Page 72 of The Atom Between Us

He opened the door a crack, checked the hall, then turned to me one last time. “Stay here,” he said. “Let the water run for ten. I’ll signal when it’s safe.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. He stepped out, closing the door behind him with a soft click. I waited. Counted out the seconds, the drops of water, the beats of my heart.

When I finally stood, the room felt emptier than it had ever been.

I dressed, boots squelching on the wet floor, and went to the mirror above the sink. My face was a stranger’s—hair plastered flat, lips split, a dark bruise already blooming at my cheek. My eyes, though. They were the same. Cold, furious, alive.

I splashed water on my face, scrubbed away the worst of the blood, and stared at my reflection until the shaking stopped.

When I opened the door, the corridor was empty. No guards. No Kang.

I walked back to the block, one foot in front of the other, each step a tiny act of defiance.

Sleep never comes the way you want it to in D block. I tried lying on my back, but the sharp-edged bruise under my shoulder blade lit up every time the patched mattress shifted. I curled on my side, knees locked to chest, but the cold climbed in anyway, searching out the cracks between vertebrae, settling in like rot. The room was quiet for once—no screams from the yard, no guards roughing up a body two cells over, not even the gurgle of water in the pipes. My own pulse was the loudest thing in the world. Sometimes, it sounded like footsteps.

I stared at the low ceiling, counting the spider-tracked fissures, the cancerous clusters of blue-black mold. Each mark was a tally for someone before me. Some days I tried to assign each one a name: the first girl who spit blood in my food, the last one I’d seen walk upright into Med Bay and come out with her brain switched off, Kang, Petrov, the bastard from the showers. I ran out of names before I ran out of cracks.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Kang. That was the worst part. My brain ran the whole encounter in a loop: the shock of him barreling in, the way he’d snapped the guard’s neck like it was a minor inconvenience, the blank fury with which he’d taken apart the man who tried to rape me. The moment afterward—the violence gone, the silence raw—was even more unnerving.

But it was the other thing I couldn’t let go of. The heat of him. The way my body had arched up into him, even as I hated him, even as I wanted him to choke on his own blood. The feel of his hands, the way his mouth caught mine, the copper taste of his tongue, the pain and pleasure twisted up so tight I couldn’t tell which was which. I hated how my skin still burned from it, how the echo of the moment clung to the inside of my mouth, how my chest kept replaying the last three seconds over and over, like a diagnostic glitch in my own wetware.

I kicked the blanket off, then pulled it back up, cursing the coarse synthetic against my scraped legs. I wanted to sleep. I really did. But every time I closed my eyes, I saw his face—Kang’s face, lit by the hellish blue of the ceiling LEDs, looking at me not like I was a problem to be solved, but like I was the answer to a question he couldn’t even articulate. It made something in my gut curl up and hiss.

When sleep finally found me, it was only because my body betrayed me. The pain got bored and went numb. My brain didn’t so much turn off as fade out, like a dying bulb, thoughts flickering in and out of sequence.

The dreams started fragmented, as always. I was underwater, lungs burning, every sense muffled by the pressure and the cold. I tried to swim, but my arms wouldn’t work. Above me, the surface flickered with yellow light—the real kind, not the Authority’s ghost-glow—and I could see shapes moving on the other side, blurred by the ripple. One of them was Kang. He looked down, hands pressed to the glass, mouth open like he was calling to me, but the sound didn’t carry. I tried to scream, but all I got was bubbles.

Then the dream shifted, and I was in a corridor—clean, white, sterile, nothing like the block. My legs were bare, feet numb, and the tiles were slick with condensation. Someone was running beside me, but I couldn’t turn my head to see them. There was warmth at my back, a big hand closing around my shoulder, fingers gentle and rough all at once. I should have been afraid, but I wasn’t. The hand guided me, pushed me onward, and for a moment I felt safe.

That’s how they get you, I thought, in the dream. They make you feel safe, just long enough to lower your guard.

The dream morphed again, now a room I’d never been in—soft light, a rumpled cot, the scent of ozone and metal. A figure sat on the edge of the bed, face in shadow. When they turned, the shape was all wrong: not Kang, not anyone I’d ever met, but the eyes were the same feral green. The figure leaned over, breath warm against my neck, and whispered something I couldn’t make out. My skin prickled, not from cold, but from longing.

I woke up to the blare of the morning alarm, adrenaline dumping hard in my veins. The dream clung to me like static, fragments stuck in the corners of my mind. My heart pounded, dry-mouthed and frantic, as if I’d been running for my life instead of asleep on the world’s shittiest mattress.

I flexed my hands, checked my pulse, catalogued the symptoms: sweat at my temples, jaw locked, the taste of blood in my mouth. My nails dug red crescents into my palm. I tried to reconstruct the dream, but the pieces wouldn’t fit. I only remembered the feeling: someone touching me with intent, not as an enemy, not as a machine, but as something in between. Something that wanted.

The air in the cell was colder than before. I pressed my face to the pillow, breathing in the antiseptic tang, the chemical afterimage of everything that had ever happened here. I wondered if anyone had ever slept in this bed and felt something other than fear.

The alarm blared again, a low-frequency buzz that vibrated the fillings in my teeth. I sat up, legs stiff, shoulders hunched, trying to shake the dream off. It clung, stubborn as a stain.

I stood, rolled my neck, stretched my arms until the joints cracked. I brushed my hair with my fingers, tried to tame it into some order, failed. My jumpsuit was still damp from the night before, the knees crusted with old blood. I put it on anyway, zipped up to the chin.

I looked in the tiny mirror bolted above the sink. My face was gaunt, cheeks hollowed out, eyes sunken. There was a bruise on my cheek that hadn’t been there yesterday, a fresh mark of Authority hospitality. My lips were swollen, split in the middle.

I remembered the feel of Kang’s mouth on mine, the way he’d bitten me back, the heat of his breath in the cold, and I hated myself for wanting it again.

I splashed water on my face, scrubbed until the skin went pink, then stared at myself in the mirror until the alarm cut off and the corridor lights clicked to full intensity.

The intercom clicked, a second of dead static before the morning’s instructions droned out. “Block D, morning chow in ten. Noncompliance will be sanctioned. Repeat, Block D⁠—”

I ignored the rest, already moving. I could hear the shuffle of bodies in the hall, the scrape of boots, the sharp retort of a baton against steel. Same as every day, but a little sharper now, a little more charged.

I glanced at the door, then back at the mirror. I bared my teeth, checked for blood, found only the echo of a snarl.

I was ready.

Or close enough.