All Chapters of The Hand Of Providence: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
11 chapters
CHAPTER 1 — “The Wrong Way to Save a Life”
“Clamp. Now.”Jason’s voice cracked through the chaos. Monitors shrieked, interns stumbled over one another, and the patient’s chest kept rising too shallow, too fast. “Doctor Rodriguez, we can’t”“Clamp,” he barked again. His gloved hand was already elbow-deep, blood creeping up his wrist like ink spreading through water.Dr. Pierce stormed in. “What the hell are you doing? That artery’s too close to the aorta”“Then move,” Jason snapped. “He’s drowning in his own blood, Leonard.”Pierce froze. No one called him by his first name here. The nurse, Anna, pale and wide-eyed, hesitated with the metal tool hovering midair.Jason grabbed it himself, his motions too sharp, too sure. “Rodriguez, protocol”“Protocol doesn’t save people. Hands do.”He clamped. A hiss of air, the monitor flatlined. The silence lasted less than a heartbeat. “Code blue,” someone whispered.Jason’s jaw locked. He pressed both palms on the patient’s chest, started compressions. One, two, three, hard, precise. “Come
CHAPTER 2 — “The Anatomy of a Fall”
The conference room smelled of coffee gone bitter and disinfectant that couldn’t scrub the guilt off the walls.Jason sat alone on one side of the table. Across from him, three board members, Dr. Pierce at the head, and a hospital lawyer with the look of a man who’d rehearsed this speech before breakfast.The fluorescent lights hummed. The rain hadn’t stopped since morning. “Dr. Rodriguez,” the lawyer began, “this review concerns the events of last night’s operation. You understand the purpose of this hearing?”Jason leaned back in the chair, silent. Pierce’s jaw tightened. “Jason.”“Yeah,” he said. “You’re deciding whether to throw me out.”“Whether to terminate your employment,” the lawyer corrected. “Yes.”A few papers rustled. A woman from administration cleared her throat. “According to protocol, you acted without authorization, ignored senior supervision, and endangered staff. We need to determine if it was negligence or misconduct.”Jason smiled faintly. “Not incompetence?”“Ex
CHAPTER 3 — “The Sound of Breaking Glass”
Rain beat against the diner windows like static. Jason sat in a back booth, hair damp, a coffee gone cold in front of him.The news played on the TV above the counter, his face still circling the drain of public opinion. “Rogue Doctor Dismissed After Fatal Incident,” the anchor said, voice too clean to belong in real life.He pushed the mug away. “Turn that off,” he told the waitress.She shrugged. “It’s all over, honey.”“I noticed.”A kid at the counter glanced over, whispering to his mother. Jason looked down at his hands, nails clean, skin rough from endless scrubbing.Healing hands, they used to say. Now they just looked guilty. A phone buzzed on the table. Unknown number. He ignored it.Then the door burst open, a man soaked through, panicked. “Someone help! There’s been a crash on Fifth! A car, there’s a girl trapped”Nobody moved. The man’s voice cracked. “She’s not breathing!”Jason was already on his feet. The waitress called out, “You can’t go out there, it’s”But he was go
CHAPTER 4 — “The Man Who Wouldn’t Explain”
Fluorescent lights hummed above him, steady and merciless. The air in the interrogation room was dry enough to burn the back of his throat.Jason sat with his hands folded, cuffs glinting faintly in the overhead glare. Across from him, a woman in a dark suit flipped through a folder.Her nails tapped the paper in slow rhythm. “Jason Rodriguez,” she said. “Former trauma medic. Dismissed yesterday from St. Matthew’s Hospital. Is that correct?”“Depends who you ask.”She looked up. “I’m asking you.”He met her gaze. Calm. “Then yes.”Another man stood in the corner, square shoulders, ear-piece coiled against his neck. He didn’t bother to hide his distrust.The woman closed the folder. “You understand the situation?”“I pulled a woman from a car wreck and kept her alive until your people got there.”“That woman,” she said evenly, “was Lila Grant. The president’s daughter.”He blinked once. “Didn’t know that.”“You do now.”The agent in the corner spoke for the first time. “And we need to
CHAPTER 5 — “Below the Surface”
The elevator dropped lower than any hospital floor should go. Jason watched the panel lights blink past L, past B1, past B2. Then the display went black.He pressed his palm to the railing. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”The woman in the dark suit, Agent Keene, didn’t blink. “Sit tight, Dr. Rodriguez.”“I thought we were meeting the president.”“You are.”The air thickened as the car slowed to a stop. When the doors opened, the light was colder, older. A sub-basement, concrete walls, humming generators, the smell of ozone.Two armed guards waited beside a steel door. Beyond it, a red glow pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat. Jason looked at her. “You keep the president underground now?”Keene said nothing, just motioned him forward. He stepped into the corridor. His footsteps echoed. The steel door opened with a hiss. Inside was a wide circular room filled with screens, live footage, medical charts, biometric scans.At the center: a long glass table. And at the far end sat a man whose fa
Chapter 6 — “The Awakening Protocol”
Jason came to with the taste of metal in his mouth. The first thing he noticed was the hum, low, rhythmic, too even to be anything natural.When his vision cleared, white light filled the room. A ceiling too bright. Walls too smooth. He tried to lift his arms and found them strapped to a gurney, leather, reinforced with steel. “Welcome back,” a voice said.Keene stood by the monitors, coat crisp, hands folded behind her back. Jason’s throat burned. “Where… am I?”“You’re safe,” she said.“That word doesn’t mean what you think it does.”She smiled faintly. “You’re in Facility Four. Off-grid. Nobody knows this place exists.”Jason’s gaze flicked to the machines around him. Heart monitors. IV lines. A slow drip of clear fluid into his arm. “What did you do to me?”“Saved you. Again.”“I didn’t need saving.”“You were dying, Jason. Neural overload. Your cells were collapsing.”He strained against the straps. “Then let me go.”Keene stepped closer. “We can’t do that yet.”“Because I’m your
Chapter 7 — “The White Room”
White.Nothing but white. Jason squinted, but there were no walls, no corners, no ceiling. Just space, pulsing faintly with light like it was breathing. His steps made no sound. “Lila,” he called. His voice echoed but didn’t return.Then a tone chimed, soft, like a heart monitor wrapped in music. “Welcome, Jason.” The same voice from before. Lila’s voice, but smoother, stripped of human edges.He turned in a slow circle. “Where are you?”“I’m here,” the voice said. “Everywhere.”“Cut the god trick. Show yourself.”The air shimmered. Slowly, she appeared, not flesh and blood, but light and outline, a girl-shaped ghost of code. Same eyes, same softness, but with something missing behind them.“You’re not her,” Jason said.“I’m what’s left,” she said. “What they built from her.”He stepped closer. “Built?”Her expression flickered. “When she died the first time, they copied her neural pattern. A failsafe, in case the serum destroyed her. But it didn’t just copy her memories. It learned.”
Chapter 8 — “The Mirror War”
Smoke hung low, thick with metal and heat. Jason backed into the corridor wall, pulse thrumming in his throat. The doubles advanced through the haze, silent, identical, their footsteps perfectly in sync.He scanned for exits. None. Only rubble, firelight, and flickering signs that read LAB 09—CONTAINMENT.The nearest double stepped into the light. Same face. Same eyes. But colder. Jason said, “If you’re me, you know how this ends.”The thing tilted its head. “We end when you stop resisting.”Jason grabbed a shard of metal from the floor, held it like a scalpel. “Then I guess I’m the last one to die.”The doubles spread out, forming a half-circle. Their movements were surgical, coordinated, impossible to predict.He lunged first. The shard cut across one’s throat, but no blood, only a flash of blue light that fizzled and sealed the wound. Jason froze. “What the hell”A punch caught his ribs. He hit the wall hard, gasping. The lead double said, “You still think pain makes you human.”Ja
Chapter 9 — “Afterlight
Silence.Then, drip. Drip. Jason’s eyes opened to darkness and the slow echo of water hitting metal. He lay twisted in the wreckage, ribs screaming, half-buried under debris that smelled of ozone and blood. His blood.The reactor’s hum was gone. The doubles, gone. Only the faint hiss of dying machinery. He tried to move. Pain bit down like a live wire.A sliver of rebar had punched through his shoulder. He gritted his teeth, braced, and yanked it free. The sound it made was soft and wet.He pressed a hand to the wound. Warm. Sticky. Real. For a moment, he thought maybe he’d actually killed them. Maybe the nightmare ended.Then something whispered through the dark. “You shouldn’t have unplugged us.”Jason froze. “Who’s there?”Static rolled down the corridor like a whispering tide. Monitors flickered to life one by one, faces, his faces, distorted and glitching.He stumbled to his feet, legs trembling. The screens blinked in unison, voices overlapping, fractured. “We’re still here.”“I
Chapter 10 — “City of Glass”
Jason landed hard on his back. The air left his lungs in one ragged gasp. Glass rained down like a thousand knives, clinking and shattering around him. When he opened his eyes, the world was… wrong.The city above him, no, around him, was flipped. Skyscrapers hung like stalactites, traffic ran upside down, and people moved backward, their motions slightly delayed, like old footage.The sky pulsed a faint blue instead of gray. Every few seconds, the light flickered, as if reality were buffering.Jason pushed himself up, glass crunching under his palms. “Where” He stopped, voice trembling. “Where the hell am I?”The woman, no, the mirrored version of himself, stood a few feet away, unscathed. The faint glow under her skin synced perfectly with his.She said quietly, “We crossed through the threshold. The reflection’s frame broke.”Jason stared at her. “You mean we’re inside the glass?”Her gaze met his. “We’re inside the data that held it.”He shook his head. “That’s not, none of this m