The little girl started asking questions.
Sometimes of her mother in the increasingly rare moments she found herself in the woman's company.
That never got her anywhere.
Sometimes of the other white coats who occupied the facility that had been her entire world almost as long as she could remember.
She had plenty of opportunities.
They were her teachers after all, were the faces she watched for clues while they ate in the cafeteria on the many nights her mother declined to dine with her, were the ones who tended to her when she was sick.
Some of them were as distracted and disapproving of her presence as her mother.
Some of them were kind if distant and eyed her with pity.
It didn't matter.
None of them would tell her more than she already knew, more than she had pieced together from her own fragmented memories and a hundred quickly aborted conversations with her mother.
Solar flares.
Destruction.
Death.
Escaping disease samples.
The flare.
More destruction.
More death.
The search for a cure.
The mysterious, formless work her mother and the other white coats did that was all behind closed doors.
Locked doors.
Just like the doors that separated her from the only other people her age that she had seen since she last stood under the sun.
Sometimes the little girl wanted to bust through those doors even if the kids on the other side killed her on sight.
Sometimes the little girl wanted to bust through the outer doors too.
Destruction and death and all.
Sometimes the sun felt worth it.