Startled, Vicky stepped back. It was as though she’d hit a wall of stone, but in front of her, there was nothing—just a dirt path flanked by plants and trees.

  “What’s wro—?” Adam began to ask, but—thud!—With his next step, he slammed into something unseen. Pain exploded in his head and nose.

  “What’s going on?” Number Three approached with Number Five trailing close behind.

  Rubbing his face, Adam pointed ahead. “I don’t know. There’s something here… that isn’t here.”

  Vicky placed her hand on whatever was blocking her path, invisible to the eye, and ran it along, trying to gauge its size.

  It was a transparent wall that even extended through trees, bushes, and everything in its way without cutting them in half. How far did it stretch? She walked a few steps, but the wall kept going and going.

  Was it isolating them—those still within the zone affected by Kappa radiation? If so, maybe it had been set up deliberately. The scientists could fear that by coming into contact with the Ita-Hu’s mysterious substance, they might have been exposed to an unknown pathogen. A force field sealing the perimeter seemed like the best quarantine measure.

  Adam looked at her, frightened; he had thought the same thing.

  “Why have they done this to us?”

  Number Three stepped between them and, after touching the invisible wall, turned to face them. With a finger to his lips, he motioned for them to stay quiet. “You hear that?” he asked, lifting his glasses and eyeing them with keen interest.

  Adam shrugged. “Hear what?”

  “Nothing,” Vicky said, puzzled. She had been so focused on what her hands were feeling and her eyes couldn’t see that she had overlooked her sense of hearing.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Number Three repeated. “There’s no sound. We can hear the jungle noises, but not the camp—even though it’s right there.”

  Damn it, he was right! How hadn’t they noticed earlier? People in the camp bustled about—shouting instructions across distances, the excavator moving its bucket to dig up soil, a van rolling near the tents—and yet none of it made any sound. Nothing from the other side of the invisible wall was audible.

  “Oh, come on!” Adam groaned. “Now what?”

  Vicky glared at Number Three. “Your people. Did they do this?”

  Three swallowed hard and shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  Then, a scientist giving orders to the excavator operator spotted them. He started pointing and yelling something none of them could hear. Attracted by his shouting, the scrawny David Anderson emerged from the main tent with his assistant, Luciano Green, and the two of them hurried toward the wall.

  “No, this quarantine wasn’t planned,” Vicky murmured.

  Judging by the faces on the biologists, the transparent wall wasn’t their idea or doing either. Her heart, which had finally slowed after the confrontation with the giant, began pounding again.

  Anderson made a frustrated gesture, as though remembering something he’d forgotten, then turned back to shout toward the tent. From it emerged another scientist—the chubby one—carrying small whiteboards in his hands.

  Vicky couldn’t decide who looked more pathetic: Anderson with his spindly, trembling legs, the sweating, sauna-soaked chubby guy, or her group, frozen in confusion with faces like doomed prisoners.

  “Let us out!” Adam yelled at the scientists, pounding the invisible wall. “We’re not infected!”

  “How do you know?” Number Five shot back.

  “Know what, Balloon-Head?”

  Five frowned, making the swelling on his forehead even more pronounced.

  “What did you call me, pretty boy? Say it to my face!”

  “Shut up! Fighting among ourselves is pointless,” Vicky snapped. She turned to Adam. “And it’s pointless to try talking to the people on the other side—they clearly can’t hear us.”

  “How do you know?” he protested. “We can’t hear them, but maybe they can hear us.”

  Anderson, Green, and the chubby scientist stopped on the other side of the wall. None of them looked in good shape; all three were winded from their brief sprint.

  “At least with this wall between us, we don’t have to smell them,” Number Four muttered.

  “What is all this?” Vicky asked, enunciating every word slowly so the scientists could read her lips. She gestured in an arc with her arms to indicate the confinement.

  Anxiously, Anderson grabbed one of the whiteboards from the chubby scientist and scribbled with his finger. He was trembling, the very image of neurosis. Once done, he flipped the board around for them to see.

  In big, hastily scrawled letters, it read:

  YOU’RE TRAPPED!!!

  Adam’s expression twisted in disbelief. “If his next message is, ‘It’s hot out,’ I’ll award him a diploma for idiocy.”

  Luciano Green averted his eyes, embarrassed for his superior.

  Anderson, absorbed in his own thoughts and oblivious to the others, erased what he had written by pressing the edges of the board and, with his trembling finger, wrote a new message:

  Do you have the samples? What caused those tremors? And the noises?

  He even repeated the same words aloud, looking utterly ridiculous.

  “Thanks for your concern, you bastard,” Number Four growled, with Adam chiming in agreement.

  Vicky took out the plastic vial, shook it to show that the Ita-Hu fragment was intact, then returned it to her pocket. Anderson’s eyes gleamed like he’d just seen pure gold.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “What is this?” she asked, patting the invisible wall.

  The scientist looked at her as if he didn’t understand.

  “What the hell is this, you moron!” Adam shouted, throwing a couple of punches at the wall, which only left his knuckles sore.

  Anderson understood and started scribbling again. Green, meanwhile, used another whiteboard to write a different question:

  What happened to you? Where are the others?

  “Well, at least someone here still has a shred of humanity,” Vicky remarked, responding with a negative gesture.

  Luciano already had a good idea of what had happened, just by looking at them: dirty, bruised, and especially the surviving agents. Their faces were scratched up, their jackets torn, and bits of branches and leaves clung to them everywhere.

  Anderson displayed what he had just written:

  An electric field appeared and isolated a portion of the jungle. Blocks electromagnetic waves and radio signals. No way to communicate with you except like this. We don’t know why it appeared or how to remove it. Working on it.

  Well, at least they had an answer. But that ‘working on it’ didn’t do much to reassure them.

  Number Three recalled the strange sensation he and his group had felt upon entering the thick forest. That surge of energy had been, after all, the prelude to what they were facing now.

  “Any way to go around it?” he asked, drawing a circle with his finger.

  Anderson frowned.

  “He’s not getting it,” said Vicky.

  Number Four repeated Three’s gesture, exaggerating it impatiently.

  “Go. A-round. It!” he snapped. “Get it, you old fool? Go. A-round. It!”

  Anderson scribbled a large ‘NO’ and surrounded it with aggressive scribbles. Luciano Green, however, calmly elaborated:

  The electric field is circular. No exit. No entrance.

  Clenching her teeth, Vicky spun around and grabbed her head with both hands.

  Disheartened, Adam punched the invisible wall and cursed.

  “Can we tunnel under it?” asked Number Three, miming digging motions.

  “Great,” Number Four snapped. “I’m burning up, everything hurts, and now we’re playing charades.”

  Once again, Luciano responded. His note was short but conveyed the gravity of the situation:

  Tried excavator. No luck.

  Then he added:

  Not a dome—looks like an O.

  Before anyone could ask if ‘O’ was a letter or a number, he clarified:

  Bubble.

  “Great. Just what we needed,” Adam snorted.

  That’s when he noticed Rune Halstein standing at the entrance of the main tent in the distance, smoking a cigar and watching them with an expression as impenetrable as it was piercing.

  “I’d give my weight in gold to know what that guy’s thinking.”

  Vicky, who had also spotted the Division Chief, was wondering the same thing. “What do you think we are to him? Experiments?”

  Adam shrugged. “Ants in a glass jar?”

  Something told him the Division Chief had some idea of what was going on. Or maybe more than just an idea—a certainty. For some reason, he felt the burly man with the mustache could bridge the distance between them and somehow knew exactly what the biologists were scribbling on their boards—and even their responses.

  “Move aside, please,” Adam said to Vicky.

  She gave him a doubtful look. “What are you doing?”

  Facing the invisible wall, he let energy crackle in his fists until it ignited into white flames.

  “You’re a smart girl; you know what I’m about to do,” he said. “The rock and I emitted the same type of radiation, but my electromagnetic charge is… I can’t remember the exact level, but I know it’s higher. If my Fotia could penetrate the Ita-Hu’s shield, I think I can break this glass wall.”

  Licking his lips, Adam took a deep breath. As long as he moderated his energy, the reactor power of Juzo wouldn’t be triggered, and Al Shaula wouldn’t appear and consume him… right?

  On the other side of the force field, Anderson, Green, and the heavyset man backed away a few steps.

  Vicky also took precautions, but the thought that Adam’s electric fire might bounce off the wall and backfire crossed her mind. She imagined him engulfed in his own energy and was about to yell, ‘Stop!’ when Adam unleashed his blazing spheres against the barrier.

  But nothing happened. Not even a sound.

  The flames’ crackling as they spiraled into a sphere was extinguished the moment they touched that solidified nothingness. The invisible wall absorbed the Fotias, like a stomach absorbing nutrients. There was no better way to describe it.

  Adam hurled two more fireballs, with the same result. It would keep happening unless he increased the power of his Fotias. But he wouldn’t risk it; the stakes were too high. He needed another solution. Maybe if he kept firing repeatedly, he’d eventually break through the barrier.

  Wiping sweat from his face, he took another deep breath, preparing to continue his effort.

  “Come on, Adam… You’ve got this!” he muttered to himself.

  “What are you trying to do?” Vicky asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? I’m gonna keep firing until—”

  “Until you burn yourself out.” Vicky grabbed his wrist and forced his arms down. “Why don’t you wait until we come up with something?”

  “What’s your plan, pretty girl?” Number Four butted in, raising his rifle at the barrier. “I say we fill this glass jar with lead.”

  “‘Pretty girl,’ my ass,” Vicky shot back, but she caught the biologists’ alarmed expressions and hesitated—Green and the big guy were waving their arms frantically, while Anderson furiously wrote on his whiteboard.

  “Wait!” she shouted at Number Four, but the S747 in the agent’s hand was already beeping, signaling its imminent shot. “Don’t do it!”

  A deafening BAM! rang out like a firecracker in a tin can.

  A whistling sound grazed Vicky’s left cheek, and her ears paid the price with sharp ringing.

  The Satellite had pulled the trigger. The bullet had struck the barrier, bounced without exploding—the detonation had been nothing more than the weapon’s discharge—and ricocheted in another direction, grazing Vicky’s face.

  Furious, she rubbed her cheek. “What the hell is wrong with you, idiot?! You almost killed me!”

  Number Four shrugged it off with a dismissive ‘Bah.’ No apology followed.

  Finally, Anderson finished writing and held up his board:

  We’ve fired at it and got nothing. The bullets bounce back. One of our biologists has a wounded arm because of it.

  “Great! So we’re stuck here forever!” Number Four groaned, making Vicky want to strangle him.

  Number Three, using his rifle as a crutch to avoid putting weight on his injured ankle, stepped between them to defuse the tension.

  “Nobody’s staying here forever,” he told his teammate.

  “Oh yeah? And how do you know that?”

  “Calm down,” Number Five interjected. The wound on his forehead was turning into an ugly, purplish bruise. “We could survive on wild fruit, maybe even hunt something to roast. At least until we find a way out.”

  “Yeah… Well…” Three replied, trying not to sound too dismissive. “Except we’re inside the Kappa radiation perimeter. It’s like standing in the sun without any protection. The longer we stay here, the worse it’ll get for us.”

  Vicky turned her attention to the real problem—the force field.

  “Something told me this thing was going to reject anything we threw at it,” she said, giving it a couple of taps.

  Number Three joined her. “That didn’t happen with your friend’s energy,” he pointed out.

  “No, his was absorbed.”

  “Hey, what if we follow the wall and check if its actual size matches the area covered by the Kappa radiation?” suggested Number Five.

  “What’s the point?” Four interrupted. “If we really are inside a damn sphere, you’ll have half a mile of pure jungle to get through. You’ll find plants, trees, and, in the center, that damn rock along with Number Two dead. There you go! I’ve saved you your reconnaissance round.”

  Vicky held herself back from punching him. “Look,” she said, “doing it will at least give us something to do for a while. But why don’t you stay here and keep an eye on those geniuses at the camp while we’re gone, huh?”

  When she turned to ask Adam if he was coming along or staying with the insufferable Number Four, he was nowhere to be found.

  Apparently, Adam had decided to go investigate on his own without telling anyone.

  But he’d been right there just a moment ago! When had he left?