Three weeks.
That's how long it takes for a prison to start feeling like home. Or maybe that's just how long it takes for hunger to make you grateful for the cage.
I settled into the rhythm of Rainbow like a gear clicking into a machine I couldn't see. Food at six. Work assignments at eight. Lights out at ten. The schedule was printed on laminated cards and posted in every dormitory, as if the mere act of writing it down made it civilized. As if civilization had ever been about what time you ate.
The rules were simple enough for a child to memorize, which I suspected was the point. Don't enter restricted areas. Don't leave the shelter without authorization. Don't interfere with Rainbow personnel. And never—under any circumstances—approach the lower levels.
I didn't ask why. I'd learned that lesson in the wasteland: every place that has a rule about something has a reason, and the reason is usually bleeding. You don't ask about the locked door unless you want to find out what's scratching on the other side.
They put me on repair detail. Unloading supply trucks that rattled in through the steel gates at dawn, then fixing the equipment those supplies were meant to maintain. Water purifiers with gummed-up filters. Generators coughing black smoke. Electric fences that sparked and whined when the wind blew wrong. The work was honest, which meant it was exhausting, which meant I slept without dreaming.
Most days, Elias found me.
He'd appear at my shoulder like a bad omen, grease-stained hands thrust into the pockets of a jumpsuit that had once been blue. He'd worked maintenance for years—how many, he wouldn't say. We talked. Or rather, we exchanged words the way men trade currency when neither has enough to be generous.
Not about the past. Not about the Collapse. Not about what we'd done to survive while the world tore itself apart.
Just small things.
"The stew's worse today."
"Impossible. It was already a war crime yesterday."
"Generator in Block C sounds like it's dying."
"Everything here sounds like it's dying. Some things just take longer."
Occasionally, he'd go quiet. I'd look up from a wiring harness or a rusted gear, and he'd be staring across the courtyard at the medical wing. It stood apart from the other buildings—cleaner, whiter, its windows tinted so you couldn't see inside. When Elias looked at it, something happened to his face. The lines around his mouth deepened. His scar seemed to pale, as if the memory of whatever had given it to him was waking up.
I noticed it on a Tuesday. Or what I thought was a Tuesday. Time inside the walls had a way of flattening out, becoming one long afternoon.
"What is it?" I asked.
He didn't turn. "What?"
"Over there. You keep looking."
Elias was silent for long enough that I thought he hadn't heard me. Then he said, "Some places should remain closed."
I tightened a bolt with more force than necessary. "That's exactly what people say when something's being hidden."
He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "You're too curious."
"So I've been told." I wiped grease from my hands. "Usually right before someone tries to kill me."
He laughed that dry, rattling laugh. Then he clapped my shoulder and walked away, and I didn't think much of it.
Three days later, he was gone.
I noticed at breakfast. The bench where Elias always sat—back corner, facing the door, the way a man sits when he's learned that threats come from behind—was empty. I told myself he'd slept in. Told myself the old man's joints were probably complaining about the damp. I finished my porridge, which tasted like wet cardboard and hope, and went to work.
His bunk was empty when I passed the dormitory.
Not slept-in. Not messy with the clutter of a man who'd stepped out for air. Empty. The thin mattress was stripped bare. The small locker above it stood open, revealing nothing but four walls of dented metal. No coat. No boots. No grease-stained jumpsuit hanging from the hook.
I stood there for a long time, listening to the ventilation system hum. It sounded like breathing.
The administration office was a prefab box near the main gate, painted in that institutional beige that exists only in places where bad news is delivered. The clerk behind the desk was young, maybe twenty, with the soft hands of someone who'd never held a weapon.
"I'm looking for Elias," I said.
She didn't look up from her screen. "Last name?"
"I don't know."
Now she looked up. "You don't know the last name of the person you're looking for?"
"He was maintenance. Older man. White hair. Scar from here"—I drew a line across my face—"to here."
She typed something. Frowned. Typed again.
"Elias?"
"Yes."
Another pause. The keyboard clicked like insect legs.
"No resident by that name."
I stared at her. The fluorescent light above us buzzed, and I became aware of how quiet the office was. How empty.
"I've known him for three weeks," I said. "We worked together. We ate together. I shook his hand yesterday."
She searched again. I watched her face carefully. There was no deception in it, which was worse than if she'd been lying. She genuinely couldn't find him.
"Maybe you have the wrong name," she offered.
"I shook his hand yesterday," I repeated. The words felt strange in my mouth. Like I was trying to convince myself.
The clerk looked uncomfortable. A specific kind of uncomfortable—the kind that comes from following a script you don't understand. "I'm sorry," she said, and I could tell she meant it, which meant she was useless.
I walked away before I said something that would get me flagged.
Elias's former room was on the second floor of Block D. I found it easily—I'd walked him there once when he'd twisted his ankle on a loose grate. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open.
Empty.
Not cleaned. Not packed. Not prepared for a new occupant. Just empty , in the way a mouth is empty after a tooth has been pulled. The air inside smelled of nothing. No grease, no sweat, no old-man soap.
Even the dust seemed confused, settling in patterns that suggested a absence rather than a departure.
I stood in the doorway, my hand still on the knob, and felt something cold settle behind my sternum.
Wrong.
Everything about it was wrong.
I started asking questions.
At first, it was easy. Six people remembered Elias. A woman in the laundry who'd given him extra soap because he reminded her of her father. A teenage boy in the kitchens who'd stolen bread for him. A middle-aged mechanic who'd cursed Elias's name after the old man had "borrowed" his wrench and never returned it.
Then four.
Then two.
By the end of the day, only I claimed to have seen him recently. The others had simply... dissolved.
One woman had supposedly transferred to another shelter—"East Block, I think," someone said, but couldn't remember who'd told them. A man who'd shared Elias's work detail had died from illness, suddenly, overnight. Another had left voluntarily, walking out the main gate at dawn, which was impossible because no one left voluntarily, and no one left without authorization, and the guards at the gate didn't remember his face.
I didn't believe any of it.
So I started counting.
Not names. Names could be erased. I counted absences. Empty bunks that hadn't been filled. Meals prepared for residents who never came to collect them. Work assignments reassigned with no explanation. Twenty-seven missing. Then thirty-two. Then forty-one.
Every single one had disappeared inside the shelter.
Nobody had seen them leave. Nobody knew where they went. And Rainbow—Rainbow with its clean walls and free soup and promises of a new beginning—didn't seem interested in finding them.
That night, I lay on my mattress and stared at the ceiling, listening to the shelter breathe around me. The ventilation hummed. The walls creaked. Somewhere, deep beneath the concrete, something else made a sound I couldn't identify. A rhythmic pulsing, like a heartbeat, or a drum, or something vast turning in its sleep.
I waited until the corridors went quiet. Until the night shift guards had settled into their predictable rounds—fifteen minutes on the east wing, ten on the west, a smoke break by the emergency stairwell that they'd never admit to taking. Then I moved.
The administrative terminal was in a side room off the main office, protected by a lock that was more suggestion than obstacle to a man who'd spent years jury-rigging equipment in the wasteland. I had a stolen maintenance card, a paperclip bent into a tension wrench, and the kind of patience that comes from having nothing left to lose.
It took two hours to bypass the security. Not because it was sophisticated, but because it was boring —layer after layer of outdated encryption, passwords written on sticky notes hidden inside desk drawers, the digital equivalent of a locked door with the key left under the mat.
Most of the files were useless. Supply manifests. Personnel schedules. Medical records for residents who still existed. I was about to give up when I found it—a directory buried so deep it felt like an afterthought, or a secret someone had hidden in plain sight.
RNB-01
I hesitated. My finger hovered over the key. In the wasteland, I'd learned that some doors, once opened, couldn't be closed. That some knowledge was a weight you carried forever.
I opened it.
The first image filled the screen. A laboratory. Stainless steel tables. Surgical lights. The kind of sterile brightness that made shadows look like wounds.
Then another. A surgical chamber. Tools laid out in rows, their edges catching the light. I recognized some of them. Others I didn't want to.
Then another.
A human body suspended inside a glass tank. Naked. Pale. Tubes running into its arms, its spine, its skull. The eyes were open. They weren't looking at anything.
My mouth went dry.
I opened the next file. A report. Black text on white background, the clinical language of monsters who didn't think they were monsters.
PROJECT STATUS: ACTIVE
My breathing stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. Like my body had forgotten how to perform the reflex, too distracted by the horror of the words.
I opened another.
ABOMINATION RESEARCH DIVISION
Another.
INTEGRATION TRIALS
Another.
HUMAN COMPATIBILITY
Then the final line, rendered in small, unassuming font, as if the person who'd typed it hadn't understood that they were writing a death sentence.
SUCCESS RATE: 0.03%
I stared at the screen. The blue light reflected in my eyes, and I wondered if this was how Elias had looked when he'd stared at the medical wing. If this was the knowledge that had carved that scar into his face long before the blade had.
The project hadn't ended.
Rainbow hadn't destroyed it.
They'd hidden it. Polished it. Given it a new name and a clean white coat and called it salvation.
My hand moved toward the terminal. I don't know what I intended to do—copy the files, destroy them, scream into the dark.
It didn't matter.
Because the lights went out.
Not gradually. Not flickering.
One second the screen was glowing, and the next I was sitting in perfect, absolute darkness, the afterimage of the tank and its occupant burned into my retinas.
A voice came from behind me. Soft. Almost regretful.
"You shouldn't have found that."
I turned.
Six soldiers stood in the doorway. Their rifles were already aimed at my chest. I couldn't see their faces—the emergency lights hadn't kicked in yet—but I could see the red dots of their laser sights, floating in the dark like fireflies.
Six red dots.
All of them on me.