Hospital Corridor

The wide hospital corridor stretches between the wards and administration, its linoleum floors worn smooth by decades of hurried footsteps. Fluorescent lights hum overhead, their sterile glow reflecting off polished chrome rails where stretchers once moved patients to isolation. A single monitor mounted on the wall replays the Marshal’s broadcast—his voice booming from a sickbed ward elsewhere—while beyond the windows, the blast-scoured skyline of the ruined city etches itself into every pane. The air carries antiseptic sharpness layered with the faint metallic tang of contaminated ventilation, seeping from sealed wards down the hall. Astra stands motionless here, her uniform the only splash of color against the institutional gray, her silence measured against the broadcast’s relentless rhetoric of defiance.