The rain pelted down on Cape Town like nails, drumming hard against the windows of the Groote Schuur records room. The air was heavy with mildew and old dust, each breath a mixture of forgotten paper and time. Detective Marks sat hunched over a metal desk, eyes bloodshot, shirt clinging to his back with sweat. He hadn’t left the archives for hours. He flipped through another manila folder, its tab labeled: "Project Osiris – Neurological Observations, 1993-1997." “Come on,” he muttered, fingers smudged with ink. “Where are you?” Behind him, Siya stood with her arms crossed, fatigue in her eyes but fire beneath her calm. “You think we’re chasing phantoms?” she asked. Marks didn’t look up. “No. I think we’re finally finding the roots.” He pulled out a stapled set of charts. “Sleep latency data. REM response tracking. All tagged ‘OSR’—which I thought was a side project.” He laid them out. “But look, I've cross-referenced patient IDs. Every single one of them has a note: Referred from

The recorder sat on the table like a loaded gun. Siya stared at it, heart tapping an anxious rhythm in her chest. She’d isolated the low-frequency tone from Asanda’s waveform earlier that morning, sitting in Khumalo’s cluttered lab while the city outside began to stir with another day. She hadn't told anyone yet, not even Marks, what she planned to do next. "You're really going to test it?" Khumalo asked, eyebrows raised. "I need to know what it does," Siya said quietly. "The signal’s inhuman, yes, but Asanda responded to it. If there's any chance it connects us to her again, I have to try." Khumalo hesitated. “We’ve seen what happens when people listen to this stuff too long. That technician who disappeared? He was hearing it for hours. Left the lab muttering about shadows with mouths.” “This will be controlled,” Siya said, forcing calm into her voice. “Short burst. Specific location.” “And where exactly are you planning to test it?” She looked up at him, face serious. “Ward E.

The rain had returned, soft and steady, drumming against the windows of Groote Schuur as if echoing the pulse of something hidden beneath. Siya stood with Marks and Khumalo outside the surgical wing, the building’s old stone facade slick with water. A maintenance map from the 1960s, dug up by Khumalo the night before, hinted at a now-sealed basement level beneath this very wing. One that wasn’t listed in any recent hospital schematics. “Looks like the original plans included a lower chamber,” Khumalo said, holding the crumpled blueprint beneath his jacket to keep it dry. “But it was decommissioned, or at least that’s the official story.” “Or repurposed,” Marks muttered. “Like everything else here.” Siya adjusted her flashlight and nodded. “Let’s find out.” They entered through a side corridor, past unused surgical theaters and storage rooms thick with dust. The deeper they went, the more the atmosphere changed. It wasn’t just the cold, it was the silence. The kind that pressed agai

The sound came first. A low, almost imperceptible vibration threaded through the hospital walls, so faint at first, it could be mistaken for the rumble of the old boiler or the aftershock of a distant helicopter, but it grew. By morning, staff across Groote Schuur’s east wing were reporting the same thing: patients humming. Different wards. Different conditions. But the same sound. A flat, atonal drone that didn’t rise or fall. Just pulsed, over and over again. Siya stood just outside Ward D3, clipboard tucked under her arm, trying to ignore the chill that crawled across her skin. From inside the closed room, she could hear it, dozens of voices, humming in unison. Low, guttural, directionless. It sounded like a choir gone wrong. Marks joined her, his face pale and tight. “Fourteen patients across five wards. All started in the last six hours.” “Same tune?” Siya asked. He nodded. “If you can even call it a tune. It doesn’t follow any known musical pattern. Khumalo’s running it thr

The lights in the hospital archives still flickered from the earlier surge. A low hum clung to the walls like mold, subtle, barely audible, but enough to keep Siya on edge as she descended into the temperature-controlled vault beneath the admin wing.She’d told no one she was coming down here. Not even Marks. If what she suspected was true, then this was about more than Asanda. It was about her. About them.She ran her badge across the sensor. The vault door clicked, groaned, and finally creaked open. Inside, the fluorescent lights buzzed to life, sluggish and pale.The filing system was mostly digital now, but legacy records, those too sensitive or too old to trust to servers, were still housed in sealed, alphabetized drawers. She headed to the row marked “N.”Ndlovu.Her fingers hovered for a moment before pulling the drawer open. Inside were two patient folders.One was her sister’s. The other… her own.She hadn’t known this existed. Her only medical file should’ve been standard, r