The hymn was the only thing Nala could hear through the thick, chemical fog in her brain. It was a soft, distorted recording playing from a speaker hidden somewhere in the white-tiled ceiling. How marvelous, how wonderful... The words were sweet, but the context was poison. It was the song her mother used to sing in the gardens of Dodoma, a memory that should have been a sanctuary but was now being used as a surgical tool to peel back her sanity.
Nala tried to move her hands, but the leather restraints were gone, replaced by cold, magnetic clamps that locked her wrists to the sides of a high tech medical chair. She wasn't in a warehouse. She was in a cathedral of glass and steel, deep beneath the city.
"You’re fighting the rhythm, Nala," a voice said.
She forced her eyes open. The man s
