Ward 14, the lower levels of Neo-Edifex. As the crew saw it in Session 1: Compassionate Use.
AI-generated image hidden
Khymera’s old low-income outreach hospital: an obsidian monolith in the middle of a bulldozed field, closed for eight years, with excavators already chewing at its base. It has been sold to a Globelin developer, Tesali Amusements, whose billboard of a tangerine-coloured Globelin waves from the edge of the field: bringing the light back to Ward 14. The air grows worse with every level on the way down; Torse once walked a beat here.
Intake
The crew set down on the old ambulance pad among looted, rusting air-ambulances. The door reads INTAKE, taped over with a health-violations notice; the keypad’s dust had already been rubbed off, key by key, in exactly the code Vosk gave them. Inside, lights on power-saving dim, terminals still running, and fresh footprints. A sticky note on the intake terminal: 212 in, 181 out. Where are the other 31? Index is paper only. Keep looking. — and a number for Tovac Wren. The corkboard spoke of rising referrals from the resettlement transports and a chest complaint everyone was told not to call an outbreak.
People here: The Hope’s Reach Care-bot
Floor 9 — Staff rooms
Staff lockers and a dead kettle. One locker was still padlocked: Nurse Trevaine’s, with her notebook, badge and uniform.
People here: M. Trevaine (her locker)
Floor 8 — Admin and the project office
The Chemtek salvage crew was loading a walker here. The project office had lost its nameplate: desks pushed together, a shredder nobody had emptied in eight years, and a blue folder for Project Viridian — four instalments billed to the Shensaati Trade Legation, three paid, the fourth stamped void — client dissolved on the day Shensaati fell to the Cavalon Empire. Half a card jammed in the shredder was an LGL consent form to donate genetic material.
People here: The Chemtek Foreman
Floor 7 — Pharmacy
Blood under a door holed by laser burns, and a security system of one large robot and four small ones that had killed two Chemtek men. Past them: a dropped gym bag with the building’s sale contract, annotated Why was floor 3 not included in the transaction log?; a scorched vent where someone had escaped; the Veldrin-C dispensing binder, every line approved by Dan Trask; and an empty rack, Viridian samples A–K, with a sticker: Sample K retained. Transferred to sub-level cold storage, level 3.
People here: The Pharmacy Security Robot
Fifth-floor balcony
Where Tovac Wren was meant to meet Imee, and where Fido brought the Stargazer in to hover for the escape.
Ward 7
Floor 3, left out of the building’s sale entirely. A hall of empty beds, then the double doors of Ward 7, welded shut until Varrik broke the whole frame out of the wall. Rows of beds around a doctor’s station full of charts: Veldrin-C, given under compassionate use, batch after batch, the dead marked match or no match. A board of names, some circled, some crossed off — among them Elias Moore, Subject 7.
At the back, an office with no nameplate — a very nice one — whose terminal logged in as A. VOSK, Legal and Compliance.
People here: Imee Sarra · Agent Vosk (his office)
The cold room
A frosted door behind Vosk’s office, cracked free of ice; rickety aluminium stairs down into a morgue. Tall glass tanks held bodies in fluid, each clipboard reading lineage confirmed, linked to royal family. A weapon tuned to the Cavalon royal line. The fridge at the back held the Batch K ampoules. All four tanks broke at once and the dead came out screaming, oxygen masks still on.
People here: Elias Moore (Subject 7) · The Chemtek Foreman