Lessons in Resonance
1765 Words
The training bay stretched beneath the bunker like a wound carved into bedrock… padded floors, reinforced walls, archived Zorathian glyph diagrams projected onto every surface. I lunged at the target dummy, and the world blurred.
My foot connected before my eyes caught up. The impact sent the dummy spinning, and I was already three meters past it, slamming shoulder-first into the wall hard enough to c***k the padding.
“Again,” the Zorathian said. Its projection flickered at the room’s edge, barely more than smoke shaped like memory. “Slower this time. Feel the song before you move.”
Song. They kept using words like that. Song. Weight. Shape. Heart. As if resonance was poetry instead of whatever the hell had hijacked our nervous systems.
I pushed myself off the wall. Wiped blood from my lip where I’d bitten through. The soldiers stationed at the observation window shifted… hands near weapons, eyes never leaving us.
“I don’t hear any song,” I said. “I hear ringing. From hitting the wall.”
“The ringing is the song,” the Zorathian replied. “You simply haven’t learned to listen.”
Breathe. Be faster than your fear.
I lunged again.
…
Kael’s locker exploded.
One moment, he was standing in front of it, reaching for a water bottle. Next, the metal doors wrenched off their hinges, flew across the room, and embedded themselves in the opposite wall six inches from Torak’s head.
“What the…” Torak scrambled backward, eyes wide.
“I didn’t…” Kael stared at his hands. They trembled. “I wasn’t even thinking about…”
Another locker groaned. The hinges whined, metal bending outward like something inside was trying to escape. Kael clenched his fists, and the groaning stopped… but sweat had broken across his forehead, and his breathing came in short, sharp gasps.
The soldiers at the window raised their weapons. One of them spoke into a radio.
“Stand down,” Dax’s voice cut through. He appeared at the bay’s entrance, expression unreadable. “It’s a training incident. Stand down.”
The weapons lowered. Slowly.
Kael sank onto a bench, head in his hands. I wanted to go to him… wanted to say something, anything… but my own legs were shaking from the last drill, and the words wouldn’t come.
Jyx filled the silence instead. “Hey, at least you didn’t hit Torak. That would’ve been a real tragedy. Who would carry heavy things?”
“Shut up, Jyx.” Torak’s voice was tight.
“I’m just saying, silver linings…”
“I said shut up.”
The joke died. Jyx’s grin flickered, cracked, reformed into something that didn’t reach his eyes. He turned away, pretending to examine the glyph diagrams, and I saw his hands shaking too.
…
Myra found me in the corridor after the session.
“Have you seen Kael?”
“Storage room B.” I jerked my head toward the end of the hall. “He’s been in there since the locker thing.”
She nodded. Hesitated. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” The word came too fast. I softened it. “Just tired.”
Her eyes held mine for a moment… seeing too much, the way she always did. Then she moved past me toward the storage room, and I watched her go with something complicated twisting in my chest.
Through the door she’d left open, I heard voices. Low. Careful.
“…not your fault.” Myra.
“I almost killed him.” Kael.
“But you didn’t.”
“This time.”
Silence. Then, softer: “You’re not a weapon, Kael. You’re just learning.”
I turned away before I could hear more. The something complicated twisted tighter, and I told myself it was just exhaustion.
…
The briefing room was supposed to be empty.
I’d come looking for water… real water, not the recycled stuff from the training bay dispensers. The door was ajar, light spilling through, and I heard voices that made me freeze mid-step.
“…parallel contingency approved.” A voice I didn’t recognize. Clipped. Official. “Three teams. First: reverse engineering. We need to understand how the artifact functions, whether its energy can be weaponized for our own defense.”
“Against Krag-Vor?” Dax’s voice.
“Against anyone who threatens us. The geopolitical implications alone…”
“And the second team?”
A pause. Paper shuffling. “Worst-case preparation. If the artifact cannot be controlled or protected, it must be destroyed. Deny the enemy the asset.”
“The Zorathians said destruction would…”
“I’m aware of what they said, Lieutenant. Those are alien entities with their own agenda. We cannot base strategic decisions on their testimony alone.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. I pressed closer to the gap in the door.
“And the third team?” Dax’s voice had gone flat. Careful.
“Termination protocol. If the artifact reaches enemy hands, or if the carriers become unstable…” Another pause. Longer this time. “The carriers are liabilities, Lieutenant. They’re connected to something we don’t understand. If we can’t use them, and we can’t control them…”
“They’re civilians. Kids.”
“They’re potential weapons. And weapons that can’t be aimed are destroyed.” The sound of a file being placed on a table. “Protocol Omega. Destroy order. You’ll find the details here. This does not leave this facility.”
I backed away from the door. My legs felt numb. The corridor stretched and warped, and I had to press my hand against the wall to keep from falling.
Protocol Omega.
Terminate the carriers.
Us. They meant us.
…
Small successes.
That’s what the Zorathians called them. Small successes, building toward control.
I phased a thrown disk through my palm on the seventeenth try. The metal passed through my flesh like water through a net… no resistance, no pain, just a strange tingling that lingered for hours afterward. The soldiers watching through the glass shifted uneasily.
Kael made a paperclip float. It hovered above his palm, spinning slowly, before his concentration broke, and it clattered to the floor. Blood trickled from his nose, and he wiped it away without looking.
Jyx built a construct… a small, glowing shape that looked almost like a bird. It lasted four seconds before dissolving, and he laughed with a manic edge that made my stomach clench.
“See? Progress.” He grinned at the observation window. “We’re basically superheroes now. Very tired, nosebleedy superheroes.”
Nobody laughed.
“Resonance answers you honestly,” the Zorathian murmured from its flickering post. “Speak softly. The louder you demand, the more it costs.”
…
Kael called his mother after dinner.
I wasn’t supposed to hear… he’d found a corner of the common area, turned away from the rest of us, voice low. But the room was small, and sound carried.
“I’m fine, Mom. Yeah, just a work thing. Training program. No, I can’t really talk about it. I know. I know. I’ll call when I can. Love you too.”
He hung up. Sat there for a long moment, staring at the cracked screen of his phone.
Myra crossed the room. Sat beside him without speaking. After a while, her hand found his, and he didn’t pull away.
I watched from the doorway. The something complicated in my chest had a name now, but I wasn’t ready to speak it. I turned away before either of them could see my face.
…
Late.
The training bay was empty except for Kael. He stood before the containment unit where they’d placed the artifact’s image… a holographic projection, not the real thing, but accurate enough that I could see the obsidian surface, the alien geometries, the faint violet pulse at its core.
His fingers trembled at his sides.
“You should be sleeping,” I said from the doorway.
He didn’t turn. “So should you.”
“I heard about Protocol Omega.”
Now he turned. His face was pale, shadows carved beneath his eyes. “What?”
“I heard them. The briefing. They have a destroy order, Kael. For the artifact. For us.”
The silence stretched. I watched him process it… watched the fear flicker across his features, then harden into something else. Something steadier.
“Then we have to get control,” he said. “Before they decide we’re too dangerous.”
“And if we can’t?”
He looked back at the artifact’s image. The violet pulse reflected in his eyes.
“We have to.”
The lights flickered.
At first, I thought it was the power grid… the bunker’s systems had been unstable since we’d arrived. But then I felt it: a pressure in the air, a hum that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Kael’s eyes widened. “I’m not… I’m not doing this…”
Metal groaned. The containment unit’s frame bent inward, then outward, then inward again. The floor beneath our feet vibrated, and somewhere in the walls, pipes screamed.
“Kael…”
“I can’t stop it…”
Soldiers burst through the door. Weapons raised. Targeting lasers painted Kael’s chest in a constellation of red dots.
The training chamber shuddered. Gravity rippled outward from where Kael stood… I felt myself grow heavier, then lighter, then heavier again, like the world had forgotten which way down was. A ceiling tile tore free and hung suspended in mid-air.
“Stand down!” one of the soldiers shouted. “Stand down or we will fire!”
“He can’t control it!” I stepped between them and Kael, arms spread. “He’s not doing this on purpose!”
The gravity ripple intensified. A soldier stumbled. Another dropped to one knee.
And then every screen in the facility blazed red.
PROTOCOL OMEGA: ENABLED
REASON: CARRIER DESTABILIZATION DETECTED
The words burned across monitors, across tablets, across the tactical displays lining the walls. Alarms began their wail. More soldiers poured into the bay, and this time their weapons weren’t trained on Kael.
They were trained on all five of us.
Kael stumbled backward, the pressure finally releasing, gravity snapping back to normal. The ceiling tile crashed to the floor. In the sudden silence, his voice came small and shattered:
“What… is Protocol Omega?”
Nobody answered. But I saw it in their faces… the soldiers, the officers, Dax standing frozen in the doorway with an expression like a man watching a nightmare come true.
They were going to kill us.
They’d always been planning to kill us.
- Writer
