Page 74 of The Atom Between Us

I caught the gaze of a woman two tables over, a hardcase with a face like it had gone a few rounds with a belt sander. She looked away fast. Others kept their heads down, or focused on the food, or on the nothing in front of them.

No one mentioned the incident. No one even looked like they remembered it.

After breakfast, I was shuffled to my new labor assignment—laundry duty, with Stitch and six others, all of them too broken to be a threat. The laundry block was a warren of old industrial machines, the air thick with steam and wet heat. The supervisor was a guard with a voice like gravel and a face that might have been carved out of leftover concrete. She barked the rules: no talking, no fighting, no fucking around with the equipment.

I kept my head down, let the motion of the work take over. It was almost soothing, in a way. The rumble of the machines, the warmth, the repetitive motion of folding and stacking and sorting. I could almost forget, for a few seconds at a time, where I was. Who I was.

At the end of the shift, as we lined up to return to our cells, I saw Kang. He stood at the end of the hall, talking with the laundry supervisor, his posture perfect, eyes hard. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t need to. I could feel the gravity of his presence, the way he bent the space around him.

He was different, now. Before, he’d been a threat, a reminder of everything I’d lost. Now, he was something else—a vector, maybe, or a fuse. I could feel the potential energy coiling, ready to snap.

I watched him until the guard shoved me forward, then shuffled back to my cell.

Inside, I sat on the bunk, arms around my knees, and catalogued everything I’d seen. The way Petrov wielded fear, the way the prisoners responded, the way the guards covered their own terror with violence. The way Kang moved now, all tight focus and hidden charge.

Something was coming.

I could feel it, just under the skin.

Weeks passed, or maybe it was only days. Time went weird in the block—dilated by routine, contracted by boredom, always warped around the next moment of violence. The Authority’s schedule was supposed to be a clock, but it ran on power outages and guard hangovers and the random whims of whatever bureaucratic black hole controlled the shift roster.

I did what everyone else did: kept my head down, worked my assignment, and didn’t make noise. The girls in my shift—Stitch, the red-haired mutant with the burned scalp, and a silent kid they called Mouse—were efficient, not friendly. The guard on laundry detail watched us with a bored, predatory gaze. After the incident with Petrov’s spectacle, even the guards seemed to move more quietly, like they were afraid of waking up the floor itself.

I didn’t see Kang. Not for days, then weeks. I told myself it was a relief. I told myself it meant he wasn’t watching anymore, that I’d finally outlived my status as experiment-of-the-week. But the truth was, the silence left a hole, and I hated myself for even noticing it.

I focused on the patterns instead. Laundry detail rotated every six hours, six girls at a time. We sorted, washed, dried, folded, and stacked. The shifts always overlapped by a quarter hour—just enough for one group to warn the next of any drama, or pass messages, or cover up contraband with a perfectly timed pile of towels. There was a logic to the way the inmates grouped themselves: the strong together, the sick together, the ones with nothing left to lose somewhere in the middle, drifting between poles of fear and numbness.

That’s how I ended up stuck with Stitch more often than not. At first, she was just noise—sharp, manic stories that spilled from her mouth like broken glass, full of details that never quite fit together. One day she’d swear she used to be a smuggler with a whole network of tunnels under the city; the next she claimed she’d once sewn up a man’s stomach with fishing line and a bent nail, then charged him double for the effort.

Most people wrote her off as cracked, or dangerous, or both. But somewhere in the middle of all that madness, I started to notice the way she always gave the weakest women the lighter loads, how she slipped extra socks into the piles of the ones shivering through winter nights, how she picked fights not to prove she was tough but to draw attention away from someone who couldn’t defend themselves.

It didn’t happen overnight, but the weeks stretched, and the routine dulled, and suddenly Stitch was the one I found myself listening for at the start of each shift. Her laugh was too loud, her grin too sharp, and yet she had a way of making the walls feel a little less close. She told me stories until I caught myself laughing, stories so ridiculous I wanted to call her a liar but secretly hoped they were true. She made the laundry room feel alive.

I mapped the guard shifts, too. Laundry was on the north end of the block, furthest from the canteen, adjacent to the showers and two stories below the admin offices. There were three main guards: the blonde, the scarface, and the one with the permanent nasal drip who everyone called “Snot.” Each worked a double, then rotated out for a full twelve, but there were always gaps—points when the cameras didn’t quite cover every angle, or when a guard would vanish into the breakroom for forty minutes at a stretch. I filed these away, even though I didn’t plan to use them. Old habits die harder than inmates.

I tracked the prisoner politics, too. The hardcases ran the shifts: D-Block Queen, the former Authority commando who now kept order by breaking teeth; the Skinners, who controlled smuggling, tattoos, and revenge; the mutant contingent, who mostly stayed out of the way but went feral if cornered. All the old lines—race, gender, even original crime—meant nothing here. Everything was about survival, and every day the balance shifted, just a little, as someone lost a fight or got transferred or just snapped. More and more, I listened to Stitch. Because underneath the mania, the scars, the wild laugh, she had a heart too big for this place—and somehow, she’d started letting me see it.

Mostly, I stayed invisible. But I listened

That’s how I heard about the pit.

It was late, last shift before lights out, and the dryers were running hot. The heat warped the air, turned the little laundry room into a sweatbox. I was folding towels—old Authority issue, still labeled PROPERTY OF EXPERIMENTAL ZONE 7—when two girls from C block started whispering by the washer.

“They’re gonna do another one,” said the first, voice barely above the noise of the machines.

“Not yet,” said the other. “They only pull the trigger at the end of the month.”

The first girl glanced around, saw me at the counter, and lowered her voice even more. “It’s almost that time. You heard what happened to the last lot, right? Half of them came back wrong. The other half⁠—”

The other girl cut her off, glancing at the camera eye above the door. “Shut up.”

They started loading sheets, talking about nothing, but I caught enough to know the pattern. “The pit” wasn’t a rumor. It was an event.

As they left, the second girl bumped my shoulder hard, enough to make me stagger. She leaned in, close enough that I felt her breath on my ear.

“Mind your own business if you want to stay breathing,” she said. Her voice was high, almost shaky.

The first girl gave me a glare, then followed.