It didn’t smell like the infirmary tent — no iodine, no canvas, no mud. It smelled like nothing at all. Clean. Cold. Wrong.

Lights hummed somewhere above him, too white, too steady. No bulbs flickered. No generator coughed. Just a low, endless electric drone.

He sat up fast. The bed beneath him wasn’t a cot. The walls weren’t canvas. Everything was smooth and pale and curved, like the inside of a shell, and a square of glass beside the bed glowed with rows of moving numbers — time, date, numbers that made his jaw go tight.

The window was one sheet of seamless glass. Outside it, the city went on and on and on. Towers where towers had no business being. Ships in the sky. Lights that answered to no switch he could see.

Footsteps. Steel-on-steel, too even, coming down the hall toward him.