Emma did not think she would ever see this place for herself. Aboveground. It seemed so far away, so impossible. The bunker was all she had ever known. It was her world.

Then came the day when her world crumbled.

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Emma’s voice was swallowed by silence. Her bottom lip quivered. Her eyes became glassy. A single drop of water slid down her cheek.

A pair of definitions blinked in my vocabulary drive.

Tear. Noun. 1. A drop of liquid that falls from a human’s eye during the act of crying. 2. A hole or rip in something that has been pulled apart forcefully.

Same spelling. Different pronunciation. The first rhymes with fear. The second rhymes with scare. But at this moment, as Emma cried, as her words were choked into silence, both definitions fit.

A tear in her eye.

A tear in the fabric of her story.

SkD let out a soft electronic sound. Its screen glowed with pictures.

Emma wiped her eyes. “Are you asking why I’m crying?”

SkD nodded.

She thought about this for 3.4 seconds. Then she said, “Because I know what happens next. And I can’t do anything to stop it.”

I thought she might end her story there. Instead, she swallowed hard and spoke again.

One night, as Emma slept in the tiny, cramped room that she shared with her FamilyUnit, she heard a sound in the darkness.

A cough.

Followed by more coughing.

“Mom?” Emma sat up in her bed. “Are you okay?”

From the bottom of the bunk bed a few feet away, Emma’s mother tried to answer.

Instead, she coughed some more.

By the morning, both her parents were sick. Coughing/Headaches/Sore throats.

“Stay here,” Emma said. “I’ll find someone who can help.”

She left the small bedroom. Her feet pattered the gray floor. This time, there were no stops to explore. She had only one destination in mind.

The infirmary.

It was the room you went to for medical checkups, or when you had a toothache, or when you sprained your wrist while doing cartwheels in the cafeteria.

As Emma turned a corner, she found the hallway crowded with people. All of them going to the same place. The infirmary. All of them coughing/sniffling, just like her parents.

Emma listened closely to the chatter.

“What do you think’s wrong?”

“Looks like the flu to me.”

“Full-blown outbreak.”

“No wonder. Everyone crammed together like sardines. One person sneezes, half the bunker gets sick.”

Rounds of coughing halted the conversation. Some of the grown-ups decided they were better off in their rooms, in their bunks.

“We’ll wait it out,” wheezed one. “This’ll pass soon enough.”

But the illness did not pass. It grew worse. The medical staff could not deal with all the people who needed their attention. Especially when they were feeling just as sick. Especially when the infirmary had long ago run out of the antiviral drugs they needed to fight the illness.