2025-06-27 12:55:38
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Chapter 35 - The Listening Post
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,
Chapter 34 - Split The Spiral
Siya’s hand shook as she punched in the code Khumalo had texted her hours ago, the override for the basement security door. She wasn’t sure what hour it was now. In the Deep, the clocks didn’t matter. Time bent here, stretched and echoed.Marks stood behind her, shifting his weight, torch balanced on his shoulder. He was sweating, though the corridor was ice-cold. The storm above still rattled the entire hospital like a dying heart.“Last chance to back out,” he said, voice tight but almost gentle.Siya just looked at him, eyes hollow but burning. “We didn’t come this far to run.”She pressed her shoulder to the door, pushed it open. The hinges screamed like an old wound tearing open.Rautenbach’s private archive didn’t look like much. A plain, windowless room under the old surgical wing, hidden behind a fake wall in the records vault. Most staff didn’t even know it was here. That was the point.Dust danced in their torch beams. The only sound was the hum in the walls, quieter down he
Chapter 33 - The Harmonic Rift
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
Chapter 32 - The City Hummed Back
The rain hadn’t stopped since they stumbled out of the hospital that night. Now, hours later, it fell in thin, slanted needles, drumming on the hood of the old city car they’d borrowed from Khumalo’s safehouse. Marks sat in the driver’s seat, engine off, the dash lights throwing pale blue across his tired face. Siya sat beside him, knees up, staring out the window at Groote Schuur’s looming bulk across the street.Neither had spoken for minutes. The building seemed to breathe in the dark — a single black lung exhaling static through every crack and window. Every so often, the old intercoms squealed. When they did, you could almost pick her voice out if you listened too hard.Asanda.Marks checked the coordinates again. Khumalo’s laptop glowed in his lap, a mess of maps and signal readouts. He dragged a trembling finger across the screen.“Every single radio tower in the city,” he said, voice raw. “Every one of these repeaters, even the private ones — all showing interference since the
Chapter 31 - It's Inside
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
Chapter 30 - The Hum Wants Them
Siya hadn’t slept in thirty hours. Maybe more. She couldn’t feel her phone buzzing anymore, Khumalo’s frantic updates, the precinct chatter, Marks’s low curses as he paced outside the car. None of it cut through the humming in her skull. It was everywhere now. Not just the walls of Groote Schuur or the dead speakers in the annex. It was out here, leaking under doors, drifting down streets, lodging in children’s throats. She parked the unmarked sedan outside a low, chipped building in Woodstock. St. David’s Haven for Children. The rusted sign over the door swung in the wind like a metronome. Inside, the matron, Mrs. Bester, met her at the threshold, eyes sunken, skin pulled tight as paper. “Detective Ndlovu, thank you for coming,” she whispered, like she was afraid the kids might hear her say anything too loud. Siya showed her badge, mostly out of reflex. “How many?” Bester didn’t answer right away. She just motioned for Siya to follow her down the narrow corridor that stank of old
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