The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  Yuna shook her head. “We don’t.”

  “What do you mean ‘We don’t’? How do we not?”

  “There was a blight or something.” Yuna glanced down at her hands. She’d switched out the gloves for a new pair, leaving the ones she’d been wearing in the greenhouse to soak in a vat of something caustic. But she still felt like the blight had somehow transferred to her. “I don’t know how we didn’t catch it before. I should have seen it coming. I should have—”

  “Hey.” Sash reached out and placed a gentle hand on Yuna’s elbow. Against the rules. No touching. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  “No.” Yuna shook her head, more vehemently this time. “It’s not.” She drew in a fortifying breath, readying herself for the next words to come out of her mouth. “You were right.”

  Sash’s eyebrows inched skyward.

  “We have to go to the surface.” The words tumbled out of Yuna, fast and ferocious, set free before she could lose her nerve. “And we have to go soon.”

  This was a terrible idea.

  Gabe knew this with a certainty he felt about little else. Oh, he thought he’d experienced certainty before. The absolute conviction that you are completely correct in a particular scenario. But this? This was a whole new level of assuredness.

  Rigging the lock had been easier than he’d thought. The electric panel had required replacing, but luckily he’d happened to have a spare one on hand. (Not really spare, but the water-filtration analyzer would live another day without it.) And once the lock had been rigged, well … things happened extremely fast.

  “Guys,” Gabe whispered as he followed Yuna’s bobbing ponytail and Sash’s messy bun through the ventilation shaft. He wheezed, but only a little bit. His asthmatic lungs were working in tandem with his anxiety-addled brain and it was a Very Bad Combination. “Have I mentioned that this is a bad idea?”

  Yuna shot him a grin over her shoulder. It was too dark to properly see it, but her teeth flashed in the reflected light of Gabe’s small hand-cranked flashlight. It hung from a lanyard around his neck, thumping against his breastbone with every jerky forward motion as they crawled. He’d brought it to read the map stuffed in the back pocket of Sash’s jeans. Every now and then, it started to slip out, but Yuna tucked it back in every time.

  Gabe wondered if they were actually cognizant of their ongoing mating dance or if their subconscious minds were driving that particular bus.

  Yuna came to an abrupt stop, causing Gabe to collide directly with her derriere.

  He tried to backpedal and mostly failed, his scuffed sneakers banging inelegantly against the duct’s paneling. “Oh my stars, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t sweat it—”

  “Gabe,” Sash cut in, imperious as ever. Her hand appeared in the darkness by Yuna’s shoulder, palm up, fingers splayed. “Flashlight.”

  “Didn’t you bring your own?” It was a futile mumble. He was already slipping the lanyard over his head and handing it over.

  “I did but I didn’t crank it enough.”

  “You never crank it enough.”

  “Ugh,” Yuna sighed. “Cranking.”

  With that, Yuna slid the uncranked flashlight out of Sash’s pocket and began to turn it. The sound ticked through the darkened silence, oddly comforting in its familiarity.

  Sash peered at the map, smoothing its many creases. They had pored over it for hours. Days. Gabe could probably navigate these air tunnels in his sleep. Sash could too, most likely. Yuna … probably not. She had seemed less concerned with the logistics of the operation than the wild and unpredictable possibilities it represented.

  But that niggling doubt remained in Gabe’s mind. It made him question what he thought he knew. Made him doubt things he would otherwise never. But one thing remained certain.

  This was a bad idea.

  Satisfied with her map perusal, Sash handed Gabe his flashlight as Yuna offered her back her own, now freshly cranked.

  With a crooked smile, Sash said, “Thanks.”

  Light activated—dimly, of course—they proceeded. Even that amount of brightness made Gabe uneasy. Years of training was hard to overcome.

  The dark is safe.

  The dark will protect us.

  Truths, universally acknowledged, at least down here, meters and meters and meters away from the sun.

  Fear the light.

  Fear what it hides.

  Fear what it reveals.

  What would it reveal though? They were about to find out.

  Sash’s startled cry alerted Gabe to the end of the duct. One minute she was there, two body lengths ahead of him. The next, she was gone. The grate fell out from beneath her, collapsing under her weight.

  “Sash!” It was more of a whisper than a shout, but Yuna’s fear was loud enough to sear through Gabe’s eardrums.

  Yuna tumbled out after her with far more physical grace than Gabe could hope to achieve.

  “I’m okay.” Sash’s mumble made the horrid knot in Gabe’s chest release. She was alive. For now, at least. And that was something.

  With an awkwardness roughly equivalent to Yuna’s grace, Gabe maneuvered himself so that his feet were the first thing through the now-open grate. He peered past his worn-out Nikes to gauge the distance, but it was too dark to see much of anything.

  “How far down is it?” Gabe asked. Sweaty skin made for the perfect conditions for glasses to slide down one’s face. His insisted on doing so, despite the aggravation it caused him.

  “Not that far,” Sash replied absently, as if her thoughts had already moved on, past this one small hurdle.

  Gabe pushed his glasses back into place. “Not that far is not a numerical value.”

  “Oh, just come on.”

  Sash’s hand—at least Gabe assumed it was Sash’s hand because Yuna would never, Yuna was a good person, she was nice—wrapped around his ankle and tugged. Hard.

  Gravity. What a fiend.

  Gabe fell. Zero points for grace. Fifty points for not shattering every bone in his body. There was always a silver lining to be found, if only one had the temerity to look.

  Sash peered down at where he lay on the floor, the wind temporarily knocked out of him.

  “See?” The tone of hers was infuriatingly chipper. “That wasn’t so far, was it?”

  “I hate you,” Gabe said, wholly without heat.

  “I know.” Sash extended a hand, which—despite his hatred—Gabe gratefully took. She hauled him to his feet with a surprising amount of strength considering her stature.

  Yuna’s flashlight carved a path through the darkness to point at something on the side of the very cramped room. A ladder. At the top of that ladder loomed a hatch, smaller than the one through which Moran walked every night. Blue instead of red. Covered in a fine layer of dust. Untouched for years. Until now.

  “This is it.” Sash’s voice was lit with a fervor Gabe had never quite heard before. She’d gotten close before, when their D&D games hit a particularly good patch, or when the wistful nostalgia of their reminisces grew too bitter. But now, it was fully realized. The thing she craved most was there. Just one climb of a ladder away. They all yearned for the surface, but Sash felt things more powerfully than most people Gabe knew. Admittedly, it was a woefully tiny sample size, but it was all he had.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Gabe pitched his voice low, but it still seemed to carry, louder than was comfortable, in the small, quiet space.

  Sash shrugged. “Nope.”

  With that, she stepped onto the bottom rung of the ladder. And then, the next step. And the next.

  Yuna followed her and Gabe followed Yuna. Together, they advanced into the unknown.

  The first thing Sash noticed was the air. For the past ten years, the only air her lungs had known was the recycled oxygenated atmosphere of the bunker. That air was clean, but it was stale. It went around and around the filtration systems, scrubbed and cleaned and sent out again.

  But the air outs
ide, on the surface … it was new. It was wild. It was dusty.

  Part of the roof of this new space had caved in, allowing a shaft of silvery moonlight to penetrate.

  Motes of dust flitted through the air, tickling at Sash’s nostrils.

  She breathed in deep, and that was a mistake.

  A vicious sneeze—the kind that makes it feel like your brain is trying to escape via your nasal cavity—tore its way through her. The sound of it echoed in the open space, as loud as cannon fire.

  Yuna and Gabe froze, heads swiveling toward her with identical looks of stunned fear on their faces.

  After a brief moment, in which all six of their ears strained to hear if the noise had summoned anything from the shadowy depths of the room, Gabe bit back a foul swear. Extremely uncharacteristic of him. He wasn’t the sort of person who even knew bad words, much less deployed them.

  “Sash,” Yuna whispered. It was all she needed to say really. It was amazing, Sash thought, how much recrimination could fit inside that single syllable.

  “What?” she rasped back. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Yuna bit her lip. Sash wished she didn’t notice that sort of thing quite so much. But alas. Here we are.

  Sash pulled her shirt over her nose and breathed in the scent of cotton. It was better than the taste of decades-old dust settling on her tongue.

  Maybe Moran was telling the truth. Maybe the air was contaminated with a poison they couldn’t see.

  She didn’t feel any different. When she looked down at her hands, there were no blisters forming, no boils taking shape. She looked—and felt—fine.

  Gabe put a finger to his lips, as if they hadn’t already made a tremendous amount of noise. They listened, but no sound came.

  Thank God. Sash wasn’t sure she believed in God. She wasn’t sure what she believed, if she believed in anything at all. But in that moment, she was grateful to any divine being that had their backs, out here in the open.

  The hatch had opened into a large space, almost like a ballroom. The floor was tiled, black and white, so the square neatly lifted by the hatch would blend as soon as it was closed.

  As if he could read her mind, Gabe said, “We shouldn’t close that.”

  He tipped his chin in the direction of the still-open hatch.

  “We won’t,” Yuna said. “That’d be dumb, wouldn’t it?”

  It was a rhetorical question and therefore merited no answer. But Sash gave one anyway, in the form of a loose bit of wooden planking she plucked from a pile near the wall. It was just long enough to lay over the hole in the floor, so even if the hatch swung shut behind them, it wouldn’t close fully. They’d be safe.

  Well.

  Safe-ish.

  “What should we do now?” Yuna whispered, too afraid to speak in her normal voice.

  Sash shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  But she did. It was there, fizzing through her veins like her blood itself was carbonated. Anticipation. Excitement. A tiny bit of trepidation, but not too much. Just enough to punch up the flavor.

  “We should stick together,” Gabe said.

  Yuna nodded.

  Sash gazed out over the indecently large room. “I didn’t know people actually had ballrooms. Like, real ones.”

  “Wild, isn’t it?” Gabe sidled alongside her, his bespectacled gaze following hers. Yuna joined them, huddling close.

  Sash’s hand sought out Yuna’s without her brain directly instructing it to do so. Reaching for Yuna was instinctual. Like breathing.

  “Yeah,” Sash breathed the word more than she spoke it. It smelled awful. Stale and slightly rotten. But good too. “Wild.”

  She nudged Gabe’s shoulder with her own and gave Yuna’s hand a playful tug. With a smile on her face she hoped came across as confident—more so than she felt—she said, “Let’s explore.”

  * * *

  The bunker was big, but the manor was bigger.

  The layout made about as much sense as the subterranean world beneath it. There were hallways that went nowhere. Doors that opened into solid brick walls. A room that was entirely made of mirrors so that a person standing in the middle of it would see themselves repeated an infinite number of times from all directions.

  The oddest so far was a room completely bare except for what looked like a hyperbaric chamber. Sash had read about those in one of the books in the bunker’s modest library, one that included treatment for a variety of ailments one might experience in severe weather conditions or when doing incredibly stupid, incredibly human things like trying to scale the highest peak in the world.

  Mount Everest. Called Chomolungma by the Tibetan locals. 8,848 meters high.

  This fact she cradled to her chest, like all the facts she could recall. They were precious, these fragments of knowledge. They made her strong. They fortified the cracks in her being, caulking the bits that leaked.

  Knowledge is power.

  It was something her father said. He had it written on a mug, the one he drank coffee out of every morning. He would sit at the kitchen table—a rickety wooden thing on whose underside Sash had sloppily drawn a map to an imaginary world. Her Terabithia, she called it. Her Narnia. Her land behind the wardrobe, where magic was real and anything was possible.

  In the bunker, there was so little to learn. Much to memorize, but memorization wasn’t learning. It was rote. It was for automatons.

  That was another thing her father used to say a lot. Anyone can memorize a fact. But it takes real imagination to conceive of something new, something no one had ever thought of before, something—

  “Sash?”

  She jumped at the sound of Yuna’s voice. Blinking, she came back to herself, inch by inch.

  Yuna peered at her quizzically, eyebrows pinched. “Where’d you go?”

  Sash breathed in deep, letting the dust tickle her nose but fighting the sneeze this time.

  Where indeed? To Terabithia. To Narnia. To the land beyond a door no one was supposed to know existed.

  “I’m here,” Sash said.

  Slipping her flashlight into her pocket, she freed her hands. One reached for Yuna, the other for Gabe. Yuna took it without hesitation. Gabe quirked an eyebrow, first at Sash’s hand, then at Sash herself.

  Human contact. Illicit. Forbidden. Against the rules that kept them safe. The rules they were told kept them safe. An important distinction.

  Slowly, Gabe twined his fingers with Sash’s. She squeezed their hands.

  “We’re here.” A smile spread along her lips, slowly at first and then with more alacrity. Yuna’s mouth followed suit. Then Gabe’s. They were wobbly smiles, unsure of their welcome, unsure of their place in the world, but they were real. That much Sash knew.

  “Now,” she began, her heart doubling its pace, hammering out a war drum against the steel bars of her rib cage, “let’s see what else is out here.”

  * * *

  They ventured up to the second floor, driven by the same need that led humans up and up and up until they touched the sky.

  Apollo 11. The first manned mission to the moon. Neil Armstrong. The first person to set foot on its surface. July 20, 1969.

  “One small step for man,” Sash muttered under her breath as she stepped onto the second-floor landing.

  “One giant leap for mankind,” Gabe finished.

  “Doesn’t that just mean the same thing?” Yuna asked.

  Gabe pushed his glasses up his nose. “Yes, but—”

  “It’s poetic,” Sash said. “Sometimes, things don’t have to be right to make sense.”

  “Now, that doesn’t make any sense,” Yuna said airily. She tugged Sash in a seemingly random direction off the grand staircase. “I wonder what’s over here.”

  Heavy wooden doors lined the hallway, closed. Under their feet lay a threadbare runner that looked like it may have been red once, or maybe purple. It was hard to tell in the dark. Only one of their flashlights was on. Sash’s. It was low, just enough to light the
ir way without being bright enough for the light to spread in anything wider than a humble three-foot perimeter of illumination.

  Between the doors hung ornate gilded frames. Shreds of canvas drooped from their edges, as if the paintings they’d once held had been ripped from their moors.

  “Wow,” Yuna whispered. “That’s not creepy at all.”

  “Nope,” Sash said. “Not at all.”

  “Should we go back?” Gabe asked, steps slowing.

  “I didn’t come this far to run at the first sign of creepy,” Sash replied.

  Emboldened—or at least doing a good job of pretending she was—Sash tried the first door. It was locked. So was the next. And the next. And the next.

  “What are they trying to keep out?” Gabe asked. There was only the slightest tremor in his voice. If you didn’t know him well enough, you wouldn’t have heard it. But Sash did.

  “Intrepid explorers like us,” she offered, trying the last door on the left.

  This one swung open under her hand. She paused, hand frozen as she shared a look with Gabe and Yuna.

  “Bingo,” she said.

  Bingo. A normal pastime in the bunker until they ran out of bingo cards. It was the only time Sash had ever been glad to experience a shortage. She hated bingo. Well and truly hated it. It was a rotten game for rotten people. Mostly, she lost a lot.

  When nothing leaped out of the shadows to devour her whole, Sash stepped over the threshold of the bedroom.

  The room seemed to be preserved with museum-quality precision. The bed was neatly made. The items on the vanity were arranged by size—and probably several years expired. The clothing in the wardrobe Yuna had opened was hung up according to color. What wasn’t draped from cushioned ivory hangers sat folded in neat piles on the wardrobe’s shelves.

  “Dresses! Pretty ones!” Yuna twirled out of the wardrobe with one of the them clutched to her chest, its chiffon skirt billowing around her ankles. Her feet moved over the matted carpet with a ballerina’s grace, her toes the only parts of her body that seemed to just graze the floor. It was like she was made of fibers too cosmic, too ethereal to be anchored to something as dully tangible as solid ground.