The first place Miss Eleina dialed was Cafe Crystál, Downtown’s premier and only restaurant. Before the second ring completed, a hand scarred with a thousand little cuts and burns snatched the phone off its receiver.

“What? Carnelia’s missing?” A graying but still stout chef in a well-scrubbed white apron demanded answers over the phone. The woman had spent her active years bellowing orders in similar kitchens, but to be heard over the banging and clanging of cutlery she had to well and truly shout. “Let me see if she’s here!”

The chef knew exactly why Miss Eleina had called her first. In this underground town with nothing to do, her kitchen was one of the few places where anything new was born. And Downtown’s limited set of natural ingredients forced some… creative interpretations of food. Luckily, if there was anything that Carnelia loved, it was novelty. No matter how nose-pinching the aroma or lip-puckering the flavor, she always returned for seconds. The chef did not want to lose the most fearless taste tester she had ever known.

The chef pulled the corded receiver as far as it would extend and yanked open the metal sliding window that connected the kitchen to the dining area.

Empty. Even in the midst of an earthquake, it still stung to see the restaurant in such a state.

“She’s not here, Eleina!” shouted the chef into the phone. “Try the library inst-"

A tremendous crash cut her off as a huge rack of pots and pans fell to the floor. And by the time the noise cleared, all that was on the other end was a dial tone.

When the call reached Downtown’s community library, the phone rang almost seven times before it was picked up. But not from lack of urgency on the answerer’s part. Having protectively flung his narrow frame over the town’s only computer, the librarian had to stretch his bony physique painfully far to pick up.

“Carnelia? Now, of all times?”

The aged scholar kneaded his exceedingly large forehead, which his long-receding hairline made all the larger. It was true, Carnelia had been visiting the library after school a lot this past year, but he already had his hands full dealing with the disaster surrounding him. Aside from the ones carved right into the stone walls, most of the bookshelves had fallen over. Books were scattered and crushed all over the floor. Damn. Right after he'd reorganized them via the Foggy Fractional system too.

The man snapped and shook his head. How dare he dawdle when Carnelia, that precocious girl, could be injured under his watch? Before her, no one had ever visited the library, not even to swing by and say hello. But she had. Even now, she could trapped under a pile of books, struggling for breath

The librarian paused, then glanced down at the computer below him.

But of course. How could he have forgotten? Carnelia never came here for its selection of horribly dated tomes. She came here for the computer and its all-important Net connection. That was why they had gotten along so grandly in the first place. She was seemingly the only other person in Downtown who appreciated what a marvel the device was. If Carnelia were here, she would have been protecting the computer with her body right alongside him.

“She’s not here!” shouted the librarian before cutting the call short.

Another bookshelf fell over. He ignored it. Damn the books. He had fought tooth and nail to convince that miserly village council to purchase this giant, magnificent computing device, and he'd die before he let anything happen to it.

That being said, if she weren’t here, where else could she be? He certainly hoped she was safe.

The recipient of the third call was the oldest of them all. A woman so wizened and shriveled that she looked as if she had petrified whilst watching over the dense plots of fungi that grew on mineral beds in front of her. Her waist-length waders and rubber boots crinkled and squeaked as the former farmer, now amateur mycologist, slowly rose for the phone. The mask she wore muffled her voice when she answered.

“The girl?” she rasped.

Carnelia didn’t visit here often. If she did, it was usually a matter of last resort. When she ran out of things to do she sometimes came down and checked on a few especially proliferous variant colonies of ectomycorhizal and talaromyces flavus. They were the closest things to pets the girl had around here.

The woman glanced around. The fungi were fine. The earthquake failed to disturb them in their dark, dank bunker of stone.

As for Carnelia…

…she wasn’t here.

And so the calls went on.

From the rippling algae pools around the periphery of Downtown, to the imports stall dropping goods all over Main Street, to even the rattling gate of the burial underhollow— Miss Eleina’s call went out to all of Carnelia's usual haunts.

But no one seemed to know where she was.

So Miss Eleina called the one person in town who knew Carnelia better than even her. The one who knew the usual haunts, as well as the not-so-usual ones. Carnelia had asked her not to let him find out she had skipped class… but Miss Eleina hardly cared about that now.

The man in question picked up on the third ring, irritation and strain audible even through the old copper lines.

“What is it Eleina?” he grunted, “I’m a bit busy securing my sculptures here! I’ve already lost two!”

“I'm sure it's a terrible inconvenience. But I thought you might want to know that Carnelia has skipped school, and no one can seem to find her!”

"Did you check-"

"Yes. I called all the usual spots. No sign of her."

There was silence on the other end for a second. Then a muffled crash.

“Fine,” he sighed, “I’ll go check up on her.”