Seven levels of housing, two levels of recreation, two levels of indoor farming, and nowhere to play hide-and-go-seek.

With 71 people in the shelter personal space was at enough of a premium that no one wanted Sally or Jacques running through their living rooms. Especially those families, like Jacques’, that only had half a level to themselves. They’d saved a few million dollars up front when buying space in the abandoned missile silo turned shelter, but that surely must have seemed scant compensation once it was sealed and the only currencies were barter and chore tokens.

But with the rec facilities hogged by the older children and the adults, hide-and-go-seek was absolutely necessary. The elected Chair was the only one with the key to the storage levels, which would have been perfect, and after the unfortunate drowning of little Maria Gonzalez (#72) the cisterns were locked tight too.

That left only the old missile operators’ living quarters.

The door and passage that connected them to the main Atlas shaft and the shelter were ostensibly locked, but 15 years of rust and neglect had taken their toll and the lock turned easily when Jacques tried it. Better still, the lighting was still connected to the silo’s geothermal grid–it had been meant to survive a direct 50-megaton hit, after all.

It was perfect.

The game went on for nearly an hour, before Jacques found Sally in an alcove behind an old vacuum tube control unit. “How’d you find me?” she fumed; it had been, in her view, a perfect spot and not the kind of place someone would stumble on after one a minute or two.

“You were making a lot of noise!” Jacques replied, miffed. “I could hear you.”

“Was not!” Sally had been quiet as a mouse; she’d even held her breath.

Jacques cocked an ear. “Maybe you’re right. I still hear it!”

Sally, no longer concerned with quietude, listened carefully. “You’re right,” she said. “I think it’s coming from behind the wall…”

Both children pressed their ears to the wall behind the console. The noise, faint but audible in the echo chamber of the old quarters, resolved itself into a recognizable form.

The tapping of pickaxes against stone and soil.