Broken Halo
The light in Ward P was never fully on and never fully off. It hummed at a tired, institutional level, a soft white that made everything look the same color as dried milk. The ceilings sweated with old sprinkler heads. The vents whispered. The cameras did not blink.
Mara Ives stared at the reflection of her own eyes in the observation window and thought, not for the first time, that she looked like someone halfway between a person and a ghost. The pupils were a little too big, the whites a little too gray. Veritasol did that. It washed the contrast out of everything, starting with you.
“Sit,” the nurse said, and the word hit her like a small shove.
Mara lowered herself into the molded plastic chair at the dosing station. The chair was bolted to the floor. Everything in Ward P was either bolted down or soft enough that it did not need to be.
On the other side of the plexiglass, Nurse Kendry held up the little plastic cup. Two tablets. Pale blue. Slightly waxy. They smelled faintly of mint and battery acid.
“Name,” Kendry said.
“Mara Ives.”
“Number.”
“Patient P-Seven.” Her tongue tried to stumble over it, as if there might be some other answer, but Veritasol did not only sap the future. It wrapped itself around the truth and squeezed.
“Purpose of medication,” Kendry recited.
“To ensure compliance, stabilize cognition, and prevent falsification.” The words came out flat and perfect, like a recording. Mara hated them. She hated that she could say them without thinking, and hated that every time she tried to say anything else, her throat seized up and her chest burned until she coughed up nothing.
“Take your dose.”
She picked up the cup. Her fingers shook. The cameras watched.
Veritasol tasted like someone had crushed up a storm and mixed it with toothpaste. It fizzed in the back of her throat. She swallowed, then opened her mouth on command, lifted her tongue, waited for the gloved fingers to prod around like she was a horse having its teeth checked.
Kendry nodded. “Return to activity hall.”
Activity hall. The room with the bolted tables, the soft rubber balls that no one ever used, the puzzle books with all the answers already filled in. The television that showed nothing but curated news footage and “therapeutic programming” about deep breathing.
There were twelve of them in Ward P. Twelve seers, all branded with the same fiction. Psychotic. Delusional. Treatment resistant. The intake paperwork said schizophrenia, bipolar, dissociative episodes, a sterile diagnosis buffet.
No one said what they actually were. Not in writing. Not anywhere a camera could hear.
Mara moved back into the hall, her limbs already starting to thicken as the drug slid into her bloodstream. Veritasol did not make you sleepy right away. It had a trajectory. First, a gentle warmth in the spine. Then a slow diffusing of urgency. Then it came for language, twisting around anything that was not strictly true and strangling it in your throat.
Lie, and you choke. Bend truth, and you cough. Try to evade, and your chest tightens until you fall to your knees, clutching at air that will not go in.
The first time they had demonstrated that, she had actually thought she was dying. That was the point.
She sat at one of the tables, her body folding with a kind of practiced resignation. Across from her, an old man named Rojer lay with his cheek on the cool surface, eyes half closed, fingers tapping out a slow, endless rhythm. Rojer saw futures in patterns, waves and codes. He said he had once traded currency with his eyes closed and never lost.
Now he tapped table beats no one else understood.
“Mara,” he murmured without looking up. “It is coming.”
“What is,” she said. The drug pulsed behind her eyes, a dull, gathering pressure.
“Noise,” he said. “From outside the circle.”
She swallowed. “You mean… a visitor.” The word felt like broken glass. It was not exactly a lie. It was not exactly the truth. Veritasol shifted, unsure, then let it pass with a warning flare.
Rojer’s fingers changed pattern. One, two, three. Pause. One, two. The secret language he used when he did not want the cameras to read his lips. He was telling her something. Two nights from now. Dark corridor. Elevator.
Her head throbbed. Side effects, the glossy brochure had said. Mild head pressure. Cognitive disorientation. Transient nausea.
Nothing about how Veritasol also pressed down on the visions themselves. As if the drug wanted to iron the future flat.
Even so, the fragments still came. Flickers behind her eyelids. A red emergency light strobed in some corridor she had never seen. Kendry running. A door that had never opened before, standing yawning and black.
It came with pain today, a spike driven between her eyebrows. She winced and pressed her palms to her temples.
“Headache, Miss Ives?” A new voice, smooth and light.
Mara glanced up. Doctor Sorell stood in the doorway, hands folded like she was about to sell a car. The staff doctors all had that same bright, unbothered energy that made Mara think of infomercials.
“Just a little pressure,” Mara said.
“Veritasol does that, sometimes,” Sorell said. “Side effect of keeping you honest. But you know we only medicate to help you.”
Mara nodded. She could not say otherwise. Not because she believed it. Because if she tried to disagree, the drug would close her throat until she passed out. They had done that to her once. Just once. The memory of waking up on the floor, eyes bloodshot, air clawing back into her lungs, was enough to keep her in line.
“Good girl,” Sorell said. “We have a consult scheduled for you. Up and at it.”
Mara stood. Somewhere behind her eyes, the future shifted again. A hallway. A door. A voice that did not belong to anyone here.
Kael Rios sat in his dark apartment and watched the ocean of data break against the walls of his skull.
The city outside was lit up in cold colors. Drone lanes moved in patient lines between towers that gleamed like teeth. Somewhere below his window, people were standing in line to buy food their bodies hated. Somewhere above, the Orbis Consortium was adjusting interest rates in four continents simultaneously, all to make sure the right people stayed scared of the right things.
On his table, a dozen holo screens flickered and glowed with news feeds. “Stable markets after minor quake in Patagonia.” “Peacekeeping forces deployed to quell protests over water rationing.” “Orbis subsidiary, Helios Health, opens new psychiatric care facility for society’s most vulnerable.”
Helios. The kind name. The soft front they spun for the Ward.
He dragged the window with the Helios news into the center of his vision. Facility footage. Clean uniforms. Doctors and nurses smiling in ways that did not reach their eyes.
He clicked audio.
“… dedicated to treating severe psychotic disorders and protecting both patients and the public.”
He muted it again. He already knew the script.
If he closed his eyes, he could feel them. A knot of minds somewhere in the city, wrapped in Veritasol and concrete. Their thoughts were not words. They were hints, colors, textures of things that had not happened yet.
Kael’s own ability was dirty, the way he liked it. Not visions that fell out of the sky. Not tarot cards or tea leaves. He read residue. The ghost impressions left by intent and action, the fingerprints of thought. He walked in other people’s long shadows.
He also knew how to step sideways. They had tried to keep that from him, back when he had been their asset. Back when Ward P had been his cage too.
He inhaled, then pushed his awareness out, away from the cramped apartment, through concrete and glass, between power lines and signal towers. The astral plane was not some glowing clouds with dead relatives waving hello. It was uglier and more honest. It felt like being submerged in lukewarm static.
Colorless shapes loomed and receded. Each was a mind, or a bundle of minds, humming at its own frequency. Normal people were dim, distracted. Psychics burned brighter. The ones in Ward P were knots of controlled light, their edges shaved down by the drug. Their glow pulsed in time with the Veritasol schedules.
Kael found them by the taste of the place: stale air, recycled lies, the metallic tang of fear. There, in the lower quadrant of his sensing, close to the ground. Twelve distinct signatures, pressed together.
He reached toward one at random and met a wall, hard and slick. Someone with a defensive halo. Not yet.
He skimmed sideways and brushed another mind. This one flared at his touch, sharp and immediate. Pain spiked through his temple, but along with it came images in a rapid strobe. A plastic chair. A blue pill. An old man tapping a code.
He latched on.
“Easy,” he whispered, silently, to the knot of awareness he had touched. “I am not one of them.”
The mind shuddered. Veritasol flared around it like static, trying to push him out. Drugs did not like surprises. They were engineered to make truth flow one way: up, toward handlers. Not sideways, toward rogue ghosts.
He held steady.
The signature sharpened. A name rose up through the fuzz, not spoken but known.
Mara.
“Hi, Mara,” he thought at her, letting his awareness shape itself into warmth, something ironically close to bedside manner. “Do not speak out loud. Just think.”
Her fear hit him like cold water. She had never felt another mind that was not sedated like hers, not here. Underneath the fear, rage glittered like broken glass.
“Who,” was the first shaped thought he felt from her, jagged and mistrustful. “Where. How.”
“I am outside,” he sent. “Name is Kael. You have not seen me, but I have seen you. I used to be there. I am going to get you out.”
There was a pause. In that pause, he tasted her disbelief, then the way Veritasol tried to clamp down on it, to smooth her into compliance.
“Can anyone else hear this,” she thought.
“Only if they know how to step in here,” he said. “And they do not. They do not even believe this place is real. That is their weakness. They think control is physical. It is not.”
Her awareness flickered. He saw a flash of her memory, unbidden. Doctor Sorell’s bright teeth. Rojer’s tapping fingers. A corridor with no doors, only cameras.
“They use you for consults,” he said. “Private sessions. Hidden floors. They bring in men in suits and ask you questions about markets, about elections, about disasters. You answer because you cannot lie. They record it, then sell the future in pieces.”
“Truth,” Mara thought, and the word came with a pulse of pain. Veritasol liked that word.
Kael pressed his awareness closer. The astral plane around them shimmered, shapes distorting in his peripheral perception as if the whole place were listening.
“They will bring you up again soon,” he said. “Two hours. Three. Time feels strange in there, but I have their schedule. When they do, something is going to be different. I need you to notice it.”
“What,” she asked.
“The elevators,” he said. “Count the floors. Remember the sound when it stops. Remember the pattern. That hallway you saw in your vision, the red light. They have a lower level. The drug lab. The control room. They keep a server there that should not exist. If we take that out, the Ward becomes just another building with sick people in it. They lose the leash.”
Mara’s awareness trembled. Anger burned hotter.
“You think I have not tried to fight,” she thought. “You think we have not tried to mess with their questions.”
“You cannot lie,” Kael said, “but you can choose which truth to tell. Veritasol enforces sincerity, not obedience. They leaned too hard on chemistry. They never understood nuance. That is where you get them.”
His own head was starting to ache, a grinding pain behind his eyes. Astral work always cost something. With Ward P, the price was higher. Orbis had invested a lot in that cage.
“For now,” he said, “rest. Let the drug think it has you. When the consult happens, I will be there. Watch the elevator. Remember the hallway. I will send you a sign.”
“What sign,” she thought.
He hesitated.
He could tell her about the generator load he planned to overload, the way he had wormed his way into the building’s archaic security system through a forgotten maintenance account. He could tell her about the blackout he was going to cause, the moment of darkness that would make their cameras blind.
Instead he sent her an image that had circled his own mind for days. A little thing he had found in the residue of Orbis meetings. A logo they were planning to launch on some new product. A simple circle, cracked through the middle.
“A broken halo,” he said. “You will see it. When you do, do not hesitate.”
Her presence stiffened. Something sharp slid behind her thoughts, a familiarity he could not quite place.
“I have seen that,” she thought.
“Good,” he said, and pulled back before his skull split open.
They took Mara up two hours later.
Not up, her sense of direction told her. Down. The elevator hummed, a mechanical lullaby that did not match the building’s old bones. The fluorescent strip in the ceiling flickered once, then steadied. Doctor Sorell hummed under her breath, something that sounded like an advertisement jingle.
“You are doing very well,” Sorell said as the elevator opened on Level Minus Three. “The Consortium is very pleased with your progress.”
Mara did not respond. She watched the numbers. Ground. Minus one. Minus two. Minus three. Her ears popped. The air here had a different weight. Less disinfectant, more metallic.
The hallway beyond the elevator was narrower than the ones in Ward P. No windows. Cameras every ten feet, the little red recording light glowing like an irritated eye.
Her visions fluttered behind her eyes, trying to sync with reality. She had seen this, but slightly off frame. In the vision, the alarm light had been strobing. In reality, everything was calm. For now.
Sorell keyed them through an unmarked door with a card and a thumbprint. The room beyond had no padded furniture, no comforting posters of trees and inspirational slogans. It looked like a confession booth had mated with a server farm.
A sleek chair with restraints. A bank of monitors on the wall. A table where three people in dark suits sat with tablets open. Orbis executives. Not the public ones from the news. These were from deeper in the hive.
Mara’s skin prickled. One of them, the man at the center, had the same stillness as a hunting animal. His eyes tracked her with clinical interest.
“Subject P Seven,” Sorell said. “Mara Ives. Present and compliant.”
“Sit,” the central man said.
She felt the Veritasol inside her tighten like a leash and stepped toward the chair. The restraints closed around her wrists and ankles, snug, not painful. The way a hand on your throat could be gentle and still mean you could not move.
“Do you know who we are,” the man asked.
She tried to say, You are parasites. Her throat closed. Veritasol flared.
“You work for Orbis,” she said, when air finally came. “You ask about futures.”
A small smile touched his mouth. “That will do.” He gestured at a staffer in the corner. “Increase her Veritasol dose by twenty percent. I want a clean stream.”
The staffer tapped a screen. A soft hiss at Mara’s neck as something in the collar around her throat adjusted. The drug thickened in her veins. For a moment she thought she might vomit.
“We are concerned about an asset,” the man said. “A rogue factor is contaminating our projections. We need you to look for anomalies centered around these terms.”
He flicked his fingers and the monitor to her right filled with words. Names. Concepts. Times. One of the words in the list was “Kael.”
The floor seemed to drop out from under her. Her heart hammered, but she felt it from a distance, like listening to someone else’s pulse.
“You will focus on the next seven days,” the man said. “Any deviation from our expected market curves, any unexpected unrest, any structural failures in our network. You will describe what you see. You will not speculate.”
He knew about the rogue. Of course he did. Orbis had not gotten this far by being sloppy.
Mara tasted copper. She closed her eyes.
The drug surged. Her awareness peeled away from the room, the restraints, the humming servers, like skin coming loose from glue. She hated this part. The feeling of being turned into a pipeline that poured the future directly into someone else’s cup.
Light flared behind her eyes, then broke apart into scenes. Trading floors. Deserts with drilling towers. Crowds in the street, some calm, some boiling over. She spoke what she saw, because she had no choice.
Her voice came out slow, low, monotone.
“Minor fluctuation in water markets, offset by surgical leak of scare campaign. No significant protest escalation. No major power grid failures. One regional earthquake, manageable. No leadership changes. No assassination attempts. No… no…”
Something snagged. A blank spot in the flow, as if someone had cut a strip out of film.
She frowned.
“What do you see,” the man asked.
“A gap,” she said. Veritasol squeezed her throat, trying to wring more from her. “Vision obstruction.”
“Cause,” he said.
She tried to look at it. Each time she did, the drug flashed electric in her chest, painful, as if she were trying to inhale broken glass. Around the blank spot, she could see hints. A flicker of emergency lights. Dark corridors. A circle cracked through the middle.
The broken halo.
“There is interference,” she managed. “A blind zone in the network.”
“Source.”
She almost said Kael. The name was there, bright on the screen. The futures wanted to stick it there too. Her own memory of the astral plane conversation strained toward that opening.
If she confirmed it, they would trace him. Hunt him. End whatever plan he had. The drug did not let her lie, but it did not always require the whole picture either.
“Unknown,” she said.
Veritasol tightened. Her throat closed halfway, then eased. The word was not a lie. She did not know the source in a way the drug could quantify. She suspected. She feared. She hoped. None of that counted as fact.
The man studied her face. His eyes were very still.
“You are certain,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and the drug let the word pass. True enough.
His gaze moved to the broken halo on the monitor, then back to her. “We have reason to believe a former patient is involved in unauthorized activity. If you perceive his presence, you will report it. You will not conceal him.”
She felt the drug flare again, impressed by the command. Truth, it pulsed. Truth, truth.
“I cannot conceal what I know,” she said, because that was also true. “Only what I do not.”
That earned a faint smile from one of the executives at the table, a woman with hair like a carved helmet.
“She is clever,” the woman said. “We should keep an eye on her semantic games.”
The central man nodded. “Increase baseline dosage for Ward P as a precaution. There will be no gaps.”
Mara’s vision dimmed. The flow of futures slowed to a trickle, then stopped. The collar hissed again. Disengagement. The room snapped back into focus.
“We are done for today,” the man said. “Return her to the ward. Run a neuro scan for anomalies. And scrub the last ten minutes of this session from external archives. I do not want a trace of that gap on the logs.”
“Of course,” Sorell said.
As they wheeled her out, Mara caught her own reflection in one of the monitor screens. Her pupils were so dilated that her irises were almost gone.
Somewhere behind the chemical fog, the memory of the broken halo flickered. And behind that, like heat behind walls, she felt Kael’s attention.
Kael staggered back from the astral plane like someone who had stayed underwater too long.
His physical body slammed back into itself in the apartment. For a moment he could not breathe. He grabbed the edge of the table, fingers digging grooves into old composite, and waited for his lungs to remember the choreography.
“Come on,” he rasped. “You have done worse.”
The holo screens flickered. One of them froze on a still image that made his stomach lurch.
A camera feed. Grainy security footage from a Helios sublevel. Mara in the restraint chair, head tipped back, eyes rolled slightly. Vitals readings on the edges. Veritasol levels spiking.
He had not hacked that feed. He had not opened it. It had opened on its own.
In the corner of the screen, a small watermark glowed. Orbis Internal. Below it, in pale, authoritative text, a string of words.
UNAUTHORIZED ASTRAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED
SUBJECT: P-SEVEN
SECONDARY ENTITY: RIOS, KAEL
STATUS: OBSERVED
His mouth went dry.
The system knew. Somehow, the contact had triggered a sensor. Orbis had not only believed in the astral plane, they had quietly instrumented it. He had underestimated them. Again.
On the feed, Doctor Sorell leaned over Mara and made an adjustment on the collar at her throat. The Veritasol line climbed.
“They are going to drown her,” Kael whispered.
He turned to his side console and brought up the building schematics again, palms sweating. The plan he had been constructing over the last month glittered in lines and code. Timed power cut. Overload of the main server to trigger a false fire alarm. Door release protocol routed through an old security patch.
He had thought he had time to test it. To simulate. To shave off sharp edges.
He did not.
On the astral plane, something pulsed, low and deep, like distant thunder. He could feel it even in his physical ears, a subsonic growl.
Another notification popped up on his screen. It was not one of his systems. Orbis again.
CIVIL DEFENSE ALERT
THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Below that, a map of the city. Little red sectors blinking online, one by one. Power grids. Water lines. Communication nodes.
In the middle of the map, a tiny symbol appeared. A circle, cracked through the middle.
A broken halo.
For a second, Kael thought Orbis had somehow stolen his signal, turned his symbol into theirs. Then he saw the code behind it. Not Orbis. Not any known municipal system.
Something else. Something nested inside the infrastructure like an invisible seed.
In his head, a thought rose that did not feel like his own.
You think it is only you on the outside.
The voice was light, almost amused.
He reached outward, instinctively, brushing the astral plane again. It erupted around him like a storm. Minds flared and vanished. Aliases of thought. Behind it all, a new presence loomed, not from Ward P, not from any building he knew.
“I am already inside,” the presence said, across no distance at all. “You are not the only rogue, Kael Rios. You are just the one they trained badly.”
He saw, quick and sharp, images that were not his memories. Servers in an offshore facility, humming in the dark. Rows of children, eyes open and unfocused, whispering forecasts to empty air. A boardroom where no one breathed on their own.
“Who are you,” Kael asked.
The presence laughed. The sound skittered along his nerves.
“Later,” it said. “Right now you need to decide whether you want to save your little ward or the city around it. You cannot have both.”
The map on his screen zoomed in. Red sectors blinked in a pattern he recognized too late. The very power nodes he had planned to overcharge for his distraction were already primed, by someone else, to cascade catastrophically.
If he triggered his blackout now, it would not be a neat cut to the Psychics Ward. It would be a citywide failure. Hospitals. Air traffic. Oxygen systems in sealed towers.
Orbis would survive that. They had bunkers. They had contingencies.
Most other people would not.
In Ward P, Mara sat on her narrow bed, eyes open in the half light, watching the fluorescent strip flicker.
She saw it then. A tiny emergency screen in the corner of the ward, one that had always been dark, blinked on for the first time. The hospital logo vanished, replaced by a simple icon.
A circle, cracked through the middle.
Her heart slammed.
Rojer’s fingers began to tap, faster now, as if someone else were guiding the rhythm.
Somewhere far above them, the lights in the city dimmed, then steadied, as two different intentions crashed into each other in the wires.
Mara raised her head.
“Now,” a voice said in her skull.
She did not know if it was Kael, or the new presence he could feel, or something the drug had failed to suppress.
For the first time since she had been admitted to Ward P, she ignored the cameras, swung her legs off the bed, and walked toward the locked ward door without waiting to be told.
The lock clicked.
Only once, soft and unbelieving.
Then it began to open.
