INTRODUCTION

The Silent Ward

They say hospitals are places of healing.
But in the dead hours of the night—when the fluorescent lights flicker and the halls echo with nothing but the wheeze of machines—they become something else entirely.

Groote Schuur Hospital stood like a sentinel on the hill, its white walls soaked in a century of suffering, silence, and secrets. Patients came and went. Some were healed. Some weren’t. But a few—just a few—disappeared.

Ward 17B doesn’t appear on any maps. No signs point to it. No records mention its name. The door was sealed shut in 1984, after something happened inside that no one was willing to explain.

Until now.

Detective Siya Ndlovu never wanted to come back. Not to this place. Not to this city. Not to the memories she buried the day her twin sister Asanda vanished from Groote Schuur without a trace. But when bodies begin piling up with no cause of death—just eyes wide open and mouths stretched in silent screams—Siya is drawn into a case that feels too close to home.

As the investigation deepens, she uncovers whispers of a government project buried beneath hospital floors, of experiments that cracked the human mind and opened something that should’ve stayed shut.

They called it Project Threnody.