Page 68 of The Atom Between Us

The next punch breaks teeth. I hear the click and scatter of them as they hit the ceramic, rolling to a stop at my bare feet. Thirty-Five’s eyes roll back. He tries to claw at Kang’s wrist, but the grip is absolute. The fingers just flap, then go limp.

The violence is surgical. Each motion is calculated for maximum effect, minimum resistance. I know the drill—Kang’s Authority record was full of this kind of improvisation, the body count always lower than it could have been, but never zero. He was trained to do this. He’s doing it for me.

The realization is a slap. I shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t even process it, but there it is: the animal satisfaction of being protected, of watching someone else’s pain transmute into my safety. I catalog the sensation, but it’s slippery, hard to pin. Somewhere in my chest, a molten warmth pools, unexpected and shameful.

Thirty-Five’s head lolls. Kang drops him, letting the body slide boneless to the floor. The man twitches, one leg jerking in a slow, mechanical spasm. His face is already swelling, the left eye buried under a bloom of purple. He tries to suck air, but the sound is wet, bubbling through the red.

Kang stands over him, breath slow and regular, shoulders squared. For a moment, I think he’s going to finish it. But instead he steps back, turning to scan the room.

His eyes land on me. He freezes.

I’m still naked, still shivering, water cutting tracks through the blood on my skin. The silence is total, except for the drip of water and the high-pitched whine of the dying lights. I want to say something—thank you, or fuck you, or just a scream to fill the void—but my voice is locked in my throat.

Kang doesn’t blink. He just stands there, hands flexing at his sides, every muscle tight as wire. There’s blood on his knuckles, and on the collar of his shirt, splattered up from the tile.

He looks down, then back at me, and something in his face changes. The mask slips, just a hair, and I see the man underneath.

His lips part. “Diana,” he says. Just that.

The sound of my name in his mouth is a bullet. It hits, but I don’t know where.

I want to cover myself, to hide, but I don’t. Instead, I stand up, letting the shower pour over my bruises, refusing to give him the satisfaction of shame.

“Why are you here?” I ask, voice a rasp. “Why did you—” I gesture at the heap of meat on the floor, at the dead guard by the partition, at the streaks of red already congealing in the grout. “Why?”

Kang doesn’t answer, not right away. He wipes his hand on his sleeve, then wipes again, as if trying to erase the evidence of what he’s done.

“You shouldn’t have been here alone,” he says, finally. His voice is flat, but I hear the quiver underneath.

I snort, short and mean. “You threw me in here, remember?”

He looks away. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I heard what he was—” He shakes his head, starts over. “I couldn’t let him⁠—”

He stops. The sentence trails off, but the meaning is clear.

I step forward, water pooling at my feet. “So what now?” I ask. “You gonna haul me off to the hole for fighting back? Or is this part of the experiment?”

Kang’s face twitches. He glances at my body, then away, as if the sight burns him. “Get dressed,” he says. “I’ll clean this up.”

He turns, dragging the dead guard’s body toward the door with one hand, as if it’s a sack of potatoes. I watch, feeling the tremor in my own hands, the way my body still hums with the aftershock of violence and fear and something else I don’t want to name.

I should have just left. He told me to get dressed, said he’d clean up the mess, but I stayed anyway—leaned against the peeling tile, arms tight around myself, watching as Kang dragged the dead guard toward the door by one ankle. The man’s head bounced once, wetly, and then the body was gone, out of sight past the rusted locker partition.

The silence that followed was vacuum-tight. Only the sound of the shower, spitting erratic pulses, and my own heartbeat—fast, arrhythmic, skipping every time I looked down and saw the blood streaking my thighs. Not even my blood, but it stuck.

I slid down the wall until I was sitting, knees pulled to my chest. My back ached from the blows, my scalp stung where the bastard had pulled my hair, and my lungs still burned from the choking. I could taste iron and chlorine, and the whole room stank of old piss and industrial blue.

I told myself to catalog the pain, to start the triage—inventory the abrasions, the likely fractures, the places I’d need to disinfect before the next shift. But I couldn’t get past the tremor in my hands. It wasn’t fear. It was something closer to rage. The kind that doesn’t care about damage, only that it wants to inflict it on something, or someone.

The showers kept running, draining the heat from my skin. I didn’t shiver. I just let myself get cold.

Kang reappeared five minutes later, the body gone, the partition spattered with new red. He’d washed most of the blood from his hands, but there was still some under his fingernails. His uniform was wet and clinging, the collar torn and one sleeve already blooming with bruises. He walked with a limp, favoring his left side, but his eyes were as flat as ever.

He didn’t say anything at first. Just stood there in the archway, arms at his sides, the Authority mask pulled down tight. Only his breathing betrayed him—quick, shallow, like he’d just finished a sprint.

He looked at me. Looked away. Looked again.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, voice level but softer than before.