For those who have lived by the Manuals, death is a door.

Beyond it, the garden of life awaits you.

The Manuals of the Bunker, Vol. 3, Verse 15

"I hope ye've made a good knot back there." Amy pointed a thumb at the tunnel through which we had arrived. The sounds emanating from it faded as we made for the last door.

"Sure."

"Good. Let's try this one." She pushed the handle.

The circular room on the other side was flooded with light, brighter than any I had ever seen. It was maybe twenty steps across. Machines stood along its sides, large boxes of metal studded with tiny lights of various colors and carrying rectangular panels set into their walls. Many of these panels were dark, but a few showed pictures glowing from within. Similar to the one in the shrine.

"Now that's more like it!" Amy stepped through the door and approached one of the machines. With a broad grin on her face, she moved a finger along its buttons as if caressing them.

"You think this is...?" I hesitated to name it.

She looked at me, the grin now almost cracking her face in two. "Yes, sir! The light, the buttons... there can't be no bleeding doubt! This is the fucking control room." She spread her arms and spun around her axis.

The control room—Amy had talked so much about it, but I had never believed her. Never believed that such a place would exist. But this place did have the buttons, rows upon rows of them. And lots of light.

One of the glowing panels beckoned me with the familiarity of the image it showed.

I stepped closer. It was a view of our village, from above, similar to how it looked from the crane. The huts nested against the dark rock behind them. The detail and reality in the picture surprised me—far better than any painting I had ever seen.

A group of people stood in front of one of the huts. Familiar figures, I knew most of them. And they were moving.

Moving like in the moving images at the shrine.

"You see that?" I pointed at the thing, my finger trembling.

"Stinky village, yes. So what?"

"Look, they are moving in it." I gestured at the people. They were smaller than my finger, but most of them looked familiar. My neighbors.

She shrugged. "Sure. That's like the one we saw in the bishop's shrine."

A man had his arm around the shoulders of a woman. I pointed at her. "I think this is Marge, Ed's mom. She's been kinda like a mother to me, too, since my mom's death." The panel was warm to the touch. I pulled my finger back, leaving a smudge in the dust.

"Ed's mom?" Amy squinted at mini-Marge. "That's not good. She doesn't look happy."

No, she didn't look happy. Face lowered, she shook her head slowly.

Amy tapped the image. "This machine prob'ly shows what's happening there right now. The Engineers needed this for their ruling. As ye see, I said the truth. This is not just some fancy story like in the moving images of the shrine wee two point oh."

Yes, she was probably right. This scene might be from right now—Marge worrying about Ed.

I pulled my gaze away from the picture. It pained me to see it.

Next to the panel, a row of buttons ran along its edge. They looked a bit like the one on the altar at the temple. I wondered if they would turn on and off the lights at our cavern's ceiling. Maybe one button for each of the lamps?

What would our new foreman do if day turned into night from one moment to the next?

Not daring to touch them, I studied some of the images in the other panels. Many showed scenes I knew, most of them from the upper cavern. Others displayed tunnels or rooms I had never seen. In a few, the colors were all wrong, or the light was unsteady like a candle when you blow at it.

"Hey, look at this." Amy pulled a book from a shelf, one of more than a dozen. They all had blue spines with a number on them.

The cover was all too familiar. It held the word MANUAL, in the Engineers' perfect script. Just like the one in the temple. At the bottom, it said VOLUME 14.

Volume 14? I shook my head. There wasn't such a volume. There were only three.

I frowned at the others on the shelf. They all had a number on their back. Somebody had ordered them neatly, with the last one carrying a 25. I pulled out number 1.

It looked identical to the one in the temple.

Carefully, I put it on a table and opened it. Its spine made a cracking noise. Just like the one the bishop had, it contained a stack of papers held by metal rings.

But here, the paper wasn't hand-written. The letters were in the Engineers' neat script on paper as white as a chicken's egg. A Phoenix was drawn in a corner—perfect, like everything the Engineers made.

"The bird looks like the one on our amulets," Amy said. "A Penis."

"A penis?" I couldn't help laughing. "It's called a phoenix."

She ignored me and pointed at the page. "And what's it say?"

I moved a finger along the words as I read them aloud.

Phoenix P34-Series Medium Community Bunker

Operating Manual

Volume 1 – System Overview

Phoenix Shelters Inc.,

35 Wellington St E, Toronto, ON M5E 1C7

Canada

For booking information: [email protected]

We Rise From the Ashes

"And what's it mean?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I don't even know half the words here."

I turned the page. On its back, it held some tiny letters with incomprehensible gibberish at its bottom. The next sheet contained a long list of words and numbers.

"Even yer bishop's manuals are better than this shite. At least I understood them. This one's daft."

I leafed through the pages and pages filled with Engineer script and drawings. "It's full of stuff like that."

I stopped at a page titled MAIN CIRCULATION PUMPS. I understood little of the text, but it had a drawing of a machine that looked like the shell of a giant snail—like the pump I had seen at Amy's place.

I turned my head to show it to Amy, but she had left my side. Whistling a tuneless tune through the gap in her teeth, she was squinting at a machine that held hundreds of glowing or blinking buttons.

I put the manual down and closed it, careful not to damage its spine. Yes, it was full of obscure, daft stuff. But that stuff was Engineerish.

"You know what?" I began, a disturbing suspicion gnawing my intestines.

Amy pulled her finger back from one of the buttons. "Yes... er, no."

I gestured at the manual, trying to express what I felt. "I think this manual here is real. It feels true. It looks perfect as if written by the engineers. The ones in the temple, they're..." I hesitated, reluctant to turn my suspicion into words. "They're in handwriting. Anyone could have written them."

Yes, anyone. The manuals I had grown up with—were they nothing but books full of stories written by priests and bishops? While the ones here had been made by the Engineers?

A tickle like an army of ants ran up my spine.

"Smart lad, the bishop's manuals are nothing but propagander. Just like I said." She looked back at the buttons before her. "Whaddya think will happen when I push one of these?" Before I could reply, she pressed her finger on a green one.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," I said.

When she pulled the finger away again, the button blinked red.

"Oh, it has changed color and winks at me," she said and reached out for another.

A clang of metal came from the corridor.

Startled, we looked at each other. She held a hand over her mouth. "Oops."

"Let's have a look." Quickly, I placed the manual back onto its shelf, went to the door, and peeked into the corridor. It was empty.

We entered it and walked its length. When we passed the tunnel that led to the shaft, faint footfalls came from it.

Shocked, I grasped Amy's arm.

"That wasn't the button I pushed," she whispered. "My button was fine. But it looks like yer knot didn't hold."

Wolfe had broken through the door, and maybe other guards, too. We had to get away. We had to hide once more.

The large, dark room with the droning machines might be good for that, but I didn't like that place full of noise. It gave me the creeps.

"The stairs, quick." I pushed her towards the stairwell at the other end of the corridor.

"But the control room..." She looked at its door, which I had closed when we left.

"No time. We must leave!"

Pulling her along, I ran to the stairs and stopped.

The steps led up into the darkness. But a button was mounted to the wall right beside the door.

Amy pushed it, and the light came on. "I told you I'm good with buttons."

As we began to ascend, the whole staircase made ringing and creaking sounds.

"Shh!" I said. "They'll hear us."

"I'm light. It's ye who makes the noise."

We trod more softly. The frame still groaned, though, as we hurried up, going round and round along the central shaft.

We were panting as we reached the upper landing. A claw was suspended from the ceiling by chains, hanging over the center of the stairwell. It reminded me of the crane. Maybe it could be lowered through the central shaft to lift stuff.

Another tunnel branched off from the top of the stairs. Lit by the same small lights like the one below, it gently curved upward. I couldn't see its end.

"Shite," Amy said, still looking down the shaft in the center of the stairwell. "We've finally found the control room, and now we have to run again."

I put a hand on her shoulder. "Let's go."

"Batcrap." She pointed down.

At the bottom of the stairs, Wolfe was looking up at us.

"Hey," he said. "We need to talk."

"Last time we talked, ye got yer head bashed, old man. And then yer balls." Amy cleared her throat and spat into the shaft. "Ye better be careful. Next time, ye might not be so lucky."

"I just want to ask you some questions."

"I so believe ye!" Amy spat again, sending drops of saliva into the shaft. Then she grabbed my arm. "Let's move."

As we entered the corridor, footsteps rang up from the stairs behind us.