The sight that greeted me at the foot of the stairs actually made a small sound of surprise escape my lips. The entire basement was just one giant lab, with a small entryway partitioned off from the rest by a glass window.

And on the other side of that window was what made me stop in my tracks. Pictures from a dozen history books on nuclear energy and particle physics suddenly came into blinding reality before my eyes. I wanted to cry at the awe-inspiring enormity of what I was looking at.

It really did look like a racetrack, the magnetized tubes that were processing raw uranium atoms and separating out the much-needed lower-neutron isotopes, creating a mass of Frankenstein element wholly impossible in nature: plutonium. Men in white lab coats buzzed about the apparatus as the humming of the magnets grew louder and louder.

I approached that reinforced glass now like a kid at the zoo seeing an exotic animal for the first time, unable to hide the amazement in my eyes as I took in the scene and watched the handful of scientists assessing the quality of the machine's output.

The scientists loped around a central figure like electrons around a nucleus, and my heart stopped when I saw who was at the center of all that energy: Alexei.

And he was looking right at me.

Or, at least, that's how it seemed at first. But only after a moment of my heart leaping into my throat did I realize that his soft gaze was actually focused on a point behind my head. In the reflection of the glass wall between us, he couldn't make out my face.

Still, I spun quickly around before his eyes had a chance to adjust, or before he took a step that reduced the glare, exposing the fact that I'd followed him here.

With the rag in my hand, I busied myself cleaning the lamps in the small lobby, trying to think of what I could do to expose Alexei to the other men in the room. If I simply came forward and announced what I knew about him, who would believe me? Even if this time period weren't proving to be even more racist and sexist than the future, it would still be hard to believe a cleaning woman over a revered scientist.

But my indecision was settled for me when I looked up again.

A small cannister, about the size of a coffee can, was now sitting under a protective glass case on a small rolling table, which Alexei now turned to push, quite gingerly, through a doorway at the back of that glassed-in room. Turning in unison, almost like they were one interconnected blob and not individual men, all the white-coated scientists in the room followed right behind him.

That cannister—such a tiny, insignificant-looking thing—was the reason this whole place existed. It was hard to believe that something so small would be the death warrant for hundreds of thousands of people.

I waited a few seconds, making sure the coast was clear, before venturing into the lab and letting my eyes rest for a just a moment on that incredible piece of machinery—still humming and radiating off a slight warmth from its efforts. Then I proceeded through the back doorway, following Alexei and that precious little cannister.

The hallway that lurked behind the door had the feel of a secret tunnel—dark and narrow, lit up only by a few overhead mining lights. It traveled on for maybe forty feet, turning a couple of times, before letting out through an identical door at the other end.

Once I reached that door, I took a deep breath, not sure what might greet me on the other side. What if Alexei was waiting for me there? What if a security guard was?

I shook off my nerves, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

It took me a moment to process that the room I had entered was the size of an entire building. Trying to get my bearings, my eyes latched onto something that was oddly familiar—high-up windows that lined the edge of the room, like storm windows, revealing that we were just underground. And it wasn't until I stared at them for a moment that I was able to place them.

They were the windows that lined the twisting, turning hallway that led to the science lab, the one beyond the boiler room. I had always said that the hallway looked like it was built to avoid hitting the trees in an invisible forest. It weaved this way and that, seemingly with no rhyme or reason, and doors on either side of the corridor led alternately to bricked-up rooms or else long-abandoned offices.

Now that I was finally seeing this subterranean maze in its original form, my brain superimposing the future version of the hallway over the one before my eyes, it was like a light of understanding had been turned on overhead.

The parts of the floor that were missing in the future were now occupied by enormous tubes, pipes and machinery. Computers the size of a living room. Pipes so wide a person could walk through them without ducking. Things that would become obsolete over the years; hulking machinery that would eventually be replaced by nanotubes and memory sticks containing more gigabytes of data than this entire building.

So in the future, when the hallway was being carved out of the remnants of this place, they simply bricked off the odd assortment of parts that were no longer needed.

My eyes zeroed in on the very back of the enormous room—a room that must have spanned almost the entire surface area of the basement of what I now realized was the building called X10, the one that would eventually contain the portals. And the men in the white coats had made it to the exact spot where those portals would be—or rather, hovering about fifteen feet over the exact spot.

I watched in stunned silence, keeping my distance and making the most rudimentary show of cleaning whatever happened to be nearby, as the cannister was taken off the rolling table and emptied carefully by a cadre of scientists into long cylindrical tubes. The entire back wall of the place was an enormous board filled with dozens of circular holes, and a quick glance informed me that they were just the right size for the tubes to fit into.

It was a reactor. This was it—the ultimate experiment. They were going to try to make a sustained nuclear reaction with the plutonium in those tubes. Was this the first time they had tried it? Was I really lucky enough to be witnessing this monumental moment in history?

But whatever it was the men were expecting to see from that reactor, it probably wasn't what happened next.

The frantic shouting of a man with a thick foreign accent made me drop all pretense of being a cleaning lady and approach softly, panic settling into my stomach.

There had been an accident. The smooth, interweaving dance of the men who'd been assisting Alexei had been replaced by chaotic bumping and careening bodies. Something was wrong. People were huddling into a small human mountain, covering those desperately important cylinders, their backs strained by tightening muscles.

I could only make out glimpses through the sea of frantic bodies. The men surrounding Alexei encouraged him softly in worried voices. The words, "Don't lose a drop" seeped out of one man's throat, muffled by the grip in his voice. For a moment, it seemed as though maybe they had controlled the problem.

But then another moment of panic seized the people in the room, causing every one of their bodies to tense and flail. "Oh, God!" someone shouted. "Oh no!"

And finally, one more voice, quiet and spooked: "What in God's name..."

Now other workers from the room behind me had joined me in gaping at the men, a fact which relieved me as it took away any focus I might have been attracting. We all stood powerless together, our mouths open, as we watched the show before us helplessly.

"Get it, get it!"

"I can't!" shouted another man. "It's too late."

Looking down, I finally made out something that took my breath away: a slow, oozing trickle of neon pink, seeping its way past the feet of all those men and wending through the ground beneath them towards the corner of the room.

"What is it?" a frantic man behind me asked.

"I have no idea," panted another.

The scientists in the room seemed equally fazed, backing away slowly with their hands on the sides of their heads, as if trying to hold their disbelieving brains into place. It wasn't until the men had backed away that I could see one figure in the middle—a man who didn't seem shocked or frightened by the lava-like flow of pink goop that was now burning a hole into the ground as it traveled.

Alexei and I were the only people in the building who had any way of knowing what the hell we were looking at. But it still chilled me to the bone to see it again.

Suddenly, the trail of pink ooze began to separate, branching like a river hitting a bed of rocks into three separate streams, all skinnier and slower than the first. And as if on cue, the three separate branches then stopped in their tracks and slowly, painstakingly slowly, began to melt their way into the earth below, boring deep and irreversible holes into the floor. Holes which glowed and radiated out a menacing pink aura that filled the room with an eerie sense of doom.

The three portals had taken root. They could never be undone.

Enthralled as I was by the sight, and as much as the terrified clamor of those around me was making me uneasy, I had the presence of mind to look up at that moment, away from the newly formed portals, towards the one person who wasn't watching this scene unfold.

Alexei had the container with the remaining plutonium in his hands. And under the cover of the confusion in the room, he was sneaking away towards the unguarded door.

***

Everyone who predicted what she'd find in the basement raise your hand. 

Keep reading for chapter 42!