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Jackson shrugs. “You never told anyone. There’s a rumor you put a piece of your own DNA in every one. Some kind of tuning mechanism. But the real secret is this: the brighter it glows, the closer you are to dying. If it ever turns red, run.”

I stare at the pendant. “Has it ever turned red?”

He nods, once. “Twice. Both times, you lived.”

I close my fist around the pendant, feeling it press into my skin. I try to conjure up any memory associated with it—none come, but my body tells me it belongs there, as if I’m not complete without it. Jackson slides back into his chair, rubbing his beard. “You used to say you’d solve the whole thing, given enough time and data. Now you’ve got both, if you want them.”

A silence settles, heavy but not hostile. I watch the light from the pendant flicker across the table’s battered wood, then look up at Jackson. “Why are you helping me?” He flinches, almost imperceptibly. “Because I owe you.” The words come out like bone fragments. “And because if anyone can make sense of what’s left, it’s you. I don’t have to like the world, but I’d rather not die in it without trying.”

I nod, not trusting myself to reply. I run my thumb over the pendant’s lens, feel it heat up, and wonder if it will still be with me the next time I wake up on a cot, memories stripped to the bone. Jackson clears his throat, shifting gears. “You want to see how it works? There’s a hot zone in the old ventilation shaft. You always liked a challenge.”

A slow smile finds its way to my lips—crooked and alien, but mine. “Let’s see if I remember how.”

He grins back, and the room, for one brief moment, feels like home.

Training is a misnomer. This is baptism, and the water’s been set to boil.

Jackson leads me down a stairwell painted over with so many hazard warnings it reads like a liturgy: DANGER, ZONE BREACH, DO NOT ENTER UNLESS SUICIDAL. The sign at the bottom has been pried off and repurposed as a kickplate on the swinging double doors. He shoulders through first, gesturing for me to follow with a flick that says “after you” and “don’t get killed” in the same motion.

The training area is the bunker’s best-kept secret—an unfinished sublevel with a concrete pad the size of a basketball court. One half is sectioned with crude partitions, plywood sheets duct-taped and painted with fluorescent bullseyes. The other is a rolling topography of obstacles: stacked crates, upended lockers, sandbags, barrels marked with the triple-black triangles of the international radiation symbol. Every object has a purpose, every inch a lesson.

There are no windows, only a cold and constant blue from the overhead LEDs. The air smells like dust, dried sweat, and a tart metallic edge I can’t place. A single Geiger counter sits on a central table, its steady tick-tick-tick a baseline of normalcy in the ocean of threat.

Jackson picks up the counter and tosses it to me underhand. “First lesson: Trust, but verify.” His smile is tight, but real. “Don’t believe the numbers until you’ve checked the battery yourself. A dead counter is worse than no counter at all.” I catch the unit one-handed and flip the battery compartment open, checking the contacts. It’s basic, but I see the wisdom. Jackson moves to a locked cabinet set into the wall, spins the dial, and pulls out a series of metal canisters. Each is labeled in sharpie: URANIUM, COBALT, X-RAY SOURCE. He lines them up along the table with a precision that feels ceremonial.

“Second lesson.” He holds up my RadShield pendant. “This is your canary. Not just for gamma or beta, but for whatever else is out there that nobody wrote into the textbooks. Trust it more than you trust your own senses. But never trust it completely.”

He places the pendant around my neck. The chain is heavier than it looks, made to survive any accident short of decapitation. The disk settles against my chest, instantly finding the hollow beneath my collarbone. I can feel it begin to hum—gentle, but eager.

“Watch,” Jackson says. He opens the smallest canister—COBALT. Sets it on the table, three feet away. The pendant pulses blue, faint but distinct. He nudges the canister closer. The glow intensifies, shifts from blue to a sharp, almost indigo. He pushes it back. The color fades, the temperature on my skin drops.

“Now, try it yourself. See what else you can learn.”

I step to the table, pick up the canister, and move it in slow arcs, watching the way the pendant responds. There’s a rhythm to it, a lag that I recognize as intentional—someone designed the sensor to avoid false positives from brief spikes. I test it at different angles, and note that at 45 degrees the blue sharpens, but the heat doesn’t increase. I file the discrepancy away for later.

I push the test further. I grab the X-RAY canister, carefully unscrew the lid, and bring it within inches of the pendant. Instantly, the color spikes, then fades almost as fast. The chain itself heats up, but the disk stays cool. Jackson watches, expression unreadable.

“It filters,” I say aloud, to no one. “Prioritizes threat levels. Heat is for persistent exposure. Light is for acute.” I glance up, catching Jackson’s smirk. “Not bad for someone who can’t remember her own birthday.”

He shrugs. “You always were a quick study.”

For the next hour, we play a game of escalation. Jackson brings out environmental samples: dust from the ventilation shaft, a sample of mutated moss, even a canister of water labeled “SAFE” in bright red tape. Each time, I run the pendant through its paces, noting how it responds to combinations—how, in the presence of both cobalt and moss, the pulse shifts from blue to a sickly green. I hypothesize aloud, test, recalibrate, and test again. The work is intoxicating, the closest thing to purpose I’ve felt since waking up.

Jackson doesn’t hover, but he steps in when I hit a wall. He demonstrates how to use the chain as a makeshift whip if you need to, how to hold the disk to your throat, and count out the pulse if you ever lose the ability to see. He runs through worst-case scenarios with the sangfroid of a man who’s lived them. Each time I get it right, he nods. Each time I get it wrong, he smiles and corrects with a dry quip.

It’s only when I pause for breath that I realize my hands are steady. The tremors, the constant edge of panic—they’re gone, at least for now. Jackson leans against the wall, watching me. “You’re better than you were before,” he says, and for a second I believe him. “You learn faster. Makes me wonder what else they rewired in there.”

I don’t know how to answer. So I keep testing. The final trial is a simple one: he blindfolds me with a strip of cloth, then sets up a gauntlet of obstacles on the floor, each booby-trapped with something dangerous. “Use the pendant,” he says. “Trust your instincts. Don’t overthink.”

I shuffle forward, feeling the concrete under bare feet, the pendant pressed to my chest. Every few steps, I stop and listen. The tick of the Geiger counter blends with the pendant’s heartbeat. I find the first trap—a glass vial leaking invisible fumes—by the way the heat on my collarbone spikes and my teeth start to tingle. I pivot left, sidestep a radiation trap. I duck low to avoid a tripwire, more because the air seems thinner than because I remember the steps.

When I pull off the blindfold, I’m ten feet from the finish. Jackson claps, once. “Not bad,” he says. “But next time, do it while running.” I smile, but the truth is, I could. There’s something in me that’s been woken up, or maybe always lived there. A kind of predatory calm.

The lesson moves on to water rationing, then improvised shelter. Jackson shows me how to build a filter from scratch, how to make a lean-to with nothing but tape and old rags. I watch, then do it myself, better on the second try than the first. He tells stories the whole time—about the last group he trained, about the time he saw a man outrun a firestorm by seconds, about the best and worst places to sleep in a city where nothing is ever the same twice. I don’t know if he’s embellishing or downplaying, but I listen, and I file every word away.

As the day dims, though the lights never change, we finally sit, backs to the wall, a shared ration between us. He passes me the canteen, and I drink, feeling the warmth in my chest and the ache in my legs.

Jackson looks at me, and for once, his mask slips. “You scared?” he asks, but it’s not a taunt.