by Melissa Grey
They barreled into the common area like two bats straight out of the bad place Yuna’s mother prayed so fervently to avoid.
Several heads jerked up at their arrival. The folding chairs had been arranged in a loose circle. The crucifix pendant dangling from the thin gold chain around her neck was still clasped firmly in Yuna’s mother’s hands.
They were praying. For what? Yuna? Sash? A salvation that would never come?
“Where have you been?” The question was sharp. Full of recrimination. Suspicion. Unconcealed anger.
“Outside.”
The bald honesty with which she answered surprised even herself.
Her parents shot to their feet. Her father’s eyebrows twitched up and down, the way they did when anger wasn’t strong enough a word to describe his current condition. Furious. Enraged, even. “Again? After all that, you—”
“Moran’s been lying to us for years. Sash was right.” She pulled the journal out of her waistband, holding it up like the smoking gun it was. “And if you don’t believe me, I have Moran’s own words to prove it.”
Yuna’s mother sputtered, incandescent. “You write a silly story and you expect me—expect us—to just—”
Yuna cut her off with the most powerful thing she could possibly say. “The air was clean enough to breath seven years ago.”
A silence fell among the group. They were each as still as mannequins, except for Gabe, who swayed a little where he sat. Only then did Yuna notice the bandage around his hand.
“What happened?” There were too many thoughts in Yuna’s head to keep them straight.
Monsters in the bunker. Moran a captor, not a savior. Sash with a sword. Gabe bleeding?
“Got eight fingers now instead of ten.” Gabe’s speech was slightly slurred, from pain or something else meant to dull it. Administered perhaps by Moran from the stash of medications she used so sparingly she might as well have not used it at all. “Long story.”
“You had to be punished,” Mrs. Correa said, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, mijo, but—” She reached for him, but Gabe flinched away from her.
“Don’t.” Gabe’s voice was thick, but firm. “You let her do this to me. You don’t get to say anything about it.”
She reared back, stricken. “Gabriel, it was for your own good. She had to show you—”
“Linda.” Gabe’s father placed a hand on his wife’s arm. She fell silent, her eyes dropping to the floor.
Mr. Correa turned back to Yuna. “What do you mean the air was clean seven years ago?”
“Moran wrote it all down. Everything. The readings she took every time she went outside at night. The atmosphere, the environment. It was livable three years after the Cataclysm. It’s all here. In her journal. There was something about a radius or a distance or—”
“An exclusion zone,” Gabe muttered. “The radio. The transmission. They said something about an exclusion zone.”
“I think that’s what we’ve been living under this whole time.”
“But why?” Nastia asked. “Why would anyone do that?”
“For fun?” Yuna ventured. “I don’t know. All I know is that this reads like some lab journal. We were the experiment. But I don’t think it worked out the way she wanted it to, and now she’s scrapping the whole thing.”
Yuna slammed the book on the table. Mrs. Eremenko jumped, her normally stoic composure just beginning to crack. It had taken the loss of a husband, a mother, maybe even a daughter to cause those discernible fissures. How much more could she take before she shattered completely? Even after everything, even after she’d betrayed her own daughter—the one person on this planet she should have loved without condition—Yuna didn’t want to find out. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Not even a mother who would leave her own daughter at the mercy of a madwoman.
But Gabe’s own mother had. This bunker had changed them. Mrs. Correa. Mrs. Eremenko. Misha. Made them malleable. And Moran had molded them into what she wanted them to be: obedient. Unquestioning. The ones she couldn’t mold, she did her best to silence. Sash. Olga.
But not anymore.
“It’s all in here. The trips outside. The measurements she took. Air quality. Water contamination. Soil viability. It’s there. You just have to read it.”
Shaking her head, Mrs. Correa tightened the shawl across her shoulders. It was ratty and threadbare after years and years and years of use. (Seven years too many.) “This can’t be true.”
Mr. Correa broke—very gently—out of his wife’s one-armed grasp. He reached for the book slowly, as if expecting it to scorch his flesh upon contact.
(Like the sun did once. But not now.)
(Not for seven years.)
With trepidation shivering up from his fingers, through his wrists, twining its way up his arms, he opened the journal. The wrinkles on his face—shallow as they were—began to deepen with every page turned, every number read, every word digested. When he looked back up to meet Yuna’s gaze, he was a different man than he had been minutes before.
“It is true.”
Yuna nodded.
His wife shook her head more vehemently this time. “No. It’s not. She wouldn’t have lied to us. It wasn’t safe.”
“Linda—”
“No!”
Yuna had never heard Gabe’s mother raise her voice like that. Sash’s, all the time. Her own mother, occasionally. But Mrs. Correa was soft-spoken. Stalwart. Not frantic. Not like this.
She was shaking her head in short, sharp bursts now, repeating the same word over and over and over. “No. No, no, no.”
Her husband laid his hands on her shoulders—large, with knobby knuckles visible even through his gloves, so like Gabe’s—and squeezed, anchoring her. “Linda, it’s true.”
“How do you know?” Lucas asked, voice quiet. Tremulous, like small rocks skipping down the side of a mountain.
“What do you know?” Gabe asked, more incisively.
Two different questions, Yuna realized. Two different questions with two different answers. Both which might lead them to the same place.
Gabe’s father turned to look at his sons, eyes laden with something Yuna thought might be shame. “You know I worked at the plant.”
Gabe nodded, shoulders tight. Mouth pressed into a thin, hard line. The bandage around his left hand was beginning to turn pink with blood. The gauze, Yuna thought distantly, wasn’t thick enough.
“The factory was segmented. Rigidly. One department didn’t know what the next was doing. What the component parts were, how they fit together, what they were being used for.”
“But you knew,” Yuna said. It wasn’t a question. There was something about the tone of his voice, the self-loathing laced throughout that spoke louder than all the words he didn’t say.
He held his son’s gaze but nodded at Yuna’s remark. “It was my job to make sure some of the segments were coordinated. Timing was … a delicate thing with our work.”
“What was your work?” Yuna asked.
“You were an engineer,” Gabe said. His voice was hollow in a way she didn’t like. It was as if someone had taken all the things that made him Gabe and carved them out from the inside.
“I was.” A short, slow nod from Mr. Correa. “A biochemical engineer.”
“What does that mean?” Lucas asked, sounding even younger than he was.
(The youngest of them all. What did he remember about the world Before? Nothing?)
Deep inside Yuna’s chest, her heart felt like it was twisting.
They had no time for this. The bunker had been breached. They weren’t alone. And yet, this had to play out. The show had to go on.
“You told me the plant manufactured medicines,” Gabe said. “But that wasn’t it, was it?”
Mr. Correa snorted. It was not an amused sound. It was too full of years of hatred and disappointment and other things Yuna couldn’t name. “Medicines aren’t half as lucrative as the alternative.”
“What was th
e alternative?” Yuna asked, even though she already knew. Deep down, she knew.
“Weapons,” Gabe said before his father could. “You made biological weapons, didn’t you?”
His father didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The way his eyes slid away from his son’s, the sagging of his broad shoulders, the shaking exhalation of his breath—all told them the truth.
Mr. Correa shook his head. “Part of my job was setting up safety measures. What happened should have been impossible. It never should have—”
“Unless someone made it happen,” Yuna interjected.
Gabe’s gaze found hers. They were wet, his eyes. Tears clung to his lashes, threatening to fall but not quite doing so.
“Moran,” Gabe said.
Yuna nodded. “Yeah. But look, we have to go.”
“We can’t,” her father said. Her parents were as deeply entrenched in their denial as Gabe’s mother. “There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere safe.”
“She lied to you, Appa!” Yuna had never raised her voice with her father before. Never would she have dared. “She lied to all of us. She’s been lying this whole time. And if we don’t leave now, we’re going to die down here.”
Her mother looked at her father. Her hand was wound tightly with his. Touching. Through gloves, but still. They hadn’t touched each other in years. “Yobo …”
“Appa,” Yuna begged. “Please. Listen to me. For once in your lives, listen to me.” She handed the book to Nastia. An odd moment of trust between them. But life was not what it had been the day before. It wasn’t what it had been an hour before. They were in uncharted waters, flailing their limbs, trying against all odds to stay afloat. “There are monsters outside. Maybe they were people, or dogs, or I don’t even know. But they’re not just outside anymore.”
“Did you let them in?” Mrs. Eremenko’s eyes bore into Yuna like daggers made of ice. “Did my daughter?”
Yuna shook her head. “I closed the hatch behind me. They were already here.”
“Rats,” Gabe said, swaying even more precariously as she tried to stand. “I found rats in the water tank. Bunker breach.”
“Scrapping the experiment,” Mr. Correa said softly. To himself more than anyone else. He shook his head, snapping out of the poisonous reverie in which he’d found himself. “You went up? Outside? To the surface?”
Yuna nodded. “Twice now. And I’m not dead yet.”
“It’s not possible,” her mother whispered. But there was no conviction in her tone. No fire. No steel.
“It is. And that’s where we have to go if we have any hope of surviving.”
“Where’s Sash?” Gabe asked. Gabe, not Sash’s own mother.
“Buying us time.” Yuna went to the kitchen area and grabbed the meanest-looking knife she could find. “Follow me if you want to live.”
She made her way to the door, trusting that they would, in fact, follow. Chair legs screeched against the floor as they got up. Fell in line. Waited for Yuna to make the first move.
And so she did, peering through the doorway to see if anyone—or anything—was waiting outside. The hallway was empty, lit with naught but low red lights. “Come on.”
Her voice sounded like a stranger’s. Confident. Self-assured.
It felt like a lie.
Maybe not all lies were bad. Maybe some saved your life when the truth would have been too much to bear.
Yuna pressed a finger to her lips, gesturing for silence. Behind her, Mrs. Correa nodded. A fine tremor had taken hold of Lucas’s entire body, and it seemed as though his mother’s arm around his shoulders was the only thing holding the boy together. Gabe caught Yuna’s eye as he brought up the rear. In his uninjured hand was another knife plucked from the kitchen stores. He nodded at Yuna. She nodded back.
You can do this, she told herself as she stepped outside of the dining area, into the unknown. You can be brave.
You have no other choice.
They were nearly at the far end of the hallway, the one that would lead them to the hatch. The main one, not the secret one. The one through which Moran left in her hazmat suit with her oxygen tank. The one that led her to the surface.
There was no need for the secret door. They weren’t hiding. They were fleeing. Escaping.
Into the exclusion zone.
A newspaper headline Gabe recalled seeing, many moons ago, flitted through his mind. There were stacks of newspapers in the bunker. Some were to line boxes of supplies, some were just there, gathering dust, slowly being converting into recycled paper (newsprint never recycled as nicely, but they had more of it).
Exclusion Zone Declared Around Chernobyl.
The newspapers in the bunker had a similar theme running through them. Disasters, both natural and man-made, screamed at the reader from the front page. Cornelius Moran had built this place in fear, and, judging from the headlines, the world had provided ample fuel to stoke that fire.
Chernobyl. 1986. April, if Gabe recalled correctly.
Facts were good. They were solid. They were unchanging. They kept you sane when the rest of the world insisted on going mad.
A nuclear reactor exploded, pitching the surrounding town of Pripyat into chaos. And eventually abandonment.
His hand throbbed. Pain radiated up from bloodied stubs where two of his fingers had once been. He couldn’t feel their absence—intellectually, he knew they were gone—beyond the utter, complete, all-encompassing pain that coursed up his arm and into the rest of his body. It was like his blood had been infected with it. It was all there was. Pain and nothing else. No fear. No horror. No doubt.
Just pain.
Which, as it turns out, could be a good thing when your other options were all as terrible or worse.
Yuna was a speck in the distance.
The hatch loomed beyond her, shiny and red. Redder still in the crimson glow of the safety lights. The only door of that color in the bunker.
Almost there. Almost outside. Almost free.
The lights went out.
I don’t want to kill him.
That was the thought that ran through Sash’s head as she barreled straight toward her brother, sword in hand.
But if I have to …
She wouldn’t let herself complete that thought.
She didn’t even know what was true. You never knew what you were capable of until you found yourself in a position to make that discovery. Usually, the hard way.
Misha blocked the hallway, his absurdly broad shoulders filling up more space than they had any right to.
“Get out of my way, Misha.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Why would I do that?”
Sash skid to a halt and held up the blade, wiggling it menacingly. Or at least she hoped it was menacing. “Because I have this and you don’t.”
Misha shook his head, his lip curling into a sneer. “You’re just the same as you’ve always been. A stupid little girl.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“I won’t let you get my family killed,” Misha said, his arms spreading as if he was some kind of goalie defending a net. “Not again.”
Sword aloft, Sash paused. “What do you mean ‘again’?”
The little laugh that escaped Misha was worse even than the silence that had dogged her so in the punishment room.
He clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles cracked. The sound bounced off the walls, louder than it ought to. Sash tightened her hold on the sword hilt. It felt expensive, well-balanced. That wouldn’t help her wield it with finesse, but it was something.
Misha barked out a second harsh laugh. “Are you going to kill me like you killed Dad?”
It was enough to loosen her hold on the sword. She managed to catch it—thankfully, not by the blade—before it could hit the floor. “What?”
“Don’t do that.” Misha’s nostrils flared. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”
(Light, blinding her. Squeezing her eyelids shut against it.)
/> Her scars itched like the wounds were fresh.
“He didn’t have to die.” Misha’s voice cracked over the last word. A roadblock to trip him up.
(Pressing her body against her father’s chest. The buttons of his shirt digging into her cheek.)
“He could’ve been in here with us.”
(Her exposed arm burning, skin melting, acid raining down from above.)
“Misha—I—”
(Her father’s body arcing over hers. Shielding her.)
“Don’t.”
(The smell of his skin burning, burning, burning under the cursed sun above.)
“I didn’t—”
(The long silence. Cowering. The dying light. The weight of a body—not a father—crushing her. Saving her.)
“Stupid. Stupid girl.”
Sash lowered the blade.
That was all the opening Misha needed. He lunged at her.
Her response time was too slow. Part of her was here, in the bunker, gazing headlong into those crimson lights, but another part, a bigger part, was somewhere else entirely.
“I pulled his body off of you!”
A body, larger than the one in her memory, slammed into her.
“Mom told me to bring him back!”
Together, they fell back against the cold, hard floor.
“And all I got was you!”
The shock of impact brought Sash back to herself. Misha was kneeling above her, his hands closing around her throat.
Misha, stop, she wanted to say but couldn’t. Already, the words were stolen from her.
“It was your fault.”
Her hand spasmed, fingers twitching open. The blade clattered to the floor, metal against metal.
“He died because of you.”
One hand slapped at Misha’s wrist. Beat against the side of his forearm.
“He died protecting you.”
Nails digging into the skin of his arm, his wrist, his hand. Anything she could reach. Tearing into flesh. Making him bleed.
“You were too stupid to run. Too stupid to do what you were told.”
Her legs kicked out uselessly, heels beating against the floor.
“It should have been you.”