The refuge smelled like rust and old sweat. Something else underneath, sweet and chemical, made Yuna's eyes water.
They'd walked for hours through the grey wasteland, the three moons wheeling overhead in their strange dance, before the structure emerged from the landscape like a bruise. It had been a fortress once, maybe. Or a temple. Something with walls thick enough to survive whatever had killed the rest of this world. Now it was just a collection of shadows held together by desperation, its stones blackened with age and something that looked unpleasantly like old blood.
"Home sweet home," David said, and the bitterness in his voice could have curdled milk.
Two figures stood at what had once been a gate. One was enormous, easily seven feet tall, shoulders like a doorframe, hands that could have palmed Yuna's skull. The other was slight and pale, hair so white it seemed to glow in the dim light. Her eyes tracked Yuna's approach with the flat assessment of someone deciding whether to let a stray dog inside or chase it off with stones.
"You're late," the white-haired one said. Female voice, clipped and cool. "And you brought a tourist."
"She fell through this morning. Grey Wastes, north sector." David's voice had changed. Harder, more guarded. "Hollow almost got her by the old streambed."
"And you just happened to be there."
"I was running the perimeter check you assigned me, Chen Wei. Like I do every third day. Like you know I do."
The woman turned those flat eyes on Yuna. Up close, she was older than she'd first appeared, late twenties or early thirties, with the kind of angular beauty that came from too little food and too much vigilance. A scar ran along her jawline, puckered and white, old enough to have faded but too deep to ever disappear.
"Name."
"Yuna. Yuna Park."
"Earth?"
"Yes."
"How long ago?"
"I—" Yuna had to think. Time had become slippery since she'd fallen through. "This morning. I think. The moons have moved twice since I landed."
Chen Wei's expression didn't change, but something in her posture shifted. "That recently. And you're still standing." She glanced at the large man beside her. "Marcus. What do you think?"
The giant studied Yuna with surprising gentleness. His face was weathered, brown skin lined with scars that didn't look like they'd come from any weapon Yuna recognized. When he spoke, his voice was deep and soft, almost incongruous coming from such a massive frame.
"She's terrified," he said. "But she walked here. That's something."
"That's nothing. Anyone can walk."
"Not everyone chooses to."
Chen Wei made a sound that might have been acknowledgment or might have been dismissal. She stepped aside, gesturing toward the dark entrance behind her. "Fine. She can come in. But she's David's responsibility until she proves she's worth feeding."
She walked into the darkness without looking back.
Marcus lingered a moment longer, his dark eyes meeting Yuna's with something that might have been kindness. "Don't mind her. She's not as cold as she sounds."
"Could have fooled me," David muttered.
"She has." Marcus smiled, just slightly, and followed Chen Wei inside.
The interior of the refuge was worse than the exterior had promised.
Torches guttered in brackets along walls that wept with damp, casting shadows that jumped and shivered. The air was thick with the smell of too many bodies in too small a space. Smoke. Cooking fat. The particular staleness of people who hadn't bathed in longer than they wanted to think about.
Maybe thirty people occupied the main hall, clustered in groups around small fires or huddled against walls with the practiced stillness of those conserving energy. They looked up as David led Yuna through, and she felt their eyes on her like weight, assessing, calculating, deciding whether she was asset or liability.
"Don't stare back," David murmured. "Some of them take it as a challenge."
"What happens if they challenge me?"
"Nothing good. Just keep walking."
They moved through the hall and down a corridor that narrowed as it went, until David stopped at a wooden door so warped with age it barely fit its frame.
"This is mine. You can sleep on the floor until they figure out what to do with you." He pushed the door open, revealing a space barely larger than a closet, empty except for a thin mattress, a wooden crate serving as a table, and a clay pot in the corner that Yuna decided not to think too hard about.
"Luxurious," she said.
David's mouth twitched. "The Ritz didn't survive the Unraveling." He dropped onto the mattress with the boneless exhaustion of someone who'd been running on fumes. "There's water in the jug by the door. Don't drink more than a cup unless you want to explain yourself to the quartermaster."
Yuna found the jug, clay, cracked but holding, and poured herself exactly one cup's worth. The water tasted like minerals and something faintly organic, but it was cleaner than what she'd drunk from the stream. She sat down against the wall, her back protesting, her ribs aching, her entire body screaming for rest she wasn't sure she'd be allowed to take.
"David."
"Yeah."
"What happens now?"
He was silent for long enough that she thought he'd fallen asleep. Then: "Tomorrow they'll test you. See if you can actually feel resonance or if you're just another mouth to feed. If you pass, you get assigned to a work detail. If you fail..." He trailed off.
"What?"
"Nobody talks about what happens if you fail."
The silence stretched. Somewhere in the refuge, someone was crying. Quiet, hopeless sounds that cut through the stone walls like they were made of paper.
"Get some sleep," David said. "You'll need it."
Yuna closed her eyes. Sleep didn't come for a long time.
She dreamed of doors.
White doors. Grey doors. Doors made of light and doors made of nothing at all. She stood before each one, frozen, unable to move forward, unable to turn back. Behind her, something was coming. She could hear it, that whisper-rustle sound the Hollow made, that pressure against her mind like thumbs pressing into her temples.
Move, she screamed at herself. Just move. Just open the door.
But her body wouldn't listen. It never listened. She was always, always too late.
Morning in the refuge was announced by the clang of metal against metal, a sound so harsh Yuna jerked awake with her heart slamming against her bruised ribs.
David was already up, pulling on his strange shifting coat, his face drawn in the grey light filtering through cracks in the ceiling.
"That's the wake-up," he said. "Food in twenty minutes. After that, Chen Wei will want to see you."
Yuna's stomach turned. Whether from hunger or fear, she couldn't tell. "The test."
"Yeah."
"What's it like?"
David paused at the door, not quite looking at her. "It's different for everyone. Just... try not to think about Earth. Don't think about what you lost. That makes it worse."
"How am I supposed to not think about—"
But he was already gone, the warped door swinging shut behind him.
Breakfast was a thin gruel that tasted like despair and nutritional yeast, served in clay bowls that had been used so many times their interiors had worn smooth. Yuna ate mechanically, not tasting anything, aware of the eyes still watching her from across the hall.
A woman approached as she was scraping the last of the gruel from her bowl. Young, maybe Yuna's age, with brown skin and hair cropped close to her skull. Her right arm ended at the elbow, the stump wrapped in clean bandages.
"You're the new one."
"Yes."
"I'm Aria." The woman sat down across from her without waiting for invitation. "Don't worry about Chen Wei. Her bark is worse than her bite. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
Aria shrugged, a motion that somehow conveyed volumes. "She lost her sister to the Hollow about six months back. She's not exactly been warm and fuzzy since." She tilted her head, studying Yuna with frank curiosity. "What did you do? Back on Earth?"
The question caught Yuna off guard. "I—nothing. I worked at a library. Processing returns. Filing."
"No, I mean what did you do? The thing that made you insufficient. The thing that brought you here."
Yuna's throat closed. She looked down at her empty bowl, at her hands gripping its edges, at anything but Aria's too-perceptive eyes.
"Hey." Aria's voice softened. "You don't have to tell me. We've all got ours. I just—" She broke off, glanced toward the corridor that led deeper into the refuge. "The test is easier if you know what yours is. If you can face it instead of running from it. That's all I wanted to say."
She stood, touched Yuna's shoulder briefly with her remaining hand, and walked away.
Yuna sat alone with her empty bowl and the weight of what she couldn't say.
Chen Wei came for her an hour later.
"Follow me."
No greeting. No explanation. Just those two words and then she was walking, expecting Yuna to keep up.
They descended deeper into the refuge, past living quarters and storage rooms and a chamber that smelled like healing herbs and old blood, until they reached a door made of stone rather than wood. Chen Wei pressed her palm against its surface and it swung inward, revealing darkness.
"Inside."
Yuna hesitated. "What's in there?"
"The test." Chen Wei's flat eyes met hers. "You can refuse. No one will stop you from walking back up those stairs and out of the refuge. We don't force anyone."
"What happens if I refuse?"
"You survive as long as you can out there. Alone. Without supplies. Without protection." A pause. "The record is eleven days. Most don't last three."
Yuna looked at the door. At the darkness beyond it. At the choice that wasn't really a choice at all.
She thought of her mother's last words. The door doesn't matter.
She stepped through.
The darkness was absolute.
More than absence of light. It was a presence, pressing against her eyes, her skin, filling her lungs with each breath. Yuna couldn't see her hand in front of her face. Couldn't hear anything except her own heartbeat, her own ragged breathing.
Then the whispers started.
Not words, not exactly. Impressions. Feelings. The same cold, hungry pressure she'd felt from the Hollow by the stream, but deeper now, more invasive, crawling through her thoughts like fingers through sand.
Insufficient, the darkness whispered. Insufficient. Not enough. Never enough. Couldn't even walk through a door.
Yuna's knees buckled. She caught herself on hands and knees, the stone floor freezing against her palms, the darkness pressing down on her like a physical weight.
She died alone. Your mother died alone because you were too scared to be there. Too weak. Too insufficient.
"Stop," Yuna gasped.
You let her die. You let her die. You let her—
"STOP!"
The word tore out of her, and with it something else. A heat that started in her chest and exploded outward, pushing back the darkness for just a moment, just a fraction of a second.
In that fraction, she saw.
Threads. Thousands of them, millions of them, silver-gold and impossibly thin, stretching from her body in every direction like a spider's web. They connected her to the walls, to the floor, to the darkness itself. Some were bright and vibrant. Others were grey and faded, barely visible.
And one, one thread thicker than the others, pulsing with a light that was almost painful to look at, stretched behind her. Back the way she'd come. Up through the refuge, through the grey wastes, through the portal, all the way to Earth.
All the way to a hospital room where a white door still waited for her to walk through.
Mom.
The thread flared. The darkness screamed.
And then the stone door was swinging open behind her, grey light flooding in, and Chen Wei was saying something but Yuna couldn't hear it, couldn't hear anything over the roaring in her ears and the tears streaming down her face and the terrible, wonderful, impossible realization that her mother wasn't gone.
She was still connected.
They were all still connected.
Yuna sat on the floor of the testing chamber for a long time afterward.
Chen Wei had left her there. "Take as long as you need." But the words had been different than before. Less cold. Almost concerned.
The threads were gone now, or at least invisible again, but Yuna could still feel them. A faint pressure at the edges of her awareness, like the memory of a sound just below the threshold of hearing.
Resonance, she thought. That's what they call it. That's what I felt.
Her mother's research. All those papers about consciousness and connection that no one had taken seriously. All those nights when she'd tried to explain to a teenage Yuna that separation was illusion, that everything was connected, that if only you could feel the threads you'd understand.
Her mother had known. Somehow, impossibly, her mother had known about this. Had been trying to tell her, all those years, and Yuna hadn't listened.
But she was listening now.
David found her in the corridor outside the testing chamber, her back against the wall, her eyes staring at nothing.
"You passed," he said. "Obviously. You're not dead."
Yuna didn't respond.
He slid down the wall to sit beside her. For a while, neither of them spoke.
"I felt her," Yuna finally said. "My mother. She's dead, she's been dead for three months, but I felt her. Like there's still a thread connecting us."
David was quiet for a moment. Then: "That's how it works. The connections don't break just because someone dies. They fade, eventually, but they don't break."
"How do you know?"
"Because I felt my brother. When I took the test." His voice was rough. "He was eight years old. Drowned in a pond I was supposed to be watching. And I felt him down there, in the dark. Still connected to me. Still..." He stopped, swallowed. "Still there."
Yuna turned to look at him. In the grey light, he looked younger than he had before. More fragile.
"Does it help?" she asked. "Knowing they're still there?"
"Some days." He met her eyes. "Some days it makes it worse."
They sat in silence as the refuge creaked and groaned around them, as voices echoed from distant corridors, as the three moons continued their eternal dance overhead.
"Chen Wei wants to see you again," David said eventually. "Now that you've passed. She'll want to assign you somewhere. Figure out what you're good for."
"What am I good for?"
"We'll find out." He stood, offering her his hand. "That's kind of the whole point of being here. Nobody knows what they're good for when they arrive. That's why they call us insufficient."
Yuna took his hand and let him pull her to her feet.
Her ribs still ached. Her body still screamed for rest. But somewhere beneath all of that, something had shifted. A crack in the wall she'd built around herself, letting in light she hadn't known was there.
She wasn't okay. She was nowhere close to okay. But for the first time since she'd stood frozen in that hospital hallway, she could imagine a future where okay might be possible.
And that was enough. For now, that was enough.