You fondly remember the garden that was displayed around your backyard, just to the side of the swing set you and Devon played on as children. That swing set would eventually be taken down when you became too old to use it. It was sold off in a garage sale, but you don't remember who to. It mustn't matter too much as you never saw it again.
The garden remained. Your mother would tend to it in her early mornings before work. She cared for it as much as she could after she had the miscarriage. She was absolutely devastated. You remember your father being sad as well, but it completely ripped your mother apart.
She hated feeling how she did, because she knew that you knew she wasn't the same after that day, but she couldn't help it. She tried all that she could to recreate that feeling in her garden. You don't know why you weren't enough to be enough to satisfy that feeling, but you weren't.
You like to think that if the Earth weren't tiny pieces of rubble millions of miles away that garden would still be there right by your tiny little house. Your swing set, father, mother, and even yourself may be gone forever, but that garden would last eternal in your memory.
You remember the last time you saw your mother. She was in the hospital, critical condition. The cancer had gotten to her real bad. It manifested in her brain and took most of her motor functions. She was almost vegetative. You walked into her room with a horrified look on your face. It wasn't your first time seeing her like this, but it still gripped your heart every time it did. You remember feeling absolutely helpless. She'd been there to care for you when you were sick so many times and here you were on the opposite side of the situation and the only thing you could do was watch her die.
You bring out a flower from behind you, plucked straight from the garden and placed in a tiny pot, the purple petals almost too bright for the dreary atmosphere around you. You place the pot on the window sill just beside your mother. Her eyes track you as you walk across the room, that's the extent of what she can do.
She doesn't thank you and you don't say anything else until you step outside and keep from crying. You see Devon out in the hallway, his hands stuck in his pockets as he stares at the floor, looking up when you come out. You shake your head and walk to him. The memory fades and you find yourself short of breath as you see Jesse right in front of you.
“Something happened to your mother, didn't it?” he asks.
You don't answer, he seems to understand, the look in your eyes says enough. You wonder how much it told him, but don't dare ask.
“C'mon, let's go find Hatta, it'll help keep you from breaking down, sound like a plan?” He asks.
You nod your head as you try to find your breath. It feels like the wind was knocked out of you, but it slowly becomes easier. You hate this feeling, but it is what you want. You want to remember, and that means taking in all the negative feelings and filtering them out. You're one step closer to remembering fully who you are. Then you can worry about what's next, like Cross coming to do whatever he wants to you anytime that he feels like it.
That's a worry for another time. Hopefully if you keep telling yourself that it'll become true.
You nod your head as you walk to the door. Jesse opens it and you both walk through. You find yourself staring at him as you walk. There are so many things you want to learn about yourself, but you can't help wondering about him as well. How long did he serve in the army? What did he do?
You think about how you don't know what to really feel about him. Is this a crush forming? Or did it already? Or is it just a longing for a friend in a time that's confusing a million times over? You don't know if you can truly feel that way about someone, that seemed to be clear enough from your memories. You have no interest in romance but you don't think that's what this is. You want answers.
But that will wait. Your priority is finding out where this Hatta is so that you can begin figuring out more about yourself. It feels good to have a plan, to have an idea of what to do and how to do it. Big scale, you don't have an idea. What are you going to do after? Keep on hiding until Cross finds you, or perhaps you take to the offensive and go find him? Nothing sounds too good, but you'll have to make that choice eventually, and you're scared of what you might pick.
You reach the elevator, it is the same one that you used to leave the bunker. The gates open and you see there is already someone inside, Pamen looks up as you step inside.
“Mr. Anderson, Mr. Duschand, it is nice to see that you are okay from the blast.”
“Hello Pamen. I am sorry to hear of the passing of one of your vessels,” Jesse says, stepping inside.
“It is a sorrow, but we survive. You have as well, and we should thank you, Mr. Duschand. You saved lives.”
You feel a rushing sense of humility. It isn't like you to accept praise constantly, with everything that's happened you almost forgot. Back when you were visiting the Capitol. Ha, visiting. More like waiting to be sentenced for the murder of Jayon Cæ, but details schmetails.
“Where're you headed to?” Jesse asks, stepping inside, motioning you in.”
“We were going to rest this body, actually. We've several others out there looking for wounded and some of them were caught in altercations with the Dromedans. It tires the rest of us out,” Pamen explains, you realize for your sake.
“There should be some free rooms out there,” Jesse says.
“I know that the one furthest on the left is occupied, Andrew is in that one,” you say.
“Thank you for the notification,” Pamen nods its completely round head to you. “If you ever need anything you will know where to find us. Also, if you decide to head to any of the other bunkers where we are at we would love to join up with you to help repay our gratitude.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Jesse nods and looks back to you, “We'll keep it in mind good friend,” he smiles.
“Definitely,” you say.
Pamen steps out of the elevator, long black legs take silent steps out of your field of view. With steps as silent as those there could have been hundreds of Pamen with you in the recreational room. That thought alone gives you chills how it can...fuck it, he can sneak around so soundlessly. You wonder what kind of things you could do if you could move that efficiently.
Jesse nods him off and then bends down to press the button on the face of the wall to head downwards to the lower level. You feel like a strange curiosity is being sated. After hearing so much about the lower level you're relatively excited to finally see what it actually looks like.
“You know, the planet itself is actually to blame for all the different bunkers we have here,” Jesse says as the elevator begins to descend.
“What?”
“Apparently the original plan was to have five or six large scale bunkers spread equidistant from any neighboring cities. Something impregnable in time of war or what have you. The original idea would have each of these bunkers specialize in certain attributes. One of them would specialize in medicine and healthcare for example, but the way the planet is prevented them from burrowing too far into the ground, so they could only make it two levels deep.”
“It'd be pretty lame if the major safeguard for people couldn't do what it was intended,” you say.
“That's why the original architects took the option of designing one hundred bunkers across the planet, two levels each. Each of them were spread and made more balanced in their skill sets. That's why we didn't have all the medicine and tools we needed, since we had to spread them thin between the hundred bunkers.”
The elevator comes to a stop and the gates open in front of you. Jesse steps out first and you follow. One day you'll trust yourself to walk around this world by yourself, but that day isn't today. You still have much to learn.
“Why couldn't the original architects dig below two levels?” You ask.
“I told you about Sayar's magnetic pulses did I not?”
“Something about them, like how they affected the color of the sky and how back in the Capitol building the rooms synced up to the waves or something like that.”
“Sayar emits powerful waves out into the atmosphere that come from the planet's core. Think of it like an orbit on steroids.”
“So then we must be somewhat close to the Milky Way Galaxy, right?”
“Close in a relative term. Enough so that humans could travel here before their planet went ka-plooey.”
“Does that pulse prevent people from digging down?”
“The core's so dense to keep that level of pulse emitting constantly, so yes. There was an accident near the old Messian capital, Andem, the location of the first proposed bunker. There's where we learned the dangers of digging too deep. It caused a fission reaction that annihilated everything within a three hundred kilometer range, settlement and all.”
“Three hundred kilometers...that's...how many miles?”
“How many what?”
“Miles, I never cared for metrics,” you say.
“You were American weren't you, back on Earth?”
“Yeah.”
“The .01% of the galaxy that uses the imperial system and not even the majority of your species. You're the one percent of the one percent,” he says, chuckling.
“My measurement skills are not what's important here,” you say.
“Fair, but it doesn't mean they're any less outdated.”
“Well okay it's not my fault I learned it that way. Blame the American educational system.”
“They're kind of defunct now so it's impossible for me to.”
“Getting back on topic...” you say.
“That was basically it. People dug too deep, people went boom. The land out there to the north is still a ruined mess because of it, nobody's gone back for fear of setting off anymore reactions. Six thousand lives were enough to be lost from that one mistake.”
“Six thousand?!”
“Yeah, it was a large city that housed quite a bit of my people.”
You nod your head as you look around you. The walls are a concave metal wrapped in bands that repeat to a door in front of you. The hall also extends to your left. You can see through what looks to be translucent glass to a wide open expanse beyond the door. Of course, it's not much of an expanse when the majority of it is filled with hospital beds carrying what look to be almost a thousand different people. And if those up top were the ones in better condition you don't even want to know what kind of pain the people down here are going through.
“Anyway, yeah. Two levels is the max here, and that's how we got so many bunkers all over the place,” Jesse says, bringing you back from your thoughts. You begin walking down the path in front of you.
“Hatta should be down here, although should is the keyword. I haven't seen her at all today, and seeing as I was with some of the main technicians around here that should help us narrow down where she could be.”
“So anywhere away from any actual work?”
“Bingo. That other path down there is where a lot of the other workers are basically going 24/7 to keep as many people alive as possible. It's a tough job, but one I and I'm sure everybody in their appreciates with their lives.”
“It definitely sounds like a tough job. I don't know if I could ever do something like that, much less do it for as long as humanly possible.”
“Some of them are doing it longer than is humanly possible,” he says with a smirk.
You groan.
At the end of the hall you open up the door to a huge open space. It fills you with wonder as you stare out to what is almost as large as a marketplace, full and bustling with bodies shifting and going about their business. It's a far cry from the constricted hallways that barely seem to be able to hold a Breeton, the ceiling rises far above your head. This must be why you were able to hear so many footsteps upstairs, the floor to the top level must be pretty thin to give this space enough room to hold all the supplies that is needed for the bunker.
“You didn't think the entire place was a compact dormitory, no?”
“It felt that way,” you say. “I mean I saw the storage units for the tools and the armory but I didn't expect anything of this size down here, especially after what you said about the core of the planet.”
“This is the main attraction, people come down here to trade goods, eat, rehabilitate their bodies after their healing process.”
“And goof off,” you say.
“Precisely,” he says.
You look back out and still find your breath hard to come. It almost feels like a world separated by what's above you, and you think you like that.