Chapter 3 #2
There are places where the walls bow out, scarred from patch jobs with off-color polymer, and places where the overhead lights flicker not because they’re faulty, but because someone has rigged them to run on variable cycles.
I see the logic immediately: unpredictability as a defense.
If you don’t know when the light will come on, neither does anyone else.
I’m impressed despite myself, and the fact slides into my internal ledger—a point in his favor.
The living area is less a room than a thicket of improvisation.
The centerpiece is a table that’s been rebuilt three times with scavenged legs and a top of mismatched planks, all scorched in places where the tools have outlived the patience of the operator.
Every flat surface is subdivided: one corner stacked with sealed ration packs and canisters of instant coffee, another colonized by a molecular chemistry set and a portable microcentrifuge, a third given over to weapons maintenance and the careful field-stripping of handguns.
It smells like burnt plastic, solvent, and the faint reek of synthetic food.
Jackson stands at the threshold, letting me case the joint.
He watches the way I catalog things—my eyes grazing over every canister, every blade, every hand-written label—and then he nods, a little proud, a little sad.
He sits at the table, grabs a foil ration, and tears it open without looking.
“Pull up a chair. If you can find one that doesn’t wobble. ”
I settle across from him, picking the sturdiest chair with a quick torque-and-rock test. My hands stray to the chemistry set, almost involuntary, but I resist the urge to rearrange the pipettes into proper order.
Jackson chews for a while, then swallows and points at the wall.
“You see those charts?” It’s not a question.
There are four of them, each hand-drawn, each tracking something different: radiation counts by sector, rainfall, external temperatures, frequency of ‘incursions.’ On the far side, a fifth chart is crossed out in heavy marker.
I squint at the faded title: “Communications.” All entries end about three years ago.
Jackson taps the radiation chart, then jerks his thumb at the Geiger counter holstered on his belt.
“Out there, the world’s not dead. Just different.
Places you can’t even breathe without your teeth dissolving.
Other places, you’d never know anything happened, until the wind changes and it all comes apart. ”
He tosses the empty ration sleeve into a bin, then leans forward, the motion calculated to keep every major muscle ready for trouble.
“Most of the city is a patchwork. Zone shifts, nobody knows why. You find a safe corridor, next week it’s a deathtrap.
Last winter, I watched a whole convoy turn to ash in less than thirty seconds because someone trusted an old map.
” He grins, but the humor is all in the teeth. “Don’t trust anything. Not even me.”
I file that away. “What about people?”
He laughs, but the sound doesn’t last. “People are worse than radiation. Raiders, marauders, whatever you want to call them—they move in packs, like wild dogs. Only dumber, and with more firepower. The ones in the city core have some kind of code, but out here, it’s a lottery.
I avoid them when I can. Used to be settlements, co-ops.
Most are gone. The rest will shoot you before they ask your name. ”
I tap the table, lightly. “And the other threats?”
Jackson shrugs, as if the list is so long he’s lost interest in ranking them.
“Weather. Mutated wildlife. There’s a breed of rats that can strip you to the bone in less than an hour.
But the real problem is the shifting. Sometimes you’ll wake up, and the air just isn’t right.
Like somebody changed the recipe. That’s when the pendants come in. ”
He says it like I should know what he means.
When I don’t, he cocks his head, then gets up and crosses to a battered locker on the far side of the room.
He opens it, moves aside a stack of folded mylar blankets, and pulls out a small, metal box about the size of a lunch tin.
He sets it in front of me with the reverence of a ritual.
“This was yours. You always said you’d never need it, but I kept it anyway.
” His hands work the latch, and he opens the box.
Nestled inside, on a velvet liner stained with grease, is a pendant on a chain.
It’s a perfect disk, slightly convex, made of some metal I can’t name—too blue, too alive for steel.
At its center, a crystalline lens pulses with faint, cerulean light.
Jackson lifts it out by the chain and lets it dangle, spinning slowly. The blue deepens as it turns.
I reach for it. The metal is warm—no, more than that, almost body temperature, as if it’s alive and waiting for a pulse to sync with.
The crystal in the center throbs, its rhythm matching my own heartbeat after two seconds.
My hands remember this before my mind does.
I turn the disk over, noting the micro-etching on the back: “Matrix v5.2 - Property of D.K.”
Jackson watches, pride and regret doing battle in his face.
“It’s called a RadShield. You built it, or something like it, when the project was still funded.
It detects gamma and beta, sure, but it also picks up…
other things. Stuff nobody had a name for.
You were obsessed with the idea that the next mutation would be invisible to the standard gear, so you made your own. ”
I hold the pendant up, watching the blue light shade from cool to electric as I angle it toward Jackson.
When he leans back, the light fades; when I point it at the doorway, it flares so bright it bathes my palm in color.
I can feel the heat, faint but definite.
“How does it work?” I ask, half to myself, half to him.
Jackson shrugs. “You never told anyone. There’s a rumor you put a piece of your own DNA in every one. Some kind of tuning mechanism. But the real secret is this: the brighter it glows, the closer you are to dying. If it ever turns red, run.”
I stare at the pendant. “Has it ever turned red?”
He nods, once. “Twice. Both times, you lived.”
I close my fist around the pendant, feeling it press into my skin.
I try to conjure up any memory associated with it—none come, but my body tells me it belongs there, as if I’m not complete without it.
Jackson slides back into his chair, rubbing his beard.
“You used to say you’d solve the whole thing, given enough time and data. Now you’ve got both, if you want them.”
A silence settles, heavy but not hostile.
I watch the light from the pendant flicker across the table’s battered wood, then look up at Jackson.
“Why are you helping me?” He flinches, almost imperceptibly.
“Because I owe you.” The words come out like bone fragments.
“And because if anyone can make sense of what’s left, it’s you.
I don’t have to like the world, but I’d rather not die in it without trying. ”
I nod, not trusting myself to reply. I run my thumb over the pendant’s lens, feel it heat up, and wonder if it will still be with me the next time I wake up on a cot, memories stripped to the bone.
Jackson clears his throat, shifting gears.
“You want to see how it works? There’s a hot zone in the old ventilation shaft. You always liked a challenge.”
A slow smile finds its way to my lips—crooked and alien, but mine. “Let’s see if I remember how.”
He grins back, and the room, for one brief moment, feels like home.