Sublimation(107)

She palms YJ’s keycard so that the face and name are against her hand, pressing it against the card reader. She holds her breath.

The gate opens, and she steps through. The night doorman doesn’t give her a second look. It’s so easy, when you have the right keys. When you look like you belong.

She pushes the button for the elevator, shifts from side to side while the numbers tick down on the little screen. She’s trying to act normal—there’s probably some security guard in a room somewhere, reviewing all the camera footage. The elevator arrives and she gets in.

Soyoung chews the inside of her lip. She’s thinking about her plan of attack. She’s thinking about all the other times she walked through the Mitosis gate. She’s thinking about what it might feel like, to go through clean. The elevator stops. The door opens. She walks quickly over to tap the second keycard at the second elevator. Punches in 26. Gets in the elevator and rides down.

She walks through the empty reception area. Her reflection against the glass windows is her only companion.

At the door to the lab, she types in the keycode on the number pad, which turns a cheerful green. She opens the door. She turns on the lights and walks into the familiar laboratory. She’s spent so much time in here. The sound of her footsteps echoes off all the metal. She goes to the terminal and turns it on, before pulling a hard drive out of her jacket pocket, which she plugs into the machine. She starts the download, and then goes over to the physical files. She’s going to take as many photos as she can.





YJ-YUJIN


Yujin throws cash at the cab driver before running out of the car and into the lobby. There’s a night receptionist sitting at the desk, looking half asleep.

“Hi,” Yujin says. “I work for Mergebreak, and I left my phone in there earlier today, but I forgot my keycard. Can you verify me and give me a temporary passcard?”

It’s late. Far past working hours. But this is a building that houses law firms and tech offices and two different investment banks. This is a Manhattan skyscraper. There’s always someone working.

“Sure,” the night receptionist says. He runs Yujin through the verification procedure that Yujin remembers doing every single time YJ had forgotten his keycard. The night receptionist nods.

“We’re good.”

He manually opens the gates, and then Yujin’s walking through. The crossing is momentarily mind-bending—he’s walked through this gate a thousand times, he’s here for the first time—but he manages to keep his expression and his gait steady until he gets to the elevator. When it arrives, he leans heavily against the wall. Scrubs his face in his hand. What was that? What the hell was that? It felt like his brain was melting out of his ears, though the feeling’s gone as quickly as it arrived.

He gets to the Mergebreak reception area and faces the second hurdle. He doesn’t have a card that’ll let him summon an elevator to floor twenty-six. But there’s a stairwell that goes down the heart of the building, accessible from every Mergebreak floor without a keycard. If he takes that down, there’ll be a keycard reader at the door that separates the stairwell from the actual floor. Those doors are made of frosted glass. Mergebreak has a whole team dedicated to network security, but Yujin bets that nobody is watching for physical intruders this deep into the building, someone who had already gotten past the prior levels of security, who would know where to go, like YJ does, like Soyoung does. The glass door would break, given sufficient force. And every floor has a civilian firefighting kit, which Yujin remembers from YJ’s memories of having to do fire drills every six months. There’s a fire axe in the kit.

This is a terrible idea. But he’s so close. And he only has so much time.

Yujin grabs the firefighter’s kit from behind the receptionist’s desk, opens it, and pulls out the fire axe. It’s a cool, heavy weight in his hand. Then he makes a beeline for the stairwell, going three floors down the brightly lit oubliette. He feels like a horror movie protagonist, carrying the axe, going down the stairs before reaching the glass door.

It is a clear and fragile thing. It delineates space with its presence. He could turn back now. Until he acts, this can all be undone. This could all just be a bad dream.

He takes a deep breath.

Yujin swings the axe, crashing through the glass, before stepping through, running down the hall to the laboratory. As he runs, he’s thinking about how good it felt to break through the glass. How good it felt to ignore all the barriers that are stopping you from getting what you want.





SOYOUNG-ROSE


The files finish copying over from the terminal. Soyoung carefully disconnects the external hard drive and opens the program that controls the Mitosis gate. The gate begins to do something adjacent to humming. She ignores the not-humming and plugs in the USB drive containing the calibration instructions that Megan shared into the computer next to the terminal. She begins to calibrate the Mitosis gate, comparing the terminal display to the USB’s instructions at every step. She needs to get this right. Even though she’s watched Gerry do this and she’s mapped his movements to the descriptions and technical diagrams that Megan provided, it’s different doing this live.

She plugs another spatial coordinate in. The hum changes pitch. She feels repulsion. She frowns. Maybe she set the gate’s field too wide. She hadn’t seen Gerry show any expression when he was the one sitting here. She plugs a different set of coordinates in. The feeling of repulsion fades. Good. She doesn’t want to accidentally step in before everything’s calibrated.