Chapter 20
They load me in at dawn, because the Wasteland’s colors only matter to the dead or the sentimental.
I barely count as either, but I remember the blue shimmer of Sphere-light long after it fades.
Here, now, it’s all red warning LEDs and the vibrato rumble of an APC engine doing its best impression of a migraine.
The Authority’s transport is a vintage model, bulked out with layers of armor that never matched, interior reek a cocktail of vinyl, gun oil, and human soursweat.
Across from me, Captain Kang holds the air like a loaded weapon.
The guards—themselves no brighter than the circuitry in their helmets—are secondary.
Kang is the sun everything orbits, even when he pretends to read his mission tablet.
I’m restrained. Nothing dramatic: hands zipcuffed to a pipe bolted overhead, ankles looped in thick canvas bands.
The Authority excels at ergonomics of helplessness.
They’ve given me a hydration mask, standard for long rides, but I smell the denatured alcohol in the tube and know it’s mostly for show.
The benches are full. I’m not the only one the Authority dragged out of the perimeter.
There are six of them—three men, two women, and a little girl so small she’s nearly swallowed by the emergency blanket wrapped around her like foil-thin armor.
No one meets my eyes. No one looks at anything, really.
They just sit there, hollowed out, as if blinking takes too much effort.
Their eyes are dull, washed out, the color of old ditchwater. Each of them wears a metallic band clamped around their brow, wires trailing back behind one ear like some grotesque upgrade. I’ve never seen one in use before, but the design feels… familiar. Scientific. Efficient. Cold.
Memory suppression, I think.
It makes sense. And yet it makes my stomach twist.
Every thirty minutes—sometimes less—we hit a spike in radiation.
When we do, the headbands emit a faint hum.
The civvies don’t react, not consciously.
But their bodies twitch, one after another, limbs jerking like marionettes dancing to a rhythm they don’t hear. It’s wrong. Mechanized. Dehumanizing.
I watch them and wonder how close I came to being one of them.
How close I still might be.
Kang sits across from me, perfectly still. Not watching the others. Not watching me. His hands rest loosely on his knees, his back ramrod straight like he was born at attention. The picture of discipline. The soldier. The tool. The machine.
It’s almost admirable, how completely he’s managed to erase the last few hours.
No trace of what happened in the echo complex. No flicker of acknowledgment.
Not of the kiss.
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.”
“Where did he go?” I ask. My voice is thin, rasped dry by hours of filter-processed air.
Kang shakes his head. “He’s already at the site. Preparing.”
Preparing for what, I want to say, but I know better.
The child screams outside, a raw, shattering wail. The mother lunges for her, but is stopped by the guards, who force her to her knees. The child’s headband flares, and she goes quiet, just like the others.
Kang doesn’t look away this time. He stands there, watching me watch him.
The guards return, the hatch closes, and the engine cycles back to life. This time, the transport is empty but for me, Kang, and the guard.
“You’re not going to memory-wipe me,” I say, testing.
Kang doesn’t answer for a long time. Then he sits beside me, close enough I can see the ragged cut at his jawline from the Sphere incident.
“No,” he says finally. “You’re different.”
I think he means it as a threat, but it doesn’t land. Not with the way his hands tremble, or the way his eyes keep falling to the zipcuff marks on my wrists.
For the next hour, we ride in silence. Outside, the Wasteland whips past: a dead city here, a forest of blue moss there, always the haze of distant aurora rippling through the dawn. Inside, the hum of the engine and the soft whine of the life support are the only constants.
I keep waiting for Kang to talk. To explain, to apologize, to interrogate, to touch.
He does none of it. But when the engine hiccups, when we hit a patch of radiation so thick the filter can’t keep up, he grabs my arm, steadying me. Just for a second, just enough to remind me of the world before the Spheres, before the Protocols, before I was a test subject instead of a scientist.
Then he lets go.
No one tells you the air in a convoy is worse than a prison cell.
My wrists are zipcuffed but my mind isn’t, which means every second in the armored personnel carrier is spent counting: number of soldiers in my compartment there’s six, two of whom are rookies by the way they grip their weapons.
number of hatches and gunports there’s eight, plus a kill-switch panel near the driver’s seat.
number of times Kang’s gaze flicks up from his datapad to my face.
I lose track before the first hour is out.