I can’t eat. My stomach growls, but I can’t bear the thought of putting any food in my mouth, not when my brother will never take in sustenance ever again.

The six-month-old on my lap doesn’t have the same problem. Hope, we named her. Ironic for the offspring of parents called Bandit and Alice. Fitting for the cramped, desolate conditions in which we live.

Hope wraps my hair around her fists, and tears spring to my eyes. Not because it hurts. But because she never met her uncle. And now, she never will.

Bandit scoops up a spoonful of rice and feeds our daughter.

“He was a bad man, an evil man.” I test out the words in the air. It’s what everyone’s been saying about the Maker. “He killed millions of people. Is it…wrong…of me to mourn him?”

“He was your brother,” Bandit says simply. “You loved him.”

“Still do,” I whisper, patting Hope’s mouth with a napkin. I bury my nose against her hair and breathe. She smells like everything that’s fresh and clean. Laundry blowing in the breeze, a pot of flowers on the front porch. But those are analogies from the old world, the one we lived above the ground. Try as I might, I can’t conjure up an equivalent in our new, tunneled life.

“I wish there was something we could’ve done,” I say. “Maybe, if Mom never abandoned us, things would’ve turned out differently.”

“Maybe if he never met Charlie,” Bandit offers.

“Maybe if Lalana hadn’t broken his heart.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t married me.” Bandit picks up my hand and holds it against his heart. The familiar thump-thump, the one I’ve been listening to for five years, almost makes me break down again. “Maybe then, our world wouldn’t be what it is today.”

“No,” I say fiercely. “If I never married you, then little Hope wouldn’t exist. And I wouldn’t trade her life for anything.”

An hour later, after Hope is tucked into her crib, which is just a hollow boulder lined with a piece of mattress and the softest blankets we could find, a knock sounds on our unit. Bandit opens the door, and a strikingly beautiful woman walks inside. Her dark eyes are as luminous as the stars that we no longer see.

“You may not remember me,” she says to me. “But ten years ago, we went to school together. We met briefly at the Newhouse awards banquet. Your brother was honored as one of the most brilliant young minds of our nation. So was your husband.” She winks at Bandit. “And so was I. My name is Cristela Ruiz, and I’m brilliant. So brilliant that we may be able to help each other. Together, we can change the fate of our world.”