The glass around me hummed.
Not loudly - it wasn't the kind of sound you'd catch unless you were listening for it - but it thrummed and vibrated in the bones of my fingers where they rested against the railing. I shouldn't have been able to feel it through the containment shell.
On the other side of the glass floated a shimmer in the air, bent like heat-haze, but sharper, more precise. If you stared too long, the edges almost formed shapes your mind wanted to name ripples, folds, distortions and then the shapes were gone, leaving only the sense that something had been there.
They called it a localized dark energy resonance. I called it trouble.
"Field integrity holding at ninety-nine-point nine percent," came Dr. Holtz's voice through my earpiece. Crisp, calm, a man who trusted numbers more than people.
I glanced at the readout hovering on the transparent display to my left. "Ninety-nine point nine is just a polite way of saying not perfect."
Holtz made a noise between a sigh and a chuckle. "You're in there to monitor, Nico, not to philosophize."
"Can't help it," I said. "You put me in a room with something that bends the universe and expect my thoughts not to wander, heh"
Truth was, I'd been staring at that shimmering distortion for the better part of an hour, and my mind hadn't quieted once. You weren't supposed to be able to see dark energy. It wasn't like light or matter - it didn't interact with anything in ways we could detect easily, much less with the human eye. And yet here I was, watching the air ripple like reality had sprung a leak.
I reached for the diagnostic controls, fingers dancing over the haptic interface. The data flowed across the display - energy fluctuations, quantum vibration patterns, gravitational drift anomalies. All textbook. All boring.
Which was why I noticed the anomaly.
A spike, so fast the sensors almost missed it. Barely a tenth of a second, but enough to shift the resonance pattern.
"Holtz!" I said slowly, "did you see-"
The shimmer pulsed. Once.
And then again, stronger.
The hum in the glass deepened, vibrating through my forearms, into my ribcage. My heartbeat jumped to match it, and for a wild second I thought I could feel my blood thrum in time with the pulse beyond the glass.
"Field drop!" Holtz barked. "Ninety-nine point nine to-"
A blare split the air. The containment alarm. I woke to the steady beep of a monitor.
The ceiling above me was dull grey, patterned with hexagonal panels. Soft light seeped from seams between them. My head throbbed in rhythm with the beeps.
"Don't move yet," a voice said.
I turned my head anyway. The movement sent a hot spear of pain through my skull.
A man in pale blue scrubs stood beside my bed, scanning a tablet. "Vitals are stable," he murmured, more to himself than to me. Then, louder: "You've been unconscious for seventeen hours. How do you feel?"
"Like I got sat on by a neutron star," I muttered. ZZZ, my voice was raw, unfamiliar.
He made a small noise of amusement. "You're lucky to be awake at all. Exposure to high-intensity resonance"
"Dark energy," I corrected automatically.
"is usually fatal," he finished without acknowledging me. "Dr. Holtz wants to speak with you as soon as you're strong enough."
I was about to ask what exactly had happened when movement caught my eye.
Someone stood at the far end of the med-bay, half-hidden by the curtain. A young woman, early twenties maybe, dark hair pulled back, sharp green eyes fixed on me. She wasn't wearing scrubs - instead, a black jacket with a security patch on the shoulder.
She didn't look away when I met her gaze.
The shimmer flared. Not brighter - dark energy didn't shine - but denser. The ripples tightened into folds, each one snapping into existence with a sound I felt in my teeth.
I moved without thinking. My hands flew over the haptic console, trying to engage the secondary containment field.
"No response!" I shouted.
"Manual disengage!" Holtz snapped back.
I keyed in the override, my eyes on the distortion. It was growing, twisting in on itself like a knot tightening. The air around it blurred more sharply, as if the very light in the chamber was struggling to decide where it belonged.
And then it touched the glass.
The hum became a roar - not through the air, but inside me.
Every hair on my arms stood on end. My lungs seized like I'd just stepped into vacuum. I staggered back, but there was nowhere to go. The resonance climbed higher, sharper, until my vision fractured.
Black. White. Stars. A horizon I didn't recognize?
And then nothing.
She stepped forward, the faint sound of her boots on the polymer floor carrying in the quiet room.
"You were inside the chamber when it breached?" Her voice was low, measured, but there was something behind it - curiosity edged with suspicion.
"Yes," I said. "I was monitoring-"
"Then you saw it."
I hesitated. "Saw what?"
"The change."
The doctor glanced up from his tablet, frowning. "Agent Lex, this is a medical bay, not an interrogation room."
Lex - so that was her name - ignored him, still watching me. Her gaze didn't just rest on my face; it weighed me, like she was checking the math on something.
I should have told her the truth: that in the last fraction of a second before I blacked out, I had seen something. Not just the shimmer folding in on itself, but a place. An impossible place.
Instead, I said, "I saw a containment breach. That's it."
Her mouth twitched, almost a imperceptible smile, but not quite. "We'll see."
She turned and walked away, her footsteps fading down the corridor.
Holtz came to see me three hours later. He looked more tired than I'd ever seen him, lines carved deeper into his face.