Chapter 0
At night, the road below Old Harmon Hill belonged to engines.
Not traffic. Not commuters. Engines.
They screamed through the dark in silver blurs, headlights bending across the wet pavement, their sound rolling up the hillside and making the shadow of the mountain look alive. A few years earlier, after a string of drunk-driving scandals had turned local rich kids into public enemies, the late-night racing scene had moved out here—away from the wide, better-lit avenues and into the quieter stretch between Timberline Road and Marshside.
It was perfect for stupidity.
The road was narrow, half-forgotten, and watched by fewer cameras than a liquor store parking lot. There were auto shops on one side, shuttered and dark after midnight, and on the other side a cluster of isolated institutional buildings hidden behind high concrete walls. Most nights, not a soul walked there. No apartment towers. No bars. No pedestrians. Just the occasional roar of imported horsepower and the waiting dark between one pass and the next.
And behind the wall, Mercy Hill Psychiatric Center.
Locals didn’t use the full name. They said Mercy Hill the way people elsewhere said jail or hell.
Most of the campus sat farther back, but Tower Three stood closer to the road—an ugly slab of white walls and black windows, with the upper floors barred and the lower ones dim as a mausoleum. In the weak streetlights, the windows looked less like glass than like holes chewed through the building by something hungry.
Sometimes a single fluorescent square would blink on inside, cold and surgical. It never made the place feel warmer.
It was mid-April, warm enough elsewhere in the city for short sleeves and mosquitoes, but the slope below Old Harmon Hill held the cold. No insects sang there. No summer smell rose from the earth. If not for the racing, the place would have felt abandoned by life.
Then the howling started.
It broke out from inside Tower Three without warning—one raw, animal cry, followed by another, and then a whole chorus. Lights snapped on in a row of windows. The dead building seemed to wake up all at once, and somehow that was worse. The dark had at least been honest. Under fluorescent light, the madness became specific: shouting, sobbing, laughter, swearing, a voice reciting something in a liturgical rhythm, another screaming at God.
A silver coupe came skidding to a stop outside the wall.
A young man with spiked hair climbed out with a beer can in hand, rounded the hood, and hauled a heavily made-up girl halfway out of the passenger seat. She was drunk enough to be decorative. He tipped the beer to her mouth, splashed some down her chin, then jabbed a finger toward the lit windows.
“See that?” he said, grinning. “That’s Mercy Hill. Whole place full of lunatics, and apparently none of them sleep.”
The girl squinted toward the building, bothered by the light more than the sound. She muttered something impossible to make out.
The boy laughed, planted a loud kiss on her cheek, shoved her back into the car, and peeled off west toward the marsh roads.
The screaming went on.
Mercy Hill was technically a specialty hospital for acute psychiatric and behavioral disorders. In practice, it was the place people brought up when they wanted to insult someone, threaten someone, or explain away the strange. Tower Three housed long-term inpatient cases, and its top three floors—the barred ones—held the patients even the staff talked about in lowered voices.
Psychiatric medicine was a dangerous profession, though not always for the reasons outsiders imagined.
It wasn’t just the violence. Violence was easy. Violence left bruises, paperwork, witnesses. The harder danger came from spending years immersed in minds built on premises so alien they could make your own feel loose by comparison. Some patients bit. Some lied. Some begged. Some preached. Some cracked open the idea of reality and talked out of the hole until the person listening leaned a little too far over the edge.
Doctors broke in places no scans could find.
A few even jumped.
Which was why Ethan Vale had become something of an institution inside the institution.
He had arrived at Mercy Hill at seven, after surviving the crash that killed both his parents. Eight years later he was still there, moving from one unit to another as diagnoses piled up in neat official language: schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, dissociative symptoms, delusional fixation, trauma complications, grandiose religious ideation. He had outlasted interns, nurses, administrators, two renovations, and a therapy dog that supposedly hated nobody and still once bit him on sight.
Ethan claimed he was the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Celestial Master.
No one believed him. Not exactly.
New doctors laughed at first. Then they noticed how often other patients listened to him. Not because he was persuasive in any conventional sense. He looked like a sleep-deprived stray with the eyes of a dead fish and the grooming habits of someone who considered lice a philosophical nuisance. But somehow he got through to people who refused medication, ignored therapy, and treated every authority figure like a hostile invader.
The official explanation was that the mentally ill spoke a common language.
The unofficial explanation was that Ethan was a little too good at knowing where to press.
He wasn’t even the most legendary patient in the hospital.
That honor belonged to Old Harlan, another long-term resident, a silver-haired gentleman in a worn Mandarin-collar jacket who looked less like a psych patient than a retired department chair. According to staff folklore, Old Harlan had once talked several severe cases into near-normal functioning—and several others into complete collapse, including one attending psychiatrist who ended up admitted two months later. After that, Harlan was officially barred from contact with vulnerable patients.
Officially.
In practice, the rules around Mercy Hill bent in strange ways.
Old Harlan still got visitors. Former patients came back to see him and called him Professor, or Teacher, or Sir. Ethan pretended not to care. Secretly he envied it. If the disciples of the Celestial Order had shown up at Mercy Hill to kneel and take notes, he would have considered it only proper.
Instead, almost everyone agreed he was insane.
Toward dawn, the noise in Tower Three began to die down. Sedatives, exhaustion, routine—the usual winning team. The racing thinned out on Marshside. Crickets finally started up in the brush below the hill as if the night had decided it was safe again.
By morning, the sky over Mercy Hill was clean and pale and innocent.
As if nothing under it had ever screamed.
