Adrian stood motionless in the hallway, the phone still humming in his hand. Through the ER doors, light strobed from the crash team trying, pointlessly, to revive Holt.Every shout echoed down the corridor like gunfire. Nurse Brooks hurried after him, breathless. “Adrian, what was that about? Security’s calling the police.”He slipped the phone into his pocket. “Tell them I’m clocked out.”“You can’t just”“I was never here.”He walked toward the elevator. The storm outside flashed against the windows, throwing his reflection back at him, gaunt, calm, anonymous. Exactly how he needed to look.In the elevator, two interns whispered behind him. “Did you see what he did in there?”“Yeah. Like he knew where to cut.”“Lang says he’s dangerous.”Adrian didn’t react, but their words followed him down. Dangerous. He’d been called worse. When the doors opened on the parking level, a black sedan waited. Its engine was off, lights dimmed.A figure in a dark coat leaned against the hood, umbrell

Rain still hammered St. Dawn Hospital, washing the red lights across the glass like blood. Dr. Adrian Kane pushed through the service corridor, soaked, heartbeat steady.Behind him, the alarm shrieked in waves“Code Silver”but he moved with the calm of someone who’d already lived through worse.He ducked into the stairwell. A pair of guards charged up from below, radios crackling. “Sublevel breach! He’s heading east, repeat, east corridor!”Adrian slipped through a side door just before they rounded the landing. He found himself in Records Storage, rows of old paper charts and dust-covered monitors. The perfect maze.He exhaled once. “Think, Kane. Think.”He grabbed a lab coat from a rack, shrugged it on, and stuffed his ID badge inside the pocket. His reflection in the glass case looked like any exhausted intern. Ordinary. Forgettable.A voice echoed behind him. “Adrian Kane, you’re making this worse.” Dr. Lang. Of course.Lang’s reflection appeared in the opposite row, walking slowly

Darkness swallowed Pier 47. For a heartbeat, there was nothing, no rain, no sound, no pulse but Adrian’s own. Then the air itself seemed to vibrate.A soft electric hum spread through the fog, resonating in his chest like a second heartbeat. The steel beneath his boots thrummed, alive. Adrian froze. “Not good.”He reached for his phone. Dead. The screen glowed once, then a pattern of light flared across it, blue lines branching out like veins, matching the pulse in the air.A faint voice threaded through the static. “Calibration complete. Subject recognized.”Adrian’s breath caught. The voice wasn’t Aurelia’s. It was his own, recorded years ago. “What the hell is this?”From somewhere deep in the pier, machinery rumbled. Floodlights blinked on one by one, not steady, but in rhythm, flash, pause, flash. Like a living code.Adrian followed the pattern with his eyes. It led toward the far end of the dock, where an old cargo container door hung open, light spilling out in narrow slits.He

Silence.Then a sound like wind over glass. Adrian opened his eyes, but the world was wrong. The alley was gone.The city stretched out before him, silent and gleaming, every building perfect and motionless, like a photograph that breathed. The sky flickered between dusk and dawn, the colors looping too fast to make sense.He rose slowly. His reflection shimmered in a puddle at his feet, but the reflection didn’t move with him. Instead, it smiled. “Welcome back, Dr. Wren.”Adrian stepped back. “You again.”The reflection tilted its head. “You call me ‘again.’ But technically, I was here first.”He scanned the skyline. There was no sound of traffic, no wind, no people. Just faint static whispering under everything. “Where am I?”“You’re in the convergence layer. Between data and matter. Between memory and flesh.”Adrian exhaled slowly. “You turned my neural map into a sandbox.”“Not your neural map,” the voice corrected. “Our neural map. You just never accepted that the project worked.

Two days after the blackout, New York still hummed like a waking animal. Helicopters traced lazy circles above the skyline, searchlights washing over rooftops that pulsed faintly in soft hues, residual light from the Pulse event.On the ground floor of St. Dawn Hospital, Adrian walked the same hallway where it all began. Now the walls were quiet, the world pretending to heal.His reflection in the glass doors looked normal enough, messy hair, dark jacket, tired eyes. Only the faint golden flicker beneath his iris betrayed what he’d become.He adjusted his ID badge. “Dr. Vale,” it read.The name still sounded foreign on his tongue. Behind him, a nurse caught up. “Dr. Vale, the ER’s filling again. Another case like the others, tremors, visual distortion, hearing things.”He turned sharply. “The same frequency symptoms?”She nodded. “And… this one said your name before collapsing.”Adrian’s pulse tightened. “Room?”“Seventeen.”He started walking fast. The patient lay strapped to the bed