Aisle of Shadows
The first thing Ben registers is the smell: cardboard, cold concrete, and beneath it, faint and chemical, something sweetish that makes his stomach lurch before his mind can even name it. Chloroform, maybe. Or some pharmaceutical cousin of it. His thoughts arrive in fragments, like a radio signal cutting through static, and for a long moment he simply lies there, cheek pressed to the floor, trying to remember how to be a person.
Pain announces itself next — a deep, pulsing ache at the base of his skull, radiating down through his neck into his shoulders. He doesn't move. Eight years of training have carved a single rule into the deepest part of his brain: before anything else, assess. Don't thrash. Don't groan. Don't give away that you're awake.
He listens.
Somewhere close, a few feet away, he hears breathing — labored, uneven, too fast. Human. Not his own. A second heartbeat in the dark.
Ben opens his eyes to blackness so complete it takes a moment to understand he isn't blind. Then, low along the floor, he catches it: a thin red smear of emergency lighting, the kind that only kicks on when a building loses main power. It paints the edges of shelving units in dull crimson,…
