Page 150 of The Atom Between Us

They say it again, louder, so close I can feel the syllables brushing across my eardrum. “DIANA. Answer me.” The words claw at the inside of my head, drag my name up from wherever I’ve gone and staple it to the moment.

I try to respond. Nothing. My jaw is glued shut, or maybe I no longer have a jaw. My tongue is a lump of char. I think to wiggle my fingers, but sensation ends at the elbow, then the shoulder, then somewhere in the solar plexus, buried beneath a pressure so absolute I wonder if I am inside the node itself, crushed into paste.

Memory trickles in. Kang. The last thing I saw was Kang—his face, the way the muscles in his jaw bunched up when he tried to be brave, the sound he made when I told him I loved him. I remember the smell of him: sweat, singed hair, copper from the blood, and something else, ozone maybe, or the charged ions from the EM field’s meltdown. I remember thinking it would be okay if this was the last thing I ever felt.

It’s not.

The pressure on my chest isn’t just a force—it’s a body. Heavy, familiar, radiating a dying heat that even now the rest of me tries to burrow into. An arm is slung across my neck, a half-circle of bone and muscle locking me in. I know the shape, the scars. I know who this is.

I try to say his name. I try to scream. What comes out is a wet, bubbling choke that coats the inside of my mouth with a new flavor: iron and saliva and something sweet, chemical, probably the signature note of dying neurons.

Above me, the world shudders. I hear the crash of glass under boots, then a groan of shifting metal. A voice—not Maven this time, someone younger, male, terrified—shouts, “Over here! I got movement!” Another pair of hands joins the dig, the tremor of the floor driving splinters of pain through my ribcage.

“Careful!” Maven’s voice again, but now they’re right above me, close enough to smell the antiseptic on their glove. “There’s two. Kang’s on top. Get him off, then—” Maven’s voice breaks, just for a second, a stutter of command and heartbreak. “Get her out. Now.”

Hands clamp onto the body covering mine. I feel Kang’s weight shift, then lift, a flood of cold air smashing into my face as the makeshift barrier of his chest is peeled away. For a split second my own lungs expand, greedy and wild, desperate to fill the new vacancy, but the emptiness hits harder than the pain. The warmth is gone. The shield is gone.

A faint keening whine—maybe me, maybe the metal, maybe the world itself—rings out as they pull him clear. The arm that was around my neck drags across my jaw, leaving a slick trail of something wet and sticky, and I want to reach for it, want to grab on and not let go, but my own arms are dead, useless, limp as washed-out noodles.

Maven’s flashlight lands on my face, the beam cruel and antiseptic. The breath catches in their throat—a microsecond hitch, a static pulse of disbelief. Then Maven’s hands are on me, prying at the wreckage pinning my lower half, all gentleness gone. I feel a finger at my carotid, a slap to the cheek.

“Diana. Hey. Don’t you dare fade now. Not after this. Not after everything you’ve done.” Maven’s voice is cracked open, raw, the command filtered through a mesh of relief and terror and something that sounds a little like gratitude, but mostly just fear.

I blink, slow, as if my eyelids are packed in wet cement. It takes three tries, but finally I manage to open my mouth. All I can manage is a breath, and then a word, hollow and shredded:

“Kang.”

It’s barely sound. It’s barely anything at all.

But Maven hears it, and for the first time in my life, I see them soften, the hard angles of their face going slack. They lean in, eyes wild and wet, and clamp both hands around my head like they’re trying to physically hold my brain together.

“He’s here,” Maven says. “We got him. You did it, Diana. You did it.”

They repeat it, over and over, each time softer, more like a lullaby than a victory chant.

“We got him. You did it. You did it.”

And I believe them.

For a second, I believe.

Then the darkness comes back, and I let it take me. This time, though, it’s not the Authority’s darkness. It’s my own, and I earned it.

The next time I surface, the world is upside down and inside out and echoing. I have no sense of time, only the taste of burnt insulation and the aftershock of all the pain I tried to leave behind.

I’m being moved, dragged by the armpits, someone’s rough hands wrapped around my torso like a child’s rag doll. My head lolls against my collarbone, mouth sticky with dried blood. The pressure on my chest is gone, replaced with an uncooperative vacuum, as if my lungs are reluctant to admit the air outside. Every breath is a new experiment in pain.

There’s light, hard and unfiltered, searing through my eyelids. I squint them open and immediately regret it.

Sanctuary is gone. Or more precisely, Sanctuary has been re-cast as a brutalist art project, all exposed rebar and smoking glass. The main tunnel is collapsed, the walls at insane new angles, entire sections melted to a runny, iridescent slag. Where the node heart was, now there’s only a crater, wires fanned out like a dead spider’s legs.

The silence is worse than the destruction. No Authority chimes, no surveillance static, no droning cycles of coded announcements from speakers. Just wind, and the wet sound of people moving through wreckage, and the distant, incongruously delicate sound of water dripping from the ceiling.

Maven’s voice, stripped of all distortion, barks orders at the edge of my awareness. “Put her there—no, the mat, not the floor. Keep her head elevated. Fuck, where is Rosie? Where is the kit?” Their voice is full volume, but the words don’t land. I drift sideways, losing chunks of the present.

Something icy is packed against the side of my head. The touch wakes up all the pain circuits at once, a flash-bang of sensation so loud I nearly retch. I blink again, and this time the world resolves:

There are bodies on the ground. Some I recognize, others are just Authority uniforms crumpled and leaking, faces erased by blast or shrapnel. There is a patch of blue at the corner of my vision—a flower, somehow still intact, embedded in the chaos.