The doors opened onto darkness.
Gray's flashlight cut a thin blade through the black, illuminating a reception area that had been torn apart by panic and time. Chairs lay overturned, their frames twisted as if wrenched by desperate hands. Papers scattered across the floor - admission forms, discharge instructions, the mundane bureaucracy of a world that no longer existed. A skeleton lay half-hidden behind the reception desk, its bones still clad in the tattered remains of scrubs, one arm extended toward a phone that would never connect again.
Elias stepped over the threshold first, his movements controlled despite the tension that Gray could see in the set of his shoulders. Mina followed, her flashlight sweeping the walls, her face already pale in the artificial glow. Gray came last, pulling the heavy door closed behind them, sealing out the gray morning light.
The silence inside was worse than the silence outside. It pressed against his ears like water, thick and suffocating, broken only by the soft crunch of debris beneath their boots. Gray's pattern-sight reached into the darkness, and what it found there made his breath catch.
The threads in this place were not merely tangled. They were knotted - twisted around themselves in configurations that seemed almost deliberate, as if someone had taken the fabric of reality and tried to tie it into shapes that would hold. The knots pulsed with that same agitated rhythm he'd sensed from outside, but here, close enough to touch, he could feel something else beneath the agitation.
Pain. The threads were saturated with it.
"Stay close," Elias murmured, his voice barely above a whisper. "We check the emergency department first - that's where the critical supplies would have been. Then we work our way up."
They moved deeper into the hospital, their flashlights carving paths through the darkness. The corridors stretched before them like arteries in a vast corpse, branching and rebranching into darkness that seemed to swallow light itself. Gray kept his pattern-sight active, watching the threads that ran along the walls, the floor, the ceiling, searching for any sign of the creatures that had become their constant fear.
What he found instead was worse.
The first body appeared in a doorway, slumped against the frame as if resting. It was a woman, or had been - her features were frozen in an expression of exhaustion rather than terror, her arms wrapped around a clipboard that she'd apparently been carrying when she died. Gray's flashlight revealed no wounds, no signs of violence. She had simply... stopped.
"There's another one," Mina said quietly, her voice strained. Her light had found a shape further down the corridor - a man in a hospital gown, lying on the floor as if he'd fallen asleep and never woken up.
And another. And another.
They found them everywhere. In the halls, slumped against walls or sprawled across the floor. In patient rooms, still lying in beds that had become coffins. In nursing stations, still seated in chairs as if waiting for a shift that would never end. All of them frozen in attitudes of rest or work, their faces calm, their bodies unmarked by violence.
It was the care that broke something in Gray's chest.
These people hadn't died in panic. They had died trying to save others. He could see it in the way the bodies were arranged - a nurse still holding an IV bag, a doctor with his hand extended toward a patient, a pair of orderlies frozen mid-transfer, a body on a gurney between them. They had worked until the end, until whatever had killed them had finally claimed them too.
"What happened here?" Elias asked, his voice hollow. His flashlight moved across a surgery theater where an entire team lay scattered around an operating table, their patient still draped and prepped for a procedure that would never happen. "There's no sign of attack. No creatures. No wounds. They just... died."
Gray's pattern-sight offered an answer he didn't want to voice. The threads that ran through the bodies were frayed, their ends trailing off into nothing, as if whatever had sustained them had simply... withdrawn. He'd seen similar patterns in the creatures they'd encountered, in the way reality seemed to bend around certain places, but never on this scale, never with this kind of systematic finality.
"Exhaustion," Mina said, and her voice was barely audible. She had stopped in the doorway of the surgery theater, her hand pressed against the frame, her face ashen. "Not physical exhaustion. Something deeper. They gave everything they had trying to help people, and when there was nothing left to give..." She trailed off, shaking her head.
Gray moved to her side, his pattern-sight reaching for the threads that ran through her. They were trembling, vibrating with a frequency that matched the hospital's oppressive pulse. She was feeling it - whatever had killed these people, she was feeling its echo in her bones.
"We should keep moving," he said quietly. "We can't help them."
Mina looked at him, and in her eyes he saw something that made his throat tighten. She wasn't looking at him with accusation or anger. She was looking at him with grief - a grief so profound that it seemed to age her, to strip away the softness that had made her seem younger than her years.
"They died anyway," she whispered. "All of this - the work, the sacrifice, the hope - it didn't matter. They couldn't save anyone. They couldn't even save themselves."
Elias appeared at her other side, his expression unreadable in the flashlight's glow. He reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder, a gesture that seemed both natural and calculated.
"We can't save everyone," he said, his voice steady. "But we can save ourselves. And maybe, if we find what we need here, we can save others too. That's what they would have wanted."
Mina didn't respond, but she didn't pull away from his touch either. She simply stood there, her hand still pressed against the doorframe, her face pale, her eyes fixed on the bodies that surrounded them.
Gray watched the touch - Elias's hand on Mina's shoulder - and felt something twist in his chest. It wasn't jealousy, exactly. It was something older, something more primal. A sense of being outside, of watching from a distance while others connected in ways he couldn't quite reach.
He didn't examine it. He didn't want to know what it meant.
---
The emergency department had been stripped clean.
Someone - the staff, probably, in those final hours - had gathered the most critical supplies and moved them to a central location. Elias found the cache in a supply closet near the ambulance bay: antibiotics, bandages, surgical tools, even a few bottles of morphine that had survived the chaos. He began sorting through the materials with methodical efficiency, his hands moving with the practiced ease of someone who had prepared for disaster long before it arrived.
Gray stood guard at the door, his pattern-sight sweeping the corridors for any sign of threat. The threads here were less dense than in the surgery wing, their knots looser, their pulse weaker. Whatever had saturated this place with pain seemed to have spared this corner - or perhaps had simply been exhausted before it reached this far.
Mina had wandered deeper into the department, her flashlight bobbing as she moved through the examination rooms. Gray tracked her progress through the threads, watching the way they responded to her presence. They seemed to reach toward her, he noticed. Like plants bending toward light.
He found her in a room at the end of the corridor, standing over a bed where a small shape lay beneath a thin blanket. Her hand was extended, her fingers hovering just above the fabric, and her face was twisted with an emotion he couldn't name.
"Gray," she said, and her voice cracked. "Come here."
He crossed to her side and looked down at the bed. The shape beneath the blanket was a child - maybe six or seven years old, her face peaceful, her body small and still. She looked like she was sleeping. She looked like she might wake up at any moment, rub her eyes, and ask where her parents were.
But the threads that ran through her were empty. Frayed. Gone.
"She was sick," Mina said, her voice barely a whisper. "Something internal - I can feel where it was, the wrongness that was killing her. But someone tried to help. Someone used their hands, their energy, to push back against it." She pulled her hand back as if burned. "It wasn't enough. They couldn't save her. But they tried. They tried so hard."
Gray didn't know what to say. He had no words for this - for the weight of failed hope, for the tragedy of effort that wasn't enough. He had seen death before, had caused it even, but this was different. This was the death of people who had done everything right and still lost.
Mina reached out and gently pulled the blanket up to cover the child's face. Her movements were slow, reverent, like she was performing a sacred rite. When she turned to face Gray, her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
"How do we keep going?" she asked. "How do we keep trying when this is what it leads to?"
Gray thought about the question. He thought about Lira, about the threads he'd seen in her final moments, about the way hope and despair had tangled together until he couldn't tell them apart. He thought about the cold-water sensation that had kept him alive, the pattern-sight that showed him truths he didn't want to see.
"I don't know," he admitted. "But I think... I think we keep going because the alternative is to become like this." He gestured at the walls around them, at the hospital that had become a tomb. "We keep going because if we stop, we're just another body in the dark."
Mina looked at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she nodded, once, and moved past him toward the door.
"Let's find what we came for," she said. "And let's get out of this place."
---
They gathered what they could carry.
Elias had found a wheeled gurney in the ambulance bay, and they loaded it with supplies - antibiotics, bandages, surgical tools, painkillers, even a portable defibrillator that might still work if they could find a power source. The haul was better than Gray had expected, enough to sustain them for weeks if they were careful.
But as they prepared to leave, Gray's pattern-sight caught something at the edge of his perception. A thread that was different from the others - not frayed, not knotted, but... alive. Moving with a rhythm that didn't match the hospital's oppressive pulse.
It was coming from above them.
"There's something on the upper floors," he said, his voice low. "Something alive."
Elias's hand moved to the knife at his belt. "Creature?"
"I don't think so." Gray focused, pushing past the migraine that had been building since they'd entered. The thread was thin, weak, but it had a quality he recognized from his own pattern - a complexity that the creatures lacked. "It feels... human. Or close to it."
Mina had gone still. Her hand was pressed against the wall again, her face pale with concentration. "There's someone up there," she confirmed. "I can feel them. They're scared. They've been scared for a long time."
Elias looked at the gurney, then at the dark stairwell that led upward. Gray could see the calculation in his eyes - the weighing of risk against reward, the measuring of their resources against the unknown.
"We check it out," Elias decided. "Quickly. If it's a trap, we retreat. If it's a survivor..." He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
They left the gurney by the ambulance bay and climbed the stairs into darkness.
The thread grew stronger with each step, its pulse more distinct, its pattern more complex. Gray could feel it now - not just the presence of life, but the shape of it. Fear. Hunger. Exhaustion. And beneath all of that, something that might have been hope, fragile as a candle flame in a windstorm.
They emerged onto the pediatric wing, and the thread led them forward, through corridors decorated with faded murals of cartoon animals and stars, past rooms filled with small beds and smaller bodies, toward a door at the end of the hall that stood slightly ajar.
Gray's pattern-sight reached through the gap, and what it found there made his breath catch.
A boy. Maybe twelve years old. Curled beneath a desk in the corner of the room, his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes fixed on the door with an intensity that felt like recognition.
And behind him, visible only as a faint shimmer in the darkness, a thread that stretched upward through the ceiling, through the floors above, through the very sky itself - connecting this boy to something far away, something bright, something that pulsed with a rhythm that matched the building storm outside.
Gray's migraine surged, and for a moment, he saw it clearly: a thread of light that seemed to tie this small, frightened child to something vast and distant and utterly beyond his understanding.
Then the pain crashed over him, and the vision dissolved into static.
"Gray?" Mina's voice, concerned. "What is it? What do you see?"
He forced himself to focus, to push past the pain. The boy was still there, still watching them, still frozen in that attitude of terrified recognition.
"There's someone in there," he managed. "A child. He's alive."
And something else, he thought but didn't say. Something I don't understand. Something that might be important.
Elias moved toward the door, his hand extended, his voice soft and reassuring. "Hello? Can you hear me? We're not going to hurt you."
The boy didn't respond. He simply watched, his eyes tracking Elias's movement, his body coiled tight as a spring.
And in the darkness behind him, the thread that connected him to something far away pulsed once, twice, three times - like a heartbeat, like a signal, like a call that only Gray could hear.