Hurt - Atalia
Honeymonster
The first thing I register is what isn’t here.
No smoke.
No heat.
No burnt metal or cordite.
That’s wrong.
Places like this don’t empty quietly unless something interrupted them mid-thought. Evacuation leaves a smell. Panic leaves a mess. This place smells like bleach layered over iron and nothing else – like someone tried to clean and didn’t have time to finish.
We’re ahead of Seytan at least. If she’d found this place, she would have razed it to the ground and we’d be standing amongst nothing but burning embers and ash right now.
That’s got to count for something, right?
We split without talking. Habit. Nightshade takes point. Valentine hangs back. Bones angles right. Ghost drifts left, already listening for things the rest of us can’t hear. Snow stays close enough to be annoying. Hatchet ghosts the rear.
I peel off down a narrow side corridor marked MONITORING and OBSERVATION, the kind of words people use when they don’t want to say control.
The lights hum overhead. Too steady. Too calm.
The door at the end is ajar.
Inside, the air changes.
Antiseptic first. Then blood – not fresh, not old. Clinical blood. Measured. The kind that means procedures, not violence. That tightens something in my chest I don’t give a name to.
Banks of monitors line the wall. Most are dark. A few are still running, green lines crawling over black backgrounds like the place hasn’t realised it’s dead yet. A chair lies on its side, one wheel still turning faintly.
Someone left in a hurry.
I step closer to the screens. Vital signs. Oxygen. Temperature. A couple read zero. A couple are frozen mid-curve, as if someone pulled the feed without shutting the system down properly.
One flickers as I pass.
STATUS: ACTIVE
My stomach drops.
Active doesn’t mean alive. Not in facilities like this. It means in use.
I look away before my head fills in what the word implies.
There’s a clipboard on the counter. Paper. Old redundancy. I flip it open with two fingers.
Sedation protocols.
Restraint durations.
Handwritten notes, sharp and irritated.
Subject remains resistant to compliance.
Increase isolation time.
