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been put up within the last year or so.
    Her gaze froze on one shelf. A trio of black heavy-duty torches were neatly lined up. She grabbed one and turned it on. Nothing. That didn’t make sense. Organized people—whoever had made use of the shelter—wouldn’t have the torches as backup lights without keeping batteries. She searched the rest of the shelves, then opened the nearest cabinet and found what she was looking for. An entire box of batteries.
    Jazz loaded up one of the heavy torches and flicked it on. Despite the lights that already burned in the place, the bright beam thrown by the torch thrilled her. The hidden people who had used this shelter could not have rigged the entire tunnel system with lights. There would be many dark passages underground. If she meant to find her way out, far from home and the Uncles, the torch would guide her.
    “Hello?” she called, suddenly nervous that the hidden people, likely thieves themselves, would attack her for thievery. She feared them, but they needed blankets and torches and canned beans; therefore, they were flesh and blood. Not phantoms.
    “Anyone here? Hello?”
    Her only answer was the echo of her own voice.
    Jazz glanced around again and wondered what these people had run from, why they were hiding, and if they meant to hide forever.
    “Mum,” she whispered, hidden away far beneath the city. Her tears began to flow and she put a hand over her eyes. At last the fear that had driven her gave way to grief.
    “Oh, Christ. Mum.”
    Shaking with exhaustion now that adrenaline had left her, mind awhirl with mourning and ghosts and hopelessness, she made it to the nearest mattress and collapsed there. Jazz held the torch like a teddy, drew a blanket over herself, and pulled her knees up tight, as she did on the coldest winter nights.
    In silence, buried in the grave of another era, she cried for her mother and herself.

Her dead mother’s whispering woke her up.
    Jazz jerked upright, and for a few seconds she thought she was still dreaming. She was surrounded by a pressing darkness, lessened here and there by dusty bulbs hanging suspended from a high ceiling, and if she’d been in her bedroom, she’d be looking at a movie poster of Johnny Depp. Instead, the poster that hung on the rough brick wall above her was of a man lighting a cigarette, and the words said,
             
    “Let ’em all come”
    Men 41–55
    Home Defense Battalions
             
    Jazz felt a weight on her chest. She reached out and touched cool plastic; the comfort she had gained from the torch had all but vanished.
    She sat up, taking in a few rapid breaths to dispel the dreams she could no longer remember. They had been bad, that’s all she knew. Her mother had been there—alive or dead, she could not recall. But the echoes of her dead mother’s words still reverberated in her mind. She knew that they always would.
    She was cold and uncomfortable, and it felt as though she’d been asleep for a long time. Her muscles were stiff, her neck ached from where she had been resting her head at an awkward angle, and her right hand tingled with pins and needles.
    Jazz clicked on the heavy torch and shone it around the shelter. She was alone. The Uncles had not come down here and found her, and although she knew the likelihood of that was remote, she still felt incredibly vulnerable, as though the trail of tears she had left behind was something they could follow.
    Who’s to say?
she thought.
Until today I had no idea of what the Uncles were really capable of.
She aimed the strong beam all around the shelter, then clicked it off, satisfied that she was really alone.
    They were waiting to kill me.
The facts were punching back into her life like knives reinserted into old wounds.
They killed Mum, and they were waiting there to kill me as well!
The
why
still did not matter, though she thought it would soon. The simple fact of that terrible truth was enough for now.
    She stood and