Chapter 7: The Deep Current

Carmen Santos had been a nurse for eight years, which meant she’d learned to function on three hours of sleep, cold coffee, and the particular kind of adrenaline that came from keeping people alive despite impossible circumstances. But she’d never worked a shift like this one.

Rhode Island Hospital’s backup generators were holding, barely, but half the electronic monitoring equipment was down. The ICU felt like a ghost ship—machines silent that should have been beeping, screens dark that should have been displaying vital signs in steady green lines.

“Santos, bed seven needs manual BP checks every fifteen minutes,” Dr. Martinez called over the controlled chaos of nurses adapting to analog medicine. “And see if you can get a read on the guy in twelve—his chart says cardiac event, but something feels off.”

Carmen nodded, grabbing the manual blood pressure cuff that felt ancient in her hands. Bed seven was Mrs. Chen, a woman in her seventies who’d come in with chest pains just as the grid started failing. Without her usual array of monitors, Carmen had to rely on observation—skin color, breathing patterns, the subtle signs her training had taught her to notice but technology had trained her to ignore.

Mrs. Chen’s pulse felt strong under Carmen’s fingers, steady and warm. But there was something else, a quality to her energy that Carmen couldn’t name. Not the exhausted resignation she usually felt from elderly patients, but something almost… expectant.

“How are you feeling?” Carmen asked, adjusting the blood pressure cuff.

“Different,” Mrs. Chen said. Her voice was clearer than it had been when she’d arrived. “Like I’m waking up from a very long dream.”

Carmen pumped the cuff, listening through her stethoscope. 120 over 80. Perfect. Better than perfect for a woman who’d come in with suspected cardiac distress.

“The pain in your chest—is it still there?”

Mrs. Chen considered this carefully. “No. But something else is there instead. A kind of… opening. Like a door I’d forgotten existed.”

Carmen made a note on the analog chart, but Mrs. Chen’s words lingered in her mind as she moved to bed twelve. The guy in question was maybe forty-five, admitted three hours ago with what looked like a heart attack but wasn’t presenting like any cardiac event she’d seen.

“How’s our mystery patient?” she asked Janet, the other nurse assigned to this section.

“Stable, but weird. His EKG was completely normal when the machines were still working, but he kept insisting something was wrong with his chest. Now he’s just lying there listening to something the rest of us can’t hear.”

Carmen approached bed twelve. The patient—Michael Torres according to his chart—was lying with his eyes closed, but he wasn’t asleep. There was an alertness to his stillness that reminded her of meditation, or prayer.

“Mr. Torres? I’m Carmen, your nurse. How are you feeling?”

He opened his eyes, and Carmen was surprised by how present they were, how focused.

“Better,” he said. “The pressure in my chest is gone. But I can hear…” He paused, listening. “There’s music coming from underneath the building. From far underneath. You don’t hear it?”

Carmen stopped, stethoscope halfway to her ears, and listened.

There it was. So subtle she’d been dismissing it as building noise, but now that she was paying attention… not music exactly, but structured sound. Rhythmic. Almost like…

“Singing,” she said.

Michael nodded. “Been going on for about an hour. Gets stronger when I stop trying to figure out what’s wrong with me and just… listen.”

Carmen placed the stethoscope on his chest. His heartbeat was strong, steady, but there was something else beneath it—as if his heart was beating in harmony with something much larger.

She moved the stethoscope to different positions, listening not just for irregularities but for whatever quality she was sensing in both him and Mrs. Chen. Something that felt like… recognition. Like their bodies were remembering how to do something they’d forgotten.

“Mr. Torres, when you came in, you said you were having chest pain. Can you describe what that felt like?”

“Like something was trying to open,” he said. “Like my chest wanted to be bigger, to hold more… more everything. Air, space, feeling. But I’ve spent forty-five years keeping everything tight, controlled, manageable.”

Carmen nodded, understanding something she couldn’t quite name. “And now?”

“Now it feels like I can breathe for the first time in decades.”

She finished her examination and moved to the next bed, but Michael’s words followed her. The pressure in his chest wanting to open. Mrs. Chen’s sense of waking up from a long dream.

Carmen had been working twelve-hour shifts for years, pouring herself into patient care with the relentless efficiency that had earned her commendations and burnout in equal measure. She’d learned to override her body’s signals, to keep going when everything in her wanted to rest, to give endlessly without considering what she might need to receive.

But standing in this half-dark ICU, listening to the subtle humming that seemed to rise from the building’s foundation, she felt something in her own chest beginning to shift.

The mechanical rhythms that had driven her for years—check vitals, update charts, respond to alarms, manage crises—suddenly felt less urgent than the deeper rhythm she was hearing. Not just from below, but from within her own body.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her supervisor: Grid failures spreading. Possible 12-hour extension on shifts. Can you stay?

Carmen stared at the message. Normally, she’d respond immediately with yes, already calculating how to push through another twelve hours on caffeine and determination. But something in her body was saying no. Not defiance or exhaustion, but a clearer kind of knowing.

She walked to the window overlooking downtown Providence. Street lights were out in sections, creating patterns of darkness that looked almost intentional. And in that darkness, she could see people moving—not panicked, but purposeful, drawn toward something.

Carmen’s hands went to her chest, pressing against the spot where she’d been feeling a subtle ache for months. Not pain exactly, but a sense of constriction, as if something essential was being compressed.

Now, listening to the deep humming and feeling the shift in her patients, that constriction was beginning to ease.

She thought about Mrs. Chen saying she felt like she was waking up from a long dream. About Michael describing the pressure in his chest that wanted to open.

Carmen had been dreaming too—dreaming that endless giving without receiving was sustainable, that pushing through exhaustion was strength, that her body’s signals were less important than external demands.

But what if her body knew something her mind had been overriding?

She pulled out her phone and typed a response to her supervisor: Need to leave at end of shift. Personal emergency.

It wasn’t quite true and wasn’t quite false. Something was emerging that felt more urgent than another twelve hours of mechanical caring.

The humming grew stronger, and Carmen found herself walking toward the stairwell, following the sound deeper into the building. Not abandoning her patients, but answering something that felt more fundamental than duty.

At the stairwell door, she paused and looked back at the ICU. Mrs. Chen caught her eye and smiled—not the weak smile of a cardiac patient, but something bright and knowing.

“Follow it down,” Mrs. Chen said quietly. “It’s time.”

Carmen pushed open the stairwell door and began descending, following a sound that felt like her body’s own wisdom finally finding its voice.