by Melissa Grey
Nastia shrugged. “Sure was acting like it.”
Further conversation was precluded by Nastia bowing her torso over her quadricep and touching her forehead to her knee. Conversation over.
“I can go look for her,” Yuna offered.
But Mrs. Eremenko was already shaking her head. “Don’t. You’re a good girl. Stay that way.”
With that, she pivoted her heel with all the grace of a true ballerina of the Bolshoi and left, sweeping out of the room with her caftan billowing in her own self-made breeze.
Hm.
Well.
Yuna was going to look for Sash anyway.
She started in the usual places. Sash’s bunk. Too obvious. The bed was made but only just barely. The disdain with which the quilt had been tossed over the mattress was abundantly evident. The kitchen. Empty save for Mrs. Correa, meticulously measuring out dried beans. They were nearly out. A pleasant thought for another day. The library, if one could call it that. (One honestly couldn’t.) Nothing.
Frustrated, Yuna turned around and made her way down the corridor to the generator room. When she turned the corner, she nearly collided into Sash herself.
“Dude,” Yuna said, catching her hands on Sash’s elbow. The other girl seized up, as if even that minor act of physical contact was too much.
A flash of memory burned through Yuna with the intensity of lightning. The night of the blackout. Her hand in Sash’s. The warmth of another person’s skin against her own. (How long had it been since she’d felt something like that? Too long.) The glare of the emergency lights as everyone saw. The viscous shame that settled low in her gut when Moran caught her eye.
Stop it.
“Where have you been?” Yuna asked. “Your mom was looking for you.”
Sash furrowed her brow. In that moment, she looked astonishingly like her mother. A thought Yuna knew was best left unshared.
“I’ve been …” Sash glanced over her shoulder. Then the other. Her gaze wandered the room, not quite locking on any one thing in particular but with an intensity that made Yuna think she was maybe seeing through things instead of just seeing them. “Around.”
“Around?” Yuna repeated. “What do you mean ‘around’?”
They lived in a bunker, for God’s sake. There were only so many places one could go.
Unless …
No.
Not an option.
But before Sash could answer, a heavy tread signaled that they weren’t alone. Yuna recognized those footsteps before their owner rounded the corner.
“Hi, Misha.” Yuna liked the face people made when she threw out their name before their faces had a chance to catch up. They’d all been living in the bunker so long that Yuna couldn’t possibly fathom not being able to recognize people by their distinctive treads alone, but apparently, it wasn’t a skill universally acquired.
“Yuna,” Misha said by way of acknowledgment. And then, there it was. The face. Puckered lips. Consternation in the set of the eyes. Nice. When he turned to his sister, his expression soured even further. “Mom was looking for you.”
“Cool,” Sash said. “I don’t care.”
Misha’s face contorted into that trademark Eremenko brow furrow. They all did it. Except for Olga. She didn’t frown. She only ever scowled. “What is wrong with you? First, that display during dinner—”
“You mean during the third blackout we’ve had this month?”
Yuna wished she could fade away into the ether, but alas, she could not. She was trapped, here, in the middle of an Eremenko sibling tug-of-war.
“Don’t be a brat,” Misha said.
“I don’t have any other hobbies,” Sash countered.
“Can the two of you just not?” Yuna cut in.
She just really hated confrontation. There was no point. They were trapped in here with one another whether they liked it or not. The only thing sniping at one another would accomplish was making everyone miserable.
Misha shot Yuna a glare, but it was softer than the one his sister earned.
“You’re on scrubbing duty,” he said.
Ah, yes. Scrubbing duty. The act of painstakingly cleaning every surface of the bunker on hands and knees. For safety, Moran insisted. Contaminants could be anywhere.
“I was on scrubbing duty last week,” Sash said, affronted. It was the most direct emotion Yuna had seen the other girl display in days. In a way, it was its own comfort.
“That’s why you shouldn’t be a brat.” Misha didn’t wait for his sister to counter with an argument. He was a wise man. He dropped that nugget and turned and left.
What was it with the Eremenkos and dramatic exits? Yuna might never know.
“Ugh.” Sash shook herself. “I’m so sick of scrubbing this place down. Especially when …”
But the thought never manifested into words. Sash dug her teeth into her lower lip and made to leave.
Yuna grabbed Sash’s forearm before she could escape deeper into the bunker—or “around”—and evade further questioning.
“What’s happening, Sash? Tell me.”
Sash studied Yuna for a good long moment. A moment so long it sort of stopped being good, actually. Sash opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Did another one of those around-the-room glances that made Yuna think she was either being extremely paranoid or, depending on the circumstances, precisely the amount of paranoid she needed to be.
When Sash finally spoke, her words failed to bring even the tiniest amount of peace to Yuna’s frazzled heart.
“Things aren’t what they appear to be.”
“What?” Yuna asked.
But Sash only shook her head, that haunted look creeping back into her eyes. She pulled her arm free of Yuna’s grasp. Without another word, she turned back in the direction she had come.
She didn’t need to tell Yuna not to follow her to make it clear she didn’t want to be followed. And so, Yuna didn’t. But the words stuck to the insides of her skull like honey. She hadn’t tasted honey in years, but she remembered what it felt like. Thick and sticky. Once it got on her tongue, it was there to stay.
Things aren’t what they appear to be.
It meant everything. It meant nothing. Yuna hated that sort of ambiguity. And so, with as much metaphorical muscularity as she could muster, she set it down and walked away.
The door had been stuck shut.
(Or locked in a way he couldn’t see.)
(Or it wasn’t connected to anything and trying to open it was a fruitless endeavor. A fool’s errand.)
He’d tugged and pulled and grunted for an hour. At least, he thought it was an hour. Time was odd and elastic in the bunker. The human body relied on sunlight to maintain its circadian rhythms, and Gabe knew that all of theirs had been out of whack for the better part of a decade. It made judging even small units of time difficult. Five minutes could feel like five hours. Five hours like five seconds.
But no matter how much time had passed, the door had refused to budge. The only thing he’d managed to knock loose was a small panel nearly hidden behind the wheel.
A closer look revealed it was electric in nature but untethered to anything. A very old, very primitive digital lock. Maybe from the 1980s. Maybe even earlier than that. It looked like it had never been properly configured, never attached to a power source. Just another dead end in the series of dead ends that comprised the bunker.
Gabe couldn’t remove it from the wall, but what he could do was commit it to memory. Every detail. Every shape. Every input and output. He rolled those details over in his mind. All through the morning ritual and the thin gruel breakfast and the physical education class he skipped. He was rolling them over in his head right now, only half hearing whatever story his father was telling him about an office softball team he’d been on Before. (Also illicit. Also forbidden. The rules were as elastic as time when no one was looking.)
The team had been called the Absolute Zeros. A clever name for a bunch of science nerds workin
g at a biochemical plant. Fitting, too, since according to his father’s tales, they never won a single game.
His dad was relaying the gripping tale of the time he stole second base, only to fracture his ankle at the end of his slide. Gabe pored over the electrical panel before him, only half listening to the tale. It was seated on a plastic storage box that doubled as a table. Nothing in the bunker was single use. Everything that could serve multiple purposes did.
Waste not, want not.
The panel was designed to be multipurpose. It could be used for the lighting system, the water filtration tanks, or the power generator. It would go where it was needed, a stalwart soldier made of circuits and copper.
Touching one end of the panel caused a minor spark to flare up at the other end.
Interesting.
Gabe liked working with gadgets. There was usually a right way to make them work amid a thousand wrong ones. Finding the right way was often through process of elimination. Failure could sting, but only if you let it. The sweet thrill of victory when you discovered the solution … that was a glory all its own.
“And then Barry said—Gabe, are you listening to me?”
The tool in Gabe’s hand slid as he jerked his head up. A mild shock zapped through his arm as one metal bit touched another metal bit it really shouldn’t touch. “Ow—what? Yeah.”
A quirked eyebrow was his dad’s response. Then a sigh, as he set aside his own task—breakfast. There had been a brownout of the red lights that flooded the bunker during the morning ritual, and fixing it had taken the better part of the morning meal. The schedule Moran set for the bunker was usually airtight, but on this occasion, the elder Correa had been allowed to prepare his own runny serving of gruel to eat at his leisure.
(“For services rendered,” Moran had said.)
“What’s on your mind, kid?”
Gabe tugged his lip between his teeth, mostly to keep his thoughts inside his head until he knew which ones to let out.
Don’t mention the blueprints.
Don’t mention the door.
Don’t mention—
“Why did you call Cornelius Moran a nutjob?”
His father blinked, brow furrowed. “When did I do that?”
“Ages ago,” Gabe said. “When I was twelve.”
“Ages.” His father huffed out a small laugh. “A whole five years. A lifetime.”
Half of one, if you squinted. Fifty percent of the time they’d spent in the bunker, a life all its own, so divorced from the world beyond that it counted as its own epoch entirely.
“I found some blueprints for the bunker, and they weren’t the same. There were differences here and there. Odd ones. I asked you about it, and you just shrugged it off and said he was a nutjob.”
“He was eccentric, I guess you could say.”
When it looked as though his father was going to leave it at that, Gabe prodded. “Eccentric how?”
His dad scratched at the stubble on his chin. Gabe was well into his late teens and had yet to grow even the slightest bit of facial hair. He wasn’t jealous. Truly. It looked like a tremendous hassle to have another involuntary bodily function to maintain.
“Have you ever heard of the Winchester Mystery House?”
Gabe shook his head. “Nope. Was it some kind of amusement park ride? Like a haunted house or something?”
He remembered amusement parks but in bits and pieces. The smell of kettle corn popping. The roar of a roller coaster he would never be brave enough to ride. The sticky sweet taste of cotton candy on his tongue. The unbroken heat of the sun bearing down on his skin.
“Or something.” His dad ran a hand through his hair, tussling the too-long strands. It was grayer now than it had been when they’d first entered the bunker. Significantly so. “It was built by Sarah Winchester, widow to a guy who manufactured one of the most popular firearms in the world, the Winchester rifle.”
“Where was it?” Gabe asked. “The house, I mean.”
“Somewhere in California.” His dad scratched his chin, his face screwing up in thought. “Can’t remember where though.”
California. What a place. It sounded imaginary. Fictional. As fake and as far away as Narnia or Atlantis or Midgard. Cal-i-for-nia. Gabe rolled the syllables around in his mind, vowing to try them out later when he was alone. It was so odd to talk about places that used to mean something.
“Anyway, she was as crazy as the day is long, so people said. She ordered construction on a house that got bigger and bigger as time went on. Some people said that construction continued nonstop for almost forty years.”
“So it was just a big house,” Gabe said. “What was so special about that?”
“It wasn’t the size that made it unusual. It was how the widow Winchester demanded it be built. Doors that led to nowhere. Hallways that bent in on themselves. It was like a fun house but without the fun.”
Gabe didn’t remember what a fun house was. But he nodded along, all the same.
“Some people thought the house was haunted by every soul killed with a Winchester gun, and that the constant, nonsensical construction was her way of avoiding them.”
Something cold tap-danced on Gabe’s spine. A labyrinth populated by lost spirits. A broken mind building a palatial fortress out of sheer will and too much money.
Sort of like the bunker.
“What do you think?” Gabe asked.
His father shrugged. “I think it’s a clever story that got people to pay the price of admission to see a weird old house.”
Gabe nodded again, mulling the thought over in his head. His father wasn’t a dreamer. He was not prone to flights of fancy. He was usually right about these things. “So you think Cornelius Percival Moran was just nuts? Is that why he built this bunker the way it is?”
“Could be. Personally, I think he was just a run-of-the-mill paranoid rich guy with an expensive hobby. But I’m glad he had one, otherwise we wouldn’t be here today.”
Here. In the subterranean version of a haunted fun house. (Without the fun.)
“I’m going to go take a look at the power lines.” His father brushed some dust that probably wasn’t there off his jeans. The air-filtration system was cracking at keeping that type of particulate at bay. “Once I finish this delicious, delectable breakfast.”
The question spilled out of Gabe before he could stop it. “Is there really only one way out of the bunker?”
His father paused, spoon frozen halfway to his mouth.
“Why would you ask that?”
That chill returned, shimmying along Gabe’s spinal column. He shrugged, hoping it was nonchalant. “Just curious.”
With a sigh, his father set aside his bowl, unfinished. When he turned to Gabe, there was concern in his eyes, but something else too. Something worse.
Pity.
“I know you’re scared. I am too. All the time. And I know it isn’t easy watching Dr. Moran walk through that door every night, but she’s doing it for us. As far as I know, she isn’t sitting on any secret, unknown exits. We’ve got to trust her. She knows what’s best. She’s kept us alive this long.”
Gabe bit his lip, trying to keep the rest of his words in, but he couldn’t. His father’s admission of fear loosened something critical inside of him. “We can’t stay here forever.”
A lone, sad nod. “No. But we can for a little longer. Until it’s safe.” The elder Correa stood, picking up his bowl as he went. With a ruffle of Gabe’s hair (a holdover gesture from Gabe’s childhood that he was far too old for now, thankyouverymuch), he turned to go.
“Do me a favor, kid.”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Don’t go around asking anyone else stuff like that. About doors. It’ll just get everyone worked up. We’re all stuck in here together. Might as well not rock the boat.”
Gabe dug his teeth into the tender flesh of his cheek, holding back all the things he could have said.
You raised me to be curious.
&
nbsp; You raised me to ask questions.
You raised me to think for myself, to figure things out, to look for ways in which they’re broken and try to fix them.
But all that came out of his mouth was: “Okay.”
With a half-hearted smile, his father rested a large hand on Gabe’s shoulders. “We’ll get out of here one day, kid. I promise.”
He left, with Gabe watching him go. The door clicked shut behind him.
One day, Gabe thought. The words left a bitter taste in his mouth. One day.
The taste lingered at the back of his throat as he turned to the mess of wires and circuits and sensors in front of him.
Another tiny project to keep their lives going one more day.
A fruitless endeavor.
A fool’s errand.
He picked up his tools and began to work. It was a simple panel. Easy enough to alter to suit one’s needs. Easy enough to adapt it for another purpose. Easy enough to turn it into something it wasn’t.
Anything that was locked could be unlocked. All you needed was a key.
The comfort of their little hideout made it easier to push away the thoughts that had been plaguing her since the other night. Since the banging sound and the hatch and the thing she thought she saw moving about in the darkness.
It was a dream. It had to be.
There was nothing outside.
No people.
No animals.
No monsters.
It was just a dream.
But no matter how many times Sash told herself that, no matter how many times she repeated those words like a mantra, they refused to feel true. They felt—like so many things in the bunker—like a lie.
Stop thinking about it, she told herself. Futilely, but it had to be said all the same.
It was a dream. Just a dream.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had a dream that felt too real.
(Waking up, throat hoarse, teeth aching from the screams—)
The others would find her in strange places. Tucked away in a tiny cupboard in the kitchen. Curled up in a ball under Baba Olya’s bunk.
(The skin on her arm blistering so surely, so vividly—)
Once, standing in front of that hatch, small hands clasping the wheel, knuckles white, eyes wide but unseeing.
