When Tifa thought back, her first thought was always of the diner.

Sure, the diner itself wasn't much to look at. The floor was scuffed from all the people who went through it on a daily basis. Johnny and Evan were always putting prank messages up on the bulletin board. The cushions on the red seats had gone flat a long time ago. The lights flickered sometimes. And it wasn't like the four metal walls were much to look at.

But after all the time she'd spent there, it was home.

Only a few people had come to the vault diner that night. Some people had hated the job the G.O.A.T. gave them, but Tifa had never minded being the apprentice Fry Cook. She got to see just about everyone every day, and she got to hear how things were going throughout the whole vault. And besides, she enjoyed the work. She had always enjoyed cooking, and it was fun trying out new recipes.

Of course, she'd be doing it for the rest of her life. Tifa supposed she was lucky to have gotten something she liked. You couldn't change your assigned job once you got it. The G.O.A.T. was for life. So was being in the vault.

"Good work today, Tifa," Mireille said. The old woman had been the vault's Fry Cook since Tifa was born, and though at times she was strict with her, she was always fair. "You run along home to your father now, you hear? You've done enough here today, girl."

"Okay, Mireille," Tifa said, hanging up her apron on the post behind the counter. She stuck her hands in the pockets of the vault jumpsuit and headed out towards the atrium. Most people lived in the residential sector of the vault, around the other side and down a flight of stairs, but Tifa lived in the Overseer's quarters with her father.

"Oh, Tifa!" Tifa turned back; Mireille was calling out to her from the diner, a bag in her hand. "I almost forgot, I made these cookies for you and your father this morning. Mercy me, I almost let you go on without them!"

"What were you telling me about rations this morning?" Tifa asked, but she couldn't help the beam on her face.

"That the Overseer might lighten up on them if he was in a good mood," Mireille replied with a wink. Tifa laughed and took the cookies. "You get those to your daddy right quick, you hear? I put lots of—"

A shrill alarm cut her off, and the light in the hallways flickered. Tifa froze. She'd only ever heard that alarm in the yearly emergency drill. They weren't supposed to have another drill for months.

"Well, isn't this the strangest thing," Mireille said, looking around.

A cold dread trickled down her spine. "What's going on?" Tifa said aloud.

"Oh, honey, I'm sure it's nothing. Why don't you go find your father? I'm sure one of the boys just set the alarm off as some silly joke." Mireille patted her shoulder. "I'm going off to bed. You take care now."

Mireille headed down the hall towards the residential quarters while Tifa turned towards the atrium. Something was wrong. She couldn't say why she knew it, or how. The boys had made their share of trouble before, but no one would dare to set off the emergency alarm. Not even Evan and that new gang of his would do this.

The alarm was still blaring in her ears, but through it, she heard something loud and sharp. It took her a moment to realize it was gunfire.

Tifa rushed out to the atrium; the diner was on the second floor, overlooking the open area below. Whenever her father held meetings for the whole vault, they'd gather there and listen to him. She looked down and saw two bodies below — bodies in vault jumpsuits — bodies covered in blood, she could make out their faces, it was Evan and Leslie —

There were people pouring in through the front entrance.

The vault had been breached.

Tifa screamed.

"Up there!" someone yelled, and Tifa didn't think, she just ran, gunfire spraying the metal walls behind her. She had to — she had to — she couldn't even think, she was so scared, but they'd — they'd drilled for this, right? What To Do If The Vault Is Breached By The Enemy, they'd gone over it in school, there were slides on the projector and Ms. Annette had talked about in her droning voice and Tifa had doodled in the margins of her notebook because she was bored and of course the Enemy, whoever they were, were never really going to attack their vault, that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Wasn't it, Ms. Annette? She remembered Kyrie asking that in class and Ms. Annette had said of course it was ridiculous, but they had to plan for it anyway.

The emergency drills had only ever been ceremonial, really. No one ever expected something like this to happen.

Tifa ran and ran, not even seeing where she was going, but she knew the vault like the back of her hand and she'd run straight to the security sector, where the alarms were blaring louder than ever. The monitors were all on and some of the guards were staring at them, all dumbfounded that this was really happening, and her father was with them, hand still on the console that controlled the alarms.

Her father— "Papa—" Tifa cried, like she was eight years old again, and rushed towards him. Her father turned towards her, breaking out of his stupor, and wrapped his arms tight around her. "Papa, what's happening? Who are they?"

"We don't know," her father said, and there was something in the way he said it that made her look up at him. "They don't look like the Wutai, but—"

"Sir, they're heading this way," one of the security guards said — Mr. Brown, who always used to smile at her when she was little. "What do we do? The weapons they've got—"

"Hold the line here," her father said. "I've got to get Tifa out of here. Come with me, Tifa."

"Yes, sir," the guards chorused, each one looking more worried than the last. Tifa took her father's hand and followed him down the hall to their quarters. The doors slid shut behind them, and her father locked the door, then headed straight for the terminal in his office.

"Tifa, you've got to get out of here," he said. "I'll create a distraction—"

"What?" Tifa grabbed her father's arm. "What are you talking about—?"

He pulled her back and away from his desk, and to Tifa's astonishment, the desk itself rose up. His chair sank back, and a passageway opened up. It was an emergency exit, one she'd never known existed.

"You have to go," her father said. "Now, Tifa! There are supplies in the tunnel — don't let anyone see you, and get down the tunnel to the outside — the radiation levels should be low enough but check your Rayleigh counter just in case—"

"What are you talking about, Papa—" None of this was making sense. Tifa felt as though her head was spinning, and the world was going with it. Before Tifa could say anything more, her father pushed her down the stairs. "Get out of here, get as far away from them as you can," he said. "I'll make sure they don't follow you."

"No— no, Papa, please, please, come with me! Don't do this!" She tried pulling on his arm, tried dragging him down into the passageway with her, but he was already closing the passageway behind her and pushing her back down into it.

"I'm sorry, Tifa," he said. "I love you, sweetheart— just run, run and don't let them catch you—"

The passageway closed with a metallic clank, and Tifa sobbed against it, pounding against it, trying to force it open again. Then there was a sharp noise and another retort of gunfire and the fear seized her again, and though she felt like a coward for it, she turned from the closed door and made her way down the stairs, terrified that they were going to find the passage.

She knew what had happened to her father — what they'd done to him — but she pushed it to the back of her mind, blocking it out and refusing to acknowledge it. She wouldn't let it be in vain. Not now, not ever.

Tifa reached the bottom of the stairs and turned her PHS light on. The first thing she saw was a radroach not three feet away from her, and she had to press her fist against her mouth to muffle a scream. She had seen radroaches before — they got into the vault sometimes and security always dealt with them — but now was not the time she wanted to take one on by herself.

Worst of all, she didn't have a weapon. And it had seen her.

Radroaches were fast, but fear and anguish and sheer adrenaline were doing Tifa a lot of favors. She stomped straight on the radroach's head, and while she didn't crush it in one go — their exoskeletons were too tough for that — it was enough to stun the creature. She stomped on it again, and again, until it stopped moving entirely.

Tifa took a moment to catch her breath. Okay. Okay. I can do this.

She waved her PHS light around the hallway. The light was sickly and greenish, the same as the display on the device itself, but it was bright enough to see by, and no one had ever installed lights in here. The hallway was narrow and cramped, about as much to be expected of an emergency tunnel, but there weren't any more radroaches, and Tifa decided to count that as a win.

She made her way forward and reached the end of the hall, finding an opening leading to another narrow hall. There was one radroach in the corner of this one, but Tifa walked over it and gave it a good stomp before realizing it was already dead. Fine by her.

She'd been so occupied by the radroach that she almost missed the box in the corner. Tifa was half afraid it'd be locked, but it gave when she opened it, and she shone her PHS light on the contents: a couple boxes of cram, two bottles of water, and a spare vault jumpsuit. She pulled the jumpsuit out and looked behind the boxes, but she couldn't find any weapons. Okay. Food was good. At least she wouldn't starve right away.

A fresh burst of panic bubbled up, and she did her best to squash it down. She could do this. She could.

At the end of this tunnel was a closed door. Tifa realized that she had to be close to the main vault entrance, where the sealed door was. She'd gotten a lot of her nerve back after killing that radroach, but the idea of opening this door to a whole group of people with guns was enough to make her freeze in her tracks.

They couldn't all be out there, she told herself. They had to mostly be in the vault by now. She could get out. She could escape.

She didn't want to. She wanted to turn around, run back up to her room, and hide under her bed. But she knew that wasn't an option. Whoever these people were, they weren't going to just give up and go away. She had to escape.

Tifa pushed the door open just enough to look out through. She froze as she caught sight of two unfamiliar people standing by the wide open vault door, a sight she'd never imagined to see in her life. They were facing away from her.

She pushed the door open further, and realized that the door itself was a hidden wall into the security booth in the entranceway. She looked down, and realized that the body of the guard was still there. It was Mr. Gould. She hadn't seen a dead person this closely since her mother died, and she felt a chill, looking at him. He'd probably been sitting right there at the guard station when they came in. Had he even known what was happening?

Wait — Gould.

Tifa stared at him. Sure enough, Gould hadn't even had time to draw his gun. It was still holstered at his waist.

She'd never fired a gun in her life. She only barely knew how. But she knew she wasn't getting past those two guards without it.

Tifa pushed the door open as slowly as she could, desperate not to make any noise. She kept looking back and forth from the guards at the front entrance to the vault itself, worried that someone was going to come out and see that she was here. After a long, paralyzing moment, she got the door open, and she crept out into the security booth, setting the box of supplies down beside Gould's dead body.

Thank you, she thought as she pulled his gun out of its holster. He had a second case of ammunition in his belt; she stuck that in her pocket.

Tifa clutched the box of supplies to her side and held the gun tight. Nobody had come out from the vault, and no one else had come inside, either. She wasn't sure why the two guards were standing there, but she didn't want to stick around in case someone else was coming. If this was the only chance she was going to get, she'd take it.

She crept out from the security booth and stayed low just in case they turned around. She hid behind one of the massive machines that powered the vault door, out of the line of sight of the guards. She just had to get past them and get out of here.

Right. She wanted to laugh. Not twenty minutes ago Mireille had been giving her cookies. Now Mireille was probably dead, and so was her father, and everyone she'd ever known—

"Entrance team, report."

Tifa nearly jumped out of her skin before she realized that the voice was coming from a radio one of the guards was holding. She froze against the machinery she was hiding behind. She didn't dare peek out and see what it was.

"All clear up here, sir," one of the guards said.

"Keep a sharp eye out. If any of them get up there, your orders are to shoot on sight."

"Yes, sir."

The radio clicked off, and Tifa knew she wasn't going to get another chance. They were going to kill her if she didn't escape, right now. She peeked up from behind the machine just long enough to see that the guards were moving away from the entrance and back towards the vault, right where she was hiding. This was it.

She'd never been so scared in her life. They had guns, big ones, and all she had was a tiny little pistol she didn't even know how to shoot. They'd kill her if she tried to take them head-on.

But—

But her father had died to get her out of here.

She had to make it.

Tifa scrambled backwards and pulled herself over the railing guarding the walkway from the vault door. She hid behind it as the guards passed by, knowing she only had seconds, but it was enough for them not to notice her.

The second they made it to the other end of the walkway, she bolted.

The sound was enough to alert them, and she heard the pepper of gunfire behind her, but the Nibelheim vault was built into a cave system, and the exit was a sharp slope upwards. Tifa ran up the hill as fast as she could, through the open door at the end, and out into the scorching daylight.

She'd always heard that it was bright Outside, that there was something called a sun that warmed the Planet, but what she never could have prepared for was the sky. There was so much emptiness up there that she was getting dizzy looking at it, and even though the jagged peaks of the Nibel mountains cut against the sky it wasn't enough to keep her from wanting to turn around and run back inside.

But she couldn't — she couldn't — she could hear someone behind her, and she didn't think, she just turned and ran, away from the vault, away from the intruders, away from everything.

"I don't know how I made it off the mountain. There were caves, and I lost the raiders, but the monsters... I ran away from every one I saw. The ones I couldn't run from, I shot, until I ran out of ammo. I just kept running. Eventually I got to the bottom and reached the town. I'd hurt my arm — a wolf attacked me — and I was exhausted. I don't know where I was exactly when Master Zangan found me."

"Zangan?" Zack asked.

"He was a wanderer from Cosmo Canyon," Tifa said. "A scavenger. He'd been doing it for years. He said he was heading to Nibelheim to see if there was anything valuable when he found me. I told him about the vault, and he decided to bring me back here, to his home."

"Wow," Zack said. His eyes were wide. "Tifa, the people who attacked your vault — they've gotta be the same ones who took over Gongaga! We've gotta go to Nibelheim!"

Tifa looked at his bright eyes and felt a burst of warmth in her chest, the kind she hadn't felt in years. She realized that it was hope. She'd given up all hope when she'd left Nibelheim for dead, but the thought that someone might have survived... that people might still be there... she couldn't bear the thought of not knowing. "You're right," she said. "If there's any chance, no matter how small — we have to go to Nibelheim. We have to help them."

"All right!" Zack sat up and tried to climb out of bed. "Let's get going!"

Nanaki pushed the man back towards the bed with one paw. "You're still dehydrated and exhausted," he said. "While I will do all in my power to aid both of you, neither of you are going anywhere until preparations are made. Including rest, Zack."

Zack started sputtering protests, and Tifa was tempted to agree with him, but deep down she knew Nanaki was right. She smiled at Zack and rose. "Come on, get back in bed," she said, and gave him a push of her own. "If we leave now, we'll just have to turn back around because you're wiped out. Get some rest, and I'll get you some more water, okay?"

Zack pouted, but he sank back into the bed. "Okaaaaay. But we're leaving first thing in the morning!"

Tifa wished that were true.