2025-06-06 09:18:07The Namib desert fell away in the rearview mirror, swallowed by the blood-orange horizon. Dust clung to the SUV’s windows like a skin they couldn’t shake. Siya sat in silence, eyes fixed on the recorder in her lap. It had captured the strange frequency still pulsing faintly from the underground dish. Not just noise, pshe was sure of it now. Something deeper. Something intelligent.
Marks drove without speaking, the long stretch of road winding back toward the South African border. It had been nearly a full day since they’d left the abandoned research station. Neither of them had slept.“What do you think they were trying to do?” he finally asked. “Out there, I mean.”Siya turned to him, voice hoarse. “Not trying. I think they succeeded, just not in the way they expected.”“Project Threnody.”She nodded. “Broadcasting something ancient. Or maybe inviting it.”Marks sighed and reached for the thermos between the seats. “And that ‘so
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Chapter 16 - Help Me
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 against
Chapter 15 - Risidual Harmonics
The speakers whined for a moment, then dropped into silence. The tone had ended. But the air still vibrated, subtly, like the room itself was remembering the sound. Siya’s skin prickled. She could feel something under her feet, like the hum of a far-off engine, pulsing through the tiles. Marks exhaled slowly, gun still drawn. “Tell me that was a power surge.” Siya didn’t answer, instead she stepped into the center of Ward E.W., past the threshold of the sound. The lights above buzzed back to life, flickering erratically, casting long, shifting shadows against the far wall. Then she heard that whisper again, it wasn’t loud or even clear, but there, at the edge of hearing. Marks turned his head sharply. “Did you hear that?” Siya nodded. “Yeah. It’s starting again.” They both stood still, listening. The whisper wasn’t in the room, it was inside the walls. A breath that moved from duct to duct, floor to floor. A voice with no throat, just tone and intent. All of a sudden the fire a
Chapter 14 - Just One Hotspot
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.W.”Kh
Chapter 13 - The Spiral Isn't Done
It had started to rain again by the time Siya reached the edge of Devil’s Peak. The sun was slipping behind the mountain, casting long shadows across the run-down building in front of her. The place looked abandoned, its paint peeling, windows taped up, and a rusted satellite dish sagging on the roof. It used to be a staff residence for Valkenberg’s extended network. Now, it was just another forgotten place tied to the ghosts of the Threnody Project.She tightened her coat and knocked, there was a long pause, then the door creaked open. The man who stood in the doorway looked like he hadn’t left the flat in years. His grey hair stuck out in tufts, skin was pale, and his eyes were deep-set and twitchy. Hestudied her like she was a trick of the light.“You’re Siya Ndlovu,” he said, not a question. “You’ve heard it, haven’t you? The sound under the hospital.”She nodded.He stepped aside and motioned her in without another word.The inside was dim, cluttered, and smelled like old metal a
Chapter 12 - She's Singing
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 si
Chapter 11 - The Humming Silence
Cape Town woke to sirens and silence.Detective Siya Ndlovu stood over the third body in as many days, her gloves slick with dew, the early morning chill clawing at her spine. The victim lay sprawled across the cracked pavement outside a convenience store in Woodstock, mouth agape, eyes wide with terror, and blood leaking from both ears.The spiral was drawn in arterial red beside the body. Precise. Ritualistic. Just like the others.Marks crouched nearby, examining the dried trail of crimson along the concrete. “No signs of struggle,” he muttered. “No forced entry. Just dropped dead. Ears blown out. Same spiral.”“And the same witness,” Siya added, nodding toward a trembling man wrapped in an emergency blanket. “Said he heard humming right before it happened.”She turned to the forensic tech. “We need to swab his ears. Fast. If the pattern holds, anyone nearby is at risk.”The tech nodded and moved in, but Siya’s focus lingered
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