Page 135 of Somno Slave

I nod once. “Fine.”

He gestures toward the door with the papers tucked under his arm. I hesitate only a second before following him.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Rheda

The reports are endless.

Paper stacked on paper, stapled corners, black ink bleeding into identical paragraphs until every page looks the same. If I shuffled them now, I doubt any of us would notice. The language repeats. The structure echoes it. Even the margins feel rehearsed.

The hum of fluorescent lights presses down on the room like a low-grade headache. The paper looks heavy beneath my pen. I breathe in the bitter notes of stale coffee. It clings to the stale air, like it has nowhere else to go. There’s no way out for it to be recycled so each breath feels like I’m tasting the past.

Peter sits opposite me; sleeves rolled neatly to his forearms. He reads out loud in that steady, clinical tone.

“Subject remained compliant during morning check. No verbal engagement. No physical movement.” His voice doesn’t rise or fall.

Sean types beside him, fingers moving fast, the soft clatter of keys the only rhythm in the room. He hasn’t looked at me since we entered the room. He keeps his head low, attention fixed on the keyboard in front of him as though the screen is safer than eye contact.

I nod where appropriate. Offer the occasional murmur of agreement.

It’s monotonous work. Three people dissecting a man who sits less than twenty feet away.

I try not to look at him. I fail.

And seeing him there almost breaks something in me.

My mind tries to lay the three versions over each other and fails. The boy choking on stone. The thing in my bed. The man sitting twenty feet away with a heart rate too slow to be human.

My breath catches.

I scan him for proof.

I don’t mean to.

My eyes search his skin, his throat, his hands, the line of his shoulders beneath the fabric. I look for something impossible. A seam. A shadow moving wrong. A mark at the base of his neck. Evidence that the world has changed and I am not the only one who knows it.

But he just sits there. Still. Silent.

Peter clears his throat. The sudden sound is abrupt in the swollen quiet, snapping my attention back down to the sheet in front of me.

“Final page,” he exhales loudly, shifting back in his chair ever so slightly. He turns his page and I quickly follow.

Today’s date rests at the top of it like a small, stubborn fact.

2ndNovember 2027

The numbers look wrong. The lines are small and scratched and the font seems to be a fraction smaller than the rest of the text.

“What do the monitors say?” Peter glances up at Sean, pen poised.

Sean scrolls and clicks something. The sound of the mouse is too loud in the room.

“Resting heart rate of twenty-seven beats per minute.” He says. “It spiked yesterday to sixty-four, but since then, it has been slow and steady.”

Yesterday.

When he spoke.