I press my ear to the door. His breathing is steady; the same slow rhythm I measured during the vitals check. The sedation isholding. But the voice is there, moving underneath it, and every instinct I have as a healer says this isn’t possible. But every instinct I have as a wolf sayslisten.
Most of the words are swallowed by the door. But the shape comes through, sentences, pauses, a rise and fall that follows a pattern. He speaks, stops, leaves space for an answer that does not come, then continues. The cadence is precise. Patient. The rhythm of a man explaining something and waiting for someone to understand.
I lower myself to the floor before I decide to.
The boards are cold through my pants. I sit with my back to the wall beside his door and my ear close enough to catch the sound. Closer, some words break through.
“…from the top. Watch your—”
Silence. Then a shift. A breath.
“…no. Lighter. Feel the weight, don’t—”
He’s…instructing someone. Like a teacher. Was he a teacher before this? I can’t reconcile that idea with the creature I’ve seen when he changes.
More silence. His voice drops, and I lose him for a while. When it rises again, the tone has changed. Harder. Not instructing anymore.
“No.” A sharp inhale, and then, “No!”
The anguish in it makes me want to rush in there, to soothe him, but I don’t. I shouldn’t even be here, dammit.
The voice comes again. “…faith has no mercy…”
The words are clear enough to make me press closer. Faith. Mercy. I don’t know what they mean. A prayer, maybe, from a man who has reason to doubt one. Or something else entirely.
He talks for a while longer. Not to me. Not to anyone in this building. To rooms that exist somewhere beneath the drugs—one where he teaches, one where he suffers. The two bleed together, as if he can’t tell the difference in his sleep.
And the more I listen, the more my body quiets. The tension I’ve been carrying since Greta’s list this morning—the names, the grief, the compound’s strained silence—all of it loosens. My breathing slows. My hands go still on the notebook in my lap. The ache in my neck fades to something I can ignore. It’s like sitting beside a fire you didn’t know was lit, heat you only notice when you realize you’ve stopped shivering.
It’s his voice.
It can’t be.
But I know it is. It’s his voice doing it. Some quality in the register, something below the words themselves. I don’t understand it. My body doesn’t care. My body saysstay.
I stay longer than I need to.
He goes quiet eventually. His breathing slows. The room settles.
When I finally stand, my knees are stiff and my back aches. I pick up the notebook and the pencil. I don’t open the door. I don’t touch the lock.
There is nothing to do tonight that will make a difference to anything.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
I go to my room and lie down in the dark with the notebook on my chest.
Dr. Fell.
Faith has no mercy.
Two fragments. One from Arden, one from a sedated man talking in his sleep.
I write them on the same page because I don’t know where else to put them. Dr. Fell is a person, or was. Someone attached to the thirty-series. Someone Arden remembered because even the staff spoke the name carefully.
The other phrase is harder. Faith has no mercy. A prayer, maybe. A warning. The broken edge of something he heard orsaid while the drugs dragged him through whatever room he was trapped in.
I don’t know if they connect.
