Chapter 22
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.
I haven’t.
And that’s what scares me.
“If you think I’m a traitor, shoot me,” I add, voice like static. “If you think I’m a tool, use me.”
There’s a standoff, more psychological than physical. I watch Petrov try on a dozen reactions, none of which fit. Finally, he looks at Kang.
“Your assessment, Captain.”
Kang’s voice is blank as carbon paper. “She’s the best we have. And the worst. All at once.”
Petrov nods, barely. “We will verify. Until then, you are to be considered hostile-adjacent. Kang, you’ll monitor. If she attempts escape, or damages Authority assets, terminate on sight.”
Kang gives nothing back, but I see the way his jaw tightens, the way he shifts his weight to the balls of his feet when Petrov says “terminate.”
Petrov stands, the chair scraping a precise line on the floor. “You will be transferred to Secure. There, you will undergo Mnemosyne Protocol. If you have memories you wish to keep, I suggest you commit them now.”
He leaves, the room shrinking around his absence. Kang is the only other living thing left. He steps forward, unhooks my wrists from the cuffs, and helps me up. His grip is steady, impersonal, but I feel the tremor in his fingers when they brush my skin.
As he leads me out, he whispers, so quiet I almost miss it: “Don’t let them see you break.”
I don’t plan to.
But I count the drips, just in case.
The transition from the interrogation cell to the Protocol suite is a study in degradation.
The Authority calls it “Secure,” but nothing about the route suggests security; it’s two floors down, past a firebreak wall pitted with blue scorch marks, and through a hall so narrow even the guards have to turn sideways.
The cuffs stay on, but the escort swaps at every junction, a relay race of armed boredom.
The Protocol suite is nothing like a lab, and nothing like a torture room.
It’s worse because it’s both: tile walls, linoleum gone yellow at the seams, a bank of monitors built into a panel that buzzes every time you look at it.
In the center is the chair—a predator’s idea of comfort—reclined, padded with what might once have been memory foam, restraint points at ankles, thighs, wrists, neck.
They sit me down and lock the restraints. There’s an instant where I try to move, just to see if I can, but the gear holds with sickening efficiency. The headrest is already damp from someone else’s sweat.
The techs are faceless, all in identical gray.
They don’t talk, except in the shorthand of their work: “Left line, green.” “Running saline.” “Forty-six, ramping to eighty.” Their hands are gloved, but not to keep anything out—to keep the subject in.
I watch the tremor in the smallest one’s left hand, the way it jumps every time the machine hisses.
Kang is nowhere. Only Petrov watches from behind an observation window, arms folded, the glass thick enough to muffle even the illusion of empathy.
Electrodes go on my temples, two on my jawline, one each on the wrists and the backs of my knees. I watch the technician work, guessing from the placement and the gel that they’re running a full spectrum: EEG, EKG, probably something to track hormone spikes if they’re feeling thorough.
The chair reclines. The lights dim, except for the ones aimed at my face.
Petrov keys the intercom. His voice is pure dry ice. “This is Mnemosyne Protocol session one. Subject: Diana. Begin at operator’s discretion.”
A tone sounds, flat and artificial. The techs retreat, each to a console, eyes flicking from screen to screen.
At first, it’s just a mild current. A fizz on the skin, an aftertaste of lemon and copper. I catalogue the sensation, rating it against the standard memory induction methods: magnetic pulse, chemical trigger, direct electrical. This is a hybrid, but with a twist I can’t quite parse.
Then the real current hits, and the world inverts.
I’m not in the chair anymore. I’m falling through the old lab at Zone One, watching myself from a bird’s-eye as I solder a connector onto a Sphere diagnostic port. My hands move too fast, and the solder burns my thumb. I flinch, both in memory and in the chair.
A rush of heat, then a cold snap: I’m at a field site, testing rad levels in a slurry pond. The Geiger goes nuts, maxes out, and I log the reading. A man’s voice, just out of focus, says, “Careful.” The memory tries to paint in a face, but it blurs, then burns away.
The current builds. The electrodes dig into my skin. Now I’m in a white corridor, running, papers clutched in both fists. An Authority drone buzzes overhead, casting my shadow in three colors. I see myself from above, then from inside, then both at once.
My body rebels—arches against the restraints, teeth clamp so hard I taste iron. I try to hold onto myself by reciting the constants of the universe: Planck’s, Boltzmann’s, Avogadro’s numbers. I make it through the second one before the memory-scrape grabs me and whips me sideways.