Sarah Mackay had finished her studies at St Andrew's and was now immersed in her Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University in Beijing. This was her first opportunity to return to Europe, where she had hoped to spend nine days in Berlin and nine days with her family in Edinburgh. However, things took a drastic turn when the war broke out in Ukraine and she made the brave decision to accompany her close friend and former colleague at CERN, Tomasz Nowak, to help rescue his family. What she hadn't reckoned on was being stuck in a basement with shells falling all around her… Her thoughts on relativity on the grandest scale help her to get through the ordeal.