by Melissa Grey
“Ugh. I’m gonna go see if I can find something less”—Gabe waved his hand dismissively at the dresses in Yuna’s arms—“this.”
“What? You don’t want to try on a dress?” Yuna asked. She held out a spectacularly tacky number, encrusted in orange sequins fading to yellow, as if the dress were on fire. Set on fire was probably the best use for it. “I think it would bring out the color in your eyes really nicely.”
Gabe rolled those very same eyes as he turned to leave, flashlight—off for the time being—clutched tightly in his hand.
“Stay safe,” Sash called out.
But time on the surface had made Gabe brave. He merely grunted a noncommittal sound in their general direction before he disappeared around a bend in the corridor.
It must be the fresh air.
Well, fresh-ish.
They were all a little drunk on it.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Yuna asked.
No, Sash thought.
“Yes,” she said. “He’ll be fine. There’s nothing out there. It’s just us.”
Yuna nodded, though she didn’t look convinced. But the lure of things new and shiny and exciting was too much for her to resist.
She pivoted back toward the wardrobe and pulled out a frock that was less wildly sequined than the last. It was white, mostly plain. Vaguely Grecian. Or Roman. Sash wasn’t sure. It looked like something someone would wear in a mythological story.
“I think you’d look nice in this,” Yuna said, holding it up under Sash’s chin.
It was pretty, sure. But it wasn’t Sash. Yuna would look great in it. Lovely. Devastating. But Sash? Sash would look like a dog trying to stand on her hind legs. Or at least that’s how she’d feel.
She did her best not to squirm. She did squirm, but only a little. “I don’t think dresses are my style.”
Yuna hummed thoughtfully, pursing her lips. “True.” She tossed the dresses onto the bed with nary a second thought. “Then forget these. We’ll just have to find something that is.”
She turned back to the wardrobe. Tapped her chin thoughtfully. Then she dove back in, a woman with purpose.
“Oh, how about a suit?” Yuna said, voice muffled by the heavy wood of the armoire, the question half swallowed by long-forgotten mothballed fabric. “I bet you’d look just darling in a suit.”
Sash smiled, digging her teeth into her lower lip to prevent it from being as wide and goofy as it wanted to be. “I don’t think I could pull off anything that could accurately be described as ‘just darling.’ But I admire your fighting spirit.”
“Hey,” Yuna called from deeper in the wardrobe. “Check it out.”
What she pulled out wasn’t a suit. It wasn’t an article of clothing at all.
It was a book. A large one.
No, Sash realized. Not a book. A photo album.
Newfound treasure in hand, Yuna sat down on the edge of the bed. Little puffs of dust rose up as her weight dented the mattress. Sash let them disperse before she got closer.
Yuna opened the album and flipped through the pages, eyes glancing over the faces of people neither of them knew. Then, she stopped, her finger landing on one photo in particular.
“What is it?”
Sash leaned over Yuna’s shoulder—more so than she probably had to, but Yuna aired no complaint—and peered at the open page of the photo album.
“Is that … ?”
“Dr. Moran.” Yuna’s voice held all the incredulity Sash felt.
It looked like a school photo, the kind where everyone in a class is arranged roughly by height and gender, and no one really wanted to be there. A dozen politely smiling faces peered back at Sash from the photo. In the back row stood a girl—her frame wire thin even then, her expression sullen. Thick black waves obscured her face, but those eyes were the same. Dark. Penetrating. Like they could see right through you. The girl’s uniform tie was askew, the tie itself loose around her neck. The shirt’s top button was undone, its wrinkles unironed. Like every square inch of her was rebelling at the thought of being there, having her picture taken with her peers. As if she could hardly consider these people peers at all.
Or maybe Sash was just projecting.
“ ‘Lyceum Lumnezia,’ ” Yuna said, reading aloud the engraving visible over the girl’s head, carved into what looked like a stone edifice. “What do you think that is?”
“From the looks of it, probably some fancy boarding school.” Sash trailed a finger over the edge of the photo to where a flagpole was half visible in the background. Frozen midflutter was a flag she recognized from the bunker’s desperately out-of-date textbooks. “In Switzerland, if I remember my flags correctly.”
“I guess that’s where Moran went to school,” Yuna said. She looked up so quickly, she nearly butted Sash’s chin with the crown of her head. “This must be her room.”
The words hung between them, each granting new weight to their surroundings. The dresses. Moran wore those. The bed. Moran slept in that. Or at least a version of her did, a long, long time ago.
“It makes sense if you think about it,” Yuna said, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “This was her family home. That’s how she knew about the bunker, right? She had to have access somehow. Someone had to build it. Her grandfather did.”
“I guess …”
It wasn’t incorrect, what Yuna was saying. The stamp of the elder Moran was all over the bunker. On his blueprints. On his illegibly scrawled notes in the margins. On the water tanks that fed their hydroponics system and the state-of-the-art—patent pending, according to the labels—air-filtration system. The Moran family was wealthy. Ridiculously so, if the resources available to them to build something as self-sustaining and complex as the bunker was any indication. But it was still odd to encounter traces of their former lives here.
And they had lives. They were real people. That was probably the strangest thing of all.
Yuna flipped the page. On this one, there were no photographs but clippings from a newspaper. Some were written in what looked like French—though it could have been Italian. Sash had precious little exposure to other languages in the written form. But one was in English. It was short, barely a footnote.
She leaned over Yuna’s shoulder, cranking her flashlight. Squinting to read the small, aged print, she asked, “What does it say?”
“ ‘Mysterious illness strikes Swiss boarding school,’ ” Yuna read aloud. “ ‘Board of trustees to determine closure. Lumnezia police investigating.’ ” She made an unhappy noise in the back of her throat. “That’s it.”
“Huh,” said Sash. “Weird.”
“Yeah,” Yuna agreed. “Very weird. Guess it got Moran out of boarding school though.”
Sash shrugged, relishing the way her shoulder brushed against Yuna’s arm. “I don’t know. Boarding school seems kind of …”
“Glamorous? Romantic?”
“Like an adventure.”
“Far, far away from your family.”
“And chores.”
“And schedules.”
“And bunkers.”
They caught each other’s gaze, and a fit of wildly inappropriate giggles seized Sash. She clapped her hand over her mouth to keep that hideous, undignified noise where it belonged. Inside her. Preferably deep, deep inside, so deep no one would ever be able to unearth it ever again.
“Did you just giggle?” Yuna asked, laughter lightening her voice. Making it too loud. “Oh my God. Alexandra Eremenko. Did you just giggle?”
“I did not,” Sash said, lying with alacrity. Her smile faded when her eyes landed back to the photo album. The page had fallen back to the last one when Yuna shifted her weight.
That picture kept staring at Sash. Or rather, the girl in it did, with her dark, haunting eyes.
“Come on,” she said, tugging on Yuna’s right hand. The photo album slipped from her left, cracked open on the bed. “Let’s get out of here. See what else this creepy house has to offer.”
/>
Yuna responded with a dramatic shudder. “Hope it’s not ghosts.”
Sash offered a perfunctory chuckle. She couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the manor was haunted but the ghosts were all underground, buried beneath the land on which it sat.
They made their way out of the room. As they walked by the fireplace, Sash made sure to grab a heavy iron poker that was resting against an equally heavy iron ring welded into the wall.
Better safe than sorry, she thought.
One never knew what was hiding out there in the dark. Or worse, the light.
They moved on from the bedroom. A part of Yuna wished she’d taken the picture, the one of Moran and her classmates. She looked so different somehow but still the same. The same dark eyes. The same knowing expression, like she held on to secrets you could only dream of learning. It made her seem both more and less human. More approachable somehow, but less, because how did that girl become the doctor who risked her life for them every night? How does something like that happen? How does a person become something else?
Life, I suppose.
She followed Sash through the corridors of the manor—and there was no better word for it, honestly. It was a manor, plain and simple. To call it a house would be a gross oversimplification.
Bright, unadulterated moonlight pooled in through the windows, illuminating the floor in disjointed shafts. Every time Yuna’s foot penetrated one, a thrill went through her. Light like this was something she hadn’t seen in years. It was forbidden. It was delicious. It was a rarity the likes of which she’d lost the ability to even imagine.
So absorbed was Yuna in the way her footfalls alternated between shadow and light that she didn’t notice Sash had stopped walking until she collided with the other girl’s back.
“Oof—sorry.”
But Sash only shook her head, waving off the apology with a dismissive gesture. She had paused before a set of double doors. Massive, ornate double doors, each carved with elaborate scenes of flying dragons and swimming mermaids.
With a trembling hand, Yuna reached for the doors. She wanted to feel the grain of the wood beneath her bare skin, wanted to trace the pads of her fingers over the uneven whorls and minuscule imperfections. Wanted to know the swoop of a mermaid’s tail and the jagged edge of a dragon’s tooth. But when her hand touched the door, the sensation was blunted by the material of her gloves.
“What do you think’s in here?” she asked.
That same smile tugged at Sash’s lips, the same one she’d worn when they’d decided to come up here. The smile that said I have no idea what lies beyond this cliff, but I’m going to leap off the precipice anyway because I’d rather die trying to find the answer than live not knowing.
Or maybe Yuna was just projecting.
The doors were stuck from years of neglect and an overabundance of dust. It took the both of them leaning their combined body weight to push them open just shy of a foot. It was a narrow opening but wide enough for one Yuna-size person.
Sash angled her head, trying to get a good look through the gap. “No way am I going to be able to squeeze through there.”
“I might.” Yuna made for the narrow opening, but a hand on her arm stopped her. She turned to Sash, who was staring, brows pinched, teeth worrying at her bottom lip.
“Be careful, okay?” Sash said. She offered Yuna the poker she’d taken from Moran’s childhood bedroom. “Take this.”
The cold iron was hard and heavy in her hands. The potential for grievous bodily harm seemed to radiate from it.
Don’t know if I have it in me to swing this thing at someone.
She hoped she’d never have to find out.
After drawing a fortifying breath, Yuna shimmied through the narrow gap between the barely open doors.
Her shirt caught on the old wood as the edge of the door scraped against her ribs. She sucked in a breath, as if that would make her any smaller. The wooden doors scraped at her as she slid past their bulk. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, but it was overwhelmed once her eyes registered what she was seeing beyond them.
It was a library, grander than any she had ever seen. (Not that she had seen that many; she had a patchwork memory of the public library in Indigo Falls, with its interlocking foam alphabet covering the floor of the children’s section and its musty stacks of reference books.) It was certainly far grander than any she could have imagined.
The room itself was cavernous. The ceiling stood at least fifty feet above her head, with a second floor wrapping around the sides of the room, accessible by a wrought-iron spiral staircase in the far corner.
Stained-glass windows overlooked it all, casting hued shadows on the floor. A segment had been blown inward, littering the floor with small, glittering chunks of multicolored glass. Very expensive-looking items decorated the room. Cracked statues. Paintings in golden frames. A suit of samurai armor that looked like it belonged in a museum and a sword displayed beside it. But what pulled most strongly at Yuna’s attention were the shelves.
They towered against the walls, carved of the same dark wood as the balustrade around the second floor. A few books had fallen to the ground, probably knocked free by the same force that had destroyed the windows. They lay there like forgotten casualties, their pages torn, their spines cracked.
“Books!” Yuna whisper-shouted. “Glorious books!”
Without wasting another breath, she turned back toward the doors. There was an errant piece of fallen wood—a part of the broken balustrade surrounding the second floor of the library—and with a triumphant kick, she knocked it free. It skidded halfway across the room as the door swung open under Sash’s weight.
“Books? What—?”
The query died in Sash’s mouth as she experienced the same moment of shocked awe Yuna had.
Yuna twirled in the center of the vast room, her arms spread wide. When she pulled them in, she twirled faster still, half raised on the balls of her feet in something that wasn’t quite a chaîné turn, but was close enough that Mrs. Eremenko would have frowned in judgment—were she here. But she wasn’t. It was just Yuna and Sash (and Gabe, but he wasn’t here here, just here.)
Sash made a beeline for the books on the nearest shelf and read the names on their spines in a hushed, reverent whisper. “Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell …”
“Sounds like a bunch of dead white guys,” Yuna said, dancing over to a table in the center of the room. Books were grand, but what was on the table proved a worthy distraction even from a universe of untold—or at least unread—stories.
On the table stood a bizarre contraption, the likes of which Yuna had never seen. A wooden pedestal of sorts supported a thin brass tube. The tube met with a connecting joint before widening to a large open horn, nearly big enough for her to stick her head in. Not that she would. Who knew what tiny monsters had taken up residence in its shadowy brass depths.
“What is it?” Yuna asked, her voice a whisper.
Sash shrugged, rapping the side of it with her knuckles. “Don’t know. Looks old. I mean, older than everything else.”
Yuna squinted, trying to read the engraving on the side. “Give me some light.”
Sash angled the flashlight over Yuna’s shoulder and clicked it on.
“Victrola,” Yuna read. She turned to Sash, blinking against the light before the other girl could angle it away from her eyes. “What’s a Victrola?”
“Sort of looks like Gabe’s busted record player.” Sash pointed the flashlight to a stack of what Yuna had assumed were folders on the floor beside the device. “Guessing it played those.”
Yuna bent down to pick one up.
Tchaikovsky. A waltz.
The name was like a bolt of lightning straight to Yuna’s heart. It was one of the names Mrs. Eremenko would whisper fondly to herself during ballet class, as if she were listening to music only she could hear.
“Can we?” Yuna clutched the record to her chest. It was
stupid. She knew it was stupid. Anyone with a half a dozen brain cells could tell it was stupid. But the chance to listen to music—real music, new music, not the same tired melodies they listened to over and over and over in Mrs. Eremenko’s class—was too good to pass up.
Sash’s lips twitched into that barely there smile of hers. It was like a real smile was fighting to get out, but her reputation simply wouldn’t allow it. Yuna liked that smile more than a normal, uninhibited one. It meant Sash was containing something so strong, she had to fight to hold it back. But it was winning. And since Sash was the strongest person Yuna knew, that meant it had to be even stronger.
With a nod, Sash said, “Yeah.”
That was all it took. Yuna plopped the record on the Victrola—not as gently as she should have—and used the crank to wind up the machine. When it felt ready to go, she released the lever and waited.
Not a second later, sound filled the library. It was an odd, thin sound, but it was music.
Her gaze caught Sash’s. They stared at each other, listening to the waltz fill the impossibly large library. Finger by finger, Yuna tugged off her gloves. With her bare skin exposed to the elements, she tossed the gloves onto the table and reached for Sash. The other girl stared at her hand as if she had never seen its ilk before.
“I don’t know how to dance to this,” Sash said, her eyes dropping to her feet.
“It’s okay,” Yuna offered. “I can lead.”
With a shaky nod, Sash accepted Yuna’s proffered hand. Her own—awkward and hesitant—fell to Yuna’s waist, her fingers half curled into fists. Tension sang through every inch of her being with more clarity than the music warbling out of the Victrola.
“Don’t overthink it,” Yuna said, swaying in place along with the melody. “Just follow me. Move with the music.”
“You say that like it’s easy,” Sash mumbled, her gaze rising just long enough to shoot Yuna a sullen glare. And long enough for her unsupervised feet to trod on Yuna’s left toe.
“It is if you stop worrying about it.” Yuna applied just a hair of pressure to Sash’s shoulders, encouraging her to move in the right way at the right time. According to the placement of their hands, Sash should have been leading, but the poor girl was clearly in no state to take on that sort of responsibility.