Page 45 of The Atom Between Us

Not of his body crashing into mine.

Not of the sound he made when I bit him like a feral ghoul.

Not of the way he was breathing ragged, like I’d reached something inside him no one else had touched.

Not of even his earlier collapse, when he fell to the ground as if strings had been cut. He acts as if it never happened, though I can still see a small trace of crusted blue by his nostril, a silent testament to the moment he refuses to acknowledge.

He hasn’t looked at me since they loaded us in.

It’s ridiculous, the part of me that still waits for it. For the weight of his stare. For the cold calculation that always felt a little too warm when it lingered on my skin.

Now? Nothing.

He’s a statue.

To my left, the guard shifts, making a show of checking her sidearm. It’s a plasma-suppressed model, Authority standard, but she’s modded the grip with a strip of green leather. I watch the way her thumb moves, the tremor in her pinky that always comes before a chemical break. She’s been microdosing, maybe to cope, maybe just to keep the shakes down.

Kang’s voice breaks the drone of the engine. “Status?”

The guard stiffens. “Radiation holding steady, Captain. ETA to site one is two hours sir. No signs of Ghoul movement along the route.”

He nods, slow, then returns to not-looking at me.

The APC windows are slits, enough to see the blur of the Wasteland as we cut through. I try to keep track of where we are, but the land is unkind—ridge and crater, patches of fused glass, forests of steel-slag that might once have been signs of civilization. At intervals, we pass what look like gravestones, but are probably just markers for the teams who never made it back. I wonder if Maven is alive. I wonder if Kang knows.

I test the zipcuffs, more out of boredom than hope. They’ve left some play in the right wrist, probably for pulse monitoring, but I could work it loose given an hour and a distraction.

The man next to me—a thickset laborer with a jaw like a broken cinder block—starts to moan. The headband’s LED has gone red, and his body twitches with every rut in the road. The guard ignores him. Kang ignores him.

I don’t. I watch the man’s eyes as they roll back, and for a split second he seems to see me. His lips move, forming a word I can’t hear over the engine. It could be “help.” It could be “run.” It could be a memory bleeding through.

I lean in, just enough to make eye contact. The man’s pupils are two pinholes, his teeth grinding so loud it sounds like he’s eating gravel. The headband zaps again, and he slumps, piss pooling around his boot. The guard sighs.

Kang keys his comm. “Suppression unit four. Civilian on bench two. Pre-seizure. Adjust field strength.”

A monotone reply: “Acknowledged.”

Thirty seconds later, the man’s headband hisses, and his entire body stiffens. Then he’s out, slack-mouthed, drool soaking the collar of his shirt.

I track the process clinically. Even without the blue glow of the Spheres, the world is a feedback loop—stimulus, reaction, control, suppress. Nothing gets out. Nothing is allowed to propagate.

I look at Kang, waiting for him to look back. He doesn’t. He glances instead at the guard, then at the child, then at his own hands. The tattooed line along his wrist pulses with his heartbeat, green to blue to almost black. He taps the inside of his left elbow, then rubs his ring finger. a nervous tic that’s new.

The child starts to cough, a thin reedy sound. The other woman, maybe her mother, leans in but doesn’t speak—just holds the girl’s hand and strokes her cheek. Their headbands are silver, not black. I file it away.

The APC slows, then comes to a full stop. The motion jars the woman, who grips the child tighter, eyes darting to Kang.

Kang stands, stretches, and says, “Checkpoint.” His voice is flat, but his posture changes—slightly softer, shoulders rounding, as if he’s bracing for impact.

The rear hatch hisses open, cold wind flooding the compartment. Outside is a scab of Authority prefab: a pair of concrete blocks, antennae poking up like brittle hair, and a perimeter fence of rusted razorwire. Three more APCs are parked in a line, their engines idling.

Kang gestures to the guard. “Rotate the detainees.”

She nods, and one by one, the civilians are unbuckled and led out onto the tarmac. They move with the shuffling reluctance of sleepwalkers, headbands glowing as the wind hits them. The man with the red LED is carried by two soldiers, his boots dragging twin mud ruts behind.

Kang turns to me. For the first time.

His eyes are shot through with burst blood vessels, the green gone radioactive. “You will remain inside,” he says. “Orders from the Commander.”