An incredibly harrowing, unsettling read that left me with so many unanswered questions.

And I still enjoyed every moment of it.

Our unnamed protagonist is one of forty women imprisoned in an underground bunker, guarded by male wardens every moment of their lives. But one day, everything changes for these women.

Whether it’s for better or for worse is purely subjective. 

Spoilers Ahead

God, where do I even begin with this one?

It’s tragic, it’s made me think about my life on this planet, and it’s made me reflect on the things that make us all human. Most of all, it makes me muse on how awful a solitary existence must be.

The protagonist is the youngest of the women trapped in the underground bunker. Their days consist of waking up, eating, existing, then going back to bed again. What’s interesting is that all of the women, except our protagonist, have memories of what life on Earth used to be like before they were imprisoned in this bunker.

This is one of the first clues that makes me believe that these women, and this whole story, are not on Earth anymore.

The protagonist grows frustrated with the other women for not disclosing things around her–such as their experience with love, relationships, and time with men. The protagonist’s puberty was hindered, so she does not menstruate and she did not physically develop as she should have. Thus, a part of her femininity was taken from her. Everything was taken from her, in retrospect.

One day, a loud siren goes off and the guards go running, but by a stroke of luck, one of the guards was unlocking the door when the siren went off. The protagonist finishes unlocking the door and the women all hurry out of the prison. Then, they ascend from the bunker and realize they’ve been trapped underground for years at that point. Where did the guards go? What was that siren and what did it mean? Those questions are never answered.

The protagonist and the women start wandering around, hoping to find some semblance of civilization, but they never do so. One by one, the women start dying–some of them more peacefully than others.

Years and years go by. The protagonist and the surviving women build a small village to live in. They forage from the many other bunkers left behind, which are filled with food to last years, among other supplies. And each time, they see around forty deceased women or men in these bunkers.

It’s chilling to think that this would’ve been the protagonist’s fate, had that guard not unlocked the door for them.

In the beginning, the protagonist holds onto the belief that maybe one day, she is going to find a bunker where the inhabitants also managed to escape. But time goes on and that never happens.

Eventually, the protagonist is the last woman standing. At this point, it’s been 13 years since she and the 39 other women escaped from the bunker. She decides to spend the next two years traveling on foot, trying to see what else this world has to offer.

Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t find anyone else. But she does find two exciting discoveries that keep her going. One is an abandoned bus, filled with deceased guards that are carrying alcohol and books on gardening.

The second is a luxurious underground bunker that possibly belonged to a very important person. It has all kinds of rare food items, a bedroom, a nice bathroom, and lots of books. Thankfully, the protagonist learned to read from the other women while living in their village, so she was able to enjoy some stories.

What truly unsettled me about this novel is despite everything, I also had the naive hope that maybe someone else would be alive or something would come along and save the protagonist. But that never happened, and it’s heartbreaking. She was truly alone in this world, with no memories of a life where happiness, love, and coexistence was prevalent amongst the population.

In the end, the protagonist dies from some sort of ovarian or uterine cancer, which is ironic since she had really no use for these organs in the first place. She never menstruated, never had a baby, never had sex, so it’s a cruel fate to die from the organs that managed to be completely useless to her.

I have a few theories on what happened in this story! For one, I sincerely do not think they are on Earth anymore. There’s no roads, no infrastructure, just nothing but trees and terrain. So this makes me think that these imprisoned people were all taken from Earth somehow, transplanted here, and imprisoned until the time came to release them.

I believe that they were all brought here as a repopulation tactic, so they could be on a distant planet in the solar system (there’s no seasons here, just the occasional rain). Another clue that corroborates this theory is the fact that the women can no longer find the familiar constellations in the sky that they once saw on Earth. 

The siren which caused all of the guards to disappear was probably a beckoning call, telling them to abort the mission on this new planet, leaving all of the people in the bunkers to die. I mean, if you think about it, the plan to repopulate a distant planet with no true way to establish agriculture or livestock was a horrible idea in the first place. The people in charge probably figured that out, and decided to end this mission, saving the guards but abandoning the people they plucked off of Earth unwillingly.

The protagonist is forced to live a meaningless life of survival, with no love, no culture, nothing to differentiate her day to day living. She was treated like an animal in this unknown planet, forced to exist until the day she died. Honestly, I feel like this novel is a good representation of what hell would feel like. 

The protagonist did her absolute best to figure out how to live in such abysmal conditions, such as acting like a human clock by using her heartbeats to track time, as well as using her footsteps to measure distance. 

But still, the protagonist was never truly able to live her life as a ‘human’ in the typical sense. She started off with nothing, and even though she found herself in a luxurious bunker in the end, she still died with nothing. Nobody to share this with, no one to accompany her at death as she did for many of the other women before her.

And yet, her innate desire to learn more about the world, to be curious, to explore when she probably knew what she was going to encounter, goes to show that you can never truly kill the human spirit no matter what. Humans will always strive to know more, to learn, to adapt to the surroundings as best as they can. This is how we’ve survived for so long on this planet, which was once so hostile to humans.

It’s a shame that the protagonist never found out what happened. It’s even more tragic that she died alone. And the fact that we’re left with more unanswered questions at the end just proves the author’s point: as humans, we want knowledge, we want answers, and we will muse and ponder and explore until the day we die in order to find them.

That, at its core, is what makes us human despite everything. You can strip everything else away from us: our relationships, our society, our culture. But you will never take away a human’s desire to learn and desire to explore. Never.