Nora Vanderbilt's life takes a mysterious turn when a near-death experience grants her extraordinary abilities, catching the attention of the enigmatic Dr. Hunter Aloysius Percy. Invited to join an exclusive research study on NDE survivors, Nora is...
In an instant, Nora inhaled sharply, the air feeling too sharp, too cold. Her senses returned in a rush, like waking from a heavy sleep, but everything around her felt unfamiliar and unsettling. She blinked, adjusting her vision as her surroundings came into focus.
She was standing in the doorframe of a large, white room, with expansive windows letting in the harsh light of a sterile daylight. The room looked clinical, almost clinical in its cleanliness. The walls were white, the floor bare and shiny, the lighting harsh and unforgiving. The space felt disconnected, alien. The air smelled like antiseptic, the kind of smell that made her skin crawl.
Before her, several people were slowly beginning to wake up. They were sitting in a loose circle, some of them still slumped forward, as though they had just been yanked from a dream.
Homer, Hap, Renata, Rachel, and Scott. It was them—all of them. But something was wrong. Something about their eyes, their faces, felt different. As if they had been woken from a deep, unnatural sleep, confused, like they were starting to remember but couldn't quite piece it all together.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Nora's chest tightened, but she couldn't make herself move forward, her feet frozen to the spot. Her heart pounded, the realization dawning slowly—this was a place of confinement. It wasn't just any room. They were in a mental facility.
Scott was the first to react, his gaze snapping to Hap as his confusion turned to raw, frantic energy. He looked at Hap, his face twisted in a mixture of fury and disbelief. "I'm going to kill you, you crazy bastard!" Scott's voice cracked with rage as he lunged at Hap, his hands gripping his neck in a frenzied attack, pulling Hap out of his chair and onto the floor. Scott's body pressed against Hap's, his fingers tight around the other man's throat, choking the breath out of him.
Nora gasped, her mind struggling to catch up with what was happening. This... this wasn't real. She had to be dreaming, or hallucinating. They couldn't be in a mental facility. But everything in this room screamed otherwise.
Then, a shadow moved quickly past her. Homer, who looked like Homer but wasn't quite the same, was suddenly there, grabbing Scott by the shoulders and hauling him off of Hap with surprising strength. The shock of it threw Scott to the side, but Homer didn't hesitate. He called for the orderlies in a voice that was disturbingly calm.
"Scott!" Homer shouted, his voice not the same as before—calm, almost too calm. He sounded like a therapist, like someone who had been trained to manage crises, not someone who had once been a prisoner, a fellow captive. His soft-spoken tone didn't match the chaos of the moment, and his eyes, usually filled with anger or frustration, now looked only gentle and measured, as though he were trying to calm a frightened patient.
The orderlies, who had appeared from behind a door Nora hadn't noticed before, rushed past her, grabbing Scott, who was now being forcibly restrained, his body limp but still fighting against them as they dragged him away.
