Page 44 of The Atom Between Us

I shake my head, feeling the ghost of the glyph crawl up my arm, rewriting itself in blue fire.

Petrov sighs. “We’ll extract it the hard way, then.”

He gestures, and the squad closes in. I brace for the impact, but it never comes.

Instead, a howl splits the air—a sound I’ve only heard from the other side of a containment wall. The Spheres’ hum spikes to a shriek. The room vibrates, light flickering so fast it turns the world to strobe. I glance back down the corridor, and see Kang.

He’s on his knees, hands pressed to his head, eyes squeezed shut. Blood drips from his ears, staining the water at his feet black. He’s screaming, but the sound is lost in the roar of the Spheres. Petrov reacts, shouting at the squad to lock down the chamber, but it’s too late. The Spheres are resonating—every one of them, all at once, a harmonic wave that rattles the teeth in my skull.

Kang’s scream goes silent. He looks up, eyes wild and glowing with blue. For a split second, I see something in him I’ve never seen before—fear.

Real, existential, animal fear.

Then he collapses, face first, into the water.

I don’t remember moving, but suddenly I’m at the edge of the corridor, staring at his prone body. The squad is in chaos, half of them bracing against the walls, the other half training weapons on me as if I’m the problem.

Maybe I am.

I look at Kang, at the blue leaking from his nose and mouth, at the way his fingers twitch in the current.

What the fuck is going on?

The Spheres’ hum rises, a siren song, calling to something I can’t see but know is out there.

I realize: the Spheres are not the only experiment.

We are.

And the test has only just begun.

They load me in at dawn, because the Wasteland’s colors only matter to the dead or the sentimental. I barely count as either, but I remember the blue shimmer of Sphere-light long after it fades. Here, now, it’s all red warning LEDs and the vibrato rumble of an APC engine doing its best impression of a migraine.

The Authority’s transport is a vintage model, bulked out with layers of armor that never matched, interior reek a cocktail of vinyl, gun oil, and human soursweat. Across from me, Captain Kang holds the air like a loaded weapon. The guards—themselves no brighter than the circuitry in their helmets—are secondary. Kang is the sun everything orbits, even when he pretends to read his mission tablet.

I’m restrained. Nothing dramatic: hands zipcuffed to a pipe bolted overhead, ankles looped in thick canvas bands. The Authority excels at ergonomics of helplessness. They’ve given me a hydration mask, standard for long rides, but I smell the denatured alcohol in the tube and know it’s mostly for show.

The benches are full. I’m not the only one the Authority dragged out of the perimeter. There are six of them—three men, two women, and a little girl so small she’s nearly swallowed by the emergency blanket wrapped around her like foil-thin armor. No one meets my eyes. No one looks at anything, really. They just sit there, hollowed out, as if blinking takes too much effort.

Their eyes are dull, washed out, the color of old ditchwater. Each of them wears a metallic band clamped around their brow, wires trailing back behind one ear like some grotesque upgrade. I’ve never seen one in use before, but the design feels… familiar. Scientific. Efficient. Cold.

Memory suppression, I think.

It makes sense. And yet it makes my stomach twist.

Every thirty minutes—sometimes less—we hit a spike in radiation. When we do, the headbands emit a faint hum. The civvies don’t react, not consciously. But their bodies twitch, one after another, limbs jerking like marionettes dancing to a rhythm they don’t hear. It’s wrong. Mechanized. Dehumanizing.

I watch them and wonder how close I came to being one of them.

How close I still might be.

Kang sits across from me, perfectly still. Not watching the others. Not watching me. His hands rest loosely on his knees, his back ramrod straight like he was born at attention. The picture of discipline. The soldier. The tool. The machine.

It’s almost admirable, how completely he’s managed to erase the last few hours.

No trace of what happened in the echo complex. No flicker of acknowledgment.

Not of the kiss.