Page 103 of Somno Slave

Then his eyes flick to me. “Just observe his vitals.”

He reaches for his jacket. The movement is reluctant, like he’s not fully convinced he should be leaving.

“I’ll only be gone a few hours,” he says. “If anything changes, you call me.”

Mike nods. “Yeah. We’ve got it.”

Peter hesitates. His mouth opens slightly, then closes again. He drags a hand down his face, trying to force something sharper back into place.

“Alright,” he mutters. “See you in the morning. Sean, be back in at five.”

Sean hums his approval. He busies himself tidying up—stacking paper cups, cramming empty biscuit wrappers into one another. The soft shuffling noise irritates me more than I care to admit.

The door shuts behind Peter and Sean.

Mike moves around behind me, pulling out a chair and dropping into it with a low exhale. He clicks through the monitors, bringing up vitals, the steady rhythm of data.

A soft chime follows.

“There we go,” he murmurs. “We’ll get alerts if anything shifts. No point staring at it the whole time.”

I don’t respond because I am staring at the glass.

The longer I look, the worse it gets. My eyes keep trying to find something to settle on, something to interpret as shape or movement, but there’s nothing to catch. Just that same heavy, uninterrupted black. It presses back like it knows I’m looking.

I shift in my seat.

“I knew that this was going to be dull,” Mike says. He reaches down into his bag, hand moving to find something. He pulls out a small book. “I brought entertainment. Do you mind if I read?”

“Go for it.”

He props his feet up before I even finish my sentence, body reclined immediately. His ankles hook over the other. “Thanks.”

The cover catches my eye first. It’s pale, faded, a kind of washed out colour with a circle in the middle. It’s so faint that it almost disappears when I blink. The title sits small and neat across the centre:you were always a part of this.

Mike turns another page. I risk another glimpse at the book, and he notices. He looks up at me and smiles. “Have you read this one before?”

I shake my head. “What’s it about?”

He unhooks his ankles and leans forward.

“It’s a horror story about a little girl who goes crazy and murders a whole town.” His eyes seem to light up. “It’s brilliant. You have to read it.”

I grimace. “I don’t read horror.”

This earns me a lopsided grin.

“Let me guess, you get enough at work, right?” He taps his temple. “That’s the beauty of it. I always see it coming.”

He laughs. “If nothing else, it at least helps the time go by quicker here. Although, I must admit, it does make me a little jumpy.”

“I bet,” I smile.

Mike glances past me, toward the reinforced door, then back down at the book. He doesn’t turn the page this time.

“Though it’s funny what sticks with you on cases like this.” His thumb rubs the edge of the page. “Some scenes...they just don’t leave you. You know? Kind of like reading about it, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”