Chapter Five – The Locked Ward

The storm began to retreat .

It didn’t stop. But it eased its grip, like a fist slowly unclenching. The howling wind was now a distant moan, and in its place came a silence too deep to trust.

Dr. Adrien Kael didn’t sleep that night. He sat at his desk long after the patients had returned to their rooms, staring at the word carved into his door.

RUN.

Not scratched , carved. With intent. Precision.

Adrien was not a man who was scared easily. But something about that word, in this place, in this storm, made his hands shake when he lit his cigarette.

He’d known the clinic had secrets. You didn’t work at Halden without brushing against a few ghosts. But this was different.

This wasn’t a haunting.

It was a warning.

And he needed answers.

---

The Halden Clinic had an upper floor few remembered and fewer used: the old Locked Ward. Officially decommissioned. Patients were never taken there. The hallway lights had burned out years ago. It had once housed the most severe cases—violent, unresponsive, lost causes.

But Adrien had always suspected it housed something else, too.

He picked the lock with the same ease he applied to human minds—calculated, patient.

Inside, dust coated everything. Gurneys, file cabinets, rusted IV stands. It smelled of old metal and forgotten screams.

He opened the first file drawer.

Empty.

The second. The third.

Then something.

A folder labeled in faded ink: Subject number 112-A.

He opened it.

Photos. A charred building. Autopsy reports. A fire investigation.

A teenage girl. Long hair. Wide, frightened eyes. No name listed.

But on the last page, a sentence caught his breath.

> Survivor transported to Halden under anonymity request. Full psychological evaluation sealed.

The page was dated seven years ago.

Adrien sat down, paper in hand.

If this was Mila if she’d been here beforeor someone had gone to great lengths to erase the trail.

Too late.

---

Back in his office, Adrien confronted the only person who might know more than he did.

“Nina.”

She raised an eyebrow, sipping coffee like a queen waiting for her execution.

“You remember her,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

She gave a slow smile. “Why do you care?”

“Because I believe she’s not the only one in danger here.”

Nina leaned forward.

“There was a fire. A facility, not unlike this one. Somewhere rural. Government funded. Lots of… experiments under the guise of therapy.”

Adrien narrowed his eyes. “What kind of experiments?”

“Induced trauma. Controlled isolation. Trying to unlock the human mind’s survival instinct by… pushing it.”

“And Mila?”

“She survived it. I don’t know how. Or why. Just that when the fire happened, she was the only one who walked out. And she didn’t speak for two years.”

Adrien’s mouth went dry.

“She was thirteen.”

Nina nodded. “Some of us don’t die in the flames. We carry them with us.”

---

Mila stood at the end of the hallway that evening, staring out the narrow window into the white expanse.

Adrien approached softly.

“You’ve been here before.”

She didn’t flinch.

“You were a patient in Halden. Not this wing but upstairs. The locked ward.”

A beat.

Then another.

“I was a file,” she said, eyes still in the storm. “Not a person. They didn’t ask questions. Just tested how long I could last in the dark.”

Adrien’s voice was low. “You started the fire.”

“No,” she whispered. “But I watched it burn.”

He stepped beside her.

“Do you remember what happened?”

Her eyes flicked to his.

“I remember the screaming. The smell. And I remember... being calm. Like I’d finally been set free.”

He waited.

“I don’t know what that makes me.”

He said nothing.

Because he didn’t know either.

---

That night, the storm broke entirely.

But the silence it left behind was worse.

Around 3 a.m., the alarms blared then died mid-scream.

The generator failed.

The clinic went dark.

Adrien grabbed his flashlight and sprinted toward the patient wing.

In the hallway, Jonas stood against the wall, whispering, “It’s happening again. The burning. The voices. It never ended.”

Hassan had locked himself in the rec room, muttering prayers.

Eloise was gone.

And Mila gone too.

Adrien’s stomach dropped.

He found her in the stairwell again, barefoot once more.

But this time, her eyes were wide open.

“I saw the fire,” she murmured. “I saw it. Right here.”

“There’s no fire, Mila.”

“Not yet.”

She looked up.

“It wants to finish what it started.”