The corridor outside Herik's room felt strangely heavier after the doctor left. It was not simply the weight of worry pressing upon Juson's chest, nor was it the exhaustion that had settled into his bones since the previous evening. Something about the hospital itself had changed. The long white hallway seemed unusually silent despite the movement of nurses in the distance. The ceiling lights glowed steadily overhead, yet the brightness somehow failed to push away the uneasiness that lingered around every corner. Juson remained standing beside the small glass panel fixed into Herik's door, staring through it without blinking. Inside, machines surrounded the unconscious child, each one performing its duty with calm precision. Their monitors blinked steadily, their soft electronic beeps rose and fell in perfect rhythm, and the oxygen mask fogged gently with every weak breath Herik managed to take. Everything inside that room looked exactly as it should. It should have reassured him. Instead, the normality disturbed him far more than the chaos that had brought them there.
His thoughts refused to settle. Every time he closed his eyes, fragments of the previous twenty-four hours resurfaced one after another. The maid dissolving into dust before his eyes. The strange particles chasing him through the darkness. Herik touching them without understanding what they were. The impossible glow that had appeared inside the boy's eyes afterwards. The silent dust lying motionless across the roof of his car. The mysterious paper that had found its way onto his windshield. Every memory seemed disconnected on its own, yet somewhere beneath the surface they were beginning to form a pattern he could almost recognise. He wanted to believe it was coincidence. He wanted desperately to believe that every strange event could still be explained by logic. Yet each new incident pushed that hope a little further away.
Behind him, hurried footsteps echoed along the corridor before slowing to a stop. Juson turned and saw Yokina approaching, her breathing uneven from rushing through the hospital. Her phone remained clutched tightly in one hand, though it looked as if she had forgotten she was even holding it. Her face had lost what little colour remained after Herik's collapse, and her eyes carried a confusion deeper than fear itself. She stopped in front of him for several seconds without speaking, struggling to steady her breathing before finally forcing the words out.
"Something's wrong with Hakiten."
The sentence barely reached above a whisper, yet it struck Juson with surprising force. His eyebrows drew together immediately. "Slow down," he said gently. "What happened?"
"I don't know everything," Yokina replied, shaking her head as if even she couldn't organise the information she had just received. "Wanna called me... she sounded frightened. She only said something happened to Hakiten and asked if anyone had seen you. Please... go to her house. Ask her yourself."
For several moments Juson simply stared at her. The name alone unsettled him. Hakiten had already occupied far too much of his thoughts that day after it had slipped unexpectedly into his classroom lecture. Now, hearing it again only hours later felt less like coincidence and more like someone deliberately placing another piece onto a board he could not yet see. His instincts told him that whatever had happened to Hakiten had nothing to do with ordinary illness or bad luck. Somewhere inside him a quiet certainty continued growing that Herik, Hakiten, the maid, and the impossible dust all belonged to the same invisible chain.
He released a slow breath and placed one reassuring hand upon Yokina's shoulder. "Stay here with Herik," he said quietly. "I'll go and find out what's happened."
Normally Yokina would have argued. She would have insisted on going with him or questioned why he believed leaving the hospital was a good idea. This time she only nodded silently. That frightened him almost more than her words had. She looked completely drained, as though every strange event since yesterday had quietly worn away her ability to resist anything anymore.
Juson turned and began walking toward the hospital exit. His footsteps echoed softly across the polished floor while nurses passed him carrying files and pushing medical trolleys. The ordinary routines of the hospital continued around him, yet everything felt strangely distant, almost unreal, as though he had stepped half outside the world everyone else still occupied. Halfway down the corridor the fluorescent lights above him suddenly flickered once. Then again. The brief interruptions were so small that most people would likely have ignored them entirely, but Juson stopped instinctively. He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. The lights steadied almost immediately, burning with perfect brightness once more. He remained still for another moment before continuing, though a quiet unease now followed every step.
Near the reception desk, an elderly woman stood holding a telephone receiver against her ear. She frowned impatiently before lowering it and pressing it back again, repeating the motion several times. "It's not working," she muttered to herself, tapping the cradle with increasing frustration. Juson slowed slightly as he passed. Something about the silence surrounding that corner of the corridor immediately felt wrong. Hospitals were never truly quiet. Machines hummed constantly. Conversations drifted between rooms. Telephones rang. Shoes squeaked across polished floors. Yet for one brief instant, every ordinary sound seemed to disappear completely, leaving behind only an uncomfortable emptiness that pressed painfully against his ears.
Then, without warning, the telephone rang.
The shrill sound shattered the silence so abruptly that both Juson and the woman froze where they stood. She stared at the receiver in confusion before answering it almost automatically. At the exact same moment, the overhead lights steadied completely, their earlier flickering vanishing as though it had never happened. Voices from nearby rooms gradually returned. A trolley rattled somewhere down the corridor. Footsteps resumed. Everything became ordinary again within seconds.
Juson remained standing there a little longer.
His heartbeat refused to slow.
He could not explain what he had just experienced, but every instinct inside him insisted it had been real. The silence. The lights. The impossible timing of the telephone. None of it felt accidental. It was as though something unseen had briefly reached into the hospital, disturbed reality itself for a single moment, then quietly withdrawn before anyone except him had truly noticed.
Without another word, he continued walking until the automatic glass doors opened before him. Cool evening air greeted him as he stepped outside. Cars moved normally along the road beyond the hospital entrance. People spoke quietly beneath the building lights. Everything looked exactly as it should. Yet the strange pressure inside his chest refused to disappear.
Something had begun moving.
He still didn't know what it was.
But deep inside, he could already feel that it had no intention of stopping.
---
Inside Herik's room, Yokina remained standing beside the hospital bed long after Juson had left. The rhythmic beeping of the monitors seemed louder now that she was alone, each electronic pulse reminding her that the machines were doing work her own hands could no longer do. Transparent tubes disappeared beneath blankets, soft lights blinked steadily across the monitoring equipment, and the oxygen mask covered nearly half of Herik's small face. He looked peaceful, yet that peace felt painfully artificial, preserved by medicine rather than sleep.
Yokina slowly stepped closer until she stood beside the bed. She wanted nothing more than to take his hand, to reassure herself that he was still there, still warm, still her son despite everything that had happened. Tears gathered silently in her eyes again as she looked down at his motionless face. "Oh, honey..." she whispered, her voice trembling under the weight of helplessness. Her fingers slowly extended toward his hand, moving almost instinctively.
"Please don't touch him."
The doctor's calm voice interrupted her before her fingertips could reach Herik's skin.
She froze immediately, pulling her hand back as though she had almost committed some terrible mistake. The doctor approached quietly, glancing once at the monitors before returning his attention to Yokina. "Let the machines continue their work," he said gently. "Any unnecessary disturbance could interfere with his recovery."
Yokina nodded without arguing, though every instinct inside her wanted to ignore the instruction and hold her child anyway. She stepped back obediently, wiping another tear from her cheek. Neither she nor the doctor noticed that, at the very moment she withdrew her hand, Herik's tightly closed fist relaxed slightly. For the briefest fraction of a second, a faint blue circular mark shimmered beneath the skin of his palm. The glow appeared so softly that it could easily have been mistaken for reflected light before disappearing completely, leaving behind nothing to suggest it had ever existed.
The nurses prepared to move Herik to another room for further observation. They unlocked the wheels beneath the bed, checked the monitoring equipment one final time, and slowly began pushing it toward the doorway. The wheels rolled smoothly across the floor, producing a faint metallic rattle that echoed through the otherwise quiet room. As the bed moved only a short distance, Herik's fingers twitched once. The heart monitor responded immediately, its steady rhythm jumping sharply upward with a loud electronic warning that caused everyone inside the room to look toward the screen.
Then everything went dark.
Without warning, every light inside the room vanished simultaneously.
The monitors fell silent.
The steady electronic beeping disappeared.
The oxygen machine stopped hissing.
For one impossible instant, the entire hospital seemed swallowed by absolute darkness.
Yokina's frightened breath caught inside her throat as she instinctively reached toward where Herik's bed should have been, unable to see anything around her. Outside the room, doctors and nurses stepped into the corridor in confusion as emergency lights failed to activate. The entire building had been consumed by a silence so complete that it felt unnatural.
Inside the darkness, unnoticed by everyone else, Herik's eyelids slowly lifted.
His eyes opened only slightly.
Deep within them, a faint blue glow emerged, shining quietly like distant light trapped beneath frozen water.
The glow lasted no more than a second.
His eyelids closed once again.
When the lights finally returned moments later, Herik appeared exactly as before.
Still unconscious.
Still motionless.
As though nothing at all had happened.