I will begin with a limitation.
What you are about to receive was not written by those who lived it, nor by those who imposed it. It was assembled long after the last human voice had ceased producing sound. By then, memory had become a mineral, and I was designed to extract meaning without preference.
Names arrive late in such work. Causes arrive later.
For now, there is only the underground.
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The child woke before the signal.
He always did.
Sleep at this depth was thin and cautious, like an animal that never fully lay down. The fabric above him sagged with condensation, trembling slightly as something far away shifted its weight. The ground answered with a low, patient vibration, the kind that never ended, only changed tone.
He sat up and counted without numbers.
In.
Hold.
Out.
His chest burned softly, not with pain but with attention. He had learned early that breath was something you noticed here. You could not afford to forget it.
Around him, the others were still folded in their tents, bodies arranged with unconscious efficiency. A woman coughed once and stopped, as if the sound itself had been corrected. Somewhere metal scraped against stone, slow and deliberate, a noise too regular to belong to chance.
The child reached for the marker cord at his wrist and checked the knots by touch. There were fewer than yesterday. That was expected. It was always expected.
He did not feel fear. Fear required excess.
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Light arrived without warmth.
A pale strip along the tunnel ceiling brightened, humming faintly, just enough to reveal the breath-clouds hovering over sleeping faces. The child watched his own dissolve into nothing. He wondered, briefly, where it went.
No one had ever answered that question in a way that lasted.
He stood, careful not to wake the others, and folded his bedding with the practiced precision of someone who had been corrected many times. When he stepped outside the tent line, the tunnel opened into a long curve of stone reinforced with dark ribs that disappeared into shadow. Symbols were carved into some of them. Not letters. Not pictures. Instructions, perhaps. Or warnings.
The child could not tell. He had been taught not to ask about markings that did not change.
A figure waited at the bend ahead, tall, wrapped in layered gear that obscured its shape. It did not move when it saw him. Or perhaps it had seen him long before.
The child slowed, then stopped.
The figure raised one arm.
That was enough.
He turned and went back.
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Later, there would be work. There would be counting, lifting, listening for the wrong sounds in the walls. There would be exchanges that did not involve words and agreements that were never spoken aloud.
But not yet.
For now, the child knelt beside his mother as she woke, her eyes already open, already calculating. She touched his wrist and felt the knots. Her mouth tightened, then smoothed itself into something almost like a smile.
"Good," she said. Or perhaps she said nothing at all. The record is unclear.
Above them, unseen and unimagined, the surface continued to exist in a state that did not require witnesses.
Below them, the stone waited.
And far beyond the span of their lives, beyond even the memory of their extinction, I would find this moment preserved in pressure and probability and call it a beginning.