When Mavis arrived back at the underground complex, she was still in a sullen mood. To an outside observer it may have seemed like everything had been a failure. But the commanders all knew the mission had been a resounding success, for they had received radio communications about it.

  As Mavis descended the stairwell inside the vertical shaft, she heard nothing but the wind howling through the ruins of the complex above. It was almost night— dark cloud loomed overhead. This shaft was exposed to the elements, unlike other deeper ones which she had seen inside. Perhaps at one point, this would have been internal too. Nowadays though, it was used as an entry and exit.

  Finally Mavis reached a heavy steel door. She knocked twice.

  The mechanism grinded and screeched as someone inside unbolted the lock and then twisted the handle. Warm light streamed out. Mavis helped the door open, and then stepped inside.

  It was the same procedure. Get undressed, new clothes – she hadn’t realised the old ones had absorbed fine particles of ash within the fibres, but now seeing others inside with their clean clothes, she realised how bad it was. She washed her hands and face in a nearby basin.

  Then when she was finished, she stepped out into the next room, and to her surprise, was greeted with a cheer and applause. All of the commanders from the briefing room were there, along with Francis, Monica and Sam.

  “Well done!”

  “Great job out there!”

  “Thank you!”

  “We owe you!”

  Any doubts any of them may have had were completely gone. They were all now thoroughly invested in their cause, and the decision which had been made.

  Mavis felt her spirits lift, basking in their gratitude. She looked away from them awkwardly. “It was nothing, really…”

  General Arnold stepped forward towards her, to speak for the group, as the applause died down. “Like I said before, anything we can offer is yours. We’re so grateful you’re here – on behalf of all of us, thank you. I hope you’ll like it here and decide to stay.”

  “It’s been great, really…” Mavis reassured him, finding it hard to meet his gaze. It was only a partial truth. She had trouble letting go of her feelings of inadequacy. Surely, it would get better though, just like Francis had said.

  The General stepped back to converse with his colleagues as they split off into small groups and dispersed. Before he left the room, he eyed Monica, Sam and Francis going over to speak with Mavis. They were more her age. It would be good if she made some friends here.

  “Hey, how was it out there!’ Sam rushed over to Mavis excitedly.

  “Uhh, you know, the usual…” Mavis was slightly taken aback. “Foggy, overcast…”

  “No, I mean the battle!” Sam rummaged in pocket and retrieved a photo, showing it to her. His tone of voice was now very serious. “Did you see him? Matthew— he’s my cousin. He’s in that regiment.”

  Mavis squinted at the ragged picture which had been folded and unfolded many times. She recognised him immediately. “Oh, yeah, he’s… that guy.” The young guy she had saved from that bullet, who had almost shat himself while speaking to her.

  “Is he alive?” Sam asked.

  “Yes – I saved his life.” Mavis responded, then added: “though he wasn’t very grateful,” muttering under her breath.

  “What was that?” Monica piped up.

  “Oh, nothing.” Mavis turned away. She didn’t want to resent Matthew, especially now she knew he was related to Sam. But the way she had left things… what she had last said to him... She couldn’t help but obsess over what he thought of her, like it was some kind of contagion that might now infect Sam and the others. And she couldn’t help but think that maybe it would have been better if he had died.

  “Come, let’s go to the rec room.” Monica offered, seeing the sulky expression descend on Mavis’s face.

  ??????

  They arrived at the rec room to the sound of laughter and the sharp, familiar snap of playing cards on a table.

  It was one of the few places in the complex that didn’t feel like a war room or a corridor of ghosts. The walls were still concrete and the lights still fluorescent, but someone had tried. A corkboard was pinned with faded photographs and hand-drawn cartoons. A radio sat on a shelf that no one dared turn on too loud. A few battered couches had been dragged into a crooked semicircle around a low table. People sat with mugs and tin cups, hunched forward over cards like the act itself could keep the world from ending.

  Conversation dipped when Monica pushed the door open.

  Then it dipped further when Mavis stepped in behind her.

  Every head turned. Every smile froze halfway.

  Monica didn’t slow down. She walked straight in like she owned the room, as if the air didn’t just tighten and the temperature didn’t just drop from nerves alone.

  “Okay,” Monica announced, clapping her hands once. “New rule. Nobody makes it weird.”

  A few uneasy chuckles—thin and polite.

  Monica turned to Mavis, her grin wide, too bright. “Do you know any card games?”

  Mavis looked at the tables, then at the cards, then back at Monica. “No.”

  Sam laughed. “None? Not even… I don’t know… poker?”

  Mavis shook her head, expression stiff with embarrassment. “I know… what cards are. I’ve seen them.”

  “That counts,” Monica said, as if it absolutely did. She hooked her arm through Mavis’s and guided her toward the nearest table before anyone could decide to relocate. “Come on. We’ll teach you something easy.”

  At the table were four people. They looked up like they’d just been told the ceiling might collapse.

  One was a lanky man with a bandage around his hand. Another was a woman with tired eyes and a cigarette she wasn’t allowed to light. The third was a broad-shouldered soldier with a shaved head and the kind of stare that had seen too much and didn’t want to see any more. The last was a younger girl with a knit cap pulled low, cheeks red from the bunker’s dry air.

  Monica leaned in, cheerful and casual.

  “Guys, this is Mavis,” she said, like she was introducing someone new at a party. “Mavis—this is Leo, Rina, Cole, and Tessa.”

  They all nodded in stiff unison.

  Mavis stared at each of them, trying to mimic what she’d seen people do. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” Tessa squeaked, eyes wide.

  Rina’s gaze flicked to Mavis’s hands, then away. “Hello,” she said, voice careful.

  Cole just grunted, but he didn’t get up.

  Monica dragged a chair out and thumped it down beside hers. “Sit. You’re with us.”

  Mavis sat, awkwardly holding her shoulders too straight, like she was bracing for a blow that never came.

  Monica picked up the deck and began shuffling. “We’re playing—” she glanced around, thinking, “—Go Fish. Because if we try to teach you anything more complicated, Sam will start lecturing and we’ll all die of boredom.”

  Sam put a hand to his chest in mock offence. “I would not.”

  “You would,” Monica said, then turned to the table with a grin that turned sharp at the edges. “Also, be nice. She’ll kill you if you’re not.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  The room went so quiet the shuffle stopped sounding like a game and started sounding like a threat.

  Monica’s grin widened. “And by that, I mean—” she nudged Mavis with her shoulder playfully, “—you need to let us win a few games, right?”

  Mavis blinked. Then, slowly, she let out a small, confused laugh—like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to.

  “Right,” she said, unsure if it was a joke or an order.

  A few people in the room exhaled, relieved at the sound of her laughter more than Monica’s words.

  Monica dealt the cards.

  The first few rounds were clumsy. Mavis didn’t understand why she was asking for “threes” or why anyone cared about “books.” She held her cards too tightly, bending the corners. She stared at faces too long, as if trying to see through them. Every time someone reached across the table, their muscles tightened like they expected to be punished for existing too close to her.

  But Monica kept it moving—quick jokes, quick explanations, quick reroutes whenever the air started to get heavy.

  “No, Mavis, you can’t just take the card you want,” Sam said gently after she reached across and plucked one from Leo’s hand.

  Leo went pale.

  Mavis frowned. “Why not? It’s faster.”

  “Because,” Monica cut in, “then it’s not a game.”

  Mavis looked down at the cards as if the concept offended her. “Then why play?”

  Tessa, surprising everyone including herself, murmured: “Because… it feels normal.”

  Mavis lifted her gaze to the girl. There was no malice in it, just a strange intensity. “Normal,” she repeated, tasting the word.

  A beat passed.

  Then Mavis nodded, as if she’d accepted a rule of physics.

  “Okay,” she said, and waited her turn.

  By the time the deck had been reshuffled twice, something shifted. Not trust—nothing so clean. But familiarity. People started speaking without checking her face first. Leo even laughed when Mavis asked, dead serious, “If I have the fish, why do I keep asking for it?”

  Monica had tears in her eyes from laughing. “Because you’re not fishing for fish, you’re fishing for cards.”

  Mavis sat back, lips quirking. “That’s stupid.”

  “It is,” Sam agreed. “That’s why it’s good.”

  For a while, Mavis forgot to listen for fear in the room. She forgot to measure every breath. She forgot the cold outside and the ash and the way the world had ended.

  When she won her first “book,” she looked up sharply, almost startled.

  “I won,” she said.

  Monica slapped the table. “She won! Great, now she’s never going to shut up about it.”

  Mavis’s smile flickered—small, real, and gone almost as soon as it appeared.

  But it had been there.

  Later, when the rec room began to thin and people drifted off to their quarters, Monica stretched and stood.

  “Alright,” she said, yawning. “Before Mavis figures out how to cheat without touching the cards, we’re calling it.”

  Mavis rose too, quieter now. She didn’t say goodnight. She didn’t know if that was something people did.

  Francis wasn’t there. She noticed that as she left.

  Back in her room, she shut the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment, listening to the muffled hum of the bunker—pipes, footsteps, distant voices.

  Then she crossed to the bed, sat, and lay back. Sleep took her quickly.

  No floating island. No telephone. No twin-faced girl reaching for her throat.

  Just darkness.

  Just silence.

  ??????

  In the morning, Mavis woke with a strange clarity. The lack of a dream felt wrong, like waking to find a familiar scar missing.

  She showered again—because she could—and dressed, and as she dried her hair with a towel she remembered something that had snagged at her yesterday, like a hook in the mind: a door in a quiet hallway. Unmarked. Locked. But calling to her in a way she couldn’t explain.

  The feeling had faded, but the memory hadn’t.

  She left her room and went looking for Francis.

  She found him in a corridor near the administrative wing, speaking to a junior officer who practically fled when he saw her approach.

  “Mavis,” Francis said, relieved. “Morning.”

  “Morning,” she replied, then hesitated. “There’s a room. Yesterday. Near… the briefing area. It felt… strange.”

  Francis’s expression changed—subtle, but immediate. “What kind of strange?”

  “Like it was… looking at me.” Mavis frowned. “Or like something inside it was.”

  Francis went very still. “You mean… the sealed corridor?”

  “I don’t know,” Mavis snapped, frustrated. “I don’t know what you call it. I just remember it.”

  Francis nodded slowly, then said carefully: “I think you’re talking about the device.”

  “The device.” The words rolled off Mavis’s tongue like it was a disappointing, arbitrary expression that didn’t reveal anything about the mystery she sought to understand.

  “The root telephone,” Francis said, voice low.

  Mavis stared at him. “Telephone?”

  He began walking, and she followed, their footsteps echoing down the hall. “It’s… old. Not old like a relic. Old like it doesn’t belong to us at all.”

  They reached the corridor. Francis stopped at the door.

  It was exactly the one.

  Mavis’s chest tightened. “This.”

  Francis nodded. “This.”

  She reached for the handle as if she might tear it off without thinking, then looked at him. “It’s locked.”

  “I can call for the key,” Francis said quickly. “It’s easier than breaking in. They’d just make us repair it later, and it’s not like they’ll deny you access.”

  Mavis’s mouth tightened. “I could open it.”

  “I know,” Francis said softly. “But… let’s do it the normal way. Just this once.”

  Mavis stared at the door a moment longer, then stepped back with a curt nod. “Fine.”

  Francis keyed his radio, requested access. While they waited, he spoke—quietly, like the walls might be listening.

  “My father only knew pieces,” he said. “He was told it was connected to the experiment that created you. Before everything ended, it was operational. A communication device. Not with other bunkers or satellites or anything human. With… something distant.”

  Mavis’s throat went dry. “With who.”

  Francis swallowed. “He said… an advanced civilisation. Maybe not even from here. And that it was activated in the 1950s when someone from that world visited Earth.” The telephone was inactive now, though perhaps not destroyed, as otherwise how had it endured so many wars throughout history? Perhaps, Mavis had the ability to reactivate it.

  Mavis felt her skin prickle. Golden hair in a test tube. A name spoken over a newborn in a glass chamber. A life that had never been hers.

  “And you think I’m—” she started.

  “A clone,” Francis said, voice barely above a whisper. “Of that visitor. That’s what the old files implied.”

  Mavis’s jaw clenched so hard it hurt. She knew the word. She had heard it many times when she was growing up. She knew what it meant - a copy. But of whom? She had never quite figured out how it related to her, until now. None of the scientists had told her. They had always avoided talking to her about it when she had asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn't know,” Francis said. “I only found out recently. I'll never stop being surprised with some of the secrets my dad has kept from me, but with this one, even he wasn't sure if it was true. It sounded insane to me.”

  Footsteps approached—multiple. General Arnold wasn’t among them, but Agent Palmer was, flanked by the cropped-hair woman and two security officers with keycards and a physical key, like they didn’t trust electronics alone.

  Palmer’s eyes went from Francis to Mavis to the door. He knew this day would come eventually, but he hadn't expected it to be so soon after she had arrived. “You want access.”

  Mavis didn’t look at him. “Open it.”

  The key turned. The lock clicked. The door swung inward.

  Inside was a small room with a desk bolted to the floor.

  And on it—

  A black handset.

  Mavis’s blood went cold.

  It was the same as her dreams. The same shape, the same weight in the air, the same wrongness that made her skin feel too tight.

  She stepped forward, slow. Everyone behind her held their breath.

  Mavis reached out and picked up the receiver.

  For a moment, it hummed in her hand, like an animal waking, negotiating her compatibility. She didn’t know how to use it. She’d never used something like this before. She lifted it to her ear.

  She didn’t even get a chance to speak.

  Pain detonated in her mind—sharp, invasive, total. It wasn’t like a headache. It was like something had driven a spike through her thoughts and twisted.

  Mavis’s knees hit the floor.

  The receiver clattered from her hand, but the pain didn’t stop. She doubled over, choking on a sound that wasn’t quite a scream.

  Behind her, voices erupted, agitated, unsure of what to do.

  “Mavis!”

  “Get back—!”

  “Shut the door—!”

  She couldn’t hear them properly. The world narrowed to white-hot pressure inside her skull.

  Mavis forced herself upright, shaking, and snatched the receiver again with a snarl. She tried to snap it in half.

  It didn’t bend. It didn’t crack. It didn’t even complain.

  Her anger surged. She swung it down onto the desk.

  The desk shattered, wood and metal exploding into pieces.

  The handset remained intact.

  The pain intensified, punishing her for touching it, for existing near it.

  Mavis’s vision swam. Rage and fear tangled together until she couldn’t tell them apart.

  She focused on it—on the material, on the molecules, on the way she always understood the world when she tore it apart.

  Nothing.

  The table disintegrated further. The floor beneath it rippled and fractured, becoming sand.

  But the handset wouldn’t yield.

  It was like trying to tear apart a concept.

  She knew, with sudden certainty, that the device was hurting her. It wasn’t an accident. It was doing something.

  In desperation she did the only thing left—she pushed back, not at the matter, but at whatever presence was pressing into her mind. A brute-force rejection, to shut it off, to contain it, to disconnect it, to terminate it.

  The pain eased by a fraction.

  Mavis pushed again. Harder. Like slamming a door against an intruder.

  It eased again—still unbearable, but less.

  She kept pushing, teeth clenched, eyes squeezed shut, breath coming in violent bursts.

  Again.

  Again.

  Bit by bit, the agony dulled, receding like a tide forced away from shore.

  Finally—silence.

  Mavis sagged, trembling, the handset heavy in her lap.

  She looked up.

  Francis stood nearest, pale with worry, but rooted in place like he was afraid his movement might trigger her.

  Behind him, Palmer and the others stared with expressions that couldn’t decide whether to be triumphant or terrified.

  “Mavis…” Francis said carefully. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  Mavis’s eyes flicked from him to the generals—suspicion flaring. Had they set this up? Was it some kind of weapon they had wanted to use against her?

  No— she had wanted to come here. She had asked for it. She remembered the dreams. She remembered what Francis had said – it was a communication device, that had been active before the war, but now wasn’t. She obviously hadn’t been able to re-activate it. Maybe it had been damaged? Or maybe she was just… incompatible, for whatever reason.

  And now… the room felt different.

  That sensation was gone. The strange radiance that had seeped through the door yesterday had vanished.

  The handset sat in her lap like an ordinary object—except it wasn’t ordinary. It was made of something she couldn’t manipulate. Couldn’t break. Couldn’t dissolve. Still, even now, she could not have any effect on it.

  It was a piece of the past that refused her.

  Mavis swallowed, voice low and rough. “It’s… nothing.”

  She looked down at the receiver again, then back up at Francis.

  “It’s dead,” she said. “And it hates me.”