She stayed in the basement, hidden so well that friends that had known her family since before she had been born never even dreamed it existed. The entrance had been built into one of the three bathrooms in their home. Unless an emergency over-ride were entered the bathroom door locked, and stayed that way until you exited the basement.

It was in a bathroom that only family used, and people weren’t in the habit of remarking on how long someone stayed in the bathroom, especially when the bathroom in question had no visible means of egress other than the door.

At first it had been for hiding, from bandits, reavers and the governor’s men, but it had been expanded many times over in the passing years. Her father had been a structural engineer exiled far from the core when his views on the morality of forcing the outer worlds into the Alliance had annoyed too many prominent men. He had built the house, and the hidey, fearing that the people he annoyed would hold a grudge. After he had married her mother, a doctor he had begun expanding it. It made a good place for him to keep his instruments and work on his projects. A safe place for his wife to store medicines and equipment that was very valuable.

And as their daughter had grown the hidey had been expanded still farter, making plenty of room for her experiments with plants. They had joked about her name, about the appropriateness of it. How her love of plants, and her ongoing struggle to bioengineer them to grow faster, with less oxygen, less sunlight, less water and less soil, to get them to bear more fruit, sooner, to help those out on the rim, who barely got by, have a garden that could sustain them for less. Eve, they had named her, Eden they had called her lab. They had always teased her about her garden.

She supposed that it wasn’t really a basement, but an underground compound. She tried to focus on the mundane, on trivial thoughts she had, had every time she came down here. But each shot that rang out, followed by a shatter of glass, or th