I felt a hand covering mine. “Just breathe slowly,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.” He settled in to sit beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off his body and the stiff fabric of his coat. “Do you remember,” he said, falling into the calm and easy tone of a storyteller, “I think it was last year. “

I withdrew my hand from his and ran it briefly through my hair. The wisps framing my face were wet from sweat and tears, although I didn’t remember crying. How long had I been sitting there on the ground? How long had we been there, together? “Rodney, I…” I started, uncomfortably, shifting in my crouched position. “I…well, thank you. I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here. ” I let out a nervous laugh to break the tension, and half covered my face with my hands. “Rodney, you must think I’m insane.”

“I don’t think that,” he said, and I could hear him shifting, standing up, and a moment later fingers brushed my wrist to alert me that he was holding out his hand to help lift me to my feet. I took it, and we stood together for a moment in the dark. “Honestly,” he said in a low voice, “I’m scared of this place, too. Anyone would be. People weren’t meant to live inside a pit, and that’s why our minds are telling us we need to go. To get out in the open before we strangle. Fear is a very useful thing sometimes.”

I gave the hand still holding mine an affectionate squeeze before letting it drop. “You sound like my brother. He says that kind of thing all the time.” I’d meant it as a compliment, but couldn’t tell how Rodney had reacted, blind as we both were in the darkness. And a moment later, he surprised me completely when he said, “well, there’s no way for us to make it through the tunnel if we can’t see. Although,” his voice went flat, “there’s not much likelihood of us getting the combination lock on the door open this way, either.” He sighed, and gave a bark of harsh laughter. “This was a pretty stupid design.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure it was done this way on purpose. Do you remember when that group of people from Juniper snuck in to old Alpha Colony? It was still during the Civil War, and they were collecting information, going back and forth, reporting on the movements of the troops we sent out to the surface. That’s why our raids always failed, you know. Well, of course you know that - your dad was in charge of security back then. God,” I shook my head in memory, although feeling calmer with every word I spoke, “when he figured out what was going on…” Rodney’s father had discovered the spies by accident, when ___. “Anyway,” I veered, casting an unconscious glance around me, “they designed it like this, impossible to get through in the dark, because anyone sneaking in isn’t likely to draw attention to themselves with a flashlight or a candle. That’s why there are windows in the door - so the light will shine through and alert whoever sees it inside the colony.”

“But it’s a dead-end - no one ever comes down this far, anyway, unless they’re a trader.”

“So? You and I and everyone in the Burrow knows that. But that’s not who it’s meant to deter. Anyway,” I planted my hands on my hips, frowning, “I remember…we had this problem before, when the Inventory folks were doing transitioning staff and kept forgetting to pack us a light. I stuck one here in the walls in case it ever happened again. It’s somewhere…” And raising my hands out before me, feeling my way through the dark, I went over to the far wall and ran my hands along it, my fingers searching for the long crevice inside which I’d hidden the flashlight some months before.

We walked together, guided by that narrow beacon of light, scrambling through the sand and clay and loose, unstratified gravel that caused our feet to skid with every step. Rodney was quiet except for the sound of labored breathing, his eyes trained on the ground, concentrating on picking out his steps. But I was a bit more stable on my feet. And my eyes roamed wildly around the walls and low, jagged ceiling of the tunnel in fear, but also wonder.

We’d been transported. The ceiling above of us was hung with a billowing stone drapery, whose decorative folds hung down nearly six inches like the arciform edges of a cloud. They had been created over countless decades by hard water dripping slowly, slowly, percolating down from the surface. Only Rodney ad I and a handful of traders had ever seen this before; it was as though the earth, as Rodney said, knew we weren’t meant to live underground, and it took pity, and tried to create for us a picture of the open sky we had all been forced to abandon. And I stared openly at it in wonder, the way I always did, searching it for some memory of the floating blue ocean I always heard people reminiscing about, but the formation was hard and unmoving, and nothing like the gentle waves I imagined when I thought about the sky.

“Rodney,” I offered hesitantly, breaking the pleasant silence around us. “You and I are the same age. What can you remember, from the Time Before?”

It was a strange question to be asking, and I could see a flash of confused surprise pass across his face. Talking about life on the surface was something the older generation did, people who had spent the majority of their lives on the outside. They would always belong to that world. And the kids who had been born either in Alpha Colony or the Burrow would know that world only through stories. But Rodney and I belonged to a lost generation, I thought. And it seemed to me that we could decide to either give ourselves to the Burrow, or live in longing for the lives we had started on the surface, and seen snatched away. And I thought we would have to choose one or the other, because trying to hold both in your mind at once would be rather like expecting a bird to live underwater, or a fish up in a tree.

“Well,” he started, thinking aloud as we labored up a shallow incline, “I remember a lot, actually.” The words came haltingly between labored breaths. “I remember everything.”

“What’s your earliest memory?”

He hesitated for a moment and passed me a sideways glance, causing him to momentarily lose his balance as his foot landed in one of the odd circles of cave coral that littered the tunnel floor, shattering it like porcelain. But he managed to recover on the next step. “My mother,” he said. “I remember her tying my shoes. I think I was two or three at the time.”

I’d never heard Rodney or his father talk much about his mother. I knew almost nothing about her, just what Theo had mentioned in passing; that she’d had dark hair, that she and Ryan had been married after knowing each other for only three days, and that from the time of their wedding until the day she died, Ryan had been utterly in love and devoted to her.

I could tell the subject made Rodney a bit uncomfortable, but felt compelled to ask anyway, “what was she like?”

“She was…” he shrugged lightly, “she was very nice. She liked to eat apples. I ever knew her much better than that, though; she died when I was five.” And guessing my next question in advance, he told me, “someone broke in while my dad was deployed overseas. Two men, actually. They…well,” again, he shrugged, unable to find the right words and simply settling for saying, “she died.” And then he was silent.

I remember everything Rodney had said. And I knew that was true. He had an eidetic memory, I remembered being partnered with him on a number of projects for school over the years. He’d tutored me on tests. Rodney was a near genius because once he saw or heard something, even in passing, it was emblazoned in his mind forever and could be recalled with perfect clarity at will. And I, who had always struggled to memorize the (geography, physics) had always envied him for it. I remember everything. Now I could see that for the curse it was.

We walked along in silence. My eyes roamed idly over the tunnel walls, the flowstone hanging in the corners where the ceiling sloped into the walls. Spigots of water, frozen in time, their ends hung loose like tattered threads. They were beautiful. But I hardly noticed them. My mind was reeling, trying to grasp the gravity of Rodney’s life. We had lived next door to each other for ten years, and this was the first time that I felt close to him in the slightest. There were in fact times when I had listened through the walls to make sure he left his house in the morning before I did, so we wouldn’t have to walk together. So I wouldn’t be seen with pudgy, apple-faced, stringy-haired Rodney. What was wrong with me?

“What else do you remember?” I asked, shifting the topic to break the anxious air that had settled over us. “From the time before, I mean.”

“There’s a lot,” he said with the same light tone he always had, as if he were talking about nothing more meaningful or consequential than what he’d had for breakfast. “My house, my bedroom, my teacher - what do you want to know?”

“I just…I mean, I can’t remember anything. I don’t have a mind like yours. The earliest memory I have is my mother passing me down the ladder into Alpha Colony - do you remember that thing? It was horrible. It was mostly rust and duct tape, I hope they’ve gotten rid of it by now. And I guess I remember the surface a little bit - I remember seeing white light glowing on the walls of the tunnel I was lowering down into, and then that light was just a…a perfect circle, way above me, like I was looking up from the bottom of a well - which I guess is pretty true, isn’t it? And then they slid the cover on, and the light was gone, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen sunlight again. It’s not the same as what gets projected down through the light shafts. That light is thin. I’m talking about actual sunlight, unadulerated. Shining. What’s that like?”

Rodney smiled sadly. He knew exactly what I was talking about. “It’s warm,” he said. “It’s warmer than anything down here. Not like a blanket - that’s your own heat, just trapped around you. This is something completely external. It’s…well, it’s like someone touching you when their hands are warmed up from cooking, or a candle, or some sort of heat. Only they’re touching you all over, and all at once. At least,” he shrugged, a little embarassed now, “I mean, that’s how I remember it. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

By now I could see the metal links of the trader’s cage, glinting in the flashlight’s crystaline beam, and a dark figure standing beyond it. The trader from Juniper. Rodney could see it, too, and I saw all the color draining from his face, and his eyes go wide. I’d seen it before - especially among the newer Traders, the stress of the transaction and the confines of the cage took them this way sometimes. And above all, it was meeting face to face your enemy. People who had killed your friends and family. Murderers. Given what Rodney had told me about his mother, I could imagine how difficult it would be for him.

I reached out and took his hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. His palm was slick with sweat. As we approached, I could see the representative from Juniper more clearly. I didn’t recognize him. He had his arms crossed over his chest, and was sitting on a large wooden crate I assumed contained the glass shards we could use to fix the plate. I wondered idly how heavy it was - obviously that’s why they’d opted to send two of us, but I was a little doubtful about even our ability to carry it back.

I looked at the man’s face, obscured partially by the layers of chain link fence, and tried to size him up. “Do you know him?” I asked aside to Rodney, low enough so that our voices wouldn’t carry to the other man.

Silently, Rodney shook his head. His fingers dug into the back of my hand, pressing so hard it hurt.

“He’s going to try and change the terms,” I said with certainty, watching the other man. “You can always tell - look how rigid he’s holding himself. He’s getting ready to argue for it. And they know they’ve got us in corner in terms of how bad we need that crate. I’ll bet he tries to double his pull. Bastards from Juniper always try to pull this.”

Mentally, I squared my shoulders. Part of me had been expecting this to happen, for them to try and change the trade terms at the last minute. And it was my job as a Trader to make sure they couldn’t do it. A lot of people thought that trading was mostly about ferrying goods back and forth, sticking to the terms set by the keepers of the Inventory, but there was so much more to it than that. The trader’s cage was the only place left where people from different colonies came together. And it was never a pleasant experience. This was war by other means. The scarcity of resources meant that every nut, every bolt, every piece of fabric Juniper had was one less thing for the people of the Burrow. There were winners and losers but never a draw, and it was my job to make sure we always came out on the winning side. So far, my record was good. Normally it was because I made them the believe I would walk away if they tried to change the terms at the last minute. And once or twice, I had actually done so. But that wasn’t likely in this situation, given what we all knew as in that box, and how badly we needed it.

“Here’s what I want you to do, Rodney,” I whispered low, and slowed our pace. The cage was less than twenty feet in front of us. “I’ll be the one to go inside the cage. Only one of us can go in, that’s the rule, but you stay just behind me. He’s not going to buy our crap about indifference, so we need to make him think we’ve been hit harder by the attack than we actually have been. Make him think we’ve lost a good deal of our inventory, so he won’t bother going after it. And who knows, maybe he’ll take pity and well come out even better than we thought. It’s happened before.”

Our hands were still intertwined. I shook Rodney’s arm to get his attention. “Rodney, did you hear me? Do you understand what we’re doing here?” He was staring straight ahead, deathly pale, with a sheen of sweat falling heavy around his temples. “Rodney?”

“Hey,” I heard a course voice from the other side of the trader’s cage calling. The man hit the fencing twice with his hand, signaling us. “Which of you is it?”

“Me,” I called back, but my eyes were fixed on Rodney, whose hand had turned ice cold in mine. I asked him lowly, “Rodney, look at me - are you okay?”

He was shivering, staring at the cage and the man who leaned against it with his hands resting idly among the links and glowering at us. “He’s trying to intimidate you,” I said. “They all do that. You remember the training.”

I put my hands on his shoulders and came about to stand in front of him, locking my eyes with his. “Just stay here, okay? Let me take care of this, and we’ll be heading home in a few minutes. Just keep quiet.”

I unhooked the backpack from his arms and slung it over my own shoulder, then turned around and approached the cage. The man from Juniper watched me through slitted eyes. Trying to frighten me. It wouldn’t work.

I beat the fence twice with my hand, returning his signal in brief formality. “Are you ready?” I asked in a cold voice. And without responding, he lifted the latch on the door in front of him, and I lifted the latch on mine. And we both stepped inside the Trader’s cage. I closed the door behind me.