The static hit her three blocks out. White noise at the edge of her skull, pitched like a minor key nobody was playing. Haley knew the feeling now. Knew it intimately. Her feet changed direction before her mind caught up.
The flowers were sorted into piles when she found her.
Three piles. Deliberate. The kind of order that takes longer than the time she had.
The woman kneeling beside the body didn’t look up. Haley recognized the posture first. The careful arrangement of limbs, the way the hands moved with precision instead of panic.
She was humming. Something old. A lullaby, maybe. A minor key in a different register than the static.
“Don’t stop,” the woman said. “I need you to listen to which flowers I choose.”
Haley’s breath caught. She knew that voice. Knew the careful, clinical tone. Five years. One voice.
Dr. Fraser.
The woman finally turned, and Haley saw the face she hadn’t thought about in – how long? Two years? The psych ward felt like a different lifetime. Different Haley. Different world.
Shelley Fraser’s eyes were red but dry. Precise tears.
“You remember me,” Shelley said. Not a question.
The body between them was young. Teenage. Girl. A hospital bracelet still on her wrist, the kind they put on kids in pediatric wards, pale blue with small yellow ducks. The static from the corpse was getting louder. Not white noise anymore but something musical, discordant. A frequency building toward consciousness. It sat in her molars, in the back of her spine. Minor key resolving into something sharp. Minutes left, maybe. The incubation had been running for hours, urgent now, building toward something that would sing when it woke.
“Your daughter,” Haley said.
“Jean.” Shelley picked up a white chrysanthemum. Her hands didn’t shake. She was still humming. The melody steady, a counterpoint to everything. “You’re wondering why I’m doing this instead of –” She crushed the flower. The smell rose sharp, chemical, almost medicinal. “– instead of letting her turn. Or running. Or any of the thousand things a reasonable person does.”
Haley didn’t answer. The static was getting closer to something. The frequency rising.
“Because I watched you,” Shelley continued, humming between words now, the song and speech interweaving. “After. In the ward. I was the one who recommended they keep you. Do you remember that conversation?”
Haley did. The office. Shelley asking questions about the night Haley’s mother died.
“I thought you were broken,” Shelley said. She set the crushed chrysanthemum on Jean’s chest. The hum continued, lower now, almost a dirge. “I thought what you’d done – what you’d had to do – meant something had shattered in you permanently. Then the ward wanted it gone. Wanted you gone. They just wanted it contained.”
The static sharpened into something almost melodic. Jean was waking up in there. Like a second heartbeat. Like an instrument tuning itself to the wrong pitch.
“Then the world ended,” Shelley said. “And I understood.”
She picked up a second flower. Something dark red, waxy-petaled, with a smell like copper and cut stems. Something Haley didn’t recognize. The humming shifted, higher, almost keening now. Shelley didn’t seem to notice she was doing it.
“Mercy isn’t what they teach you in a ward,” Shelley said. “It’s not a diagnosis or a pathology. It’s just – sometimes you love someone, and the only way to prove it is to let them go before they become something that hungers.”
“How long?” Haley asked.
“Started turning about forty minutes ago. The incubation was fast. Maybe she was bitten days back and we didn’t know.” Shelley’s voice was steady. Conversational. The song continued underneath, a counterpoint. “I felt her start to change maybe ten minutes before the fever broke. That’s when I knew.”
Haley nodded. She understood the timeline. The desperate math. The way you counted down minutes and waited. The static was almost a chord now. Complex, dissonant, heading toward resolution.
“When I was deciding what flowers to use,” Shelley said, “I remembered something you said. In one of the sessions. You were talking about your mother, and you said –” She paused. The red bloom trembled in her fingers. First sign of emotion. The humming wavered. “– you said that the worst part wasn’t the act itself. It was after. It was knowing you’d done it, and having to live with that knowledge, and no one would let you talk about it.”
The static was almost coherent now. The frequency peaked. Sharp, singular, a note about to break.
“So I’m going to do what no one did for you,” Shelley said. The song steadied. Became almost fierce. “I’m going to stay here. And then I’m going to carry it.”
She set the red flower down.
She picked up the third flower. It was black. Not any flower Haley recognized. Almost like charred bone. Almost like something that shouldn’t exist in a world that still had color in it.
“This one’s for you,” Shelley said.
“For me?”
“So you remember what it costs.” Shelley held it out. The humming stopped. Silence suddenly present. “Not Jean. Not the killing. The knowing. The carrying it forward. The becoming someone who understands that mercy and monstrosity are sometimes the same thing, and you have to be willing to wear both.”
The static peaked into a single, terrible note.
Jean was waking up now. A human mind starting to exist in a body that was no longer human. The note was crystalline. Perfect. About to shatter.
Shelley took a breath. Picked up something else. A knife, small, clean. Her hands had steadied even further.
She positioned herself over Jean’s exposed skull. The angle was precise. She’d thought about this.
“Shelley –” Haley started.
“Don’t,” Shelley said. “Just – when you leave here, remember the black flower. Remember that I chose this. That I’m carrying it. That some of us figured it out in time.”
She moved. Fast. Merciful. Jean’s consciousness snuffed out before it fully assembled. That brief moment of reanimation cut short by someone who loved her enough to make sure she never knew what she almost became.
The static died.
Complete silence. Not peaceful. The absence of that discordant frequency left a void so present it was almost violent. Haley’s skull felt hollow. Empty. Like she’d been listening to music for so long she’d forgotten what silence actually was.
Shelley sat back on her heels. She was crying now. Not precise tears. Real ones. The ritual was over.
She looked at Haley.
“Tell me I did the right thing,” she said.
Haley didn’t answer. She was thinking about the psych ward. About the woman who had institutionalized her because she was afraid of what Haley had become.
She understood that now.
She picked up the black flower. Crushed it like Shelley had taught her. The smell was sharp. Ancient. Like something that had been waiting in the dark.
“You did the right thing,” Haley said.
It might have been a lie. It might have been true.
She tucked the black flower into her pocket and walked away, already feeling the next static building three blocks over.
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