Page 23 of The Atom Between Us

And then: black.

I come back to the filter house gasping, lungs locked in the panic of the remembered moment. The beaker in my hand is shattered, glass biting into my palm. There’s a chemical burn on my wrist, and the air is thick with iodine vapor.

Maven is beside me, hands on my shoulders. “Hey. Hey! Breathe.”

I do. The world narrows, sharpens. The pain is real, here-and-now, but it’s nothing compared to the terror of the flashback.

“Sorry,” I say, and wipe my hand on the front of my shirt. The blood smears purple, then brown.

Maven doesn’t let go. “What the fuck just happened?”

I don’t want to talk, but the words come anyway. “Memory. It’s… not like remembering. More like being thrown back into it. I was in a lab. Big one. Higher tech than this by a factor of ten.” I squeeze my eyes shut, chase the details. “There was a containment breach. I was patching the seal, but I knew—” I hesitate, taste the fear again. “I knew it wouldn’t be enough. That something was going to spread.”

Maven looks at the mess on the table, then at me. “That’s how you knew what to do here.”

“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe I just learned the hard way.”

They let go of my shoulders, but not before giving me a little shake. “You’re not the first person in this place to see ghosts, but you’re the first to pull something back with you.”

I snort. “Lucky me.”

They turn, grab a rag, and help me mop up the iodine. The act is almost gentle, but Maven can’t keep curiosity out of their voice. “What do you think it was? The thing you were sealing in?”

I shake my head. “Don’t know. But it felt important.” I want to say ‘critical,’ but the word scares me.

Maven tosses the rag in the bin. “You get flashbacks a lot?”

“Only when I’m around stuff like this,” I say. “Chemistry. Engineering. Anything with risk.”

Maven looks at the shattered glass, then back at me. “Then you’re going to have a tough time out here.”

“I already do,” I say.

For a minute, we just stand in the chemical fog, both of us soaking in the new reality.

Maven breaks the silence. “You’re not safe here, you know. Kang’s got his own agenda, and the Authority loves to disappear people with skills.”

“I guessed.” I scoffed.

They drum their fingers on the table, thinking. “There’s someone you should talk to. An old researcher, lives on the fringe of the Zone. Still remembers the world before the Protocols.” Maven’s eyes glint with a mix of respect and dread. “Name’s Elara. She’ll know what to do with someone like you.”

I let it hang. The name means nothing, but the idea does. “What’s her angle?”

“She hates the Military even more than you do,” Maven says, and grins. “Which makes her practically a saint.”

I nod, and start cleaning the bench with Maven. The iodine stains won’t come off my skin, not for days. But the flashbacks—the ghosts—are already fading, washed away by the familiar logic of the task.

I finish the new filter mix, pour it into the sample tray, and label it for Kang. “This will get them three more weeks,” I say. “After that, they’re on their own.”

Maven takes the tray, studies my face. “You sure you want to do this?”

“I don’t want to do anything,” I say, and mean it. “But I have to.”

They gesture at the door. “Come by the hut after dark. I’ll take you to her.”

We exit the filter house together. The sky is shading toward late afternoon, a blood-and-copper kind of light. I watch the dust settle behind Maven’s boots, and know I’ll follow, no matter how many ghosts come with me.

When darkness finally falls, it does so in a single motion, like a magician’s flourish. The settlement changes shape in the absence of sunlight: the basin turns from water feature to mirror, and the hum of the market flips from commerce to suspicion. I make my way to Maven’s hut at the perimeter, keeping to the shadows and stepping over the lines of wet laundry that serve as the closest thing to a tripwire defense.