Chapter 5: They Don't Sleep, They Dream

Chapter 5: They Don't Sleep, They Dream

The supply closet was a cage of darkness and fear, barely big enough for two people. The only light was the thin, pulsing blade of red that sliced through the crack in the door, strobing across the girl's haunted face. Alex’s mind was a frantic scramble of disconnected thoughts: the file, the T-Rating, the bloodcurdling scream, the armed guards. And now this—a terrified girl with a piece of glass, the epicenter of the entire catastrophe.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Alex whispered, his voice hoarse. He kept his hands raised, palms open. It felt like trying to calm a wolf.

Her eyes, wide and unnervingly bright in the gloom, narrowed. The glass shard in her hand didn't waver. "Who are you?" she rasped, her voice rough from disuse, layered with a paranoia so deep it was almost tangible.

"My name is Alex. I'm... I'm the janitor." The words sounded absurd, a ridiculous lie in the face of the unfolding horror.

A humorless, brittle smile touched her lips. "A janitor. In Wing C. During a lockdown." She shifted her weight, the pale blue gown rustling against the concrete floor. "They sent you, didn't they? To talk me down before they come back."

"No one sent me," Alex insisted, his heart hammering. "I was just here. I saw... I saw your file. On a tablet. Subject 217. Eve."

The name hit her like a physical blow. The feral aggression in her eyes flickered, replaced for a heartbeat by a profound, soul-deep weariness. The glass dipped an inch. "What did you see?"

"Enough," he said, the word tasting like ash. "I saw something called a T-Rating. Terror Rating."

Her breath hitched, a sharp, pained sound. The last of her suspicion seemed to crumble, replaced by a shared, desperate reality. She knew that he knew. "So you know," she whispered, the words barely audible. "You know what this place is."

"I know they're measuring fear," he said, his voice dropping. "But I don't understand why. I thought you were all..."

"Sick?" she finished for him, a bitter laugh escaping her lips. "In comas? We're not sick. And we're not sleeping." Her eyes bored into his, demanding he understand. "They don't sleep us, they dream us. They strap us in, induce a coma, and plug us into their machine. This place isn't a hospital, it's a factory. They build nightmares, Alex. And they watch what happens."

The pieces slammed together in Alex’s mind with dizzying force. The unnatural stillness of the wing. The lack of beeping monitors. The twitch of her hand. The shadow. It wasn't a ghost. It was a manifestation, just like the file said. Something born from a nightmare, bleeding into reality. And his own horrifying dream—the watching presence, the voice in his head—hadn't been a dream at all. It had been a stray signal, a glimpse into the network. He had been close enough to the source that the broadcast had bled through.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Heavy, measured bootfalls. Narsi's team. They were sweeping the hall.

Eve's entire body went rigid. The terror returned to her eyes, sharp and immediate. "They're coming," she breathed.

"We have to stay quiet," Alex whispered, his own panic rising to meet hers.

"Quiet won't help," she hissed, her gaze darting around the small, dark space. "You don't get it. They're not just looking. They're listening. Not with their ears." Her eyes fixed on a metal conduit running along the wall, a thick bundle of cables that pulsed with a faint, almost imperceptible hum. "The whole building is the machine. It's always on. Always watching."

She looked at him then, her expression a mixture of desperation and furious resolve. "You still think I'm just a scared patient, don't you? You think I'm crazy."

"No, I—"

"You need to see," she interrupted, her voice gaining a strange intensity. She crawled toward the conduit, the glass shard held in her hand like a surgical tool. "They've been inside my head for six years. You learn things when someone lives in your skull. You learn how the wiring works."

Before Alex could react, she jammed the point of the glass shard into the seam of a junction box on the conduit. She twisted it hard.

Sparks erupted with a sharp CRACK, lighting the tiny room in a flash of brilliant, actinic blue. The hum from the cables spiked into a deafening whine, and the air grew thick, tasting of ozone. The lightbulb overhead flickered once, then died.

For Alex, the world dissolved.

It wasn't a vision; it was a total immersion. The supply closet vanished. He was falling, tumbling through a void of static and corrupted data. The alien voice from his dream screamed in his mind, no longer a whisper but a deafening roar of pure information. He saw not one shadow, but hundreds. Writhing, distorted forms of pure terror, each tethered to a still, sleeping body in the real world. He saw figures in blue gowns like Eve's, their dream-selves thrashing against constructs of darkness—spiders made of knives, drowning oceans of black oil, hallways that folded in on themselves.

He saw the architects of this hellscape: shadowy figures in lab coats observing the chaos on floating screens, their faces cold and impassive. He felt a shared consciousness of pain, a symphony of suffering conducted by Narsi and his blue-carded acolytes. And at the center of it all, he saw her. Eve. Not the frail girl in the closet, but a burning figure of defiant light, lashing out at the nightmares with weapons made of pure willpower, the only subject fighting back. The T-Rating wasn't just a measure of her fear; it was a measure of her resistance.

The vision lasted only a second, but it felt like an eternity. He was slammed back into his own body with a nauseating jolt, collapsing against the shelves. He gasped for air, the smell of bleach and burnt wiring filling his lungs.

Eve was slumped against the wall, trembling from the feedback, her face even paler than before. The shard of glass had fallen from her numb fingers.

"Do you see now?" she whispered, her voice shaking with exhaustion. "They don't just study the nightmares. They're trying to control them. To weaponize them. And anyone who gets in their way, anyone who finds out..."

The footsteps stopped directly outside their door. A low voice murmured, inaudible through the steel.

Eve locked her haunted eyes on his. The choice was laid bare in that single, desperate glance. He was no longer a janitor. He was a witness. He had seen the truth, and in a place like this, witnesses didn't get to walk away.

"They'll find you," she said, her voice a raw, urgent whisper. "When they do, they won't fire you. They'll give you a bed, a number, and plug you right in." She took a ragged breath. "So you have a choice. Help me get out of this building... or be their next victim."

Outside the door, a sharp, metallic click echoed as someone inserted a keycard into the lock.

Alex looked from the door back to Eve's fierce, terrified eyes. His life of keeping his head down, of not making trouble, was over. That life had ended the moment he’d seen that impossible shadow. His mother had died because the system saw her as a collection of bills, a disposable problem. The Cerulean Institute saw Eve the same way. Not anymore.

The lock beeped, beginning to disengage.

"What do we do?" Alex breathed, the words sealing his fate. He had just joined the rebellion.