att(pirated)

This place was too clean.

That was the first thing that jumped out at me as I took in the Henry Estate's hidden bunker. The whole place was too damn clean. There was almost no dust buildup, the lighting was fine, and the place had power. And although I hadn't yet checked the other rooms yet, I was damn sure that they were just as pristine. So if we knew one thing beyond any doubt, it was that people knew about the bunker, and it was routinely maintained. If we left anything out of place, then people would know that we'd been here.

Still as far as things go, stumbling on an underground shelter is probably one of the better things to have happened today. No murder traps or self-destruct buttons yet. My internal monologue helpfully suggested in an attempt to soothe my mind. But it was ruined by the last word in the statement, that I grumbled to myself. "Yet…"

"Tanya? Did you say something?" Christine asked, poking her head out from the most recent cabinet to catch her attention. She probably thought I was talking to her.

"Huh? Yeah, I'm fine. I was just wondering where I was going to start my search." I lied, before joining her in searching the bunker's recreation area. From what I could tell so far, the bunker was roughly T-shaped, with the recreation area filled out the top of the T. It was divided into two areas; a relatively comfortable looking lounge space on one side, and a saloon on the other. Christine was busy rooting around the former, arm-deep in one of the many cabinets that surrounded a large television in its own alcove. A large L-shaped couch and a coffee table occupied the rest of the space, though with practically nowhere else for things to hide, Christine had ignored it in favor of the wall-mounted storage.

So while she was busy there, I investigated the saloon. It essentially served as a miniature version of the one in the mansion, and was furnished to match. It had some small tables with chairs, bookshelves, and a piano in the far back corner. There was even a minibar, though the small number of bottles meant that any theft would be easily noticed. And with the prospect of using the booze as a bartering chip with the guards gone, there was nothing valuable.

"Hey, Tanya. What does this mean?" Christine asked after a few minutes of silent investigation, and I turned to see her holding up a faded sign. In spite of its age, the symbol was immediately recognisable. Three inverted triangles with their tips meeting in the middle. The symbol was similar in design to the internationally recognised sign for radiation, and that was entirely by design.

"That's a sign for a fallout shelter. I guess that this place was meant to be one." I replied with a slight shrug. So the airlock had been exactly that, an airlock. I hadn't seen anything that would have been a decontamination shower, but I hadn't exactly spent much time looking around.

"What's a fallout shelter?" Christine asked, and I mentally kicked myself at having just assumed that she'd know what I was talking about. I shouldn't have expected Christine to know what a fallout shelter was, and now I had to come up with an explanation.

"It's basically a bomb shelter. A very strong one too." I quickly replied, before realizing that she probably didn't know what a bomb shelter was either. I paused for a few seconds as I considered how to describe the concept in a way that she'd understand, before going for the simple approach. It wasn't ideal, but it would have to do. "There's a lot of bombs in the world that leave behind very nasty poison after they go off. Somewhere like this gives people somewhere to wait and hide while the nasty stuff goes away."

Christine frowned at the overt simplification. But as she processed what I'd just said, her frown twisted into a look of confusion. "You're joking, right? There aren't bombs that poison the air, right?"

"I'm not lying. If I was, then why else would they have put some much time and effort into something like this?" I said, gesturing around as I closed a book I'd been holding, and slotting it back onto the bookshelf. It was some French novel about a gentleman thief, which was in the original French rather than any language that I was properly fluent in.

"I thought it… I thought it could be some cool spy thing, like in the books that I've been reading. Or that television show, with the puppets." Christine shyly admitted, and I had to stifle a sigh at her childish ideas. Thankfully, the admission somewhat lightened the mood, and it gave me a hook to pull on to get her to stay with me.

"Well, maybe we can find some cool stuff down here? Come on, let's have a look around." I announced, before gesturing for Christine to follow me as I went deeper into the bunker.

The corridor that composed the stem of the T-shaped bunker was lined with nine doors. Four on one side and five on the other, each with a sign atop the door for identification. The first door on the left led into a small infirmary, with two beds with privacy curtains, plus some wall-mounted racks that could be pulled down and set up in an emergency. The room wasn't set up for major casualty incidents, but it was probably enough for minor incidents or individual casualties, which was good enough. Past that, the second room on the left appeared to be some sort of accommodation room, which we'd get to later.

The first door on the right-hand side of the corridor on the other hand was far more impressive. It was a large kitchen-dining room, taking up the same volume of space as the opposite two rooms, and set up in a similar way to an American roadside diner. There were four-person booths along one wall, cooking stations along the other, and a serving counter and stools dividing the space in half. Past that, there were a pair of doors in the far wall, which I assumed led to either cold storage, the pantry, or service rooms to support the kitchen.

"How long do you think you'd have to stay down here? If one of those big poison bombs went off." Christine asked as she looked into the kitchen, focusing on the faux-diner rather than looking at me. And given that her voice carried an odd mix of curiosity and concern, I imagined that she was still coming to terms with the fact that there were bombs out there that could force people underground.

"I don't know. However long it takes for things to be safe. That could be anything from a few days, to a few weeks. That's why there's all of this stuff down here, if you can't leave then you might as well make the place more comfortable." I explained as I joined her in taking in the fake diner's details.

Christine was silent after that, and after a few seconds, we left the dining area behind. But the mood had certainly been ruined by the topic of nuclear annihilation, even if my friend hadn't been fully introduced to the concept. So in an effort to cheer her up, I brought up the chances of such an exchange actually happening. "If it makes you feel any better, the chances of something like that happening are pretty low. It's a whole lot of destruction, and nobody wants to be the person to start it."

"But Lord Henry did have this place built, so I guess he would disagree with you." Christine moped as we reached the first accommodation room. Christine sighed to herself as I poked my head into the room, before bringing up something the Lord had said. "I guess he's right. People are just too stupid to realize just what they're putting at risk. It's very stupid."

I nodded at Christine's words as I inspected the room. It was a large mixed-use area, with five single beds on each side of the room, and a smaller recreation and storage area at the far back. I could see a few single seats and a couch at the far end, plus a radio and a bookshelf or two. But nothing in the room jumped out at me, so I kept the conversation moving. "You know, you're starting to sound like Alexia."

"Tanya, from what you've told us she prefers work to play, and is incredibly boring. I wonder who we know who does that?" Christine sarcastically asked, and I politely chuckled at the slight barb as we moved along. The next room on the right was just a block of toilets and showers, which were probably there to share the same plumbing as the kitchens, but was nothing to really hold your attention. Meanwhile, the next accommodation room was much like the previous one, except for the fact that it had bunk beds rather than singles.

"We can't all be as smart as you Chris." I replied as I pulled my head back from the second accommodation room, and continued on. We only had a few more places to check, and if they were just as uninteresting as the rest of the rooms so far, then we'd probably be back in our rooms within the hour. Assuming we didn't stop for a snack.

"Hey Tanya, look. There are twenty beds here." Christine pointed out, and I back-tracked to the doorway to have another look into the room. Sure enough, there were the bunk beds, all twenty bunks. I didn't understand what she was getting at until she put the question to me. "Do you think that they put them here for us?"

Now that got my attention, and I paid the beds a bit more attention to try and find some clues that would support her hypothesis. They were certainly child-size, but the thing that sold it to me were the small brass plaques on them. I walked inside, and looked at the plaques on the closest beds. And sure enough, they matched with the names of some of our adoptive siblings. "It looks like it, the beds are marked with our names. But how would everyone get here from the mansion? We only got in because we had the key."

"We got in because we had a key. Maybe some of the staff have their own keys?" Christine asked from the doorway, leaning against it as she thought up a few answers to my question. "Or maybe there's a secret tunnel, and we just found the back door?"

I opened my mouth, before closing it again as I couldn't find it in myself to refute her suggestions. After all, none of them were too unreasonable, so I moved the conversation along as I rejoined Christine in the corridor. "Maybe. But it's not a very conventional locking system, with the buttons and the pegs. Speaking of which, how did you find out about all of this?"

"Well, Anders found the buttons a few days ago, and he asked me to help him, as you and Jonah were in the middle of a lesson. We switched them on, but we didn't know what they did, so we kept it between us while we looked." Christine explained as we walked to the next set of doors. From the looks of it, there were four doors left, two per side. We'd be done with the initial search soon enough. "When I was walking around outside yesterday, I saw the pins sticking out of the pile of wood. It looked like our keys might be compatible with them, and when I checked with mine it moved the lock, so I decided to get you."

"And you didn't decide to tell me this before we came out here, why?" I asked as we reached the next pair of doors. We ignored the one on the right, it was just a storage room. The one on the left was labeled as an "activities room" and it should have been more interesting, but a quick look inside revealed some weird combination of a gym and a classroom. It seemed like the Lord was set on making sure that the end of the world wouldn't mark the end of our education.

"I couldn't get to sleep. I wanted to find out what was inside, and I guess I got too excited." Christine sheepishly replied as I closed the door. I felt a flush of anger at that, this whole situation was caused by her impatience. I did what I could to not let it show, but something must have tipped Christine off, as she stopped halfway to the final set of doors. "I wanted to show you that I can do stuff like this on my own! That you don't need to baby me, like what you do with Jonah and Valerie."

I stopped just a few steps in front of her, and sighed to myself as I considered how to answer her. I planned my words for a few seconds, before saying them in the kindest tone I could muster. "Chris. I'm proud that you figured out how to get down here, and I'm happy that you've shown me all of this. I just would have preferred it if you'd told me earlier, and we planned for this. I just don't like getting dragged into things without knowing what's going on."

"Do you mean that?" Christine asked, a hopeful tone in her voice, even if she didn't look me in the eye.

"Yes. Good help is hard to find. And the fact that you trusted me enough to show me all of this is a sign that I should have been more honest with you from the start. I apologize for that." I answered with a smile, and a kind pat on the shoulder. Of course, I could have explained to her why I was bothering with Jonah and Valerie, but the core of the issue was our relationship. And that would only be solved through reconciliation.

"Then… then can you please stop calling me Chris? That's a boy's name." Christine asked, and couldn't help but I chuckle at the request, and at the fact that calling her that name was such an issue. But I didn't see any reason not to humor her.

"Sure. Now, come on. Let's see what's behind the last door. I don't think that either of us think that a generator room would be a very interesting place to look, right?" I accepted Christine's request, and led her towards the last doors in the bunker. There were only two left, but we wouldn't find anything interesting in a generator room. That left only one door, which I allowed Christine the honor of opening, and leading us in.

The final room in the bunker wasn't a big one, and it was an inconvenient L-shape. Though it provided the sole occupant with the one thing that everyone else in the bunker would have to give up. Privacy. But most importantly, the room looked lived in. I picked up on it as soon as we walked in, but Christine was the first to bring it up. "Someone's been here. There's stuff out on the desk, but everywhere else has been clean."

"Let's look around first, see what else we find." I suggested, and my friend nodded, before leading us deeper into the room.

The room was a fairly modest affair. Most of the room was taken up by a living area. There was a desk with a radio, the one that Christine had pointed out as the one with 'stuff' on it. There was a tiny kitchen with some small and basic equipment, including a very tempting coffee machine, though I forced the idea out of my mind. I couldn't use it without leaving a sign that we were here. Around the corner of the L-shaped room sat the bedroom, with a large bed, a television, a bedside table with a lamp, a wardrobe, and an en-suite bathroom.

But the one thing that brought the whole room together was the fact that it looked lived in. The desk and the small tables had coffee stains on them that matched the ones on the coffee machine, and the desk chair had a noticeable indentation in its leather surface. But the part that caught both mine and Christine's attention was a set of papers on the desk. Some were still neatly stacked in one pile, but a couple had been opened on the desk, and abandoned without a care.

"So, what do you think all of that paperwork is?" I asked as we completed our search, and returned to the desk. Christine got there first, and picked up one of the sheets of paper.

"They're reports of some kind. Candidates for something… this one is on number two-hundred and fifteen." Christine explained as she examined one of the open reports. She picked up one of the sheets of paper, and held it up as she read it.

"Two hundred and fifteen…" I repeated the number. 215. That's only a dozen off-

"Check the other ones! Look for number two-oh-three!" I barked at Christine, before snatching up one of the reports from the desk. I scanned the document for a number, saw that it was 213, and tossed it aside for another one.

"Who's candidate two-oh-three?" Christine asked. She must have been confused by my sudden change of attitude at just a number, but she still followed my order. Picking up one of the reports, checking the name, and tossing it aside for another.

"It's me! I'm candidate two-oh-three. So who do you think these other 'candidates' might be?" I replied as I tossed away another report. It took a couple more reports before I finally found mine, and I wasted no time in going through the contents.

The document itself was a progress report on a candidate. In this case, me. It covered everything from academic performance to medical history, psychological development, and other points. And the amount of information it covered was staggering. It detailed the days when I'd visited Paris, and my time with Alexia. My academic scores were a problem point, as I was now only 'above average' rather than leading the class. But even so, the last line in the report was one that I was proud of. 203 maintains higher than expected intellect, but her guarded personality makes understanding her limits difficult.

"Is that all we are to them? Just… candidates? Rats in a maze?" Christine asked, and I looked over to find that she'd found the report that covered her. I didn't know what was on the report, but it couldn't have been good.

"I don't know. We have numbers, and they watch us like… like this. But they haven't done anything to us. At least nothing in these reports, or that we've noticed. So maybe they aren't going to?" I suggested as I went back to the start of the report and started re-reading it. I probably wouldn't be able to take it with me, so I'd need to commit as much of it to memory as possible.

"They're always watching us! They know everything about us. They haven't touched us yet, but that doesn't mean that they won't!" Christine replied, her voice high and scared. The report in her hands was crumpled and crunched in her hands, both locked into fists.

"Hey. Hey! Calm down!" I tried to soothe my shocked sister, only for her to step back and out of my reach. She wasn't crying, not yet, but she had tears in her eyes. She was certainly rattled by the news. Which was something that I didn't understand. This whole place was some weird program right from the start, it was only fair that they'd make reports on us.

"What's the point? You're not my sister. Not really, anyways." Christine grumbled, before cynically chuckling to herself at the situation. "No wonder you didn't trust me, I'm just a stranger."

"Christine. I…" I started, before pausing for dramatic effect. I knew exactly what I wanted to say to her, as I'd already said the same thing to Jonah over a year ago. That little conversation had netted my second truly loyal friend. If I could do the same with Christine, then I'd have a third person who I could trust to watch my back. "I'm going to tell you exactly what I told Jonah. We're not a true family. But that doesn't mean that we can't look out for each other. If we do that, then they won't be able to tear us apart!"

"But they're going to send Valerie away. Look at this." Christine gloomily replied, before reaching over to the desk, picking up a report, and handing it to me. The report on candidate 213, Valerie, listed that she had substandard emotional development. And that if measures aren't taken to make her more sociable with the rest of the children, then there is a high likelihood that she would be sent away.

That wasn't good news. Aside from the fact that Valerie was probably the person I trusted the most on the estate, there was the simple fact that someone I counted as a loyal asset was at risk of being removed. This needed to be addressed, and I told Christine exactly that. "Ok then. We can adapt to this. We need to make Valerie socialize more with everyone else, so that she doesn't get sent away. I can take a step back, and you can guide her along."

"So, what? We're just going to give them what they want? How does that help us?" Christine stared at me as if I'd grown a second head. Which, given that I was suggesting going along with the people who she felt were using us as lab rats, was probably warranted.

"If we do what they want, then they won't send anyone away. And I don't want any of you to get sent away." I explained, using a metric that the other girl could easily understand. Telling her that I was keeping them around to improve my chances of survival probably wouldn't have gone over well. So I moved away from that topic, and focused on what else needed to be done. "We should also get the other kids to start trying to be nice to their adults. If they were planning to send Val away over being a bit shy, then they might do the same thing to kids that don't have a good relationship with their adult."

"So that's it? We're just going to play along and hope that they're nice to us?" My friend asked, with a tired tone of voice that showed that she was losing her fire. I didn't know if that was down to my arguments starting to make it through, or if her sadness at the current situation was starting to show through. Either way, it meant that I just needed to push a bit more.

"Christine, I was sent to work with Alexia because they trusted me. If they didn't, I wouldn't be sent to Paris to see her. There were many times where I could have escaped, but I didn't run because I know that they're not going to hurt us. They've spent too much money on us to do that." I pushed the sunk cost angle next. Of course, the real reason why I'd decided not to try and run away was the simple fact that Ludmila had always been within arms reach of me. But I didn't need to tell Christine that.

"But then, what are they planning to do to us?" My friend asked, and I had to force myself to not roll my eyes in exasperation. We all knew why we were here, that was one of the few things that they'd made abundantly clear.

"You already know the answer to that question. Don't you?" I asked, and it was a testament to just how frazzled the French girl was when it took her a few seconds to come up with an answer.

"Do you think that they want us to be the super people that Lord Henry wants?" Christine asked after a few seconds of thought. Maybe now she was starting to see the idea for the stupid pipe dream that I'd I'd figured it to be.

"Why else would they give us all of this? Why else would they make these reports on how we're doing? I don't know why they'd do all of this if they didn't want us to become something special when we're older." I reiterated the simple sunk costs in this whole endeavor. I had no idea what the bills for this sort of place looked like, but with this much staff, at a facility like this? The total costs had to be somewhere in the millions by now.

"I… I don't know…" Christine slowly mumbled as her mind struggled to come to terms with the situation, and what I gathered were some very conflicting ideas on the topic. That was fine and all, I would usually have given her the time she needed to figure things out on her own, but we didn't know what the time was, so we couldn't afford to waste time on moral quandaries.

"Christine. I can't do this on my own. You're the only person here who's seen all of this. You know the stakes here, and what might happen if someone doesn't meet their standards. I need you. No. All of our friends need you." I hit Christine with the emotional big guns, hoping that guilt-tripping her into sticking with it would work. It wasn't a good plan, as it had a higher likelihood of backfiring. But at the same time, I wanted to end this sooner rather than later.

Christine was silent at that for nearly a minute, a minute that I spent gathering up the reports and putting them back where they'd come from. But eventually, she asked her final question. "And if I don't?"

"Then that's your choice. I won't hold it against you if you don't want to help me. And if you don't want to be here, and you want to leave, then I won't stop you. I made the exact same promise to Jonah, back in the woods. You can trust me on that." I answered with a nod. I had no doubt that she'd probably ask Jonah about that, just to make sure that I wasn't lying to her. But I was confident that he'd tell her the truth. But just in case, I'd bring him up to speed on the situation some time tomorrow. Well, technically speaking later today, as we were probably past midnight at this point.

Christine was quiet for a few seconds after that, before finally sighing and nodding her head. "Ok Tanya, I'll help you."

"Thank you, Christine." I thanked my friend, before leaning over and giving her a reassuring hug. It was a small thing, but it wasn't something she'd been expecting, as she tensed up at my touch, only to relax a second later and return the hug. "Now. How about we go and see if there's any food in the kitchen? Then we can go back inside and go to bed. We've got a busy day tomorrow, and we don't want to be so tired that they figure out that we were snooping around. Right?"

"Right. That sounds nice." Christine agreed as I let go, and started to lead her towards the door. Along the way, she asked me a question that put an idea in my mind. "Hey, do you think that you could introduce me to Alexia? It might help keep me here."

"I don't know. But I'll see what I can do." I assured Christine as we made our way into the corridor, and closed the door behind us. Neither of us noticed the small camera in a dark corner of the room, or the microphone under the desk that recorded the whole conversation. And the fact that their bait had been successfully deployed.