The silence didn’t end. It throbbed. A held breath stretched so long it became painful. Siya lay on the cold concrete, eyes open, lungs burning, unable to tell whether she was breathing or simply remembering how. The world felt paused mid-vibration, like a record needle lifted but still humming with momentum.Then sound crept back in. Not the Choir. Not the Conductor. Human sound.Marks coughing. Ragged. Close.“Siya… Siya, can you hear me?”Her fingers twitched before her voice returned. The hum inside her chest was still there, quieter, restrained, like a predator crouched in tall grass.“I’m here,” she whispered. The words scraped her throat raw.Light flickered overhead. Emergency strips along the chamber walls pulsed weakly, throwing fractured shadows across collapsed equipment and fractured Cantor rods. The Array was still standing, its crystals dimmed but intact, humming in a low, unstable register.Marks was kneeling beside her, face streaked with dust and blood she didn’t re

For a long moment after the Conductor named her, nothing else happened in the way people expect something to happen. There was no explosion, no sudden lunge, no catastrophic rupture that could be neatly described. Instead, the world thinned. It thinned around the edges of the chamber, around the frame of the observation window, around the lines of Marks’s shoulders and the sharp angles of the console. Reality did not break so much as grow porous, as though the hospital were holding its breath and forgetting, for an instant, how to be solid.Siya did not move her hand from the glass. The pressure beneath her palm remained constant, not forceful, not gentle, simply present, like the steady weight of a tide that never receded. Inside her chest, the hum had changed its quality. It was no longer something that vibrated against her ribs. It lived deeper now, threaded through muscle and bone, woven into her pulse. Groote Schuur was no longer breathing in slow, measured draws. It was breathin

For several long seconds after the trolley wheels fell silent, none of them moved. The open doorway behind them remained empty. Beyond it, the corridor stretched away beneath harsh fluorescent lights, as ordinary as every hospital passage they had crossed that night. Yet nothing about Groote Schuur felt ordinary anymore.Siya's eyes drifted back to the monitor. The faded blueprint still filled the screen: Original Foundation Level. Do not excavate further. It is not beneath the hospital. The hospital was built above it. Those words had settled somewhere deep inside her, refusing to let go. Months ago she had believed she was investigating a surgeon's murder. Then she thought she was exposing Project Threnody. Now, standing beneath the oldest part of the hospital, she realised both investigations had been leading here.Someone had hidden the truth long before Cantor. Long before Project Threnody. Long before Dr. Alex van Wyk had died trying to uncover it.Marks holstered his pistol wit

Marks was the first to notice the drawing. It was so faint that, at first, he mistook it for a water stain spreading across the old plaster behind the reception desk. He had moved away from the lift and was examining the wall because something about the construction had bothered him since they entered the annex. The lower half had been painted several times, but the upper section had been left untouched, and where the paint had cracked, thin dark lines showed beneath it.He raised his flashlight. “Siya.”She looked over from the counter. “What?”“Come here.”There was nothing urgent in his voice, but she had learned to recognise the difference between Marks asking her to look at something and Marks asking her to look at something that had already begun to trouble him. She crossed the room. The beam of his flashlight moved slowly across the wall. Beneath the peeling paint was a network of lines drawn directly onto the plaster. Some had faded almost completely. Others were still dark en