THE MANUAL WAS the most useful thing our parents left us. Without it we wouldn’t have known how to operate the generators or grow food in the greenhouse, or anything. We wouldn’t have known our own bodies. Hunter had started asking questions, saying the manual was out of date and we couldn’t trust it, but I thought the opposite. What if the manual contained the secret to crossing the mountains? But yeah, I got where Hunter was coming from. He was bored. We were all so fucking bored. After a while, boredom takes over everything.

The first decade on our own was kind of exciting. We kept expecting someone to come in and say, Don’t touch that! Put that down! Go to bed. It’s late! The second decade we were all like, Okay, this is our place now. We decorated the corridors with torn pages from old picture books, painted the inside of the glass dome in bright colours, tried to read as much of the manual as we could. Then boredom started settling in, so we made our first attempts at travelling, but the surrounding mountains were too rocky and steep, no matter which path we took. By the third decade I wondered why our parents hadn’t left us a vehicle. Sometimes the lake froze over, but we had no skates and the ice was too thin for a sled. The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh decades filled me with bitterness. I felt like the big oak tree in the centre of our play garden, stuck in the same place forever. Except even the oak tree’s life was more interesting because when it was small Parent 3 had told us to be careful not to step on it, and now it was this huge thing with ugly tree wrinkles and scars in the trunk from the branches we cut off to build a raft one summer, but I’d hardly grown at all. I guess I wasn’t a lot of fun to be around when I had these thoughts.