Page 26 of The Atom Between Us

At the outer wall, Maven cuts through the mesh with wire snips, the process slow and deliberate. I keep watch, but nothing stirs. Inside, the world is different. The concrete is overgrown with vines, but not normal ones—these have thorns as big as thumbs, their color a mix of blue and purple, and the sap inside glows in the dim. The vines pulse, almost in time with my heart.

We duck through an opening into a corridor. The floor is littered with the bodies of rodents, insects, and the occasional larger animal, all of them dried to husks by the ambient radiation. Maven gags at the first one, but I keep moving.

“Up ahead,” I say. “Second door on the right.”

“You remember this?” Maven asks.

“I think so,” I say, which isn’t true. I know so.

The lab is a disaster zone. Benches upended, every cabinet open and looted. There’s a skeleton in the far corner, curled around a canister of what looks like sugar pills. The smell is old ammonia and the sticky-sweet tang of formalin.

I go straight for the back wall. Embedded in it are three Echo Spheres, each about the size of a grapefruit. They are pulsing, much brighter than the ones in the market. The light stings my eyes. I reach for the nearest, and Maven grabs my arm.

“Wait. That’s a bad idea.”

I ignore them. I press my palm to the surface of the Sphere. Instantly, the blue glow of the RadShield at my neck spikes to white, then back to blue. My head fills with static, then:

A memory, clear and painful. I’m standing in this lab, not as I am now, but in a suit that fits. The Sphere is new, and I’m testing it—logging data, recalibrating the EM output, watching the way the animals in the cages react. The man in the suit from the first flashback is there, watching through the glass. He’s older, but the eyes are the same: cold, calculating, waiting for the experiment to go wrong so he can record it. There’s a sense of impending failure—something about the sequence is off, but I can’t fix it, not in time.

I turn away from the Sphere, the memory fading but leaving behind a residue of panic.

Maven’s staring at me. “You phased out. For almost a minute.”

I shake my head to clear it. “I remembered a code. 18-06-Beta. That’s the panel for the lower corridor.”

Maven frowns. “There’s no power down there.”

“There will be,” I say, and start moving.

The stairs to the lower level are caved in, but the vines have made a kind of ladder. We climb down, boots slipping on the sap-slick steps. At the bottom, the darkness is total until Maven cracks a chem lamp. The light reveals more Spheres, smaller ones, set into the walls in a spiral pattern. At the end of the corridor is a control panel, the keys worn but readable.

I enter the code. The panel lights up, faint at first, then steady. The Spheres along the wall begin to strobe, and a low vibration sets in, so deep it makes my teeth itch.

Maven hangs back, pipe ready. “If something jumps out, I’m braining it.”

I ignore them, scanning the shelves for anything that survived the looting. There’s a box of backup batteries, a set of laminated research notes, and a sealed envelope marked with the Authority’s insignia.

I snatch the notes and flip through them. They’re written in a spidery hand—my own, I realize, after the third page. The research is all about neural adaptation, the effect of radiation on memory, the attempt to build a human immune to forgetting.

I stuff the pages into my pack, grab the batteries, and head for the stairs. The vibration is louder now, and the Spheres are pulsing in sync with my own heartbeat.

Maven grabs my arm again. “We have to go. Now.”

I hear it too, this time: the faint whine of a hover engine, far away but closing. Military.

We scramble up the steps, Maven half-hauling me by the collar. At the top, the corridor is awash with blue light, the Spheres at maximum. We sprint, ducking low and weaving between glass ridges. The hover engine’s whine resolves into a patrol drone, slicing the sky fifty meters above outside.

Maven finally breathes. “You’re insane,” they hiss. “We should be dead.” I check the pack. The research notes are real. The envelope is sealed. My head is spinning, but for the first time, the world feels less random. Less arbitrary.

I look at Maven, and the terror in their eyes is mixed with something like awe. “What did you see?” they ask.

I think about the lab, the Sphere, the code, the hands that wrote the notes. “Myself,” I say. “I saw myself. And I don’t think I liked her very much.” We lie low for another hour.

Let them come, I think. The experiment isn’t over yet.

We wait for dusk to finish its work. In the ruins, every shadow is a hiding place and every silence is loaded. Maven and I take cover in what used to be a ventilation crawl, the passage roofed in slabs of half-melted polycarbonate. Through a gap, I can see the line of sight to the old lab’s entrance, now crawling with Authority boots.

The patrol is surgical, five men and one woman, each kitted out with a rifle and the glazed look of professionals who know how to make a corpse disappear. They move as a unit, every gesture mirrored, every check-in crisp and quiet.