The hospital smelled of antiseptic and fear.
Elias sat in his narrow bed, scratching numbers into the paint of the wall with a broken pen tip. Patterns spiraled outward — prime numbers, musical scales, fractals blooming in chalky blue. Nurses whispered when they passed, calling him the calculator.
Elias wasn't insane. He just saw the world differently. Every heartbeat was a rhythm. Every voice was a frequency. Every movement in the corridor fit into an equation that only he could perceive.
They said he had Savant Syndrome. They said his gift came at the cost of normal life: he couldn't tie his shoes without help, but he could play an entire symphony after hearing it once. He couldn't remember to eat, but he could predict stock markets by listening to the hum of fluorescent lights.
Lately, though… the patterns had changed.
When the Catalyst Syndrome swept the city, patients across the wards began to collapse, mutating into something else. Elias was no exception.
One night, as he stared at the cracks on the ceiling, he realized they weren't cracks at all. They were coordinates. Numbers bled into his vision, glowing, arranging themselves into star maps. And for the first time in his life, he felt clarity instead of chaos.
His illness was no longer just a disorder. It was becoming an ability.
He could see the hidden design of reality itself.
The alarms began at 2:17 a.m.
Elias knew the time exactly, not because of the clock, but because the rhythm of the machines shifted. The ventilators and heart monitors sang in a different key — a minor chord, dissonant, trembling. He froze mid-scribble.
Something was happening.
The corridor outside erupted with shouts. Orderlies rushing. A gurney's wheels screaming across tile. Elias pressed his forehead against the cold door, listening.
> "Another Host— get restraints!"
"She's ossifying— her arm— oh God, it's bone!"
Elias's pupils dilated. He saw numbers ripple over the soundwaves, breaking apart into vectors. Each scream, each panicked footstep, became coordinates pointing toward one room: Ward C-12.
Then he heard it. A voice. Not words, not even language — but the resonance of pain, vibrating through the walls like an earthquake.
And suddenly, Elias saw her.
Not with eyes. With the pattern.
A girl in the next ward, her body tearing itself open, bone blooming from muscle like white fire. Aria.
He staggered back as the vision hit him. His chalky blue fractals on the wall twisted, rearranging into a human shape — jagged, armored, beautiful and monstrous all at once.
The door to his room burst open. A nurse stumbled inside, pale and shaking, fumbling with a syringe. "Elias, stay calm—"
He never heard the rest.
Because the world exploded into geometry.
Lines of probability bloomed in his sight: the angle of the syringe, the weak knee of the nurse, the trajectory of the sedative. In a flash, he knew what would happen: she would inject him, and in sixty seconds his mind would blur into static.
And if he lost clarity now, he would never understand the patterns.
He moved — awkward, clumsy, but precise. The syringe clattered to the floor.
The nurse gasped. "He… predicted me."
But Elias wasn't listening anymore. He was staring past her, past the walls, into Ward C-12 where Aria screamed. His equations spelled a single truth:
> She is the first. But not the last.