2025-07-03 14:57:30
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Chapter 37 - Lost Footage
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
Chapter 36 - Between Frequencies
The rain hadn’t stopped by the time Siya and Marks pulled back into the Groote Schuur staff lot. The storm washed the world in cold neon. Every streetlight haloed in the downpour. Somewhere high in the wards above them, an emergency siren warbled on and off, but down here, the annex waited quiet as a grave.Siya stepped out into ankle-deep water. She could feel the vibration under her boots, the hum that hadn’t left her since they’d heard the boy at the Listening Post. The same note. The same spiral in her head. She wondered if it would ever stop.Marks fell into step beside her, shotgun hidden under his coat, shoulders hunched against the wind. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. The truth sat between them like a living thing: the hospital wasn’t just infected by the Spiral, it was the Spiral and Asanda’s voice was its pulse.They slipped through a side entrance near the old psychiatric wing, dark now, flooded in parts from the broken windows and leaky pipes. Each footstep ec
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
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