Daybreak

Whoever came up with the phrase “better safe than sorry” would need to do some real evaluating in 3056.

Here in the underground, everyone plays it safe. There are many who’ve never seen the sky, surviving off of sad substitutes like daylight lamps and bottled vitamin D. The bunker keeps us fed, keeps us safe…and keeps us in the dark.

People don’t talk much about how things used to be. How we used to live on the surface and not take the clean air for granted. Now everything is heavily guarded, the only two exits from our underground abode inescapable fortresses.

There are those of us who have been lucky enough to see the sky - if only once or twice. It wasn't always that way. When tunnels began shaking and the foundation in the underground’s blind support began to crumble, they sent us out.

A handful of us revel in this small but luxurious freedom. The exploration team was larger, but no one knows what happened. Danny says they died on a mission and the Underground covered it up, but I think they escaped.

I hope they escaped.

Danny and I trek one of the outskirts of the tunnel now, inspecting various passageways.

He does, anyway. I’m more along for the ride than anything else.

I peer down at him as he tinkers with some of the rudimentary lighting that trails the path.

“How far have you been from the bunker?”

He looks up at me warily. “I’m going to pretend you’re asking for curiosity’s sake and not because you’re going to do something stupid.”

Danny leans on his wrench. “Roughly a mile to the north and five miles to the south. We have a storage bunker out there, along with the lab.”

Ah, yes, the lab. Another of the Underground’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies.

“Have you ever been inside?”

He sighs. “No, Josie, I haven’t. I don’t have an interest in being killed because I know too much.”

His tone is jovial, but I know there’s a depth of truth behind his statement. We both know previous members of the exploration team that have gone missing who asked a few too many questions. They promptly disappeared with no word from the higher ups.

I know Danny is trying to protect me, but I can’t help but be curious. What else would I do with my ample free time?

I like to consider myself covert, anyways. Barely coming up to Danny’s collarbone, I’ve found myself able to slink in and out of many a place I wasn’t meant to be.

“Yeah, I know,” I placate him. “But I’d love to feel the wind on my face. Can you believe that used to be normal?”

I sit down on a rock beside him and scratch at the out-of-place underground logo that's fastened on the wall. Marking territory is a must for the bunker. “My sister has never even been out of the bunker. Not that she has any interest in it.” I stare down the hallway wistfully. “Though that’s probably wiser.”

“Probably,” Danny agrees, knowing my aversion to any kind of confinement. My father kept my mother confined, once. He kept her hostage in the back rooms, and then one day, she was gone. I had millions of questions and asked all my neighbors and family for help, but everyone pretended like she didn’t exist.

With this, my distrust of the Underground was cemented early. My sister was too young to remember our mother and clung tightly to the ways of the bunker.

He brushes back his messy hair out of his face.

I lean on my elbow. “Speaking of siblings, where’s your brother?”

“Sawyer is doing god knows what god knows where,” He scowls, returning to his tinkering

Sawyer, Danny’s younger, rebellious brother, is also on the exploration team. He may be a bit of a flight risk, but he’s saved our asses more times than any of us can count. The tunnels can be a dangerous place.

“Sounds about right,” I muse. “We can’t all be the favorite child.”

Danny cracks a smile at that. “It’s honest work.” He looks over his shoulder at me. “But if you’re looking for him - and you didn’t hear this from me - he’s likely in the weapons cave near the second gate.”

I leap up, excited at the prospect of stretching my legs. “ I’m going to go find Sawyer.”

He waves his hand in a sarcastic dismissal. “He’s in one of his moods. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I shrug, not deterred in the slightest. We’ve been best friends since we were tykes, constantly causing trouble. As we grew older, we realize we had a common objective - escape.

While Danny was content to be a part of the system, Sawyer and I needed freedom. The bunker was stifling, in more ways than one. What Danny didn’t know was that Sawyer and I had been planning this escape for months.

I’ve only been Above once, in the middle of the night. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, but Sawyer swears by the daylight.

I’ve never been so eager to be proved wrong in my life.

The Above, from what little I’d seen, appeared a desolate wasteland. I was awed, of course, at anything other than the bunker. But it didn’t seem viable, or at least until Sawyer came back from a solo mission with interesting information.

He’d met someone - a traveler, unaffected by mutation- who spoke of lush green forests and civilization that spanned for miles. That shocked us, who’d heard our whole lives that the few that manage to survive above ground after the radiation spread were mutated beyond help.

His brush with the traveler proved that they were no different than us, other than some environmental differences. Most of our population was pale from the lack of sun, our lamps doing the bare minimum to keep us content.

This was our first evidence of the lies we’d been fed. Not suspicion, but proof. And we were determined to find more.

I slip into the weapons cave, admiring the way the rock turns into stainless steel.

Sawyer’s head pops up over a workbench, goggles resting on his black curls. He grins. “Hey, Josie. Long time no see!”

I roll my eyes. “You saw me at breakfast. Danny stopped to fix some of the path lights while we were on patrol, in which case I am zero help, so here I am.”

I climb up into an adjacent table, narrowly avoiding a domino effect of miscellaneous weaponry. I wince. The Underground’s menacing logo seems to watch me, displeased.

“Here you are,” he laughs, tossing his work gloves on the table. “And just in time, too.”

“In time for what?”

He raises his eyebrow. “An adventure.”

My chest fills with excitement, and I find myself barely able to control my volume. “An adventure? Where?”

I mentally catalog his map of explored tunnels. He’s been farther than I have, sure, but not so far as-

“Above. You in?”

No hesitation. “Of course.”

“It’s a scouting mission. We can’t stay,” he adds, regret heavy in his voice. “But it-“

“Yes. Doesn’t even matter. Yes.”

He thrusts a ready pack into my arms. I peer into it and grin. “You’re so thoughtful,” I croon, making him chuckle. "And prepared."

“I knew you would say yes. I may have even convinced Danny to let you go early this afternoon.”

I raise my eyebrow at that. It wasn’t often Sawyer planned this far ahead. “I’m impressed. What prompted this change?” I needle.

His grin dims a bit. “Unfortunately, there’s something we need to see for ourselves.” Sawyer pulls out one of our exploration schematics. Holographic map points dance back and forth. “There’s an exit they never told us about.”

I mull this over. Not surprising, given the fact that secrecy is the norm around here.

“The other explorers don’t even know. It’s been used recently, though, as there were footprints the last time I checked. Wet footprints, coming back in.”

Realization dawns. “Water.”

“Yep. Another thing they lied about the surface not having.”

So much for the vast, desolate wasteland they showed us in training. Water was a rare commodity, and certainly not congregated enough to soak someone’s boots and leave footprints.

He beckons me down a tunnel I’m not familiar with, and the lights slowly become farther and farther apart as I follow. I’m not nervous, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t uneasy.

Sawyer stops at an intricately carved rock door I’ve never seen before. I marvel at the touch of the smooth surface beneath my fingertips.

“This is old,” I whisper.

“Very old,” he agrees. He pushes a circular-looking carving in the bottom right of the door, and it slowly begins to move.

I glance at him hesitantly. He shakes his head. “Our intel is good, don’t worry. Let’s check it out.”

I follow him once again, weaving through increasingly narrow tunnels. I’m afraid we’ll no longer fit through soon, but he doesn’t seem bothered.

We round another corner, and there we find a set of stone stairs.

“This just keeps getting weirder,” I mutter, but dutifully follow anyways.

At the top, light filters through a covered hole in the ceiling. Sawyer pushes brush aside, letting sunlight stream in. He pulls himself up and out, then reaches a hand in to help me out.

I wince as sunlight fills my corneas. I’ve never seen this much light in one place! I have to wait for my vision to adjust, and when I do, I’m awed all over again.

The ground is covered in green - grass! - and trees tower above us. Sawyer and I look at each other in disbelief.

“This isn’t supposed to exist,” he whispers.

I look from Sawyer to the grass again, and something's off. Red adorns the ground. I trail my eyes after random splotches, and it seems to form a path.

“Sawyer…” I begin, and he catches sight of it.

“Blood.” We silently follow the path until we come to a shallow pool of water, resting in the mouth of a cave.

If it weren’t for the dead man floating in the middle of it, it would be rather serene.

Sawyer begins to wade through the water, turning the body over.

He lets out a quick breath as we both survey one of our own. Ned, a camp guard, lies limply in Sawyer’s arms. The Underground’s unmistakable logo seems to sneer at us.

“Look what he's wearing, Josie. He didn’t get lost. He meant to fight.”

He’s right. The Kevlar covering his chest has seemed to have done him no good, considering the gory slit in his throat.

His blaster is half sunk in the shallow water a few feet away, and then a gleam catches my eye in the translucent water.

“What’s that?”

I reach slowly into the tepid water fingers catching around some sort of necklace. Upon pulling it out, it has a heart-shaped pendant.

I frown. “My mom had a necklace like this.”

I turn it over in my hand carefully. I notice the crease in the middle, and I pry it open.

I feel like I can’t breathe.

Sawyer speaks over my shoulder. “Josie?”

A waterlogged portrait of myself stares back at me. I slowly turn around to face Sawyer, overwhelmed and breathless.

“My mom isn’t dead, Sawyer. She’s here.”