote Schuur Hospital. Except, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t even a memory. It was the resonant echo of Groote Schuur, floating, trembling, formed from translucent lines of vibrating light. The corridors pulsed like throats. Floors rippled like struck tuning forks. Every surface flickered between matter and frequency, as though the building itself were mid-breath.Siya stepped forward, and her foot didn’t make a sound. No echo. No friction. The airless quiet pressed on her skull. A pressure so suffocating it felt like the silence was listening.Her throat tightened. “Marks?” s