Page 138 of The Atom Between Us

Rosie nudges me. “You seeing things, Captain?”

I blink, shake my head. “Nothing useful.”

She grins, but there’s pity in it. “You’ll catch up to her. You always do.”

I don’t answer. I just rub my ring finger harder.

At the next breach, a flood of heat hits us—vented from the main generator, cycling on emergency now that the complex is half-crippled by the last raid. The air is so thick with humidity I feel it collect on my eyelashes, running down my nose in stings of saline and sweat. Rosie’s shirt goes transparent in patches, but she ignores it, her mind running miles ahead. Markus peels his glove off to better grip the service ladder, and I see the network of scars and home-inked tattoos spiraling up his palm. Even the Authority couldn’t scrape those off.

At sublevel five, we break through into the admin ring—a circular corridor lined with blast doors and recessed security nodes. The walls here are pristine, untouched by mold or soot, white as the day they were poured. The lighting is different too: a cold, blue-white that eats shadows and makes everyone look like ghosts.

This is where I really lose it. The hum is gone, replaced by a dead silence so absolute I hear my own pulse, echoing back and forth like it’s trying to get away from me. I remember Diana’s description of this place, how she said the blue light made her feel like a cell sample, how she used to whistle tunelessly so she wouldn’t dissolve in the quiet. I want to whistle now, but my throat won’t work.

Markus stops, raises a hand: two o’clock, thirty meters, movement behind the observation glass. I see the shimmer, too—a figure, Authority blue, pacing the length of the security booth. I signal Rosie: left flank, soft entry. We take it slow, using the blind spots between the lights, moving in parallel until we’re ten meters out.

The glass is bulletproof, but the seal at the bottom isn’t perfect. Rosie wedges a folded wedge of plastic explosive against the edge, Markus wires it with a coil of filament. The countdown is five seconds, no time to second-guess. I count down with my fingers, slow and steady, and at zero Markus hits the trigger.

The blast is quiet, more a pop than a boom. The guard inside doesn’t even get a chance to react before Markus is through, knife up, hand over mouth. It’s a clean kill, textbook. Rosie drops in after, scooping up the guard’s badge and dragging the body out of sight.

I follow, but stop at the threshold. Because for one split second, when the glass went, I saw her face reflected in it. Not the guarded—Diana. Clear as day, standing over my shoulder, eyes wide, mouth moving in silent warning.

I almost drop the gun.

Markus doesn’t notice. Rosie does. She puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes.

“You okay, Kang?” she whispers.

“Fine,” I say. “Just⁠—”

I don’t finish. There’s no word for this.

We press on. The last stretch is the hardest—a choke point where the Authority expected resistance. The corridor narrows, bottlenecking into a single blast door, flanked by two machine gun nests, both manned and live.

We pull back, regroup. Rosie checks her shells, fingers moving so fast I barely see the motion. Markus swaps out the knife for a compact SMG, checks the mag, then points at me.

“Call it,” he says.

I count the guards. Four, maybe five. One in the left nest, two in the right, another two at the door. They’re Authority, but tired. Hungry for a break. They’re talking, heads close, weapons down.

I run the plan in my head, but nothing fits. Not unless we go loud, not unless we’re ready to kill everyone in the room.

Diana would have a plan. Diana always had a plan.

I close my eyes, breathe, and see the map of the tunnels. The way she would see it. The ducts above, the fire suppression lines, the bundle of cables running parallel to the floor.

I signal Markus: cover left. Rosie: take the high ground. I go low, crawling under the exposed conduit, praying the guards are too bored to notice a shadow sliding across the dirty tile.

At the ten meter mark, I pause. The air is thicker than ever, charged with something I can’t name. The guards are louder now, voices echoing off the walls. They’re telling jokes, Authority jokes, the kind that only make sense if you were bred for war and never learned to laugh.

I listen, and in the background, under the noise, I hear her again. Diana, laughing.

This time it isn’t a hallucination. It’s the real thing, piped in through the PA, a snippet of her voice from some long-forgotten audio log. Someone in the control booth must have triggered it by accident.

The guards freeze. One of them stands, head cocked, listening.

That’s when we move.

Markus pops the left guard, two shots. Rosie takes the high with a flashbang, then sweeps the second nest with scattershot. I’m on the ground, sliding behind the main desk, and I put two rounds into the nearest boot I see. The guard goes down hard, gun clattering.