Chapter Text
“Alastor! Hey, wait up!”
Charlie’s shoes clack against the linoleum as she hurries down the hall towards the tiny break room. It’s the first time she’s really seen Alastor since the incident with her dosimeter a couple days ago, and certainly the first time that she’s caught him without having her hands full of irradiated samples. He turns, smile widening as he sees her and his grip on the door shifting to hold it open instead of letting it close behind him.
“Gosh, you sure are good at disappearing,” Charlie says as she slows her steps to make her way over the threshold, brushing her hair back just to give her hands something to do. “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you all day.”
“Oh, nowhere exciting, I assure you. Simply dealing with all the minutiae of administration. Paperwork, inventory… Such a funny thing, having to inventory this place. As if the reactor is liable to walk away!” Alastor hums, moving to the counter and pulling a small hotplate away from the wall. “Coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Charlie declines, eyeing the red Folgers can that Alastor offers her with some distaste. “I actually…um, think there might be something wrong with the dosimeters. Well, not wrong, but— mine was acting…strange.”
Alastor never falters as he measures out precise, neat spoonfuls of coffee grounds from a bag that was stashed behind the Folgers and dumps them into the battered pot that he’s set down next to him. “Strange?”
“Yeah, I…” Charlie shifts her weight, suddenly feeling silly. “I was putting it back at the end of my shift, and for a moment it read the wrong dose.”
“I haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary in the logbook,” Alastor says, and despite the mild tone of his voice, Charlie suddenly gets the sense that she’s treading on extremely dangerous ground.
“No, no, I, um…when I checked it again, it said zero.” Charlie sets her shoulders, trying to tell herself that there’s no reason for her to feel as stupid as she does. “So that’s what I wrote. Of course I didn’t think it was right, it— it told me that I had been exposed to 34 roentgen, which is… There’s just no way. That would kill me within weeks.”
“Quite right,” Alastor agrees, sounding far too chipper. “Are you worried?”
Charlie blinks. “About it killing me within weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Well… I…I don’t think so, but—”
Alastor sets the coffee pot on the hotplate without a care in the world, turning to face Charlie with a broad smile. “Then what’s the issue?” Seeing Charlie’s look, he chuckles. “That must seem very laissez-faire of me. But I can assure you, Miss Charlie, this facility is safe. I’ve been working here since the autumn of 1945, and as you can see, I have yet to keel over from radiation sickness.”
“But if the dosimeters are wrong…” Charlie tries again. Her determination not to feel silly is rapidly crumbling.
“If they were wrong, the facility alarms would go off, as would the dose integrators stationed in almost every room, and I daresay that if you were truly contaminated with 34 roentgen of radiation, all of our dosimeters would indicate that,” Alastor says. “This is not 1939. My facility may be outdated, but I am no fool.”
Charlie has to bite her lip to avoid scowling at him, hating the condescension — and the shame his words bring. Of course she should have known that he wouldn’t put himself at risk. Even if she doesn’t know him well, she’s sure about that.
“Right, I… Right. Sorry.” Charlie clears her throat and briefly clenches her hands into fists in her pockets. “I…I just wanted…to make sure you knew.”
For a moment, Alastor just stares at her like he’s not entirely sure she’s real. Then the moment is gone and he’s sighing, not unkindly, as he takes a step towards her and pats her on the shoulder.
“No harm done, Miss Charlie. In fact, if it would ease your mind, I believe I have several spare dosimeters in my office. Let’s go fetch them — staring at the coffee won’t make it brew any faster.”
The light tone of his voice wipes away the shame like fog from a mirror, and Charlie follows him out the door without hesitation when he opens it. His office is only a few steps away, across the hall from another office that Charlie doesn’t know if she’s ever actually seen occupied. Alastor unlocks his door, pushes it open, and flicks on the light, motioning her in with one of his ever-present smiles.
His office is small but neatly organized, with a wall calendar hanging next to the desk and bookshelves filled with physics and chemistry textbooks. There’s a few personal touches: an immaculately maintained tombstone radio on one of the shelves behind the desk and a photo on the wall of what looks like younger versions of Alastor, Niffty, and Husk. Charlie almost starts towards it, wanting a closer look, but Alastor breezes past her and goes to open one of the large file drawers that sit next to his desk, withdrawing a small box that’s almost certainly military issued.
“They seem to have done the supply calculations for Project Cerulean assuming that there would be far more of us,” Alastor says as he takes the box to his desk and undoes the latch. “Every so often we discover some old box of spare things squirreled away. I suppose perhaps that’s why they want us to take inventory, hah! Perhaps they realized they’re missing more than they ought to be.”
Charlie huffs out a laugh, but his words have sent her brain careening onto another tangent and she asks, “The lieutenant said that name, too. When he offered me this job. Project Cerulean. What does it mean?”
“What do any of the silly names the government comes up with mean?” Alastor asks, giving her a distinctly mocking smile. “Though in this case, I do have…let’s call it a hunch.” He straightens, holding a dosimeter exactly like the one Charlie has clipped to the pocket of her lab coat right now, and comes around his desk to stand in front of her. “You’ve heard of the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect, I presume?”
“Y-Yes, I… I observed it with…uranium salts. In water.” Charlie has to resist the urge to take a step back as he reaches for her — but he just clips the dosimeter to her pocket with care before undoing the old one and raising it up to the light.
He looks back to Charlie a second later and idly smooths out a crease in her lab coat. “If you find yourself with a free moment, it may be interesting to spend some time in the spent fuel storage room. There is a switch on the board next to the door to turn the lights off. I think that will explain our code name quite nicely.”
Charlie swallows, unsure of why her mouth suddenly feels dry. Alastor just backs away as if nothing happened and goes to wrap her old dosimeter in a handkerchief and set it back in the box.
“Was there anything else?” He asks carelessly, the lights seeming to buzz a few tones louder than before.
“Uh… No,” Charlie says. She suddenly wishes for nothing more than to get back into the control room and the little lab she’s set up in the room adjacent to it. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Lovely.” Alastor smiles one of those benign smiles. “Have a good day, Miss Charlie.”
Charlie nods at him, backing away to the door. “You as well.”
She’s out in the hallway and halfway to turning around to head back to the control room when she remembers something else, another question that’s been nagging at her every time she flips through the experiment logbook that’s only sparsely filled with unfamiliar handwriting.
“Actually, um,” Charlie starts, turning around and hovering in Alastor’s doorway for a second longer. “There was…one other thing.”
Alastor raises an eyebrow.
“The…the experiments I’m doing…” Charlie struggles to find words. “Artificial radioactivity and fine structures… I…I don’t get it.” In a rush to clarify, afraid that Alastor will think she’s stupid, she adds, “I mean, I don’t get why I’m doing them. Why does the government want to know these things? You’d think…well, I know that doing experiments over and over is good practice, but there does come a point where you really should just move on… Why are they having us do these experiments and nothing else?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” Alastor says after a moment, and he closes the lid to the box of dosimeters slowly and carefully, as if handling a bomb. “Your predecessor asked many of the same questions.”
Charlie feels the undertow tug at her again, like she’s treading calm water over depths full of roiling, dangerous currents. “My predecessor? Erin Lloyd?”
It’s the name that’s scrawled in the logbooks in the scant few places where there are actually notes: quick, scratched cursive that brings to mind visions of mousy scientists with glasses and sweater vests. Alastor nods in response to her question, but doesn’t say anything else. The silence feels too quiet to be real. From underneath them comes the quiet hum of water rushing to keep the reactor cool.
“Why’d he leave?” Charlie asks. “The…the lieutenant, when he offered me this job, he…told me that it was the kind of job where you don’t leave until the work is done.”
Alastor’s smile is impossibly, dangerously sharp, his eyes hard like flint. “The obvious answer is that his work was done, isn’t it? He's off to explore…new horizons." Before Charlie can find the words for a response, Alastor glances at the clock and hums. “Ah, look at that. The coffee is probably done. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup?”
Charlie feels like she’s moving through syrup as she takes a step back so Alastor can leave the office, every reaction slowed to a fraction of the time it should take. “I’m…I’m okay.”
“If you insist,” Alastor says, as cheery as ever, and he locks his office door behind him. “Do take care. And if you have any more questions, please, don’t hesitate to ask. I am always happy to help.”
Charlie watches as he pockets his keys and walks down the hall back to the break room, whistling softly to himself as he does. She suddenly feels acutely aware of her own heart rate, pounding against her ribs like it’s trying to beat a tattoo on the wall of her chest. Why? Alastor didn’t threaten her. Did he? She takes deep breaths of the cool air, faintly smelling of coffee and old paper, until she feels herself settle. She knows Alastor is strange — she knew that on her first day walking up to find him dressed like it was still 1928 — but there was something about him just now in his office, something she can’t put her finger on.
Not for the first time, she wonders what got him from a position as a radio operator on a nuclear submarine to the facilities head for a top-secret test reactor. Something tells her getting a straight answer from him about that will be like pulling teeth. She reaches for her new dosimeter and unclips it from her pocket to look at it, staring at it for a moment before holding it up to her eye and squinting at the quartz line.
Zero. She takes another deep breath. Don’t scare yourself with fairytales. They have enough of those here already.
⸻ ☢ ⸻
The roar of pumps is like a constant thunder as Charlie sits on one of the balconies above the valve pit, her legs hanging over the edge and her notebook open in her lap as she peers through the railings to the mess of pipes below. She’s almost got the plumbing completely mapped out — after she does that, it’s only a matter of sorting out the maze of valves and pipes in the reactor room itself. And she’s only been here…she has to take a moment to recall the wall calendar hanging next to the control room door…for three weeks. She can’t resist a proud smile that no one except her will ever know about.
“Hello?”
Well, and whoever that is.
Charlie leans forward a little to look through the railing and find the person standing in the doorway, staring up at her. If his grease-stained overalls are anything to go by, it’s one of the engineers.
He squints up at her. “Who are you? What are you doing up there?”
It takes Charlie a moment to place his accent — she didn’t know there were any foreigners working here, but the man certainly sounds like he shipped off straight from London. She sticks one of her hands through the railing and waves at him cheerfully.
“I’m Charlie! I’m the physicist they hired a few weeks ago. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“Oh!” The man’s demeanor changes in an instant, and he puffs his chest out, scrambling up a few stairs to get in front of her and snap out a crooked salute. “Of course! Sir Thomas Peterson, Head of Reactor Engineering, at your service!” He pauses, then adds, “...But you can just call me Thomas. Or Peterson.”
Charlie can’t help but smile at his enthusiasm. Aside from Nifty, everyone else here treats this job like it’s a chore. Something to be tolerated at best and actively loathed at worst. Charlie does kind of understand that — the work is monotonous, the hours are long, and the environment doesn’t exactly make up for either of the preceding things — but she can’t help but feel out of place. Despite the tedious and repetitive experiments, eerie atmosphere, and constant danger, Charlie has found herself settled firmly into Lazarus Bluffs like she’s never settled anywhere else. If there’s a place she’s meant to be, this is it.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sir Thomas Peterson,” Charlie says indulgently, and Thomas beams. “Say, I had a question about some of the plumbing. Would you mind helping?”
“I would love to!” Thomas starts climbing another flight of stairs before Charlie can even pick herself up off the floor of the balcony, navigating the maze of walkways without hesitation and coming to stand next to her. “What seems to be the issue?”
“This feed line, right here…” Charlie flips the page in her notebook and points to a pipe within the tangled diagram she’s done her best to sort out. “I can’t figure out where it bends. It comes out there — I’ve seen it — but then only appears again here, I think, and that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Oh, no. You’ve got that all backwards.” Thomas takes her notebook, flips it upside down, and pulls a pencil from a pocket of his overalls. “Here. See? It goes like this. Turns here, above the valve gallery, then follows the concrete vessel until you see it again here.”
“That…” Charlie takes her notebook back when he hands it to her, staring at the diagram. “That seems…strange.”
Thomas shrugs. “You can tell this place wasn’t planned out.”
Charlie purses her lips as she stares at the diagram again. The mass of piping and ductwork in the reactor room still looms in the back of her mind. Then a light bulb goes off and she has to resist audibly gasping.
“Hey, Thomas, you want to help me get the pipework in the reactor room charted like this?”
Contrary to the excitement Charlie expected, though, Thomas’ face blanches. “Absolutely not! I don’t step foot in the Devil’s room unless I absolutely have to.”
It’s enough to make Charlie stop and nearly drop her pencil into the mess of plumbing below them. “...You can’t be serious.”
“I am being as serious as a heart attack!” Thomas crosses his arms. “I don’t know how much they’ve told you, miss, but I’ll tell you that anyone with any ounce of sanity avoids that room like their life depends on it."
“Not you too,” Charlie groans. “Look, Anthony already gave me the whole spiel, and all I have to say to it is that I’m not going to let silly superstitions get in the way of necessary research. I can't even count the times since I’ve started working here there’s been a stuck valve or the pressure in the pipes has dropped too much for me to do the things that I need to do, and it always ends up with me in the reactor room trying to figure out that dumb mess of plumbing anyway, so I might as well do it now instead of later!"
“If you want to invite danger, be my guest,” Thomas says with a petulant huff. “But you ought to demand triple pay for going anywhere near Lucifer and perish the thought of spending any more time in that room than you absolutely must. You think stuck valves and dropped pressure are the worst of your problems? Just wait until one of the control rods jams."
Charlie recoils. "What?"
"Oh, they didn't tell you about that? Hmph. Figures." Thomas throws a dirty look in the direction of the control room. "I've been working here for two years and personally witnessed seven emergency scrams. Every single time, some of those damned rods stick, and then what do you think happens? 'Thomas! Into that cursed room you go!'"
"Seven emergency scrams?" Charlie asks, disbelief making her voice weaker than she'd like. "Why in God's name…?"
"Same reason anything else happens in Lazarus Bluffs," Thomas says. "Because unlucky reactor aside, this place is held together with some old welds and hope."
Charlie feels her shoulders slant, and she turns to look over the valve pit again, frowning as the roar of water rushes up over her head at yet another reminder of what this place is to the people who are already here. "So you must really hate it here, then…"
"Well…" Thomas pauses, wringing his hands for a moment. "It's not all bad. Here, um, can I show you something?"
Charlie focuses on him again and blinks. "Sure, what is it?"
"Follow me," Thomas says, and then, sheepishly. "Please."
Charlie obliges, and he leads her through the walkways up to the highest balcony, climbing up a short ladder and pushing open the gate to reveal a makeshift office set up in the tight, but efficiently-used space. There's a few crates with notebooks and diagrams laid out on them, the papers covered in handwritten additions. Next to the crates is a small military-issued blanket folded up to sit on and a foot locker with a copy of the Tool Engineer's Handbook on top. A scrap of paper covered in pencil sketches sticks out halfway through as a bookmark.
"Nice setup," Charlie says, and Thomas chuckles.
"They didn't give me a nice office or fancy lab, so I made one of my own." He kneels down and sets the book aside to open the foot locker and take out a small, battered cigarette box. "I help out at the pump house and filter plant sometimes, and I've started collecting…these."
Charlie peers down at the little box. Instead of cigarettes, it's filled with stones polished to the characteristic dull satin of river rocks. Some of them she recognizes, like the sharp black edges of obsidian and the cloudy white planes of quartz, but others she doesn't. As Thomas motions meaningfully and Charlie gets the hint and takes it in her own hands, he stands up and leans over to look along with her.
"They get caught in the filters sometimes," Thomas explains. "That's jasper, that's quartz, and that's calcite." He points as he names them. "I find a lot of fluorite, but only keep the best ones, like this one here. See the bands?"
"I do," Charlie says, and she can't help but smile. "These are really nice. Are you a geologist and an engineer?"
Thomas smiles back. "I just think they're nice to look at. I have a book, if you'd ever like to borrow it."
"Or I could just bring them to you, it looks like." Charlie tilts her head to admire the play of the industrial lighting on the fluorite with its bands of purple and green. "You're sure you don't want to help me in the reactor room?"
Thomas huffs and holds his hand out, seeming somewhat mollified when Charlie hands the cigarette box back. "Absolutely certain, thank you."
Charlie sighs — it was worth a shot. "Well, if you ever change your mind, just let me know. I'd love to have someone with expertise on this."
"Give it a few months," Thomas says, carefully tucking his prizes back into the foot locker and then turning to give Charlie an unenthused glare, "and you'll find that the expertise you need to work at this place is knowing how to perform an exorcism."
⸻ ☢ ⸻
The quiet calm of the afternoon is broken by a crisp knock on the door and the sound of a woman's voice calling, "Miss Magne?"
Charlie hastily slips her hands out of her thick lab gloves and brushes them off on her lab coat as she shoves her materials back onto her workbench. The laboratory that now belongs to her is right across from the control room, so she can hear Anthony and Husk talking across the hall as she walks to the door and pulls it the rest of the way open. It's a pleasant surprise to see Vivian standing there, looking much less comfortable in the washed-out lighting of the hall compared to when Charlie sees her striding across the grounds. Vivian's tie is hanging loose around her neck and her top button is undone, which Charlie only notices because her eyes are immediately drawn to the quite frankly obscenely thick books and stacks of paper the woman is carrying.
"Wow," Charlie says, and then she winces. "I mean, hi! Are these…for me?"
Vivian nods, then clears her throat and inclines her head towards the room. "May I come in?"
"Oh! Oh, yes, of course. Sorry. Yes, please put those down, they look heavy." Charlie follows Vivian back into the lab, watching as she carefully sets the books and papers down in an empty space on one of the bookshelves. "I could have come and gotten those…"
"It's alright," Vivian replies, seeming brusque but not annoyed, and she looks around the room. "You've settled in."
Charlie can't even feel sheepish about it, and she chuckles to herself as she looks around the room, already covered in her notes and with her handwriting covering the chalkboard. "Yes, I definitely have. It wasn't exactly hard. There wasn't much left from the guy before me." The reminder of her earlier conversation with Alastor is like an annoying tug at the back of her mind, like a hangnail that she just can't ignore, but she clears her throat and plows on. "I figure I'm going to be here for a while, so there's no reason for me to hold back, right?"
Vivian nods, tapping her fingers on her thigh silently before tucking both her hands behind her back. "Right. Anyway, those papers are from the reactor library. There's a guide from the administration about everything you'll need to memorize for the annual certifications on top."
"Right, of course." Charlie goes to the stack of papers and flips through them for a moment, nodding to herself. "You know, you really didn't have to deliver these. It's really nice of you, of course, but I could have gotten them."
"I realized we still haven't gotten a chance to properly talk," Vivian says after a moment, her voice suggesting a hint of uncertainty but her face perfectly impassive. "Introduce ourselves."
"Oh! Certainly. I'm Charlie," Charlie says, and she sticks her hand out for Vivian to shake. "…But I guess you probably knew that already."
Vivian stares at Charlie's hand for a moment, then reaches out to shake it, "Vivian Alvarado, but you knew that already, too." Something in her seems to relax just the slightest bit, and she gives Charlie a brief, tight smile. "I know this must be a big change from Berkeley. You, um…seem to be handling it pretty well."
Charlie shrugs as she picks up the stack of papers and carries them to her desk, plopping them down and starting to sort them into rough piles. "It's definitely a change, but it's a welcome one. You can only do so much theory work before you start getting antsy. Well, that's how it is for me, at least. Do you know how many papers I wrote on theoretical experiments that are almost identical to the ones I get to do every single day at this place? When I got this job offer, I was so excited I could have sprinted from California to here."
"You probably would have gotten shot on the way in," Vivian says.
Charlie stops what she's doing and stares at Vivian. Vivian blinks back. She doesn't seem hostile and it didn't sound like a threat… Well, she's a soldier. Charlie's accepted that sometimes they're just sort of…like that. She starts trying to even out the edges of one of her piles.
"So, everyone knows how I got here… What about you?" She asks, hoping to see the severe woman soften up.
It's not just Alastor that has a mysterious past. No one here seems very open to talking about how they ended up stationed at this place, even Anthony, and he'll talk about anything and everything else. Literally anything else, as Charlie has found out on a few occasions. Surely it's not top secret now that they're all here, right?
But Vivian's mouth just thins into a displeased line, her one good eye darkening. "It was this or something worse."
"Oh," Charlie manages after a second of awkward silence, feeling suddenly guilty. "Sorry. I didn't mean to…"
There's a long pause. Vivian's throat works above her open collar, then she gives a little cough and shrugs, focusing beyond Charlie to the chalkboard behind her.
"It's alright." She looks like she's about to start fiddling with her clothes, then she just tucks her hands behind her back again and takes a step backwards. "I'm glad I was able to properly meet you…Charlie." She takes another step, and her hand is on the door before she looks at Charlie again. "By the way…you got the offer for this job from Adam, right? Adam Bennet?"
Charlie nods. "The lieutenent. Yes."
Vivian purses her mouth, then looks away just long enough for her expression to have smoothed out by the time Charlie meets her eyes again. "That's what I thought. Good to meet you. Be careful."
There's a pause in which Charlie can hear the echoes of Adam's voice asking her if she has any family, and then Vivian smiles once more and disappears into the hall.
⸻ ☢ ⸻
"I love it when you say things like neutron bombardment. C'mere, big guy, say it again."
"Just tell me what the channel one neutron monitor says or I'm gonna throw you into the damn thing."
"Halfway between the 1,000 and 10,000." There's a dull thunk. "Actually, make that three-quarters of the way."
Husk and Anthony's voices are a murmur of background noise in the quiet control room. Charlie taps the eraser of her pencil against her chin absentmindedly as she scans the graph she's sketching on the sheet of drafting paper she's spread out over her desk.
Husk growls where he's sitting at his control panel, his chair creaking as he leans over to rap his knuckles against one of the panels protecting the recorders. "Damn the night shift guys. Look, it's doing that fuckin' thing again."
That draws Charlie's attention fully away from her work, and she sits up, leaning over her desk to squint at the data skittering out from under the needle. "What's going on?"
The reactor, she's learned, does a lot of things. Most recently, it was a sudden and drastic evaporation of water in the cooling lines that required no less than twelve additional control rods to be inserted so they had enough time to replace the water without the reactor melting down. That was a fun day, for sure — goodbye to Charlie's carefully calibrated samples. Before that, there was apparently some kind of buildup of particulates in a separate cooling line that made the dosimeter readings in that part of the facility spike so high, Alastor ended up in the control room furiously demanding to know what the hell was going on with his reactor. Before that… Well, Charlie's beginning to lose count, and it's only been a few weeks since she got here. Safe to say that Lucifer doing something weird is nothing new.
Charlie rolls her eyes at herself. Come on, I said I wouldn't start using that stupid nickname!
Husk stands up and ignores her as he stalks to the phone in the corner of the room and drags out a series of numbers from the rotary — the specific sound of each movement has become so familiar that Charlie recognizes it immediately as the number that connects to the phone nearest the valve pit. Another cooling line problem, Charlie assumes, but as she stands up and makes her way over to the panel of the various pressure gauges, she can't find any alarms or readings that seem out of the ordinary. She tilts her head as if a different angle will make it make sense. What's wrong with the reactor this time?
Anthony must see her confusion, because he reaches up to tap her forearm and then points towards the two neutron monitoring channels on the wall. "See those?"
"Yeah," Charlie says, and she looks a little closer. "But I don't see why…?"
"On a usual reactor, that'd just mean that the two different channels have two different readings," Anthony says. "But this isn't a usual reactor. Look, check those, and then check the continuous recording." He points to it and gives Charlie a second. "Notice anything weird?"
Charlie does. "That doesn't make any sense. Why isn't it the average?"
"Well, it might be the average." Anthony shrugs. "Or it might not be. Or maybe channel one is correct, maybe channel two. If you check the flow meter monitor, it'll tell you something completely different, and no, the gamma shield monitor also won't tell you the correct answer."
"So what you're saying is…" Realization is slow to dawn because the very idea is so incomprehensible to Charlie. "We…don't know…what the neutron levels are inside the reactor right now?"
"Ding, ding, ding, and the pretty gal from California gets a gold star," Anthony says, far too casually. "It does this sometimes. Husk blames the night shift, but I've gotten way too many strongly worded and terribly penned notes from Blitz complaining about us being the cause of it, so I think it's just something Lucifer does."
"Damn it." Husk hangs up the phone with a clatter. "Peterson isn't answering. I swear that little snake knows when I need him to do something."
"What did you need him to do…? It's not a problem with the plumbing, is it?" Charlie asks, mystified and unsure whether to feel concerned or not. Not knowing the neutron levels in the core is dangerous, but Husk and Anthony don't really seem to be panicking.
"No, but it's a lot easier to sort shit out when you have two people down there and one up here." Husk sighs and turns to Anthony. "Alright, up. We've gotta go deal with this before Alastor throws a fit. Again."
"Wait, I mean— I can do it," Charlie interrupts, and then she blinks at Husk and Anthony when they both stare at her. "It'd be better to have an actual control room technician in here anyways, right? I'm a radiochemist, not a reactor operator…"
"I'm beginning to think you want to spend time in that room," Anthony says eventually, but he sits back down. "Husk? You fine with her?"
"Fine," Husk says gruffly. "Come on, then."
He shoves open the control room doors without ado, leading her not in the direction of the main doors into the reactor room but instead towards the stairs that will take them deeper into the facility. On his way, he grabs a Cutie Pie from an alcove on the wall and offers it to Charlie.
"You ever used one of these before?"
Charlie nods, taking it from him and slinging it over her shoulder before checking the readout. The little rate meter is a comforting weight at her side. Despite its diminutive size — the source of its name — having an additional dosimeter beside the one clipped to her coat does give her a little bit more peace of mind.
"Alright, if that needle hits that number, start to worry. Anything before that, don't pay it any mind." Husk jerks his head to the side. "Follow me. We're going to work towards the reactor. That way if something's really wrong with it, we'll know about the radiation before we end up on the wrong side of the containment shield."
"You have such a positive outlook on life," Charlie says, not sure if she's joking or just trying to take her mind off the danger of the possibility of a runaway reactor with no way to monitor the neutron levels.
Husk waves a hand irritably. "Whatever. I've done this a dozen times now and I'm still standing."
"Shouldn't we put on protective gear or something?" Charlie asks as they descend a flight of stairs, keeping one hand on the wall to balance herself against the weight of the Cutie Pie.
"Good luck finding any," Husk replies, voice echoing off the concrete. "It all got damaged. Rips, tears. There was a small fire in the equipment room a few years ago that wiped out a bunch of supplies. Alastor keeps trying to get us more, but they keep blowing him off." The echo is the only reason Charlie catches the muttered addition, "At least, that's what he says."
Charlie purses her lips, but Husk is pushing the door open before she can reply and leading her down one of Lazarus Bluffs' many identical hallways. She can hear the roar of water above them and the cadence of it tells Charlie that they're somewhere below the valve pit, near where the water comes back out of the reactor and is cooled to somewhere not far below boiling before being piped back out into the river. The first monitor is the one on the outflow meter, giving a reading of the radioactivity levels of the water that leaves the facility, and Husk reaches it and pulls the front panel open without any preamble.
"Each of the monitors has a series of switches." Husk points as he talks, seeming well-practiced at picking apart the separate things in the messes of wires and components inside the plain box. "They're easiest to get to on this one, but it's also the one that tells us the least. What we always do is just reset it. Flip these down…" He flips all of the switches off. "And then back on."
The gauge sputters when the switches are flipped back to the on position. The needle slams all the way to the high end of the range, a momentary shock of adrenaline to Charlie's system, but then, gradually, it lowers back down. Husk watches it critically until it's settled somewhere about a third of the way above its baseline.
"That's a normal reading, but we won't know if it's actually right or not until we get at least one more." Husk closes the panel again and latches it with a careless thunk of his fist against the front. "Man, the things I'd do for an actual desk job."
Charlie follows him as he starts off back down the hall. "How did you get this job? I—I mean…"
Husk snorts. "I know what you mean. Did Alastor tell you we served together?"
"Yes," Charlie says, keeping pace with Husk as they turn down a hallway that she instinctively knows is one step closer to the concrete containment shield around the reactor. "On a…submarine."
"A nuclear submarine," Husk corrects. "Damn bastards found a way to split the atom and immediately decided they were gonna stick a bunch of men in a little tube with it." He looks at Charlie out of the corner of his eye. "You think it'd be bad if shit went wrong here? Imagine how bad it could get when you're 115 meters down."
The mere thought is enough to send unease flickering through Charlie's chest. "…Did something go wrong?"
"You could say that. Alastor and I were the unlucky sods that ended up fixing it. But they didn't want to give people like us awards, so they stuck us here instead." The vagueness of his explanation seems to dawn on Husk, because he adds, "Frankly, I don't wanna end up clogging the river intake, so you'll have to ask Alastor the details yourself."
Charlie doesn't know what she should say to that. Husk doesn't seem to care. He turns another corner and heads to the box that monitors the neutron levels of the gamma shield. Behind this wall, Charlie knows, is the exterior of the containment shield. The thought is strange and exhilarating all at once: all that separates her from the blinding, melting glow of the core is a few layers of concrete and steel. She places her hand on the wall, almost able to feel the warmth.
Husk does the same thing to this monitor that he did to the last one. This time, though, before he closes the panel, he looks up at the ceiling. Charlie follows his gaze, squinting, and finds herself still just as mystified as before when she finds only bare concrete above her.
Then: knock, knock.
Husk smiles. "Good. That's Anthony telling us things are beginning to even out. There's a loose panel in the control room where you can knock on one of the pipes. If you're close enough to Lucifer, you'll hear it. Don't bother carrying a radio — they're heavy and they never work."
Charlie glances down at the Cutie Pie when Husk closes this monitor up, relieved to see that the needle hasn't so much as twitched.
"There's only two more, right?" She asks as she falls into step with Husk once more. "The two in the reactor room?"
"Unfortunately," Husk says.
"I can do them." Charlie has always been eager to prove herself, and now is no different. "They're the same kind as the ones you just did, right? You made it look pretty easy."
"Ain't that sweet," Husk deadpans. "But you know what, sure, have at it. Anthony'll tell you when it's back to baseline. Just listen for the knocks."
It's the closest thing to encouragement she's heard him say, and she can't help but smile as she hefts the Cutie Pie and takes the last few steps to the doors of the reactor room. Husk crosses his arms and watches her, clearly unimpressed, as she pulls one open and gives him a cheerful salute before slipping inside.
The neutron monitors are underneath one of the panels that litter the floor, giving the reactor room the appearance of being made with uneven building blocks. Each of the steel plates are stamped with letters and numbers and, try as she might, Charlie's never been able to make heads or tails of any of them. Still, she remembers which one it is from her studies of this room. She glances at the Cutie Pie as she walks past the huge circle that forms the cap over the reactor—the needle twitches ever so slightly then stabilizes once more.
"It feels like I have to come in here to fix something at least once a day," Charlie says drily, because she's already here and no one else is around to judge her for talking to a pile of uranium and graphite. "With the way Anthony and Husk talk about you, I might start thinking you enjoy making things go screwy."
She sets the Cutie Pie next to her as she crouches down next to one of the panels and undoes the latch on it. The air that gusts out is noticeably warmer than the chilled air of the rest of the room, likely from being closer to the water that rushes out of the reactor to be sent back to the river, and Charlie huffs slightly as she examines the tangle of wires and rods to find the two boxes of the twin neutron channel monitors.
"But I'm in here so often that you already feel like an old friend," Charlie continues, and she lowers herself to her knees to reach into the cavity. "…If you felt like anything at all. Oh, God, am I talking to a reactor now?"
Her mild dismay over that fact is interrupted in its tracks by a faint but unmistakable knock, knock. Charlie looks up and stares at the door in confusion as there's a scraping noise and Husk leans in.
"Good job," he says, and then he impatiently motions her back. "Come on."
"But I didn't do anything—" Charlie starts, but Husk is already turning and leaving.
Charlie stares after him for a moment, then turns around and stares back into the cavity. She didn't even touch the neutron monitoring instruments. She didn't even find them! They're definitely in here — she reaches in and pushes a bundle of wires to the side to reveal both of them, their needles at the same level as the other two ended up at — but she didn't do anything to them that would have reset them. So why did they apparently reset themselves entirely spontaneously?
"What the fuck…?" Charlie murmurs, not expecting an answer and not recieving one.
"Are you comin' or not?" Husk calls from the hallway.
Charlie hurries to close the panel and latch it once more, grabbing the Cutie Pie as she pushes herself up to follow Husk out the door. The room is unchanged when she looks over her shoulder, but she swears she feels a warm breeze over her face right before she lets the door fall closed.
⸻ ☢ ⸻
The spent fuel storage room is as close to silent as anything in this building gets.
Charlie leans against the railing and takes a deep breath, the faint, soft noises of water lapping ever-so-slightly at the walls of the pool making her think of the pond on the Berkeley campus. It wasn't really on the campus, but one of the trails between the lab and the main buildings split at a certain point and took a meandering path towards the hills. Charlie followed it out of curiosity one day and ended up at a small, perfectly crystalline little pool that was created by one of the countless small spring-fed streams in the area. It was one of her favorite study spots when she was there.
Berkeley already feels like so long ago. Charlie blinks down at the fuel slugs in their careful piles. She hasn't even been here one full month yet, but there's something about this place that seems to warp time, like she's been plucked right out of it. It feels, for all the world, like the woman that fought tooth and nail to graduate from Berkeley is an entirely different woman than the one standing against the railing and staring down into the too-clear water.
Shaking those thoughts off, Charlie pushes herself off the railing to walk to the panel near the door. The switch for the lights is, in a strange turn of events, clearly marked, and she pulls it without sparing a thought for hesitating. There's a thunk as the first set of lights turn off, and then the second, and then the third, and then darkness swallows the little room entirely.
It takes a moment for Charlie's eyes to adjust.
From underneath the water, a blue glow grows and shifts, expanding as her eyes get used to the darkness until she can see the outline of the railing. Carefully, knowing there's nothing to trip her but still wary, Charlie approaches the railing once more and wraps her hands around it as she leans over to peer into the pool.
You’ve heard of the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect, I presume?
Alastor's words are haunting when they're lit up by the blue glow like this. Despite Charlie knowing that she's perfectly safe, there's still something eerie about it, like watching a wildfire.
The Vavilov-Cherenkov effect is the product of atomic particles moving faster than light itself, and it glows bright, otherworldly cerulean, each of the fuel slugs limned with azure. Every one of those little cylinders is radioactive enough to burn a hole right through her palm, but from up here, separated as she is by the water, they all look no more threatening than a roll of coins. The clarity of the water skews the distance: Charlie almost feels like she could reach in and grab one.
"Project Cerulean," Charlie confirms to herself, voice soft, and then she laughs. That's very creative. The Russians could figure that one out in five seconds flat.
Uncreative as it may be, though, the blue glow is beautiful in its eerie, ethereal way, shifting on the walls of the pool. Charlie puts her chin on her hand and leans her weight against the railing as she looks down. This whole place, even for all its flaws, is like a dream to her. And there's nothing more dreamlike than this, everything seeming untethered from reality in the soft light of radiation that would leave her bleeding and senseless in mere hours.
Charlie wonders, absentmindedly, if the angels people talk about would glow like this, too.