Hours passed. Everything began to look the same, and the longer we took, the less anything stood out. All the cement walls melded together into a blur of gray on gray on gray. The smell faded away along with all the distinctive features of this place. It didn’t bother us anymore. We were a well-oiled machine with only one goal in mind — to find the girl. My entire world narrowed down to just this one task and the small toy in my pocket. I couldn’t afford to feel my exhaustion, at least not yet.

  The most concentrated section of radiation consisted of just four corridors at the intersection of two different tracks. Back and forth. Back and forth. We had retraced our steps a hundred times and found no evidence. No trail. Again and again and again. No footprints, no disturbances. No Cassie.

  “We have to be missing something,” I muttered. “But if I go over it one more time, I’m going to lose my mind.”

  “Want a snack?” Gabe asked, rummaging through his pockets for a chocolate bar. “Make you feel better.”

  “I’ll pass,” I sighed, although I appreciated the sentiment.

  The lump inside my pocket was nagging me. Part of me wondered if I was reading too much into this small, white rabbit toy. The matted fur scratched against my palm as I pulled it out. There were no eyes anymore. The friction from my pocket had broken whatever was left of the pitiful threading holding those buttons in place. If it didn’t look sad before, it sure did now, but there was also something strangely captivating about it, and I couldn’t stand to throw it away.

  “Something wrong?” Gabe asked, peering over my shoulder.

  “Who knows?” I muttered. “Maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way the whole time.”

  That was the problem with having a body to house your soul. Your height, your build, and everything else that made you who you were changed the way you saw the world, but you could only ever see the world as yourself. We had been looking at this like adults, like ourselves, but Cassie and our mystery android were anything but.

  I rang Ethan. The yellow ring lit up in my vision, and Ethan soon answered.

  “How tall was she?” I asked.

  “Five foot even,” he said, after pulling up her file.

  “That’s it,” I said. “That’s what we’re missing.”

  The missing piece was the one thing we always took for granted. Gabe quirked a brow, and I gestured irritably at our bodies. We were statistical anomalies. I, a woman, was just shy of six feet, and Gabe had nearly four inches on me. It’d be laughable to focus on what we could fit through, and even taking into account a smaller build, we were likely still overestimating the kind of clearance the girls needed to fit through.

  “We need to look again,” I said. “Differently. Smaller. She could’ve slipped through spaces we didn’t even consider.”

  So once more we walked down the corridors, and this time we weren’t searching the walls for doors or the floors for hatches. We were looking for cracks, crevices, and crawl spaces — the type of opening that we would have scoffed at for being either too small or narrow. We were looking for a space fit for a child, and we were still coming up empty.

  “Maybe we’re still looking for the wrong thing,” I said.

  The white rabbit sat in my pocket, calling for me. Of course, a toy couldn’t speak, but the instinct to bring it with me could. There was a part of me using the soft plush as a mediator to tell me something I’d long forgotten. I pulled it out and stared at the sad, pitiful thing when something occurred to me.

  Maybe even thinking like a child was a mistake. Maybe I needed to think like an animal. A rabbit. A small thing. Prey. Animals were simple. They lived off instinct without pride or ego. Where did they go? Anywhere they could fit. It didn’t matter if it was ugly, dirty, or damp. What difference would it make if it kept them safe and hidden away from all the violence and danger waiting for them in the form of claws, teeth, or guns? Where would I be if I were a rabbit?

  “We need to dig,” I said. “We need to burrow like a rabbit.”

  Gabe tilted his head quizzically. For a moment, I thought he was going to call me crazy and ask me if I’d lost my mind. Hell, even I was starting to wonder at this point, but then he just smiled and asked me a question.

  “Is your gut telling you that?” he asked.

  I nodded sheepishly.

  “Well, I’ll try anything once,” he said, and then we were back in business.

  I didn’t believe in prophecies, fate, or karma. Things like that were naive and idealistic. There were countless ways humans learned to make sense of a world that was constantly in flux. And who could blame them? Everything always went downhill faster than you could run, and if you ever tried to stop and catch your breath, you’d be the fool tumbling head over foot down into the dark abyss. Time waited for no man, and society wouldn’t either. I asked myself every day and reminded myself every night that it would be beautiful if it was. Forget pragmatism. Remember the way it makes you feel deep in your bones, like you’re truly alive.

  We moved like rabbits — sprinting, pausing, and listening for quiet signs of danger. Again and again. Lower, smaller, and faster. Throwing away the guise of civility, we reduced ourselves to what people pretended humans weren’t. At the end of the day, we were just animals who stood up on their two back legs and decided they were better than all those base creatures that still crept around on four. But were we? Maybe not.

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  Whether they were cracks, crevices, or holes didn’t matter. I had a feeling that we needed to go down — deep down. We were tunneling to the center of the earth to save a lost soul. Descending into the hell beneath to appeal to an apathetic god. ‘Turn off the flames,’ we’ll say. ‘We’ve come to take her back.’ Beneath them. Behind them. Between them. Everything was back on the table.

  I crouched down near the edge of a broken vending machine with the glass smashed out. The shards crunched beneath my feet as I moved to stand again. We hadn’t thought to check it before because of how tightly it had been wedged in, knocked over, and slammed into a space too small for its metal frame. How could a small girl have gotten past something like this? But that was the beauty of it, wasn’t it? She didn’t have to. She had a friend.

  We planted our feet firmly on the ground and threw our weight against it, but even with our combined strength, it didn’t move.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I still have this.”

  I flexed my artificial hand. It’d work well enough.

  With my hand wrapped around the metal frame’s edge and my elbow propped against the wall, I pushed it to the limits. No holding back. Slowly, it budged, groaning as it gave way until, finally, the vending machine crashed down on the floor before us. The last remnants of glass shattered and scattered across the ground. I was grateful for it — that sound. It had drowned out the unmistakable snap in my arm.

  Gabe crouched down by the opening while I inspected my arm. The limb still moved, but there was a sluggishness to it now. Instead of ruminating on something that would have to wait, I joined him in peering down into that broken space. It was like a rabbit’s burrow without the dirt, mud, and smell of earth.

  “The scanner’s whining,” he said. “Looks like we might’ve found our girl.”

  Then, appraising the narrow opening further, he added. “Think we’ll fit?”

  There was a small passageway almost wide enough for us to get through on our hands and knees, but I wasn’t the gambling type of woman. Almost or maybe wasn’t going to cut it. If we were going to give this a go, I’d make sure we’d make it through to the other side. This space that was a death trap for us would have been comfortably wide for that much smaller girl and android to squeeze through.

  “Back up,” I said. “I’m going to make us some breathing room.”

  I hated gambling, but sometimes you had to pick the lesser of two evils and make of it what you would. The tunnel could easily collapse, but we couldn’t afford to pull our punches. It was a calculated risk, I knew that much, and I felt it in my lower back. The tension locked me up stiff enough to crack. There was no time to second-guess myself. I blew two of the larger pieces out of the way. The impact made the ground quake, and I held my breath until the dust settled.

  The space cleared. It was still going to be a tight fit, but it didn’t look like suicide anymore. Still, we were putting our lives on the line. Even if it was holding for now, there was no guarantee it would last. Getting a crew and equipment down here to look for the girl had been out of the question; getting them down here now to haul us out wasn’t looking much better. We had to make it work.

  “Ladies first,” Gabe said, grinning.

  “Gabe, if I die, I’m blaming you,” I said.

  For all my shortcomings, an aversion to getting dirty wasn’t one of them. Without hesitation, I stooped and crawled inside. The passage was cramped, and broken pieces of rubble pricked at my skin, but I’d been through worse. It wasn’t even the risk that bothered me now; it was the sensation of crawling into a coffin.

  When we buried our father, was this how he felt inside? If his soul was still bound to his body, it must have been torture. My eyes crushed shut trying to block it all out. I had prayed then because it was all I could do for him. And I prayed now because it was all I could do for myself. And pray I did when my footing gave way and I plunged down.

  The sharp plunge knocked the air out of my lungs. Grit dug into my skin with the force of my fall. The disorientation was temporary, but the nicks and scratches would take longer to disappear. I dusted myself off, grimacing as the pieces lodged into my skin gave way to droplets of blood.

  Gabe’s boots hit the floor with a dull thud behind me, dependable as ever.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Who knows?” I muttered. “But there’s only one way to go.”

  We followed the darkness until another barrier stopped us. Fortunately, this time it gave way easily with just the force of our combined body weight. Light streamed weakly in from the opening. With every step we took, it grew brighter. The ceiling left more and more space overhead until we were standing in a reasonably wide and open space. Dead center, we located our light source. A narrow shaft of daylight bled through a crack in the ceiling, illuminating the spot beneath it.

  Despite our descent into the darkness, our final destination was open to the air. It looked like it was once a storage space. Dust-covered containers lay scattered throughout the room, but that was not what caught our attention; that honor belonged to a large clump of balled-up blankets in front of us. The shape moved, and a pair of wide eyes popped out to stare at us. And whose eyes were they? Cassandra Weddel. We’d finally found the face we’d been chasing all this time.

  Gabe stepped forward to approach her, but I stuck out my arm in front of his chest.

  “No, let me do it,” I said.

  He looked at me quizzically so I used the one word I hated more than any other.

  “Please,” I said. “Let me do it.”

  That got my point across. He stopped dead in his tracks and left the room to me. There was a strength in the words we didn’t use — the ones we choked on because of how bitter they tasted on our tongues. The question I was asking myself now was why I cared at all. Why did this feeling creep into my bones like it was meant to live there? Where had I seen this before? This uneasy sense of déjà vu made my skin crawl, and then the past melded with the present and the figure from my dream with the girl. I had seen this before.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “We’re here to help. Can you tell us your name?”

  She eased herself into a sitting position wordlessly.

  “Are you Cassie?” I asked.

  Now that was a reaction. She jerked from her seat and skidded back into the wall, scratching at it like a cornered animal. Those wide, sleep-fogged eyes cleared in an instant and then all I saw was fear. But was it my fear or hers?

  “Again?” she whispered.

  Before I got the chance to ask her what she meant, a blow landed by my feet. On pure instinct, I leaped, tumbled, and rolled, landing with my gun in my hands, pointed and ready to go. Muscle memory ran me, and my mind was a jumble of half-finished thoughts, but through that haze, one thing was certain.

  We weren’t alone.