Nasira moved to the first window and peered through. It was eerily lit by purple light, and only in certain places. The rest of the dome was bathed in darkness. She could make out a smaller dome inside. It looked like a semi-transparent bubble; the colors of its contents were blurred and smeared. Outside the bubble there were banks of equipment and what looked like a row of study workstations, self-contained like cubicles.
But it was the bubble that drew her attention. It seemed to almost agitate its surroundings.
Her breath fogged the window. She wiped it away with her sleeve. She knew she had to get inside. But through the clean window she noticed someone in a white NBC suit. It was a one-piece body suit with matching white boots and gloves. The person was unarmed and looked to be a civilian contractor, not one of the sentries from outside.
Nasira moved deeper into the half pipe and found a door that connected to the inner dome. That was where she wanted to go. She took care to open the door slowly, listening for sound. There was an in-between chamber and a door that connected to the inner dome. She opened it slowly as well.
She set foot in the inner dome. She relied only on her lack of movement to avoid detection. There wasn’t much cover she could use to cross from there to the bubble in the center. The inner dome, like the half-pipe, lacked cameras. The base must be extremely temporary, she figured, if there were no cameras.
She spotted the white-suited civilian behind the workstation cubicles, bent over to collect something at his feet. She checked the edges of the inner dome and was pleased to find no one else lurking. She breathed in slowly and exhaled halfway.
Then she moved. Quickly.
For the other side of the cubicles. This close to the bubble, she could almost feel it humming. From her end of the cubicles she listened to the footsteps of the civilian. His boots squeaked on the vinyl floor. He moved away from the bubble to the edge of the inner circle. As he did so, she carefully moved around the cubicles, keeping them between her and the civilian. She heard him open a door and move through into another portion of half-pipe. He’d left the dome. She was clear for now.
Turning to face the cubicles, she realized they weren’t cubicles at all. They were square containment cells. In the cell before her, a crumpled human body in a powder blue hospital gown. Spidery blue veins worked along his neck. His eyes were a dull white, pupils wide. Blood had dried across the Plexiglas wall in mid-drip, leaving long crimson fingers.
In the cell adjacent, a second human body in a gown lay in the fetal position. Thin arms curled over knees. Underneath, a pool of dark deoxygenated blood. Nasira stepped back from the row of five cells, struggling to draw breath. She could see a third body, limbs mottled in purple bruises. A fourth, the same. But the body at the end was different.
Nasira pushed herself closer, to the fifth cell. To the body that sat upright, hands clasped in her lap. Although just as dead as the other poor fuckers, she seemed less distressed. There was no blood. No mottled skin. No sign of illness. Sitting in her hospital gown, she looked perfectly healthy.
New footsteps.
From Nasira’s right. She was completely exposed. She darted past the cells and took a position on the end, hidden from the footsteps as they approached the cells. These footsteps sounded slightly different, but only slightly. The civilians were wearing boots so it was hard to tell them apart. And the echo through the inner dome made it tricky to pinpoint the location of the boots as they moved around. Nasira drew her knife and kept it below her waist.
The bubble in the center drew her focus. She had to blot it out with her mind and focus on the ground, on the contours of the earth. She could see its magnetic field slide away from her. Although see wasn’t the right word. She just knew it was there.
The person — civilian or sentry — fizzled into her awareness. He was behind her, near the other end of the containment cells. She turned to the containment cells and noticed a certain distortion in the wall of the cell. But it wasn’t the cell at all. It was through the cell. The person on the other side. And through the indistinct shape, she knew he was carrying a long weapon, a carbine. He was definitely a sentry.
And he was moving towards her.
She circled around the back of the containment cells, each step carefully placed with the outside of her feet first, then the inside. It helped her avoid stepping on things that might make an unexpected sound, like the empty blister pack in front of her, discarded after someone finished their medication. She stepped off the blister pack without applying any weight and continued until she was on the other side of the dome from the sentry. And completely exposed to the dome’s main entrance.
The sentry continued along the containment cells, perhaps inspecting them as he went. She wondered whether he was as disturbed as she was, or interested, or perhaps didn’t give a shit either way. That was the worst of the three, she decided.
He seemed to spend some time in that position before continuing on. She could feel his movements. They were indistinct — she had a general idea of his position and his movement, and she could almost see him move across the ground behind her.
He emerged at the end, where Nasira had been hiding only moments ago. She matched his movements, placing herself at the other end of the cells. She caught sight of his back. She watched him continue in the same direction with a degree of purpose and increased speed. He moved for the very doors she’d come through.
Nasira didn’t move from the end of the containment cells. She kept herself low to make herself smaller and waited for the door to close behind the sentry. Then she made her move.
She moved for the bubble and reached an open zipper. She was closer to the source now. And it made her hands shake. Pressure welled inside her head. It spread to her body and buzzed across her. She clenched her teeth and stepped through the open zipper.
Inside, another much smaller bubble, only this was sealed up tight. It was completely transparent, unlike the other bubble, and she could see everything inside.
Rubble. Just rubble in a bubble.
But there was something about the rubble. It shimmered, looked like honeycomb had fused with liquid silver. It seemed to pulse around her. She recalled the meteor that passed overhead the night before.
‘Just a big chunk of rock.’ She shrugged to herself. ‘And RDX explosives in a ring around—’ Nasira paused in mid-step. ‘Oh shit.’
Inside the smaller bubble she noticed a rectangular timer with a display.
00:00:41.
Nasira sheathed her knife and rolled her eyes. ‘Great.’
She stepped from the bubble and broke into a run. There was no one in the inner dome to see her escape. They had the good sense to escape already. She moved for the same doors she’d come through, hoping that sentry hadn’t lingered. And if he had, she gripped her knife.
She ran for the doors, noticed something different.
She felt it. It was blunt, fuzzy. Near the door. A sudden chill fired from her stomach to her lungs, stealing her breath. In mid-run, she spotted a trail of wiring that weaved its way through intervals of square boxes the size of a house brick.
The buzzing made sense now. She was sensing another demolition charge. Not just the bubble, the entire base was wired to blow.
She ran harder.
Her vision widened. Blood shunted through her limbs. She shouldered through the connecting chamber and into the half-pipe, a new release of adrenalin almost knocking the doors off their hinges. She moved at double speed. No one was in the half-pipe. She kept moving. Ran for the door at the rear. She stuck to the exit she knew.
She opened it without hesitating. There was no time to check. She sprinted through the snow towards the severed razor wire at the rear of the base. She felt the snow cold against one foot and realized she’d lost a boot. She couldn’t go back for it. She kept running.