Chapter 32 part 2
Chapter 32 part 2
Nyra
I finish the day as if it were any other. That’s the trick here: act like nothing is happening even while the floor tilts under you. Keep your head down. Don’t let your pulse show. Teyla finds me again before the end of shift to hand me the temporary badge stickered with a red stripe. “Scan won’t work everywhere yet,” she says. “But where it works, it will log you. Don’t linger.”
“I won’t,” I say. We both know I’m lying to someone—either her, or myself.
“Tomorrow,” she adds, tapping the badge with a knuckle. “Don’t be late.”
When she moves away, I let my fingers close around the plastic until it warms in my palm. It’s cheap, ugly, a piece of lamination and code, and I want to laugh because my chest is tight with gratitude for an object I shouldn’t want. I’m careful leaving the floor. I always am. I don’t look up at the cameras. I don’t turn my head toward the corridor that leads to Sublevel Three. But I feel it, like weather pressing at windows. The dorm is colder than it should be when I get back. I stand inside the door for too long, listening to the radiator tick. The room smells like detergent and something faintly sweet I don’t recognize until I realize it’s me—my skin, scrubbed too hard, trying to smell like nothing.
I sit on the bed and count to a hundred. Then another hundred. I make tea I don’t drink and watch it cool. I fold and refold the same towel until the edges line up like a wound stitched neat. You could wait, I tell myself. You could be good. You could be careful. But the truth is a needle: I won’t sleep until I feel him there, even if it’s just through steel. I change my shoes for softer soles. I put the badge in the inner pocket. I braid my hair tight so it won’t leave a trail. I tell myself I’ll only go to the hallway, just once, just to say it out loud where it matters. And then I’m moving, back through the quiet after curfew, heart knocking not with fear but with something worse: anticipation.
The stairwell breathes me in. The concrete still remembers the press of my back. Sublevel Three rises under my feet like a tide. I check each corner twice, then again. No guards posted. No voices. Only the hum. The corridor looks the same as always—blank, unmarked, mindless. It doesn’t care who I am. But my bones do. They seem to lengthen toward the end of the hall, toward the door that shouldn’t mean anything and yet is the only thing that does. I stop in front of it. I don’t look for the lens. I don’t look for anything but the metal. I lay my palm flat against it and feel the cold climb into my skin.
“I got it,” I say softly. “They made me a handler.”
The word hangs there. I hear how it sounds in my own mouth—thin and greedy, a little breathless. I don’t say for the gamma. I don’t say not you. The lie is omission. I’ve learned the facility’s language too well.
“Evening slot,” I add, because it feels like a promise. “Pre-sedation checks. Nutrition. Hygiene. Sensors.”
For a long moment, there’s only the sound of my own breath, the slow reach of my fingers across the seam the way I always do, like I might find warmth there by accident. Somewhere inside, something shifts—small but unmistakable. The change in his breathing is subtle, but my body knows it like it knows its own name: the drag-in, the hold, the stillness that reads as attention.
I lower my voice until it’s almost not there. “It means I’ll be closer.”
The corridor waits. The air thins, like the whole place inhaled and forgot how to let go. Then he speaks—a single word that lands deep enough to shiver bone.
“Closer.”
It’s an echo that makes itself into a warning because it knows how easily I’ll ignore one.My throat tightens. I rest my forehead to the door.
“I hope so,” I whisper, and I don’t know if I mean I hope I’m right or I hope it doesn’t ruin me.
The cold is steady under my skin. His presence presses at the other side of it—no weight, all weight. I stand there until my feet ache and the part of me that wants to sink to the floor is the same part that wants to claw it up with my hands. I leave only when the risk of being seen outweighs the risk of not hearing him again tonight. On the way back up, I touch the badge in my pocket with two fingers, as if to check that the path I chose still exists. The plastic gives, warm from my body. It feels like permission and punishment at the same time.
Tomorrow, everything changes. Or maybe nothing does. Maybe I only move a single step closer to a door that won’t open.
Either way, I’ll take it.