The alert didn’t feel like information. It felt like something breaking.
Savannah stared at the screen, her fingers frozen around the phone as the message repeated itself with mechanical indifference.
“Cardiac support device detected extreme stress.”
Below it, a location pin pulsed.
Not Nancy’s house. Not a hospital. Not anywhere that belonged to a living, breathing person trying to survive.
A garbage compactor.
Five kilometers away.
Her brain rejected it instantly. Devices failed all the time. Signals crossed. Systems glitched. There had to be a rational explanation—something technical, something temporary, something that didn’t point straight toward the worst possible outcome.
Then the call came.
The voice on the other end was calm in the way people are when panic has already passed and been replaced by procedure. They asked her to come. No details. No reassurance. Just a quiet insistence that carried more weight than any explanation could have.
By the time she arrived, the scene looked unreal, like something staged for an audience that wasn’t there. Police lights flashed in sharp bursts of red and blue, cutting the darkness into fragments. Officers moved in controlled patterns, speaking in low voices, avoiding eye contact with her as if looking directly at her might make things more real.