Starla had not seen daylight for decades.

She couldn’t be certain how many decades. There was no time underground. She slept and ate and attending to her business when she felt like it. There was no sun to tell her to sleep. But there was also no sun to tell her how many days had gone by.

Decades, though, certainly. She was small when she came down here. Her hands were little and chubby and unmarked. Now the skin on the back of her hands was thin, her veins large and blue, her fingertips callused and scarred. She was around 70, maybe. She really couldn’t be sure.

At age 5, her parents told her they would be building a new home. It would be exciting, they said, like a game. They would have to play spy and be very, very quiet all the time so no one would even know they were there. There wouldn’t be trips to the grocery store anymore, or school. Wouldn’t she like to live with just Mommy and Daddy forever?

As a matter of fact, she would. Starla didn’t like bright lights or loud noises or chit chat or, frankly, other people. She would much prefer a day in her room with a good book to a day on the beach. Plus, she didn’t win very many games, mostly because they involved dealing with other people and she didn’t like that very much. But being very, very quiet would be a game she could win.

The house was complete by the time she was 6. It confused her, at first. She had never seen a house that was only a tiny trap door in the ground.

Then her parents opened the hatch, and the universe below caught her eye. It was huge, much bigger than any house she had ever seen, even bigger than any mall she had ever been in. There were plants and toys and books and it was all for her. She descended into the house with her parents, and she didn’t come out again.

She had speculated, over the years, why she was down here. She assumed there was still a world above. It didn’t matter much—the house had everything it needed to self-sustain: an underground farm, a well, a box that collected energy from solar panels however many yards above them. She knew the sun must still be shining if they continued to have electricity. That was about as much as she knew about the above ground, that and the few toddler memories she tried to untangle from dreams and fantasies. After a while, they all blend together.

Her parents were vague. “It’s bad out there,” they told her when she was a child. As she grew older, she came up with more questions, but her parents never seemed to come up with more answers.

She was full-grown by the time her father died, but not by much. She seemed to have stopped getting taller. Her parents trusted her to do all the same tasks they did. Her father could not have been very old, either. His skin was barely creased, the faintest pencil strokes accented by one deep wrinkle between his eyebrows. One day, he was digging up crops. The next, he was gone.

That would be her chance, she had thought. They would go to the above ground to bury him.

But her mother showed her the compost chamber instead. This way, he would live on, giving their plants the nutrients they needed for new life.

Then they would eat the plants, she thought, and that would mean they were eating him—but she didn’t say that part out loud.

She was much older by the time her mother passed. Her mother’s hair had gone white and her own had turned gray. This death she saw coming from far away. She watched her mother shrink, close in on herself, spend more and more of each day sleeping. And then she didn’t wake up.

Starla laid her in the compost chamber. It was the only way to safely dispose of the body without venturing to the above ground. And by now, she didn’t even know how she would do the latter. She wasn’t going to use the compost on the crops, though. Wasn’t going to accidentally eat her mother’s spirit.

It was a waste of a life, maybe. But then again, so was her own. She had come down here so young. Never married, never had children, never left any kind of mark on the world. Just survived. And for what?

She had been content. Maybe that was all there was. She didn’t know what was going on above her, but it must have been something terrible for her family to go to these lengths to save her. Her preschool classmates might be all dead by now. Maybe they suffered some terrible plague, or fire, or starvation. Maybe they all took their weapons and killed each other. But Starla—she had lived her life down here. She had had books, and plants, and her parents’ love.

She had been happy in the darkness. That had been enough.