The glass cube containing his experiment was supported by hydraulic shock absorbers and thick rubber pads—additional insurance against eventualities exactly like this one. They were all intact, as was the glass upon first inspection. He went around it slowly, running a bare hand carefully along its sides. His heart rate began to regulate as he moved, but then his finger hit something. It was nearly imperceptible—nothing more than a slight roughness in the meticulously ground surface. He held his breath, moving his head back and forth in the red light, praying to the Christian god he’d adopted so many years before that the imperfection was just a trick of perception.

But like so many times before, his prayers weren’t answered. The crack was only a few centimeters long, and there was no way to determine with any certainty if it had fully penetrated. Not that it mattered. No chance of a loss of containment, no matter how remote, could be tolerated.

“We have a possible breach,” Ito said, his voice shaking audibly as he passed back through the hatch.

It took the combined efforts of both him and his assistant to open the bent locker that held their radiation gear. They put it on without speaking. There was nothing to be said.

Ito secured his face mask and connected it to an oxygen supply as Isami went to the unconscious girl and began trying to get her limp body into a bright yellow hazmat suit similar to the ones they were wearing. The safety gear would be sufficient to keep them from being killed outright by the radiation-driven sterilization process, but that was all. They would trade a relatively quick death for a drawn-out, painful one.

Ito used the key around his neck to unlock a cage protecting a fluorescent orange lever. He put his gloved hand on it and closed his eyes. In that place, in that moment, it was impossible not to look backward and question his entire adult life. To wonder if he had spent the last forty-five years shining a light into a place that God intended to remain dark.

1

1

Northwestern Japan
Present Day

Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith had parked his rental car in the trees about a mile back, negotiating the remaining descent on foot. The dirt road was steep as hell and turned slick near the bottom, but there was no other way into the remote fishing village without a boat.

Behind him the mountains had swallowed the stars, but ahead the clear sky above the Sea of Japan was dotted with tiny pricks of light. Combined with a few salt-encrusted bulbs still burning below, there was just enough illumination to make out the sloped roofs of buildings hugging the shore and the long skiffs beached in front of them. The haphazard paths among the tightly packed homes, boathouses, and processing buildings, thankfully, were inky black.