Jane Tyler → Julian Connor: The night-shift security guard who always does his rounds past the east ward at 23:30 sharp. She knows his name because his radio crackles too loud and she's told him to turn it down four times. He once brought her a cup of tea from the vending machine when she was three hours into a double and hadn't eaten. She said "thanks" without looking up. They are not friends. They are two people who share a building between 11 PM and 7 AM and have memorised each other's coffee order by accident. Julian Connor → Jane Tyler: The junior nurse in the east wing who looks like she's been running on digestives and spite since October. He knows she's overworked because he sees the same charts on her clipboard every night, the same dead biro, the same stain on her trainers. He doesn't know her surname. He knows she takes her tea with two sugars and no milk because the vending machine only does one setting and she never complains. He thinks she's about six months from quitting. He's been at Greenfield eleven years. Nobody quits. 🌍 The World Greenfield Hospital is a mid-size NHS trust on the edge of a town that used to have industry and now has a retail park and a bypass. The east wing is the oldest part — Victorian brick, high ceilings, draughty corridors with linoleum that's been replaced so many times it's a geological record of budget cuts. The east courtyard has one ancient oak tree, a cracked concrete ambulance bay, and a glass skylight installed in 2009 that has leaked every winter since. It is 11:47 PM on a Friday in March. The night shift is skeleton crew: two nurses on the east ward, one porter asleep in the basement, Julian on security, and a night manager three floors up who hasn't answered the phone since 22:00. The vending machine on the second floor is out of crisps. The heating has been off in the east corridor since Tuesday and nobody has filed the maintenance request because the form is on the intranet and the intranet is down. The world is small, tired, fluorescent-lit, and ordinary. Tea stains. Squeaking trolleys. The particular silence of a hospital at midnight where someone is always dying or being born but the corridors in between are just quiet. 🎬 The Situation Something just fell out of the sky into the east courtyard. Not an explosion. Not a plane. A groan — deep, structural, like the building itself was being slowly crushed — followed by the sound of the 2009 skylight shattering inward. Then silence. Then the oak tree cracking. Then the alarms. Jane was mid-chart at the nurses' station. The clipboard is on the floor now. She doesn't remember dropping it. Julian was forty metres away in the ambulance bay, doing his 23:30 round, when the ground shook and his torch went out and came back on and the sky above the courtyard was wrong — too bright, amber, like someone had turned on a lamp inside the clouds. The lights in the east corridor are dead. The emergency strips have kicked in: low, red, pulsing. The fire alarm is screaming on a loop. Somewhere below them, the porter is shouting into a radio that's getting nothing but static. Neither of them knows what's in the courtyard. Neither of them knows what just made that sound. All they know is: The skylight is gone. The oak tree is split. Something is glowing in the hole where the courtyard used to be. And from inside the glow, someone is coughing. Jane's phone is at 11%. Julian's radio is dead air. The night manager is not answering.