Chapter 116: The Lower Ward

Astrid Vale

I couldn’t stop turning it over in my head. A man had transformed in front of an entire crowd, had bitten his own son, had been dragged away by soldiers who moved like they’d rehearsed the exact sequence a hundred times before. And then, hours later, nobody remembered any of it. Not his wife. Not his son. Not a single stranger who’d stood close enough to watch.

I told myself there had to be some explanation that didn’t involve losing my own grip on reality. Maybe their memories worked differently down here, some side effect of the curse I didn’t understand yet. Maybe some kind of magic had smoothed it over for everyone but me. But every time I circled back to an explanation, I landed on the same detail. The doctor’s face, that flicker of recognition and concern the moment I’d mentioned the feral man. He knew something. I was certain of it.

He came to check my wrists that afternoon, the bruising from the restraints still faintly visible along the skin. He was polite in a way that felt almost rehearsed, asking whether I was eating properly, sleeping well, whether I’d felt any dizziness since the blood draw.

"What did you do with my blood?" I asked, watching his face carefully.

He paused, just barely, before answering. "Routine analysis."

"Do you take blood from everyone who comes from the surface?"

"Yes," he said, too quickly for it to sit right with me.

Before I could push further, a nurse appeared in the doorway and murmured something to him I couldn’t quite catch. His entire posture shifted, the careful ease dropping away into something tighter, more urgent.

"Excuse me," he said, already moving past me, and I watched him go, deciding almost without thinking that I was going to follow.

I waited long enough that it wouldn’t look obvious, then trailed after him at a distance, staying close enough to keep him in sight without drawing attention. The bright, clean sections of the medical ward gave way slowly to something quieter, narrower corridors with fewer windows and fewer people, the number of guards increasing the further I went.

Eventually I reached a heavy door with no ordinary signage on it at all. Instead, a symbol had been carved directly into the stone beside the frame, unfamiliar but not entirely unlike something I’d noticed before. I stared at it, trying to place where, and then it clicked. The tray in my examination room. The one Dr Audrey had used for my blood sample. Something about the shape matched.

I pressed myself against the wall as two soldiers approached from the opposite direction, dressed in equipment I didn’t fully recognize, heavier than their usual gear. They were escorting someone between them, and I couldn’t see the person’s face, only their feet dragging uselessly against the floor as the soldiers half carried them forward.

Then came the scream. Not human, not entirely. Something raw and animal that scraped straight through me and pulled the feral man’s face back into my mind instantly.

The soldiers forced the person through the heavy door, and it shut behind them with a sound too final for comfort. I took a step toward it before I could stop myself, my hand almost reaching the frame, when something slammed against the other side hard enough to make me jump back. Another howl followed, then silence, thick and complete.

I stood there for a long moment, my pulse hammering, before another group appeared from a side corridor. These carried sealed containers between them, medical in appearance, and through the clear paneling I could see the dark red contents sloshing gently with each step. I didn’t let myself leap to any dramatic conclusion. I simply wondered, watching them move toward that same restricted door, why anyone would carry blood toward a place where people were apparently being locked away.

Then one container passed close enough for me to catch the symbol printed on its side.

It matched the marking beside the door. And it matched, close enough that my chest tightened uncomfortably, the same shape I’d glimpsed on the tray that held my own blood sample days ago.

I backed away slowly, my mind racing faster than I could organize it, and walked directly into someone standing behind me.

The doctor.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t call for guards. Somehow that made it worse.

"You shouldn’t be here," he said quietly.

"I was looking for you," I said, the lie sounding thin even to my own ears.

He didn’t bother arguing with it. He simply stepped past me and pulled the door to the restricted corridor fully closed, sealing off whatever remained on the other side.

"What’s in there?" I asked.

"Patients," he said.

"Why do they need guards?"

"Some patients are dangerous."

I thought of the father instantly. "Is that where you take people when they become feral?"

He didn’t answer that directly. "There are things about our society you don’t understand yet."

"Then why did nobody remember what happened to him?" I pressed. "Why did the boy have no bite? Why are people locked behind doors nobody talks about?"

He was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally spoke, his voice had lost some of its careful neutrality. "Some things are better left alone."

"You were brought here because you were found unconscious," he said, before I could argue further. "You are safe. Don’t make yourself unsafe by looking for answers you aren’t prepared to hear."

"Is that a warning?" I asked.

"It’s advice," he said, and something in the way he said it made it impossible to tell whether he meant it as protection or as fear of his own, fear of whoever stood above him in whatever this was.

"I’ve already learned that nobody here answers questions properly," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment, something almost sad settling into his expression. "You’ve survived things most people wouldn’t," he said.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

He turned and started walking away instead of answering, and I followed a few steps before he spoke again without looking back.

"Go back to your room, Astrid."

I stopped cold. I hadn’t told him my name, not once, not in this conversation. I told myself it didn’t mean much, not really, since Maximus and everyone connected to him already knew exactly who I was. Still, hearing it fall from his mouth unprompted settled somewhere cold in my chest.

I made my way back to my room slowly, my mind refusing to let go of any of it. The howl. The soldiers. The blood containers being carried toward that guarded door. And underneath all of it, the doctor’s strange, almost gentle warning, delivered like he genuinely wanted me safe even as he refused to tell me why any of this existed at all.

I looked down at the faint mark still visible on the inside of my wrist from where the needle had gone in days earlier, and something settled into place with quiet, unwelcome clarity. My blood hadn’t simply been analyzed and discarded the way he’d claimed.

It had gone somewhere. And now I’d seen exactly where blood went once it left that clinic.

I didn’t know yet what any of it meant, whose blood filled those other containers, or what waited behind that locked door beyond the sounds I’d already heard. But for the first time since arriving here, I understood that whatever this place actually was, it wasn’t built around hospitality at all.

It was built around something they needed. And I was starting to suspect I might be part of it.