The elevators didn’t go to the psychiatric wing anymore. At least, not officially.The old ward, P.W.3, had been closed for nearly fifteen years after a fire in the electrical core made it unsafe. It was supposed to be sealed. Disconnected from the grid. But Siya had followed the signal anyway.She stood at the rusted gate now, flashlight in hand, the hinges creaking from her touch. Beyond the threshold, the corridor smelled of scorched insulation and mildew. Long-dead fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead without flickering. No electricity. No backup generator. And yet… the lights were on.She glanced over her shoulder. Marks was back in Records, pulling medical files linked to Threnody’s Phase III. Khumalo was tracing the encrypted coordinates they’d found in the waveform. For once, she was alone, but not by accident. Something had drawn her here.It began with a feeling: pressure behind her ears, like the world was pressing inward. Then came the distant hum. Not electrical. Not mechani

The service elevator groaned like it hadn’t moved in decades. Metal scraped against concrete as it descended, floor after floor, past where any map of Groote Schuur ended. The lights inside flickered as the last numbered level blinked out, and the floor display shifted to nothing but a dash.Marks adjusted the strap on his shoulder, tightening the grip on his sidearm. “How many floors are there?”Siya stared at the blinking dash. “Officially? We’re already beneath them.”The elevator thudded to a stop. No chime. Just a hiss of old hydraulics giving out.Beyond the open doors everything was pitch black. The flashlight beam cut through layers of dust and mildew, revealing cracked tile underfoot and exposed wiring overhead. The air was still, but too still, like the entire floor was holding its breath.Marks stepped forward first. “This doesn’t look like a ward. Looks more like a bunker.”They passed through the threshold. Sound shifted. No echo. Just the soft shuffle of boots and the fa

Siya came to with her cheek pressed against cold metal. Her breath fogged the floor in front of her nose. For a moment, she thought she’d drowned, the air so thick it felt like water in her lungs. Somewhere far off, she heard a single, low hum. Familiar now. The Spiral’s heartbeat.She pushed herself up, hands trembling. Her flashlight lay beside her, flickering its dying beam against a rusted wall. She turned to see Marks laying sprawled a few feet away, his shoulder wedged up against a half-buried pipe. His eyes were open but unfocused, pupils flicking side to side like he was dreaming with them open.“Marks,” Siya croaked, voice raw. “Hey. Hey! Wake up.”She crawled over, grabbed his jacket front, shook him once, twice. His lips moved before his eyes did.“Too... loud,” he mumbled. “It’s too loud in here.”She slapped his cheek, gentle but firm. “Focus on me. We’re still in the annex, or under it. Do you hear it?”Marks’s eyes blinked back to her, glassy but there. He nodded, pushi

The rain had turned the hospital’s back courtyard into a swamp of puddles and dripping floodlights. Siya stood under the broken overhang near the annex entrance, her coat soaked through, the hum vibrating in her teeth. Marks was next to her, eyes fixed on the metal service door ahead, where they’d last seen the corridor swallow itself in flickers of static.Behind them, Dr. Louw and what was left of his old Project Threnody team huddled around a battered crate of equipment. Nobody was wearing a proper lab coat, most of them looked like they hadn’t seen daylight in days. Pale faces. Raw eyes. They spoke in clipped murmurs, moving with the frantic calm of people trying to fix a leaking boat while already underwater.Louw pulled off his cracked glasses, wiped them dry on his sleeve, then turned to Siya and Marks. “We have one shot at this,” he said. His voice rasped, heavy with exhaustion and that dry, bureaucratic edge that never quite left him. “The magnetic dampeners, if we get the ar

The security office in Groote Schuur felt like a tomb. Flickering monitors cast ghost-light across the tired faces of Siya, Marks, and Khumalo. The hum of the annex still throbbed at the back of Siya’s skull, but here, under buzzing fluorescent strips, the nightmare almost felt contained.Almost.“Play it again,” Siya said, voice raw.The head of hospital security, a stocky man named Daniels, nodded. His finger jabbed the worn keyboard, and the feed rewound. Grainy footage flickered across the main screen. The timestamp: 02:17 AM. A hallway near Ward E.W., lights dim, no movement at first, but then static and a skip in the feed. The corridor warped for half a second, pixels twisting into noise.And there it was, a shape. Human, but not. Faceless, smooth where a mouth and eyes should be, head cocked at an unnatural angle like it was listening for something inside the walls. Its form flickered in and out, each pulse matched with a faint, reversed hum, like tape run backward.Siya leaned