The hospital gates groaned, the heavy iron bars shivering as if reacting to Elian’s proximity. As they stepped onto the manicured gardens, the once-pristine lawns were now littered with discarded neural patches, their synthetic fibers matted with morning dew. The silence here was thick, heavy with the weight of five hundred minds trapped in a waking nightmare of forced re-integration.
Elian did not speak. His eyes, burning with that unnatural violet hue, scanned the architecture not as a man, but as a diagnostic tool. He saw the hospital as a series of cascading logic gates.
They are already at sixty percent capacity, Elian said, his voice dropping into a register that made Sarah flinch. Thorne has diverted the remaining power from the city’s water grid to the ICU. He is turning their br
