#Chapter 221: Recovery and Revelation

Amelia I woke slowly, with a strange calm pressing in around me. The light was soft and low, the kind that told me it was either early morning or someone had dimmed the room on purpose. The sheets beneath me were stiff and tucked too precisely to belong to a normal bed, and the sterile smell of antiseptic clung to the air. I was in the infirmary. The ache in my body stretched deep and steady, dulled to the edges but unmistakably there. My limbs felt heavy, as though everything inside me had been drained and packed back in wrong. My thoughts moved sluggishly, but the chaos that had consumed my head for weeks had gone quiet. The signal was gone. The pressure that had coiled behind my eyes and twisted through every step of the field was no longer with me. The only thing I could hear was the slow, repetitive beep of a monitor keeping time with something I hadn’t yet named. Richard was beside me. His hand was wrapped around mine, like he didn’t trust himself to let go. His shirt w