Siya didn’t remember kicking the door open. She only felt the sudden, sharp drop in air pressure as she and Marks stumbled into the old service corridor beneath Ward B. The concrete walls sweated moisture. Somewhere above them, the hospital was howling, the intercom system vomiting static that rose and fell like a chorus of wolves.They’d shut down the breakers. They’d killed every redundant feed they could find. But the hum hadn’t stopped, it had burrowed deeper. The power failure had only made it hungrier.Marks leaned against the wall, gasping. His flashlight beam cut through the dark in thin, panicked sweeps. Every few seconds, the beam caught flaking signs, rusted trolleys, the outline of an old gurney draped in a sheet that looked like skin in the strobe.“You okay?” Siya asked. Her voice sounded wrong in her own ears, tinny, hollow, echoing back too slow.Marks wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “No. You?”She didn’t bother to lie. She checked her phone — dead. The static from th

The sky cracked open above Groote Schuur just past midnight. The rain that had pelted Cape Town for days became a white sheet, thunder rolling so low and constant it felt like the city’s spine might snap. From the hospital’s upper windows, flashes of lightning turned the corridors into strobed snapshots — ruin, ruin, ruin — all caught between blinks.Siya stood at the old surgical annex’s entrance, soaked to the skin even inside. She’d just come back up from the relay chamber. The spiral hum was quieter for now, but she could feel it still, pulsing at the base of her skull like an infected tooth.Marks leaned against the doorframe next to her, sleeves rolled to his elbows, eyes sunken and hard. He held Khumalo’s scanner in one hand — it beeped and burped static every few seconds. He’d stopped flinching at the noise. Now he just listened, teeth clenched, like he was daring it to speak again.Thunder boomed so close it rattled the floors. Somewhere deep inside the hospital, the power gr

The storm over Cape Town hadn’t broken yet, but the sky churned like it wanted to peel itself open. Siya sat behind the wheel, knuckles white on the steering. The old departmental SUV rattled every time she hit a pothole on the back road out of the city.Marks was half-asleep in the passenger seat, his head resting against the window. Rain peppered the glass, but the hum in the hospital hadn’t stayed behind, it traveled with them, buried in the static of the radio they’d ripped out and thrown on the floor, yet somehow still bleeding through.Siya’s mind kept drifting back to the footage: the first resonance breach wasn’t an accident. Asanda’s lullaby hadn’t been a comfort song, it was a summoning, a key turned in the wrong lock.The wipers screeched over the glass, clearing only a smear of clarity. The road turned off into darkness, no lights for kilometers. Just an old sign, almost lost behind wild grass and rust: D:6 – Listening Post. Restricted Research Site.Marks lifted his head,

The old AV room smelled like burnt dust and stale air. Siya stood with her arms crossed, watching the projector stutter to life. The machine looked ancient, a relic from the era when everything about Groote Schuur had been hush-hush behind padlocked doors and redacted folders.Marks hunched over the reels, his hands steady despite the tremor that had crept in since they’d come back from the psychiatric wing. He threaded the brittle film through the projector’s teeth, squinting in the dim light.“Tell me again why we’re digging through thirty-year-old reels,” he muttered, voice dry but tight.“Because Rautenbach’s private archive didn’t just keep written files,” Siya said, her voice low. “He logged everything and the tapes he hid weren’t just records. Some of them were experiments they didn’t want anyone to see.”She flicked the wall switch. The overhead fluorescents died with a soft snap, plunging them into shadow. The projector threw its beam onto the cracked pull-down screen, flicke

Marks lay slumped against the wall, breath rattling like gravel in his throat. Siya held him there, feeling the tremors in his chest ease to a shudder. She wiped the blood from under his nose with her sleeve, her own hands shaking worse than his.He opened one eye, unfocused. “Still here?” he croaked.“You scared the hell out of me,” Siya said, voice rough. “You’re not dying today, you stubborn bastard.”Marks coughed, a raw, tearing sound. He pressed the heel of his palm to his temple. “What… what the hell was that, Siya?”She looked past him, at the blank monitor. Her own reflection stared back in the dead glass, wide eyes, hair matted to her forehead with sweat.“That wasn’t just an echo,” she said. “It’s feeding back on us, on you and pulling something out.”Marks tried to push himself upright but winced. Siya hooked her arm under his shoulder and braced him until he was sitting up, back against the cabinet.She forced herself to focus, to do what she did best, gather evidence eve