Page 52 of The Atom Between Us

I sit on the bed, feeling the afterimage of the Spheres burned into my retinas.

I think of Kang. Of Maven. Of the woman in the convoy, her eyes wild and free for one perfect second before the Authority turned her off.

I clench my hands, knuckles white. I make a promise, to myself and to the ghosts.

I won’t forget. Not this time.

They come for me at 03:17, not that I’m sleeping. The Authority’s clock resets its own definition of night every few hours, chasing power surges or maybe just keeping everyone too jet-lagged to think. The room’s cold enough to numb my fingers, but I keep tapping the pulse at my left wrist, counting the time since the last Sphere spike. The base is built on precision—sterile, rectangular, too many right angles and not enough hiding places. Even the shadows are institutional.

When the guards open my door, there’s a triple beat before they enter, a rhythm so rehearsed it could pass for polite. I’ve seen these ones before: one with a healing nose break and another who walks like he never grew out of puberty, both in heavy Authority black. They don’t bother with words. They clamp restraints over the old ones, metal on bone, so tight the skin splits in two crescents along my radius. I catalogue the pain, rank it against previous.

They lead me through a sequence of corridors that never quite line up with the architecture in my memory. On the third left, I catch a flash of my reflection in a window—short hair gone feral, blue-circled eyes, a bruised jaw that already looks like the start of necrosis. There’s a moment of cognitive drag: the face in the glass is wrong, but it’s the only one I have.

The interrogation chamber is textbook Authority: cube of concrete, single lamp pendant, every inch engineered for leverage. They park me in a metal chair bolted to the floor, wrists locked to loops beneath the armrests. There’s a stink of old bleach, the underlying note of ozone, and a constant, throbbing hum that might be generator or might be the echo of my own blood.

Petrov is waiting. He’s steel-gray hair clipped to the scalp, scar along the jaw like a watermark, eyes like they were carved from frost. He sits at the far end of the table, two fingers drumming a time signature on a data slate, posture so upright it almost folds in on itself. Kang is already in the room—stood to the left of the door, rifle at parade rest, eyes low but never off the mark.

No one says anything for eleven seconds. I use the time to count the drips from a leaking pipe above the door, measuring the lag between droplets: 2.1, 1.9, 2.0. It’s almost comfort.

Petrov begins. “Diana. Your Authority file says you’re a biophysical researcher. Six years in the quarantine labs, two years field lead in the Echo Zones. Yet, you turned up at a classified site wearing unauthorized tech and accompanied by known subversives. Would you care to revise your self-assessment before we start?”

His accent is an old war, thick in the vowels and sharper at the ends. I watch the way his mouth curls around the syllables of my name, like he’s savoring the taste of a guilty verdict.

“My self-assessment stands,” I say. “If you want the notes on my pendant, I’ll need a power source and a voice recorder. Otherwise, you’re wasting time.”

He glances at Kang, who gives the smallest nod, a ripple of muscle along the jawline. I notice the new bruising at Kang’s throat, a half-moon matching the contour of my own teeth. The memory stings worse than the restraints.

Petrov ignores my dig. “Tell me what you know about the Spheres.”

I shake my head, slow. “No one knows what they are. The outer casing is titanium-carbon composite, but the inner lattice can’t be resolved. The EM signatures vary by placement, but the harmonics are always in the subsonic band. I’ve run every protocol on them, and the only constant is their refusal to be constant.”

A flicker of amusement, or maybe just satisfaction. “And the incident at Echo Complex? The Spheres were arranged in a pattern you recognized. What was the intent?”

I feel a twinge in my left wrist, the bone shifting against the cuff. “It was a frequency test. I hypothesized they could be synced, like cardiac nodes in a failing heart. I didn’t expect them to respond to biological cues.”

Petrov leans in, voice dropping a register. “You triggered a resonance event that killed sixteen people. You’re either reckless or a traitor. Which is it?”

I let the words hang. My instinct is to fire back, but the calculation says to stall. “Neither. The deaths were collateral.”

He pushes a file across the table. It’s thin, Authority-issue, stamped with my old ID photo and the red mark of “CONDITIONAL.” He doesn’t open it. He just lets it sit there, a dead weight between us.

“You were observed talking with known dissidents. You accessed classified files without clearance. You resisted Authority capture. Explain.”

I stare at the file like it might rewrite itself into something that makes sense. My memories—whatever’s left of them—are still half-developed film, nothing clear enough to anchor to.

I start counting the drips from the leaky pipe above, lips barely moving. “2.2, 2.0, 2.1⁠—”

The slap comes down hard. The metal table rings beneath it.

“Focus,” Petrov snaps, the word slicing through the haze.

The copper taste in my mouth returns—fear or memory, I’m not sure. I shift my gaze to the LED strip above the data slate, watching it flicker with each escalation.

Then, out of nowhere, the words come.

“I was recruited because no one else survived the last Sphere event,” I say. Calm. Collected. Too fast. Too fluent.

The lie rolls out like I’ve practiced it a hundred times.