POV: Emilia Conti
The first sign wasn't a threat.
That was what unsettled me.
No messages. No warnings. No pressure disguised as concern. Just an absence that felt… deliberate. As if something that used to react to me had decided it no longer needed to.
I noticed it on Tuesday.
Ordinary shift. Three trauma admissions before noon. One ruptured spleen. One drunk driver who wouldn't stop apologizing. One woman who kept asking if her shoes had been saved.
Life, uninterrupted.
Yet every time I stepped away from the bed, I felt it—the sensation of being slightly outpaced. Not followed. Anticipated.
"Dr. Conti?"
I turned. The intern held a chart too carefully. "Radiology flagged an anomaly. Not urgent, but… unusual."
That word again.
"Show me," I said.
The scan was clean. Technically. No hemorrhage. No foreign bodies. But the timestamp caught my eye.
"It was accessed twice," I said.
"Yes," the intern replied. "Once by us. Once by—"
She hesitated.
