“Speaking of nice people,” Charlotte said, “don’t either of you have any brothers? Or sisters?”

“Of course not,” Sue said. “We are the sisters. Three older brothers, though.”

“One little one,” said Michelle. “He’s a total brat. If you’re trying to think of other people we could try to defrost, try harder.”

“Really?” Charlotte asked. “He’s still your brother …”

“That doesn’t mean we want to have him with us,” Michelle replied. “Trust me, he’ll slow us down, whine the entire time, and probably break something important at the most inconvenient time possible. Not everyone has sugar, spice, and everything nice in their very genes. Right, Sue?”

“Siblings are jerks,” Sue agreed. “I won’t tell you not to look for any of mine, but I don’t think they’re around anyway.”

Charlotte frowned. “Well we’re still getting my brother out.”

“No complaints here,” Michelle said. “Speaking of which …”

They looked up. There was a hatch on the ceiling with a white circle on it. Directly underneath it was a trampoline built into the floor. There was no ladder here.

“This is going to be so stupid,” Michelle said.

“This,” Sue said, “is going to be so awesome!”

She bounded forward joyfully and bounced off, aiming for the hatch; she tumbled in midair, fumbled, and splatted onto the edge of the trampoline, rolling off onto the floor.

Charlotte ran over and squeezed her hand. “Sue! Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

Sue was laughing maniacally. She tried to compose herself enough to speak, but only burst into a fresh round of giggles.

Michelle facepalmed. She looked at Sue, then at Charlotte, decided they could sort themselves out, and went onto the trampoline. She bounced three times, building height, and leapt for the hatch’s door. She snagged it and swung in space, before her momentum twisted the latch and it swung open, revealing what looked like a literal ton of small tubs of butter.

She had only a fraction of a second to stare in sheer horror before it dropped, knocking her from the hatch onto the trampoline, where the butter splattered like a bomb. Sue took a few globs across her face and gown; she took one look at Michelle and began laughing even harder.

Charlotte ran over and swatted the butter away. “Michelle! Are …”

Michelle lay face-up, coated with butter, with the most world-weary expression Charlotte had ever seen. “I wish I could remember the life decisions that led up to this point,” she said, “so that I’d know which ones to regret the most. This is not funny, Sue. This will never be funny.”

“Don’t be bitter,” Sue said between peals of laughter, “be better!”

“That’s the kind of wordplay that makes people batter you,” Michelle said. She sighed and sat up, butter flaking off with each movement. “Speaking of acts of violence, I’m going back to the music room and beating that guy’s face in. You guys want to help?”

“Um, do we have to?” Charlotte said. “We’ve already spent a lot of time doing things that aren’t getting my brother back.”

“That’s a good point,” Michelle said. “Having a guy along would make it much easier.”

“That wasn’t my point at all,” said Charlotte.

Michelle wrung out her hair and tried to brush the butter off, but it was far too oily and clung to her body and gown. “It’s open to interpretation. They say the greatest works of art are always a little ambiguous.” She suddenly noticed that, off to the side, lay two heavy woollen blankets; they hadn’t been there a minute ago, so they must have fallen out of the hatch with all the butter. “Huh? Who leaves blankets in a butter booby trap?”

Charlotte ran the phrase ‘butter booby trap’ through her mind a few times. Nope, still weird.

Michelle walked over, picked one up, and began towelling herself off. With the work of a few minutes, she managed to get off the bulk of the butter off. She tossed the blanket to Charlotte, who wiped her hands on it, and took the second, experimentally wrapping it around herself like a cloak. “This is pretty thick,” she said. “I think it’ll be warm enough.”

Sue finally picked herself up. “That doesn’t look like we’ll all fit under it,” she said. She took the butter-soiled blanket from Charlotte and tried to clean herself off, but it was hard to find any part of it still clean enough.

“It’ll be okay,” Charlotte said. “We’ve warmed up walking around, and we can take turns under it if we have to. I just don’t want to waste any more time without waking up my brother.”

They made their way back over to the cold sleep room. Now that Charlotte was properly awake, she keenly felt the bitter cold biting straight through the thin fabric of her gown. It struck her to wish she had been hit by the butter: it would probably keep her warmer.

Michelle threw the blanket over them, taking the middle, and the three of them crouched in front of the empty sleep pod, whose plastic top was still open from when Charlotte had come out. Charlotte and Sue huddled into Michelle’s side for warmth and tugged at the blanket, wishing it were larger. They stared at the console on its side, the Spanish labels no more illuminating than before, until Michelle began pressing buttons, working her way from left to right. One beeped; the top folded itself shut, and the machine began humming.

“Hold on,” said Charlotte. “What if one of these buttons is, I don’t know, a self-destruct?”

“Self-destruct?” Michelle repeated. “On a cold sleep pod? What, for in case a passing battleship runs out of depth charges, and the captain decides that frozen people are clearly the ideal replacement explosive for the job?”

Charlotte blushed. “Okay, well, fine, but there could be other bad things that might happen. If thawing can possibly go wrong, which I think it could because it seems like a medical procedure and those can always go badly, then just pressing buttons at random might –”

Stolen novel; please report.

There was a kachunk; the bottom of the pod rotated away, and another slid into place. In this one was a young man in the same gowns as the girls. He had dark brown hair, and was clean shaven. Michelle’s eyes traced the curves of his biceps; he wasn’t buff like a bodybuilder, but he had plenty of muscle mass on any adolescent girl.

“That’s him!” Charlotte said, leaning forward. She stayed there a moment before pulling away, and had to rub her chilled hands to get feeling back. “Okay. How do you wake him up?”

“Last time, I’m pretty sure it was this button,” Michelle said, pushing it.

Nothing happened.

“Or maybe this one?”

A cool, polite, automated man’s voice said a few sentences in Spanish.

“I think I caught ‘por favor’ at the end of that,” Sue said.

Michelle pressed another button; the machine cycled him out and Charlotte’s empty pod back in. Grunting in irritation, she brought him back.

“I anticipate this taking longer than we’d hoped,” Sue said.

Michelle opened her mouth to snap at her, but caught herself. “You know, you’ve got a point. Since only one of us can really play with this at a time anyway, why don’t the two of you go on ahead and keep looking for somebody to give us directions? There’s no sense all of us freezing here, and even after I find the button, it’ll take thirty minutes for him to thaw anyway.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte. “Does it really take that long?”

Sue looked at Michelle. “Yes. Yes it does.”

“Well, even so, I don’t mind waiting,” Charlotte said. “And I don’t think we should split up. Won’t you get lonely here, all by yourself? Or scared? This place is a little creepy.”

“No, because I’m not a wimp. Seriously, it’ll be fine. I’ll take care of getting him out of there, and you’ll both take care of getting out of here. Or at least finding out what it is. The Aquinas? What does that even mean?”

“Wasn’t he some saint or other?” Sue asked.

“Something like that, but who names an underground apocalypse bunker after a saint?”

Sue considered this. “If it were me, I’d probably call it Zion, like in The Matrix. Or Eden or Jericho or something. Maybe not Jericho.”

“Exactly. So someone has to find out, before the walls start tumbling down.”

“I’m convinced,” Sue said, taking Charlotte’s hand. “Good luck with popsicle duty.”

“That’s the idea,” Michelle said.

Charlotte and Sue returned to the corridor. “That was nice of her,” Charlotte said.

“Helping is its own reward.”

“That’s true. Where should we look?”

“Just walk and knock on every door, I guess.”

They went along and soon came to a waist-high cat flap on their right. Charlotte hesitated, her inner critic wondering whether anyone who chose to hide behind a cat flap would be particularly reliable, but Sue pushed on, so she bent over and followed her in.

Inside was similar to the paint room, except that it was full of board games. They had been stacked in neat piles, but some had been knocked over, their lids askew and pieces spilling out across the carpeted floor. There seemed to be a ridiculous number of chess sets, their designs similar but mostly not quite identical, but there were also backgammon, Monopoly, plastic tubs of Lego, and a huge number of newer titles, mostly in Spanish or Mandarin. There was even a stack of boxes of D&D miniatures, along with rulebooks and what were probably blank character sheets scattered around one corner. Loose playing cards covered the green-carpeted floor.

“Nobody’s here,” Charlotte said, feeling a little stupid as she did because of how obvious it was.

“Yeah,” said Sue, “I was just thinking. When a school or a shop or somewhere has a cache of games like this, they usually have a checkout sheet, so you can borrow one without the owner worrying that you’ll steal it. If there’s something like that here –”

There was a sudden jolt, and the room shifted sideways, like a giant had given it a shove. Charlotte squeaked as she and Sue lost their footing and fell into a stack of games, which gave way and spilled out over the floor, deepening the mess on the floor.

“Ow,” said Sue. “Was that an earthquake?”

“I think those are supposed to last longer,” said Charlotte. “Still, though … whatever it was, it might have done some damage. Should we go check on Michelle?”

“Uh, better not. She’ll yell at us for wasting time.”

“She might be hurt. If she banged her head against the pod …”

Sue waved this aside. “She’s tough. Besides, that probably wasn’t the first earthquake or whatever it was, what with all the spilled games and paint, and if there are going to be more shocks, all the more reason to find a way out quickly.”

“Hrm,” Charlotte said disapprovingly, but she let Sue lead her out of the games room and further along the steel-and-stone corridor.

The next door was thick steel, painted with ominous yellow radiation symbols and secured with a crossbar. Charlotte and Sue exchanged sceptical looks.

“I don’t want to waste time walking past doors that might have people behind them,” Charlotte said, “but I get a bad feeling about this one.”

“Anyone chosing to lurk inside a room full of radiation is probably not someone we really want to meet anyway,” Sue agreed. “We should be looking for the kind of person who goes to a dance club and stuffs cubby holes with metric tons of butter. I mean, not that one guy specifically, but we were on the right track.”

They came up to a plywood door with a gold-rimmed plaque reading ‘Admisiones’. Charlotte walked up and knocked.

Sue giggled. “You’re precious, you know that?”

Charlotte huffed. “Well if there was someone in there, it’d only be polite. We ought to try to make a good first impression.”

“Sure. Let’s look around anyway.”

Inside were rows upon rows of filing cabinets, each row labelled by a letter of the alphabet. The room should have been brightly lit by rows of overhead fluorescents, but only about a quarter were still on, and half of those were flickering. There were tables stacked with stationery and pens; a broken laptop lay on bare floorboards beside one. Stray bits of paper littered the floor. Sue bent over, picked one up, and held it to the light.

“Miguel Sanchez, clase de economia,” she read. “I’d’ve thought that that meant economy class, but since when do apocalypse bunkers have tickets?” She read a few more. “These are all the same. Different names, all Spanish I think, clase de economia.”

“I think this isn’t a bunker,” Charlotte said. She brought one hand up to rub her temple as a pulse of forgotten information flowed behind it. “My memories are slowly getting clearer. We didn’t come here to hide; we came here to escape. It’s not a bunker,” she said again, “it’s a vessel, the SS Aquinas. We’re refugees.”

Sue leant out into the corridor. “Big vessel,” she said. “Big, weird vessel. What are we running from? Where are we going to?”

“I don’t remember those yet.”

“I don’t feel or hear anything that could be an engine,” Sue said. “Maybe it’s broken down? And Michelle and I are supposed to fix it?”

Charlotte walked further into the room. “There must be a generator still working somewhere if there are lights. Maybe it’s solar powered. Or maybe it’s too far away from here for any vibrations to reach us.”

“If we’re really lucky, maybe it’s something like a few fuses blew out,” Sue said. “I could probably replace that quickly. Upside of having three brothers is you can’t help but learn a little about machinery. What are you doing?”

“I’m in here,” Charlotte said. She had opened the cabinet labelled A. “Charlotte Abercrombie, clase de negocios.”

“Negocios?” Sue came over to read over her shoulder. “Like negotiate. That must mean business class. I didn’t know you were a one-percenter.”

“Neither did I.” She put the ticket back and, on a whim, looked around a little more, and found two others under the same surname. “Roger Abercrombie, clase de negocios. That makes sense. April Abercrombie, clase de obrera. What does obrera mean?”

“Sober, spelt by someone who isn’t? No idea. Who’s April?”

“She’s my mother,” Charlotte said. “I think … I think she’s working here.”

“Maybe we’ll meet her,” Sue said. “It’s hard to work while in cold sleep. What is she, like an exec or something? Chief scientist?”

“You really like anime,” Charlotte mused, then blushed. “I mean, I don’t think so. I think she’s just a regular worker. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …”

Sue laughed again and ruffled her hair, making it stick in all directions. “Have I ever told you that you’re precious?” Charlotte pulled away and patted her hair straight. “You’re right, it was a dumb question. Come on. Michelle’s surname is Bright. Check under that for any of her family, and I’ll do mine, and then we’ll keep looking.”