Subject Zero-Nine
The rain hadn't stopped since Tuesday. Lia felt it in her boots before she saw the Aster Institute rising out of the mist, a long gray slab of a building crouched behind a chain-link fence and a row of dead sycamores that no one had bothered to replace. She badged through the outer gate, then the second one, then the thirdβeach door swallowing a little more of the outside world until she couldn't remember what fresh air smelled like at all.
Inside, the fluorescent lights buzzed a thin, sourceless hum, the kind that burrowed into the base of her skull after an hour and never quite left. The corridors of Sublevel Two were the same as they'd been the night before, and the night before that: pale green walls scuffed at gurney height, the floor tiles yellowed at the seams, doors marked with numbers instead of names. Ward C. Ward D. The smell of antiseptic layered over something else, something animal and old that the bleach never fully erased.
She passed the nurses' station, where Devon was hunched over a paper cup of vending-machine coffee, dark circles bruising the skin beneath his eyes.
"Long one already?" she asked.
"They brought in a new subject two hours ago," he said, notβ¦
