by Melissa Grey
Same rounded rectangular shape.
Gabe settled his hands on the handle, curled his fingers around the peeling paint. And turned.
One minute she was asleep. The next, she was not.
Sash lay in bed, staring at the bunk above her. Nastia’s soft snoring was the only sound she could hear. Normally, the audible, rhythmic rise and fall of her sister’s chest lulled Sash gently to slumber, like an organic metronome.
But not tonight.
I heard something.
She squinted into the semidarkness. It wasn’t completely dark. Soft red lights set into the wall granted her enough light to just about see her surroundings. Red light was safe. Red light was the only light that was safe. And normally, it was enough to chase away the nightmares of the dark room. She hadn’t had one for years, but Moran’s threat at dinner had brought them roaring back. But usually, opening her eyes to see the red light was enough to pull her from their grasp. Tonight, it wasn’t a nightmare that woke her.
It was a sound.
The door was closed, as it always was. In the other bunk bed against the opposite wall, Baba Olya slept, a scrap of unfinished knitting clutched in her hand. Her arthritis was getting worse, but she kept on knitting through the stiffness and pain. It calmed her nerves, she claimed. It was the only way she could sleep at night, buried under however many layers of sand and soil and sediment. Whenever she ran out of yarn—which was often, considering that their supplies were limited—she would unwind the last thing she made and start over. Usually it was a sweater, or a scarf. (Though it wasn’t like they ever experienced anything one could rightfully call weather down here). It was the action that mattered, not the end product.
In the bunk above Olga, Sash’s mother lay curled on her side, facing the wall with her back to Sash. She always slept like that, her body tight and small like an armadillo. She was quiet now, so quiet Sash couldn’t hear her breathe. It was too dark to see really, despite the dim red track light that was always on. It glowed faintly from the recessed area where the floor met the walls, hooked directly into the bunker’s generator.
Sometimes her mother had nightmares that left her whimpering. Other nights she woke half the bunker with her screaming. But tonight, she was as silent as death.
Then what did I hear?
As quietly as she could, Sash pushed her blankets down to her waist and sat up. They were the same blankets she’d been sleeping under for almost ten years. White, with dinosaurs cavorting across the length of them in various primary colors. A yellow triceratops. A blue T. rex. A red stegosaurus. Green ferns separating them at regular intervals. The cotton fiber had gone soft with repeated washings and some of the colors had begun to fade. The stegosauruses were more pink than red at this point.
Sash strained her ears to listen, to check if whatever noise had awoken her came again.
It didn’t.
Go back to sleep, she told herself.
But something else whispered at the back of her skull, some voice that was hers and not.
Get up.
She did.
The metal floor was cold even through her socks (knitted lovingly by her grandmother). She inched forward, hyperaware of the bunk bed’s propensity to creak whenever any significant amount of weight shifted on it. But it was quiet as a tomb as she slid out from under the covers and tiptoed across the room to the door.
Her fingertips grazed the cold metal of the doorknob when it happened.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Sash froze, her hand just barely touching the door.
That was it. That was the sound. That was what had woken her up.
A tendril of fear unfurled languidly in her stomach as she waited, holding her breath to see if that rhythmic pounding came again.
It didn’t.
Probably just the generator.
There were all manner of strange sounds in the bunker. How the lights stayed on was something of a mystery to Sash. She knew there were generators somewhere, hooked up to something, but the details had never really troubled her before. The Correas handled all that.
She could go back to bed. She could crawl under the covers and pretend she hadn’t heard a thing.
It was nothing. Probably nothing.
But …
Her hand closed around the doorknob and turned it, pulling the door open by painfully slow inches. Behind her, someone shifted, their sheets whispering together in a soft susurration that seemed impossibly loud in the silent, dark night.
She went still, waiting.
A snore.
A huff.
Someone rolling over, burrowing deeper into their mound of blankets.
Then nothing. All the Eremenkos were snug in their beds, oblivious to … whatever was happening.
Now or never.
Sash opened the door just enough to slip through.
The same dim red track lights ran the length of the hallway … or at least they should have. But they were off.
Sash swallowed a thick, curdled lump of dread in her throat. She began to walk down the hallway, her right hand on the wall, her left extended before her and groping blindly in the darkness.
It’s nothing, she thought. Something’s up with the generator. I should just go wake Gabe or his dad and—
Boom.
She jumped, her socked feet slipping on the cold hard floor.
Her heartbeat thudded so loudly it reverberated through her skull, drowning out all other noise.
Something’s outside.
The thought came unbidden. Unwanted. Unthinkable. Except, she thought it. And now, she could not unthink it.
There was nothing outside. All that existed, all that survived, was right here. In this manmade burrow beneath the ground, hidden far from the penetrating rays of the sun.
Maybe it’s someone pulling a prank.
The thought felt flimsy in comparison to the first. Like a scrap of tracing paper placed over a neon sign in a futile attempt to shield it.
But even so, she had to check.
Sash tiptoed to the other bedrooms. A peek through the small round windows set in each hatch showed rows of bunks identical to the one she shared with her brother.
The Correas were right next door to theirs. Two bunk beds, sleeping four. Mr. and Mrs. Correa against the right-hand wall with Gabe and Lucas against the left. Mrs. Correa’s hand hung down over the side of her thin mattress, her wedding ring gleaming amber in the faint red glow from the track lights. Mr. Correa’s hand lay, palm up, by the side of his head, directly below her dangling fingers, as if at some point those two hands had been touching.
We aren’t supposed to touch.
The thought came unbidden. Uninvited. Unwelcome. But there all the same.
All four Correas were fast asleep. A soft snore rumbled from Gabe’s bunk as he mumbled something in his sleep.
“Divide by two … carry the four …”
Sash left him to his mathematics.
Her socked feet carried her farther down the corridor. Yuna and her family were all accounted for, all asleep. She may have lingered for just a moment in the doorway, admiring the fall of Yuna’s hair over the side of the bunk. It was long enough to brush the ground at this point. It was due for a cut, but Sash hoped she’d keep it just a little bit longer.
She forced herself to leave. It was creepy watching people sleep, even if they were all sleeping on top of one another like puppies in a pile.
Moran’s office door was at the end of the hall, right before the bend that led to the common area.
Anyone leaving the bedrooms would have to walk past her door to get anywhere else in the bunker.
Sash’s fingers hovered over the handle, remembering the feeling of the lash across her knuckles when she had tried to pick the lock six years ago. It had taken weeks for the welts to heal. Her mother may have looked like a fragile music-box ballerina, but she had a surprising amount of upper-body strength.
But th
e memory wasn’t strong enough to keep Sash from closing her hand around the knob and trying to turn.
The door was, as always, locked.
Boom.
Her head jerked in the direction of the hatch.
Maybe it was Moran. Maybe she’d gone back out again and was trapped and needed to be let back in.
Surely, the sound was something as quotidian as that. The nightly ritual, gone somewhat awry.
But uncertainty drummed out a beat in Sash’s chest.
Her breath rasped out harshly as she felt her way through the darkened hallways to the supply closet. There was a flashlight in there. The kind with the hand crank that didn’t need batteries, which was good because they’d run out of batteries about three years ago.
The sound of the crank was impossibly loud in the silence. Every grind of its motor made Sash’s stomach turn as if it was rotating along with it. Once it had enough juice to light her way, she continued to the hatch, her pulse thrumming in her ears loudly enough to drown out the frantic sound of her own breathing.
Boom.
Sash jumped. Her socks skidded against the metal floor. The flashlight tumbled from her hands, clattering loudly enough to wake the dead as it fell.
The hatch was just up ahead.
And there was no mistaking where that sound was coming from.
The hatch. The sound was coming from the hatch. There was no question.
It’s just Moran, she told herself. It’s just Moran doing some stupid experiment. She locked herself out and now she needs to be rescued. The savior becomes the saved. Blessed dark, my ass.
How Sash wished she could believe that.
The bulk of the hatch came into view like a shadowy threat at the end of the corridor.
The flashlight came to life in Sash’s hand, the beam so blindingly white it stung her eyes.
Sash’s feet slid against the metal floor, snagging here and there on an uneven rivet holding the floor plates together.
Every fiber of her being screamed at her to run in the other direction, to hide deep within the belly of the bunker, somewhere far in the twisting nonsensical hallways. So deep no one could find her.
Certainly not whatever was making that noise. A noise that sounded too much like knocking for Sash’s comfort if it were actually anyone but Moran making it.
But of course it wasn’t anyone but Moran.
Sash took one step forward. Then another. And another. Her feet had gone unbearably cold through the worn cotton of her socks. It was just the cold metal. Not the fear, crawling up her throat like bile.
The hatch loomed ahead, the chipped red paint of the heavy metal handle lurid against the drab green of the door.
“It’s just Moran,” Sash whispered to no one but herself.
Her limbs trembled only a little as she climbed the stairs leading up to the hatch.
Just Moran.
Swallowing thickly, she rose up on her toes and looked through the hatch.
Her breath fogged up the glass for a moment. All she could see was her own reflection. Hair a mess. Eyes a touch too wide.
Nothing. There was nothing out there.
Not Moran. Not some nameless monster. Just the inverse of a scared, silly girl, jumping at things that go bump in the night.
“Stupid,” Sash told herself. “Just stupid.”
She was ready to go. The flashlight clicked off in her hand. Not enough cranking. Only the bare minimum. But it was fine. Because there was nothing out there. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Be on your way.
A fine idea, Sash thought, to do just that. But she glanced back through the glass window of the hatch once more, just for good measure.
This time, something looked back.
Not every aspect of living in the bunker was entirely terrible.
Yuna would never admit so aloud within earshot of Sash, but there were moments she liked. Maybe even truly enjoyed.
Like ballet.
Staying in shape was one of Moran’s rules. It wasn’t a bad one. (Another thought never to be spoken in Sash’s presence: Not all of Moran’s guidelines for life were devoid of merit.) It went hand in hand with her ideas about purity of mind and body. The body was a temple. The owner of said body was its caretaker. If they were ever going to survive on the surface, they had to be in peak physical form.
To outrun the monsters. Yuna pressed her lips tightly together to hold back the giggle threatening to spill out. She didn’t think monsters were funny, but she did think the thought of outrunning them via a series of gracefully performed glissades was.
Mrs. Eremenko clapped her hands in time with the scratchy recording of piano music emanating from the record player in the corner.
“Tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, assemblé! I said assemblé, Nastia, not … whatever that was.”
There wasn’t a mirror in the drained swimming pool, but Yuna had a vivid imagination. She pictured the line of them—her, Nastia, and even little Lucas, struggling to keep up—bobbing up and down in her imagined mirror’s reflective surface, toes pointed, knees extended, arms cutting through the air as they moved through their prescribed port de bras.
Gabe had been granted special permission to skip these classes. Asthma, Dr. Moran had said. It wouldn’t do to have him collapse on the pool’s hard, tiled flooring. He did have to go to yoga and Pilates, also taught by Mrs. Eremenko, but the ballet he avoided. It was just as well. Yuna would never say it to his face, but he was terrible at it. No ear for music, that one. Only the tiniest sliver of dexterity.
Normally, Sash would be lurking toward the back of the room, but today, she was nowhere to be found.
We can’t stay down here forever.
Sash’s words had been rattling around in Yuna’s brain ever since that disastrous dinner.
So far, Sash hadn’t been made to pay for them. That was rare. Usually, that sort of back talk wasn’t tolerated, but Moran had shown herself to be unusually magnanimous about the whole thing.
Perhaps because she knew—they all knew—that Sash was right.
They couldn’t stay down here forever.
There wasn’t an infinite amount of food.
There wasn’t an infinite amount of air, especially if the circulation system went out.
And despite Moran’s assurances, there might not be an infinite amount of water. The doctor said there was an underground stream that fed their system—groundwater that remained safe for human consumption after the Cataclysm—but all they had to go on was her word. Yuna had never seen it with her own eyes. The stream might have been less than a stream and more of a generous lake, feeding them for the better part of a decade, but eventually, it could run dry. And if it did …
Well, the thought hardly merited further explication. It was dark enough as it was, and frankly, Yuna had precious little patience for dark thoughts. They were pointless. They accomplished nothing. They were a plague upon the mind, distracting oneself from vastly more important things like—
“Your arms, Yuna.” Mrs. Eremenko’s voice reverberated against the walls of the swimming pool. “They’re flapping about like dead chicken wings.”
To drive her point home, she flailed her arms up and down in a wild gesticulation only vaguely reminiscent of dying poultry. “Support from the below. Not from the shoulder.”
“Yes, right. Sorry.” Yuna made the appropriate adjustment and continued with the exercise.
Tombé, pas de bourrée, glissade, assemblé. Jeté, jeté, jeté, jeté. Waltz step and waltz step and waltz step and waltz step. Piqué arabesque. Tombé and sous-sus.
“Not beautiful but serviceable.”
High praise coming from Mrs. Eremenko. She was nearly impossible to please. This was the closest Yuna could hope to come.
The physicality of it took Yuna out of herself. When the sweat was beading against her brow and sticking the Transformers T-shirt to her back, she could forget where she was. For the most ephemeral of moments, she could pretend she was anywhe
re else other than where she was, buried far underground, deep enough for no sunlight to penetrate. She had, in this moment, a tiny suspension of disbelief, one in which she could pretend that daytime was more than just a half-remembered fantasy.
Mrs. Eremenko clapped out the beats, shouting at them to keep on time. “The music is not a suggestion, Nastia. The music is master.”
“There is no music,” the younger girl grumbled, so only Yuna could hear.
She snickered, not enough for Mrs. Eremenko to notice, but enough for Nastia to feel at least a little bit validated.
But to Yuna, there was always music. Inside, where no one else could hear.
The class wound down, ending as it always did, with a reverence in the direction of the nonexistent pianist. Mrs. Eremenko was nothing if not a creature of habit. That was how ballet class traditionally ended everywhere in the world, back when there was a world in which to have ballet class. And so that was how they ended every class here. With a reverence. But without a pianist.
Afterward, Yuna wiped at her brow with a rag that had once been white before it had been through the wash a few thousand times. Mrs. Eremenko came over, her brow pinched, her lips flattened into a hard, displeased line.
“Where is my daughter?” The consonants were clipped and harsh. The question was proposed with the air of not truly expecting an answer but mildly—and Yuna couldn’t stress mildly enough—hoping to find one anyway.
“I don’t know,” Yuna said.
And truly, she didn’t. Normally, they were joined at the hip, but for the past few days, Sash had been oddly cagey. Jumping at little noises. Fading away halfway through conversations she was clearly less than invested in. Yuna had tried to ask what was wrong, but Sash only shrugged and said everything was fine. A lie. Yuna wasn’t always the greatest judge of that sort of thing, but it was so obvious this time around that it was almost offensive.
“Hm” was all Mrs. Eremenko said.
“I saw her by the hydroponics,” Nastia offered from where she sat on the floor, stretching her hamstrings. “Mumbling something to herself like a crazy person.”
Mrs. Eremenko frowned. It made her look a solid ten years older. “Your sister is not crazy.”
