Echoes seemed to travel for miles in the dark, steel catacombs. Buried under hundreds of metres of metal lay the remains of a long-dead city, the corpse of a past almost forgotten. The negligence and indifference of humanity meant that hundreds of years of history lay just beneath their feet, a footnote in the annals of a history written by unfeeling people.

Alexandria Quinn was not such a person. As she walked reverently through the catacombs, she couldn’t help but imagine what life must have been like five hundred years ago, when these catacombs were open to the sunlight and plants grew all throughout the city. Her prized collection of photographs showed how the city once was - a glorious assortment of buildings in all colours, shapes and sizes.

Now, it was simply an impersonal collection of steel cubes and glass tunnels. Even the Heritage Society building where she worked was bleak and characterless on the outside, as per city regulations. That was why Alex was here. She had followed a complex paper trail down into the warren of steel tunnels seeking some remnant of that vibrant past. The plans and blueprints she had meticulously studied hinted that something was down here.

All of a sudden, she turned into a large chamber. As she shone her torch across its wide length, she realised that an entire wall of the catacomb was… different, somehow. It wasn’t reflective, and was an odd colour - grey, but tinged slightly pink. Its texture was also odd - it looked rough to the touch.

“Stone,” Alex whispered. “It’s made of stone!”

Stumbling closer, she noticed unique details. The building seemed to have been constructed from large blocks of stone, held together by something she recognised from her studies - mortar. What she had originally taken for a pile of crates was revealed to be an ornate staircase, leading up to the most remarkable door she had ever seen.

“Wood!” In the dry, cool catacombs, nothing rotted or decayed, existing in stasis like a museum artefact. Because of those conditions, an ancient wooden door was able to exist, still shiny with green paint and carved with fantastical images. The walls were also carved, depicting faces she didn’t recognise and places unlike anything she had ever seen.

Most windows nowadays were made of sturdy reinforced glass - and most buildings didn’t even have windows. This building had windows. Not just windows - enormous arched ones, with stained glass in bright colours. One of them was cracked, a chunk of glass missing that should’ve been part of a book’s cover. It must’ve been knocked out hundreds of years ago, when the steel catacomb was first constructed.

A shard still remained, lying on the ground amongst smaller pieces of glass, like a gemstone washed up on a sandy shore. With a reverential air, Alex walked over to it, feeling its smoothness in her fingers. She probably wasn’t supposed to take things from the historical site, but how would anybody know? She slipped it into her pocket.

With that, she whipped out her camera. It was modelled after a disposable camera from the olden days, a big rectangular box with a round black hole in the front and a button on the side. It used modern technology, but people still gave her strange looks.

“Alex, why do you even have that thing?” her coworkers asked her. Well, this was why. So that if she ever found a historic building buried underneath the city, she would be able to take some photos rather than gawking like an idiot. (Although, that was exactly what she had just done.)

Alex made sure to photograph every inch of the building, bouncing on her heels all the time. The Heritage Society would love these photographs! Such a perfectly preserved building… it was as if Christmas had come early! Humming delightedly to herself, Alex walked back through the catacombs, ready to share her discovery.