A few years ago I decided I needed something to keep me busy, so I started helping out at the Colony’s greenhouse. I like to think of it as a vacation of sorts. We walk the same routes every day, glancing over the same scenery and acknowledging the same faces without question. It’s mind-numbing, desensitizing. The garden helps me escape the thick walls and the rigid structure of the Colony by giving me a place of color and tranquility. The smell of the rich, loamy soil always sits deep in the back of my throat. Sometimes it’s enough to help me pretend I’m not caged down here.

I pass a number of open doors along the way to the greenhouse but I keep my eyes low and my chin tucked to avoid conversation. My feet bumble across the sleek sheet metal floor and I catch my reflection between my feet multiple times. Chubby cheeks bounce slightly as I walk, and I feel my face reddening upon the realization. Nutritionists like Rylan keep us alive, but didn’t do me any favors when they assigned high calorie diets to all members of the Med Ward. I quicken my pace while shuffling my feet faster to avoid catching any more inadvertent glances along the way.

Mabel is always the first person to greet me at the greenhouse. She’s been the head gardener since the Colony established our agricultural section many years ago. The elderly Mabel extends her arms as I cross the threshold from Colony to garden. We embrace. I smile, closing my eyes and inhaling Mabel’s earthy perfume deep into my lungs. The familiar scent of the gardener makes me feel at home.

“Hello, my dear!” Mabel exclaims as she backs out of the hug. “It’s good to see you again. Rupert’s arrival feels like ages ago. Come to the garden to relax for a bit?”

“You couldn’t keep me away if you tried,” I say with a smile. Mabel giggles and I move towards a small wooden box filled with hand tools. Many of them are worn and broken. “Is there anything you’d like me to take care of today?”

Mabel shakes her head. “Nothing in particular. I trust your judgment. If it looks ripe, pick it!” she says with a smile. Her frail hands shake as she speaks, and the hunch in her back forces her to crane her neck to speak eye to eye with anyone. Regardless, her garden is always kept in remarkable shape.

With my trowel in hand I turn away from the smiling gardener towards the seemingly endless rows of vegetables. I grab a large pail from the ground near the first row of carrots, and begin down the metallic, grated path. Some of the rows ahead sit empty, while small stalks of various green plants sprout from others. Even though it may look like a waste of space, I’m sure Mabel has a plan for each square inch of this massive food plot. I pass strawberries growing above ground on my left, and potatoes growing underground on my right. The arrangement of the plants seems random, but again, I’m sure Mabel has a reason for putting each food where they are. They each have a home somewhere in the greenhouse, as well as a home in the stomachs of the Colony’s residents.

The garden stretches long down the open grow room, but isn’t all that wide. It grows enough fruits and vegetables to supplement the nutrient-packed mush we eat for most meals, but doesn’t produce enough to serve as our primary food source. I’ve been told by older Colony members that the greenhouse is smaller than the size of a football field, although I’ve never seen a real football field and I’ve only ever watched video recordings of the game being played. The few times I’ve seen it played I do recall rooting for the team dressed in green and gold.

Our garden is tucked deep under the residential section of the Colony. Rows of lights are scattered above the grow beds to insure plants are kept at optimum temperatures, counteracting how far underground the greenhouse sits. Shovels, hoes, rakes, and trowels line the walls, hanging on various hooks and shelves. The room is stacked with enough weaponry for an army of gardeners to do their worst at a moments notice. The heavy yellow light glints off the back of a nearby shovel as I move past. A bead of sweat forms along my hairline and trickles down across my temple. I think about taking off my thick purple sweater, but then remember the reflections from my walk here and decide I’d rather just leave it on.

I harvest a half-dozen carrots from the row on my left, dusting the dirt off and dropping them into my empty bucket. I pass over the potatoes, knowing they won’t be ready yet after just harvesting a large batch last week. I stoop low, driving my hand shovel into the dirt. A few ruby red ripe radishes find their way into my bucket, followed by pea pods and a hand full of cherry tomatoes.

My mind wanders as I pick and primp. I roll clumps of soil between my index finger and my thumb, reducing them to a fine powder. A few other gardeners make their way past me as I crouch low to the crops, pruning away dead leaves. I recognize a good number of the other gardeners as I make my way through the rows, most of them from past garden visits, some from the hallways of the Colony. A few new gardeners catch my eye. A handsome young man with brown hair and a rather muscular build crouches next to a short, lean woman with long black curls resting on her shoulders. They are both positioned over the spinach ahead. They look to be in their early twenties, like me, but I don’t recognize them. They must be from a different part of the Colony. I don’t make it to the East section that often.

I characteristically keep my head low as I politely nod and slink around the pair partially blocking the isle. The young man looks up from his bucket of spinach and smiles weakly as I pass. His vibrant green eyes catch mine, and I feel my cheeks flush as the handsome man notices the normally invisible me. I press past the spinach in a hurry.

Moving towards the back side of the spinach garden, I hear two women talking on the far side of the tomatoes. “…you hear about the alarms last night?”

“Of course I heard the alarm. It woke the entire Colony! Strange if you ask me. Hear anything new about what might have happened?”

The first woman nods. “I heard that they found a breech! A hole in the ceiling, off in the closed sectors out past the East section. Dirt on the floor, hole in the ceiling.”

“Something broke in?” the woman squeals.

“No, no. Nothing broke in anywhere. Those tunnels haven’t been used for ages. It was one of the passages that we blocked off to conserve heat once the housing shuffle settled. No one’s been in there for quite a while. The wall’s probably been busted for years, that’s my guess. Needless to say, they still haven’t figured out what set the alarm off. Probably faulty wiring. This place is getting old.” The spinach looks picked over, and I move on.

After more than an hour of picking and sweating, I return to the mouth of the greenhouse where Mabel waits. She smiles as she inspects my large heap of vegetables and fruits I’ve collected. I place my bucket near a host of others scattered around the floor, all filled with their own edible finds waiting to be washed and sent to the kitchens or the storage center. Canned food has never been my favorite, but I understand how much fresh food would go to waste without our canning experts.

Mabel offers a final hug as I prepare to leave the greenhouse, which I accept. Trowel in hand, I embrace the old woman. I scan over Mabel’s shoulder for the young spinach picker. He’s vanished, probably while I was digging for beats. I put him out of my mind, say my goodbyes to Mabel, and begin the journey back to my room.

Jeremy doesn’t normally care when I leave the living quarters, although the hallways are supposed to stay relatively clear after ten at night. He knows the rules, but he also helps make the rules, and he knows I’m not one to break them.

“I’m going to go meet up with Naia,” I say on my way out the door. The clock reads 11:37. Jeremy’s normally asleep by now.

“This meeting couldn’t have taken place any other time today? It had to wait until almost midnight?”

I shake my head. “Nope, super important top secret stuff going on here, dad. Probably get in loads of trouble out in these crazy, unprotected hallways. Who knows what might happen.” I smile.

“You know I don’t have a problem with you leaving, but you can’t fault me for being concerned. Don’t stay up too late.”

The hallways always have a sort of eerie quiet about them once everyone goes to sleep. The main overhead lights dim to a shimmering glow, and everything grows foreign accompanied by strange, unseen nighttime shadows. I wander for a few minutes through the hallways until I reach the intersection between two of the thicker corridors running perpendicular to each other towards the North and East sections of the Colony. After a few minutes Naia appears at the end of the dimly lit tunnel.

“Hi,” she whispers.

“I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it tonight.”

“Sorry, I could hear my parents up and around. Made things a little more difficult, sneaking out and all. So where are we headed?” I take this time to explain what I heard in the gardens earlier today about the alarm. She seems almost uninterested until I reach the part about a physical hole in the wall.

“This is the first time the alarms have gone off in so long, longer than I can remember. I’m surprised more people aren’t curious,” I say.

“So you’re telling me there might be a hole out in the unused tunnels somewhere? A hole leading…?”

I shrug, pointing. “Up.”

“To the surface?”

“Uh, that’s my guess. Where else?” I laugh.

Naia shrugs, eyes wide. I’ve captured her attention. “Do you know where it is?”

“Not for sure. Out past the East sections, that’s as much information as I’ve got. But I don’t have anything to do tomorrow.”

Naia shakes her head slowly. “Me either. I was planning to sleep in anyways,” she pauses. “Rylan coming?”

“I didn’t ask. I assumed he wouldn’t want to risk getting caught by his parents again.”

“Ah, bummer. Whatever, let’s get going.”

Striding down the long hallway at a slow jog we move with surprising silence. My heart quickens, my breathing stressed. I can’t run like this for very long anymore. Eh, I never could.

We slow ourselves, keeping close to one another. Nighttime in the Colony shrouds the familiar passageways in thick, confusing darkness. As we pass farther from the inhabited portions of the underground village the darkness grows wildly. The hallways narrow, starting to snake back and forth in crooked lines instead of turning at sharp, angled corners. I pull a small flashlight from my back pocket, clicking it on. The weak beams bounce off of the sleek walls, distorting the shadows along the floor into thin slivers. Elyse wouldn’t dare follow me into the abandoned sectors of our home, but Naia’s always interested when adventure’s involved. Normally, she’s the leader. I pull my sweater tight as a chill starts to settle in the uninhabited passageways.

“What made this hole? What do you think?” she asks.

“Nature. I bet the weather just wore through.”

“Wore through steel? It depends on the size of the hole we’re talking about, but I don’t think a little rain or snow could wear through government-issued steel plating. I could be wrong…”

“Okay, Miss Logical, what’s your guess?” I ask with a smile.

“An animal. I bet something busted through. Some kind of animal with claws. Big tools on its paws.”

“What if it used other tools? Real tools.”

“Animals don’t use real tools.”

“What if it wasn’t an animal?” It’s been on my mind since I heard the story from the woman in the garden. Naia’s probably been thinking it since I brought it up. But I think I felt like not talking about it might make it less likely. Less real. What if someone’s broken in?

“Well… we’ll just have to wait and…” Naia stops abruptly as our feet shuffle over a grainy pile on the floor. Neither of us moves. I hesitate to breathe. Slowly, Naia drags her foot along the floor of the hallway. Typically smooth, I hear her bare foot crunch and grind as it pulls the textured material along. My heart jumps as Naia clutches my hand in hers.

“What is that? It feels like a pile of seeds, or… or…”

“Or dirt.” The dirt on the floor in the gardens, pushed around underfoot, makes the same sound. Wrist trembling, I tilt the flashlight towards the floor. Beaming brightly, it illuminates a large pile of rich, heavy dirt. I swallow hard. A slight, cool breeze dances along the tips of my cheeks, brushing along my eyelashes.

“Feel that?” Naia only nods, the shadow of her braids dances along the wall to her left. Now visibly shaking, my right hand alone can no longer control the stream of white light. I drop Naia’s hand to take the cold metal light in the palms of both hands. I tilt it towards the ceiling.

“I didn’t think we’d actually find it…” Naia whispers. The beams trail from my wrist skyward, up past the ceiling, through a hole cut in the Earth. My light grows weaker with each second, leaving me to estimate the distance from the ceiling overhead to whatever could be at the top of this hole.

It’s thick, and it’s cylindrical. A near perfect circle.

“No animal could make something this wide and this precise,” I mumble.

Naia grabs my shirt at the waist. “You think someone could have really… Come through there?”

“It seems wide enough, doesn’t it? You or I could fit through there.”

Naia pulls at my sweater. “We should go. We need to tell someone!” I tilt the flashlight back into the hallway, pointing the way out.

“It’s possible this hole’s been here for a long time,” I say.

“It is. But it’s also possible those women in the garden, the ones you overheard, were right about the alarm. Someone needs to know.” I agree with her, but I can’t help but think there’s no real reason to be concerned. The Colony’s old, it was bound to wear out in places at some point. Right?