The morning sun struggled to pierce the murky hospital windows, casting a dim, yellowish glow over the second-floor dormitory. The fluorescent lights above flickered lazily to life. The students stirred to the hum of a bell, not a traditional one, but sharp and mechanical, like a warning more than a greeting.
Finn was already awake, seated at the corner desk with a steaming cup of bitter hospital coffee. His notebook was open, his handwriting tidy and rapid, recording thoughts from the night before.
"Unmarked sublevels. Undisclosed labs. Security protocols for something beyond patient care."
He underlined the words twice, thinking about the floor plan he'd glimpsed during their tour. There were inconsistencies, wings labeled in the staff map that didn't exist on the copy they'd been given. Most notably: Sublevel 4 and the West Wing corridor that ended with a reinforced red door.
Edward, meanwhile, yawned dramatically and rolled out of bed, nearly crashing into Jonah, who was brushing his teeth with zombie-like exhaustion. "Did you guys hear that sound last night?" he asked no one in particular. "Like... a scrape? Maybe a cart being dragged across the floor?"
"Could've been your snoring," Jonah replied dryly, mouth full of toothpaste. "Sounded like a dying raccoon."
"I'm being serious. It was creepy."
Franklin chuckled from his bunk as he pulled on his jacket. "I heard it too. Probably just the janitor cleaning the halls with a machete."
"Franklin," Eve scolded, buttoning her coat. "Can you not?"
Finn glanced up. "What if it wasn't staff?" They all paused.
Rika, who had been quietly tying her shoelaces, looked up with calm eyes. "There's something not right with this place," she said softly.
The comment drifted across the room like a chill. No one could argue.
After breakfast in the silent, too-clean cafeteria, where the food tasted like it had been boiled in hospital air, the students were given a basic rundown of their duties. Jonah, Eve, and
Williams were assigned to Patient Observation. Franklin and Edward were given data entry roles in the Records Office. Rika and Finn, listed as shadow interns, were told to report to Dr. Hess for a general lab orientation.
But Hess was late.
Finn checked his watch. "She's twenty minutes behind schedule."
Rika stood beside him in the hall near the central elevator, gazing out a window that overlooked a loading bay. A truck was parked there, unmarked, dark, and unusually reinforced. Men in biohazard suits carried a sealed crate toward a hidden service entrance.
"Finn," she said. "Do you trust this place?" "No."
"Then let's see what's past that red door."
Finn turned to her, surprised. Rika never took the lead. She was usually passive, observant and quiet. But something had changed in her tone. It was steady. Decided.
He didn't hesitate long.
They slipped away from the main corridor and moved toward the Restricted Wing, the area they'd passed during the tour with retinal scanners and coded locks. It was empty now.
The hallway stretched in silence, lined with overhead lights that buzzed faintly. The hum was almost hypnotic.
The infamous red door stood at the end.
Finn walked up to it and crouched, inspecting the access panel. "This requires a six-digit code. Probably rotates every few hours. Military-level encryption. But…"
He pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and ran his fingers along the outer casing. "There's a panel loose here. Might be able to bypass the current lock, if the emergency battery override is still active."
Rika glanced nervously down the corridor. "You can do that?"
"I think so. I watched a lot of tech lectures."
Just as he reached for his penlight to probe the circuit board, a voice thundered behind them.
"Hey!"
They turned sharply.
A man in black scrubs stood a few feet away, broad- shouldered, his eyes hard beneath a buzzed head. His name badge read Dr. Alvin Kross, though the tension in his posture suggested he wasn't just a physician.
"What do you think you're doing?" he demanded.
"We—uh—sorry," Finn stammered. "We got turned around looking for Dr. Hess—"
"Don't lie to me," Kross barked. He stepped forward, filling the hallway with his presence. "You're not authorized to be anywhere near this door. Do you know what kind of risk you just took?"
Finn swallowed. "We didn't open it."
"Intent is enough," Kross growled. His voice dropped, but it didn't become any less threatening. "You don't get it, do you? You kids think this is some kind of school field trip. That you can poke around where you don't belong and not suffer the consequences."
Rika took a step back. "We're sorry. It won't happen again."
Kross's jaw clenched. Then he tapped his ID badge to a sensor on the wall. A camera clicked, and a second, hidden panel slid shut over the red door, completely sealing it off.
"This is your one and only warning," he said. "Next time you come this close to a restricted area, I'll have you pulled from the program. Permanently."
With that, he walked away, his footsteps echoing long after he disappeared.
Finn exhaled slowly. "Okay. So that guy is definitely not just a doctor."
"Security, maybe," Rika said. "Or something worse."
They returned to the others in silence.
When they arrived at the Records Office, Franklin raised an eyebrow. "Where've you two been?"
"Getting yelled at," Finn muttered.
Edward looked up from a stack of folders. "By the guy with the shaved head? He's terrifying. He barked at me this morning because I leaned against the lab door."
"I think he's watching us," Rika whispered.
The students grew more reserved as the day went on. Eyes flicked toward cameras. Hallways seemed more twisted. Nurses barely spoke to them. One even avoided eye contact completely. And when Finn passed an internal monitor near the elevator, he caught a glimpse of something he couldn't explain: an alert log showing Containment Breach: Subject X- 15 – Status: Dormant – Level 5.
There was no Level 5 on the hospital tour. No one spoke of it.
No one dared ask.
By the time they returned to their quarters, the atmosphere had changed. Orientation had dissolved into anxiety. The hospital felt less like an institution and more like a trap, each hallway a web, each locked door a silent threat.
That night, Rika sat at the edge of her bunk, staring at the ceiling.
Finn scribbled in his notebook: "They're hiding so
mething alive."
And below it, he wrote one more word: "Danger!."