Dust

36

Charlotte leaned away from the radio, stunned. She stared at the crackling speaker, listened to the hiss of static, and played the scene over and over in her head. An open door, toxic air leaking in, people dying, a stampede, a silo gone. A silo her brother had labored to save was gone.

Her hand trembled as she reached for the dial. Flipping through channels, she heard other voices from other silos, little snippets of conversation and silence with no context, proof that elsewhere, life continued apace:

“—second time this month this has happened. You let Carol know—”

“—if you’ll hold it for me until I get there, I’d sure appre—”

“…”

“—roger that. We have her in custody now—”

Bouts of static between these conversations held the place of silos full of dead air. Silos full of the dead.

Charlotte dialed back to 18. The repeaters were still working up and down that silo; she could tell from the hiss. She listened for that voice to return, the woman calling for everyone to head to the bottom levels. Charlotte had heard someone say her name. It was strange to think she’d heard the voice of this woman her brother was obsessed with, this rogue mayor as he called her, this cleaner-come-home.

It could’ve been someone else, but Charlotte didn’t think so. Those were commands from someone in charge. She imagined a woman huddling down in the depths of a distant silo, someplace dark and lonely, and felt a sudden kinship. What she wouldn’t give to be able to transmit rather than just listen, some way to reach out.

Leaning forward, she rubbed the side of the radio where the mic would wire up. It was suspicious that her brother saved this part for last. Almost as if he didn’t trust her not to speak with someone. Almost as if he wanted her simply to listen. Or maybe it was himself he was worried about. Perhaps he didn’t trust what he would do if he could broadcast his thoughts over the air. This wasn’t the heads of the silos listening in, this was anyone with a radio.

Charlotte patted her chest and felt for the ID he had given her, and images flashed before her of a boot rising and falling, of a wall and a floor spotted with blood. In the end, he hadn’t been given a chance. But she had to do something. She couldn’t sit there listening to static forever, listening to people die. Donny said her ID would work the elevators. The urge to take action was overpowering.

She powered the radio down and covered it with the sheet of plastic. She arranged the chair so it appeared undisturbed and studied the drone control room for signs of habitation. Back at her bunk, she opened her trunk and studied the outfits. She chose reactor red. It fitted her more loosely than the others. Pulling it out, she inspected the name patch. Stan. She could be a Stan.

She got dressed and went to the storeroom. There was plenty of grease to be had from the disassembled drone. She collected some on her palm, searched one of the supply bins for a cap, and went to the bathroom. The men’s room. Charlotte used to enjoy putting on make-up. That seemed like a different lifetime, a different person. She remembered moving from playing video games to trying to be pretty, shading her cheeks so they didn’t look so chubby. This was before basic training made her lean and hard for a brief time. It was before two tours of duty helped her to regain her natural body, get used to that body, accept it, even love it.

She used the grease to deaccentuate her cheekbones. A little on her eyebrows made them appear fuller. A foul-tasting smear on her lips so they weren’t so red. It was the opposite of any make-up job she’d ever applied. She stuffed her hair inside the cap and pulled the brim down low, adjusted her coveralls until those looked like folds of fabric rather than breasts.

It was a pathetic disguise. She saw through it immediately. But then, she knew. In a world where women weren’t allowed, would any suspect? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t know. She longed for Donny to be there so she could ask him. She imagined him laughing at her, which was nearly enough to make her cry.

“Don’t you fucking cry,” she told the mirror, dabbing at her eyes. She was worried what the crying might do to her make-up. But the tears came anyway. They came and disturbed nothing. They were drops of water gliding over grease.

There was a schematic somewhere. Charlotte searched Donny’s folder of notes by the radio and didn’t see it. She tried the conference room where her brother had spent much of his time poring through boxes of files. The place was a wreck. Most of his notes had been hauled off. They must be planning on coming back for the rest, probably in the morning. Or they could arrive right then, and Charlotte would have to explain what she was doing there:

“I was sent down here to retrieve… uh…” Her lowered voice sounded ridiculous. She shuffled through the opened folders and loose pages and tried again, this time with her normal voice just slightly flattened. “I was told to take this to recycling,” she explained to nobody. “Oh? And what level is recycling on?” she asked herself. “I have no fucking clue,” she admitted. “That’s why I’m looking for a map.”

She found a map. It wasn’t the right one, though. A grid of circles with red lines radiating out to a single point. She only knew it was a map because she recognized the layout with its grid of letters down the side and numbers across the top. The Air Force had once assigned daily targets on grids like these. She would grab a bagel and coffee in the mess hall, and then a man and his family from D-4 would die in a fiery maelstrom. Break for lunch. Ham and cheese on rye.

Charlotte recognized the circles laid out across the grid. It was the silos. She had flown three drones over depressions in hills just like this. The red lines were odd. She traced one with her finger. They reminded her of flight lines. They extended off every silo except for the one near the center, which she thought might be the one she was in. Donald had shown her this layout once on the big table, the one now buried under the loose pages. She folded the map and stuffed it into her breast pocket and kept looking.

The Silo 1 schematic she had seen before seemed lost, but she found the next best thing. A directory. It listed personnel by rank, shift assignment, occupation, living level, and work level. It was the size of a phone book for a small town, a reminder of how many people were taking turns running the silo. Not people — men. Scanning the names, Charlotte saw that it was all men. She thought of Sasha, the only other woman who’d gone through boot camp with her. Strange to think that Sasha was dead, that all the men in her regiment, everyone from flight school, all of them were dead.

She found the name of a reactor mechanic and his work level, looked for a pen amid the chaos, found one, and jotted the level number down. Administration, she discovered, was on level thirty-four. A comms officer worked on the same level, which sucked. She hated to think of the comm room right down the hall from the people who ran the joint. A security officer worked on twelve. If Donny was being held, maybe he’d be there. Unless they’d put him back to sleep. Unless he was in whatever passed for a hospital there. Cryo was down below, she thought. She remembered coming up the lift after he’d woken her. She found the level for the main cryo office by locating someone who worked there, but that probably wasn’t where the bodies were kept. Was it?

Her notes became a mess of scribbles, a rough outline of what was where above and below her. But where to start in her search? She couldn’t find mention of the supply and spares rooms her brother had been raiding, probably because no one actually worked on those levels. Starting over on a fresh piece of paper, she drew a cylinder and made the best schematic she could, filling in the floors she knew from Donny’s routine and the ones from the directory. Starting with the cafeteria at the very top, she worked her way down to the cryo office, which was as far down as her notes took her. The empty levels were her best bet. Some of those would be storerooms and warehouses. But the lift could just as easily open to a roomful of men playing cards — or whatever it was they did to kill the time while they killed the world. She couldn’t just roll the dice; she needed a plan.

She studied the map and considered her options. One place for sure would have a mic, and that was the comm room. She checked the clock on the wall. Six twenty-five. Dinnertime and end of shift, lots of people moving about. Charlotte touched her face where she had smudged grease to dull her cheekbones. She wasn’t thinking straight, probably shouldn’t go anywhere until after eleven. Or was it better to be lost in a jostling crowd? What was out there? She paced and debated. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, testing her new voice. It sounded like she had a cold. That was the best way to sound male: like she had a cold.

She returned to the storeroom and studied the elevator doors. Someone could burst out right then, and her decision would be made for her. She should wait until later. Returning to the drones, she pulled the tarp off the one she’d been working on and studied the loose panels and scattering of tools. Glancing back at the conference room, she saw Donny curled there on the floor, trying to fend off the kicks with his shins, two men holding him down, a man who could barely stand landing sickening blows.

Picking up a screwdriver, Charlotte slotted it into one of the tool pouches on her coveralls. Not sure what to do, she got to work on the drone, killing time. She would go out later that night when there were fewer people up and less chance of being spotted. First, she would get the next machine ready to fly. Donny wasn’t there — his work lay unfinished — but she could soldier on. She could piece things back together, one bolt and one nut at a time. And that night, she would go out and find the part she needed. She would win back her voice and reach out to those people in that stricken silo, if any of them were still alive.

37

The arriving lift struck midnight. Well, five past midnight. That’s when Charlotte finally built up enough nerve to venture out, and the lift sent a ding echoing through the armory.

The doors rattled open, and she stepped inside memories of a lost place and time, memories of a normal world where lifts took people to and from work. Clutching the ID card Donny had given her, she felt another pang of doubt. The doors began to close. Charlotte stuck her boot out and allowed the doors to slam against her foot, and the lift opened again. She waited for alarms to sound as the doors tried to close a second time. Maybe she should get off the damn thing and make up her mind, let the lift be on its way, grab another in an hour or two. The doors pinched her boot tentatively, and then retreated, like a monster considering whether to eat her. Charlotte decided she had delayed long enough.

She pressed her ID card to the reader and watched its eye blink green, then pressed the button for level thirty-four. Admin and comms. The lion’s den. The doors seemed to sigh gratefully as they finally met. The floors began to flash by.

Charlotte checked the back of her neck and felt a few loose strands of hair. She tucked them into her cap. Admin was a risk — she would stand out in red coveralls meant for the reactor level — but it would be even more awkward to show up where she seemed to belong while not knowing her way around or what she was supposed to do. She patted her pockets to make sure she had her tools, made sure they were visible. They were her cover. Hidden inside a large pouch on her hip, a pistol from one of the storage bins sagged conspicuously. Charlotte’s heart raced as the levels flew past. She tried to imagine the world outside that Donald had described, the dry and lifeless wasteland. She imagined the elevator going all the way up and opening on those barren hills, the wind howling inside the lift. It might be a relief.

No passengers joined her on the way up. It was a good decision, going this time of night. Thirty-six, thirty-five, and then the lift slowed. The doors opened on a hallway, the lights beyond harsh and bright. She doubted her disguise immediately. A man looked up from a gate a dozen paces distant. There was nothing familiar about this world, nothing like her home of the past few weeks. She tugged the brim of her hat down, aware that it didn’t match her coveralls. The important thing was confidence, which she felt none of. Be brash. Direct. She told herself that the days here were full of sameness. Everyone would see what they expected to see. She approached the man and his gate and held out her ID.

“You expected?” the man asked. He pointed to the scanner on her side of the gate. Charlotte swiped the card, not knowing what might happen, fully prepared to run, to pull out the pistol, to surrender, or some confusing mix of all three.

“We’re showing a, uh… power drain on this level.” Her pretend-sick voice sounded ludicrous to her own ears. But then, she knew her voice better than anyone — she told herself that was why it sounded funny. It might sound normal to someone else. She also hoped a power drain made as little sense to this man as it did to her. “I was sent up to check the comm room. You know where it is?”

A question for him. Tickle his male ego for directions. Charlotte felt a rivulet of sweat run down the nape of her neck and wondered if there were anymore loose strands of hair. She fought the urge to check. Lifting her arm might tighten her coveralls across her chest. Sizing up the large man, she pictured him grabbing her and slamming her to the ground, hands the size of small plates pummeling her.

“Comms? Of course. Yeah. Down the hall to the end, turn left. Second door on your right.”

“Thanks.” Tipping her hat allowed her to keep her head down. She pushed through the bars with a clack and the tick of some invisible counter.

“Forgetting something?”

She turned. Her hand fell to the pouch by her leg.

“Need you to sign the work log.” The guard held out a worn digital tablet, its screen a haze of curling scratches.

“Right.” Charlotte took the plastic stylus hanging from a cord of wire repaired with tape. She studied the entry box in the center of the screen. There was a place to write the time and a place to sign her name. She filled in the time and glanced at her chest, already forgetting. Stan. Her name was Stan. She scrawled this messily, tried to make it look casual, handed him the tablet and stylus.

“See you on your way out,” the guard said.

Charlotte nodded and hoped her way out would prove just as uneventful.

She followed his directions down the main hall. There was more activity, more sounds than she expected at that time of night. There were lights on in a few of the offices, the squeak of chairs and filing cabinets and keyboards clattering. A door opened down the hall, and a man stepped out, pulled the door shut behind him. Charlotte saw his face, and her legs went numb. She staggered a few steps on stalks of bone and meat, wobbly. Dizzy. Nearly fell.

She lowered her head and scratched the back of her neck, disbelieving. But it was Thurman. Slimmer and older-looking. And then images of Donny curled in a ball and being beaten half to death flooded back. The hallway blurred behind a coat of tears. The white hair, the tall frame. How had she not recognized him then?

“You’re a ways from home, aren’t you?” Thurman asked.

His voice was sandpaper. It was a familiar scratch. As familiar as her mother’s or her father’s voice would’ve been.

“Checking a power drain,” Charlotte said, not stopping or turning, hoping he meant her coveralls and not her gender. How could he not hear that it was her voice? How could he not recognize her gait, her frame, the bare patch of skin on the back of her neck, that few square inches of exposed flesh, anything to betray her?

“See to it,” he said.

She walked a dozen paces. Two dozen. Sweating. Feeling drunk. She waited until she was at the end of the hall, just starting to make the turn, before glancing back toward the security station. Thurman was there in the distance, speaking with the guard, his white hair like the bare sun. Second door on the right, she reminded herself. She was in danger of forgetting the guard’s directions to the comm room, such was the pounding of her heart and the racing of her mind. She took a deep breath and reminded herself why she was there. Seeing Thurman and realizing it was he who had laid into Donny had stunned her. But there was no time for processing that. A door stood before her. She tested the knob, then stepped inside.

A lone man sat inside the comm room, staring at a bank of monitors and flashing indicators. He turned in his seat as Charlotte entered, a mug in his hand, a great belly wedged between the armrests. Fine wisps of hair had been combed across an otherwise bald head. He peeled back one of the cups from his ear and lifted his eyebrows questioningly.

There had to be half a dozen radio units scattered across the U-shaped arrangement of workbenches and comfortable chairs. An embarrassment of riches. Charlotte just needed one part.

“Yeah?” the radio operator asked.

Charlotte’s mouth felt dry. One lie had gotten her past the guard; she had one more fib prepared. She cleared her mind of having seen Thurman in the hallway, of images of him kicking her brother.

“Here to fix one of your units,” she said. She pulled a screwdriver from a pocket and briefly imagined having to fight this man, felt a surge of adrenaline. She had to stop thinking like a soldier. She was an electrician. And she needed to get him talking so that she wasn’t. “Which is the one with the bum mic?” She waved her screwdriver across the units. Years of piloting drones and working with computers had taught her one thing: there was always a problem machine. Always.

The radio operator narrowed his eyes. He studied her for a moment, then glanced around the room. “You must mean number two,” he said. “Yeah. The button’s sticky. I’d given up on anyone taking a look.” The chair squeaked as he leaned back and locked his fingers behind his head. His armpits were dark stains. “Last guy said it was minor. Not worth replacing. Said to use it until it gave out.”

Charlotte nodded and went to the machine he had indicated. It was too easy. She attacked the side panel with her driver, her back to the operator.

“You work down on the reactor levels, right?”

She nodded.

“Yeah. Ate across from you in the cafeteria a while back.”

Charlotte waited for him to ask her name again or to resume some conversation he’d had with a different tech. The driver slipped out of her sweaty palm and clattered on the desk. She scooped it back up. She could feel the operator watching her work.

“You think you’ll be able to fix it?”

She shrugged. “I need to take it with me. Should have it back tomorrow.” She pulled the side panel off and loosened the screw holding the microphone’s cord to the casing. The cord itself unplugged from a board inside the machine. On second thought, she undid this board and pulled it out as well. Couldn’t remember if she had one installed already, and it made her look as though she really knew what the hell she was doing.

“You’ll have it tomorrow? That’s great. Really appreciate this.”

Charlotte gathered the parts and stood up straight. Pinching the brim of her hat was enough of a goodbye; she turned and headed out the door, leaving too hastily, she suspected. The side panel and screws had been left on the counter. A real tech would’ve put them back, wouldn’t they? She wasn’t sure. She knew a few pilots from a different life who would’ve laughed to have seen her pretending to be technically inclined, modding drones and building radios, putting grease rather than rouge on her face.

The operator said one last thing, but his words were pinched off as she pulled the door shut. She hurried down the hall and toward the main corridor, expecting to round the bend and find Thurman there with a handful of guards, wide shoulders blocking her way. She slotted the screwdriver back into her pocket and coiled the microphone wire up, cradled it and the board to her chest. When she turned the corner, there was no one in the hall except the guard. It took what felt like hours to walk down that corridor to the security gate. It took days. The walls pressed in and throbbed with her heartbeat. Her coveralls clung to her damp skin. Tools rattled, and the gun weighed heavy at her hip. With each step, the lift doors somehow drew two steps further away from her.

She stopped at the gate, remembered the place on the slate to mark her time out, and made a show of checking the guard’s clock before scratching the time.

“That was quick,” the guard said.

She forced a smile but didn’t look up. “Wasn’t a big deal.” She handed him the tablet and stepped through the clacking gates. Behind her, down the hall, someone closed an office door, boots squeaking on tile. Charlotte marched toward the lifts and jabbed the call button once, twice, wishing the damn thing would hurry. The lift dinged its arrival. There was a clomp of boots behind her.

“Hey!” someone yelled.

Charlotte didn’t turn. She hurried inside the elevator as someone else clacked through the security gates.

“Hold that for me.”

38

A body slammed against the lift doors, a hand jutting inside. Charlotte nearly screamed in fright, nearly slapped at the hand, but then the doors were opening, and a man crowded into the lift beside her, breathing hard.

“Going down, right?”

The name patch on his gray coveralls read Eren. He caught his breath while the doors closed. Charlotte’s hand was trembling. It took two tries to scan her card. She reached for the button marked “54”, but caught herself before pressing it. She had no business being on that level. No one did. The man was watching her, his own card out, waiting for her to decide.

What level for the reactor? She had it written down on a piece of paper inside one of her pockets, but she couldn’t very well pull it out and study it. Suddenly, she could smell the grease on her face, could feel herself damp with sweat. Cradling the radio parts in one arm, she pressed one of the lowest levels, trusting that this man would get off before she did and she would have the elevator to herself.

“Excuse me,” he said, reaching in front of her to swipe his card. Charlotte could smell stale coffee on his breath. He punched the button for level forty-two, and the lift shivered into motion.

“Late shift?” Eren asked.

“Yeah,” Charlotte said, keeping her head down and her voice low.

“You just waking up?”

She shook her head. “Night shift.”

“No, I mean are you just coming out of freeze? Don’t think I’ve seen you around. I’m the on-shift head right now.” He laughed. “For another week, anyway.”

Charlotte shrugged. It was boiling hot inside the lift. The numbers were counting down so damn slowly. She should’ve pressed a nearby floor, gotten off, and waited on the next lift. Too late, now.

“Hey, look at me,” the man said.

He knew. He was standing so close. Too close for anything but suspicious scrutiny. Charlotte glanced up; she could feel her breasts press against her coveralls, could feel hair trailing out from her cap, could feel her cheekbones and stubble-free chin, everything that made her a woman, not least of which was her powerful revulsion at this strange man staring at her, this man who had her trapped and powerless in a small lift. She met his gaze, feeling all of this and more. Helpless and afraid.

“What the fuck?” the man said.

Charlotte threw her knee up between his legs, hoping to cripple him, but he turned his hips and jumped back. She caught him on the thigh, instead. She fumbled for the pistol — but the pouch was snapped shut. Never thought she’d need to draw it in a hurry. She got the pouch open and the pistol free as the man slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her lungs and the gun from her hand. The gun and the radio parts clattered to the floor. Boots squeaked as the two of them wrestled, but she was vastly overpowered. His hands gripped her wrists painfully. She screamed, her high-pitched voice a confession. The elevator slowed to a stop on his level, and the doors dinged open.

“Hey!” Eren yelled. He tried to drag Charlotte through the doors, but she placed a boot on the panel and kicked off, attempting to wrench free of his grip. “Help!” he shouted over his shoulder and down the dim and empty hall. “Guys! Help!”

Charlotte bit his hand at the base of his thumb. There was a pop as her teeth punctured his flesh, and then the bitter taste of blood. He cursed and lost his grip on her wrist. She kicked him back through the door, lost her cap, felt her hair spill down to her neck as she reached for the gun.

The doors began to close, leaving the man out in the hallway. He lurched from his hands and knees and was back through the doors before they could bang shut. He slammed into Charlotte, and she hit the back wall as the elevator continued its merry jaunt down the silo.

A blow caught her in the jaw. Charlotte saw a flash of bright light. She jerked her head back before the next punch landed. The man pressed her against the back of the lift, was grunting like a crazed animal, a sound of fury and terror and startlement. He was trying to kill her, this thing he couldn’t understand. She had attacked him, and now he was trying to kill her. A blow to her ribs, and Charlotte cried out and clutched her side. She felt hands around her neck, squeezing, lifting her off the floor. Her palm settled on a screwdriver slotted into her coveralls.

“Hold… still,” the man grunted through clenched teeth.

Charlotte gagged. Couldn’t breathe. Could barely make a sound. Her windpipe was being crushed. Screwdriver in her right fist, she brought it up over his shoulder and slammed it at his face, hoping to scratch him, hoping to scare him, to make him let go. She drove it with all the strength she had left in her, with the last of her consciousness, as the dark tunnel of her vision began to iris shut.

The man saw the strike coming and turned his head to the side, eyes wide as he sought to avoid the blow. She missed his face. The screwdriver buried itself in his neck instead. He lost his grip on her, and Charlotte felt the screwdriver twist and tear inside his throat as she clung to it to keep from falling.

There was a flash of warmth on her face. The elevator came to a sudden stop, and both of them fell to the ground. There was a gurgling sound, and the heat on Charlotte’s face was the man’s blood, which jetted out in crimson spurts. They both gasped for air. Beyond, there was laughter in a hallway, loud voices booming, a gleaming floor that reminded her of the medical wing in which she’d woken up.

She staggered to her feet. The man in gray who had attacked her kicked and squirmed on the ground, his life spilling out of his neck, his eyes wide and beseeching her — anyone — for help. He tried to speak, to cry out to the people down the hall, but it was little more than a gurgle. Charlotte stooped and grabbed him by the collar. The doors were closing. She jammed her boot between them, and they opened again. Tugging on the man — who slipped and slid in his own blood, heels slamming against the floor of the lift — she pulled him into the hallway, made sure his boots were free of the doors. The lift began to close again, threatening to leave her there with him. There was more laughter from a nearby room, a group of men cracking up over some joke. Charlotte dove for the closing doors, stuck her arm between them, and they opened once more. She staggered inside, numb and exhausted.

There was blood everywhere. Her boots slipped in the stuff. Looking at the horror on the ground, she realized something was missing. The pistol. Panic tightened her chest as she glanced up, the doors shuddering together a final time. There was a deafening bang from the gun, hate and fear in a dying man’s eyes, and then she was thrown back, a fire erupting in her shoulder.

“Fuck.”

Charlotte staggered across the lift, her first thought to get it moving, to flee. She could feel the man on the other side of the door, could picture him clutching his neck with one hand and holding that pistol in the other, could imagine him fumbling for the lift call button, leaving a smear of blood on the wall. She pressed a handful of buttons, marking them with blood, but none of the floors lit up. Cursing, she fumbled for her ID. One arm wouldn’t respond. She reached awkwardly across herself with the other, dug the ID out, nearly dropped it, ran it through the scanner.

“Fuck. Fuck,” she whispered, her shoulder on fire. She jabbed the button for fifty-four. Home. Her prison had become home, a safe place. By her feet lay the radio parts. The control board was cracked in half from someone’s boot. She slid down to her heels, cradling her other arm, fighting the urge to pass out, and scooped up the microphone. She draped this by its cord around the back of her neck, left the other parts. There was blood everywhere. Some of it had to be hers. Reactor red. It blended right in with her coveralls. The lift rose, slowed to a stop, and opened on the dark supply room on fifty-four.

Charlotte staggered out, remembered something, and stepped back inside. She kicked the doors open as they tried to shut, was angry with them now. With her elbow, she tried to wipe the lift buttons clean. There was a smear of blood, a fingerprint, on button fifty-four, a sign pointing to where she had gone. It was no use. The doors again tried to close, and again she kicked them for their effort. Desperate, Charlotte bent and ran her palm through the man’s spilled blood, returned to the panel, and covered every button with a great dose of the stuff. Finally, she scanned her ID and pressed the top level, sending the goddamn thing far away, as far away as she could. Staggering out, she collapsed to the ground. The doors began to close, and she was glad to let them.

39

They would look for her. She was a fugitive locked in a cage, in a single, giant building. They would hunt her down.

Charlotte’s mind raced. If the man she attacked died there in the hallway, she might have until the end of shift before he was discovered and they started looking for her. If he found help, it could be hours. But they had to have heard the gun going off, right? They would save his life. She hoped they would save his life.

She opened a crate where she’d seen a medical kit. Wrong crate. It was the next one. She dug the kit out and undid her coveralls, tearing at the snaps. Wiggling her arms out, she saw the grisly wound. Dark red blood puckered from a hole in her arm and streaked down to her elbow. She reached around and winced as her fingers found the exit. Her arm was numb from the wound down. From the wound up, it was throbbing.

She tore a roll of gauze open with her teeth, then wrapped it under her armpit and around and around, sent the roll behind her neck and across her other shoulder to keep it all in place. Finally, another few laps across the wound. She’d forgotten a pad, a compress, didn’t feel like doing it again. Instead, she just made the last wrap as tight as she could tolerate before cinching the end. As far as dressings went, it was a train wreck. Everything from basic training had gone out the window during the fight and after. Just impulse and reflex. Charlotte closed the lid on the bin, saw the blood left on the latch, and realized she’d have to think more clearly to get through this. She opened the case back up, grabbed another roll of gauze, and cleaned up after herself, then checked the floor outside the elevators.

It was a mess. She went back for a small bottle of alcohol, remembered where she’d seen a huge jug of industrial cleaner, grabbed that plus more gauze, wiped everything up. Took her time. Couldn’t get in too big a hurry.

The bundle of soiled and stained cloth went back in the bin, the lid kicked shut. Satisfied with the condition of the floor, she hurried to the barracks. Her cot made it obvious that someone lived there. The other mattresses were bare. Before she fixed this, she stripped down, grabbed another pair of coveralls, and went to the bathroom. After washing her hands and face, and the bright spill of blood down her neck and between her breasts, she cleaned the sink and changed. The red coveralls went into her footlocker. If they looked in there, she was screwed.

She pulled the covers off her bed, grabbed her pillow, and made sure everything else was straight. Back in the warehouse, she opened the hangar door on the drone lift and threw her things inside. She went to the shelves and gathered rations and water, added this. Another small medical kit. Inside the bin of first-aid gear, she discovered the microphone, which she must’ve dropped earlier while grabbing the gauze. This and two flashlights and a spare set of batteries went inside the lift as well. It was the last place anyone would look. The door was practically invisible unless you knew what to search for. It only came up to her knees and was the same color as the wall.

She considered crawling inside right then, would just need to outlast the first thorough search of the level. They would concentrate on the shelving units, the stacks, and think the place was clear, move on to the many other warrens in which she could be hiding. But before she waited that out, there was the microphone coiled up that she had worked so hard to acquire. There was the radio. She had a few hours, she told herself. This wouldn’t be the first place they’d check. Surely she had a few hours.

Dizzy from lack of sleep and loss of blood, she made her way to the flight control room and pulled the plastic sheet from the radio. Patting her chest, she remembered she’d changed coveralls. And besides, that screwdriver was gone. She searched the bench for another, found one, and removed the panel from the side of the unit. The board she wasn’t sure about was already installed. It was a simple matter of plugging the microphone in. She didn’t bother with affixing it to the side panel or closing anything up.

She checked the seating of the control boards. It was a lot like a computer, all the parts slotting together, but she was no electrician. She had no idea if there was anything else, anything missing. And no way in hell was she going on another run for parts. She powered up the unit and selected the channel marked “18”.

She waited.

Adjusting the squelch, she brought enough static into the speakers to make sure the unit was on. There was no traffic on the channel. Squeezing the microphone put an end to the static, which was a good sign. Weary and hurting and fearful for herself as well as her brother, Charlotte managed a smile. The click of the microphone back through the speakers was a small victory.

“Can anyone read me?” she asked. She propped one elbow on the desk, her other arm hanging useless by her side. She tried again. “Anyone out there with ears on? Please come back.”

Static. Which didn’t prove anything. Charlotte could very well imagine the radios sitting miles away in this silo somewhere, all the operators around them slouched over, dead. Her brother had told her about the time he had ended a silo with the press of a button. He had come to her with his eyes shining in the middle of the night and told her all about it. And now this other silo was gone. Or maybe her radio wasn’t broadcasting.

She wasn’t thinking straight. Needed to troubleshoot before she jumped to conclusions. Reaching for the dial, she immediately thought of the other silo she and her brother had eavesdropped in on, this neighboring silo with a handful of survivors who liked to chat back and forth and play games like Hide and Find with their radios. If she remembered right, the mayor of 18 had somehow transmitted on this other frequency before. Charlotte clicked over to “17” to test her mic, see if anyone would respond, forgetting the late hour. She used her old call sign from the Air Force out of habit.

“Hello. Hello. This is charlie two-four. Anyone read me?”

She listened to static, was about to switch over to another channel when a voice broke through, shaky and distant:

“Yes. Hello? Can you hear us?”

Charlotte squeezed the microphone again, the pain in her shoulder momentarily gone, this connection with a strange voice like a shot of adrenaline.

“I hear you. Yes. You can read me okay?”

“What the hell is going on over there? We can’t get through to you. The tunnel… there’s rubble in the tunnel. No one will respond. We’re trapped over here.”

Charlotte tried to make sense of this. She double-checked the transmit frequency. “Slow down,” she said and took a deep breath, took her own advice. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

“Is this Shirly? We’re stuck over here in this… other place. Everything’s rusted. People are panicking. You’ve gotta get us out of here.”

Charlotte didn’t know whether to answer or simply power the unit down and try again later. It felt as though she had butted into the middle of a conversation, confusing one of the parties. Another voice chimed in, supporting her theory:

“That’s not Shirly,” someone said, a woman’s voice. “Shirly’s dead.”

Charlotte adjusted the volume. She listened intently. For a moment, she forgot the man dying in the hallway below, the man she had stabbed, the wound in her arm. She forgot about those who must be coming after her, searching for her. She listened instead with great interest to this conversation on channel 17, this voice that sounded vaguely familiar.

“Who is this?” the first voice — the male voice — asked.

There was a pause. Charlotte didn’t know whom he was asking, whom he expected an answer from. She lifted the microphone to her lips, but someone else answered.

“This is Juliette.”

The voice was labored and weary.

“Jules? Where are you? What do you mean, Shirly’s dead?”

Another burst of static. Another dreadful pause.

“I mean they’re all dead,” she said. “And so are we.”

A burst of static.

“I killed us all.”

Silo 17

40

Juliette opened her eyes and saw her father. A white light bloomed and passed from one of her eyes to the other. Several faces loomed behind him, peering down at her. Light blue and white and yellow coveralls. What seemed a dream at first gradually coalesced into something real. And what was sensed as nothing more than a nightmare hardened into recollection: Her silo had been shut down. Doors had been opened. Everyone was dead. The last thing she remembered was clutching a radio, hearing voices, and declaring everyone dead. And she had killed them.

She waved the light away and tried to roll onto her side. She was on damp steel plating, someone’s undershirt tucked under her head, not on a bed. Her stomach lurched, but nothing came out. It was hollow, cramping, heaving. She made gagging noises and spat on the ground. Her father urged her to breathe. Raph was there, asking her if she’d be all right. Juliette bit down the urge to yell at them all, to yell at the world to leave her the hell alone, to hug her knees and weep for what she’d done. But Raph kept asking if she was okay.

Juliette wiped her mouth with her sleeve and tried to sit up. The room was dark. She was no longer inside the digger. A lambent glow beat from somewhere, like an open flame, the smell of burning biodiesel, a home-made torch. And in the gloom, she saw the dance and swing of flashlights at the ends of disembodied hands and on miners’ helmets as her people tended to one another. Small groups huddled here and there. A stunned silence sat like a blanket atop the scattered weeping.

“Where am I?” she asked.

Raph answered. “One of the boys found you in the back of that machine. Said you were curled up. They thought you were dead at first—”

Her father interrupted. “I’m going to listen to your heart. If you can take deep breaths for me.”

Juliette didn’t argue. She felt young again, young and miserable for breaking something, for disappointing him. Her father’s beard twinkled with silver from Raph’s flashlight. He plugged his stethoscope into his ears, and she knew the drill. She parted her coveralls. He listened as she swallowed deep gulps of air and let them out slowly. Above her, she recognized enough of the pipes and electrical conduit and exhaust ducts to locate herself. They were in the large pump facility adjacent to the generator room. The ground was wet because all this had been flooded. There must be water trapped above here, a slow leak somewhere, a reservoir gradually emptying. Juliette remembered all the water. She had donned a cleaning suit and had swum past this room in some long-ago life.

“Where are the kids?” she asked.

“They went with your friend Solo,” her father said. “He said he was taking them home.”

Juliette nodded. “How many others made it?” She took another deep breath and wondered who was still alive. She remembered herding all that she could through the dig. She had seen Courtnee and Walker. Erik and Dawson. Fitz. She remembered seeing families, some of the kids from the classrooms, and that young boy from the bazaar in shopkeep brown coveralls. But Shirly… Juliette reached up and gingerly touched her sore jaw. She could hear the blast and feel the rumbles in the ground again. Shirly was gone. Lukas was gone. Nelson and Peter. Her heart couldn’t hold it all. She expected it to stop, to quit, while her father was listening to it.

“There’s no telling how many made it,” Raph said. “Everyone is… it’s chaos out there.” He touched Juliette’s shoulder. “There was a group that came through a while back, before everything went nuts. A priest and his congregation. And then a bunch more came after. And then you.”

Her father listened intently to her stubborn heartbeat. He moved the metal pad from one corner of her back to another, and Juliette took deep, dutiful breaths. “Some of your friends are trying to figure out how to turn that machine around and dig us out of here,” her father said.

“Some are already digging,” Raph told her. “With their hands. And shovels.”

Juliette tried to sit up. The pain of all she’d lost was hammered by the thought of losing those who remained. “They can’t dig,” she said. “Dad, it’s not safe over there. We have to stop them.” She clutched his coveralls.

“You need to take it easy,” he said. “I sent someone to fetch you some water—”

“Dad, if they dig, we’ll die. Everyone over here will die.”

There was silence. It was broken by the slap of boots. A light slashed the darkness up and down, and Bobby arrived with a dented tin canteen sloshing with water.

“We’ll die if they dig us out,” Juliette said again. She refrained from adding that they were all dead anyway. They were walking corpses in that shell of a silo, that home for madness and rust. But she knew she sounded just as mad as everyone else had, cautioning against digging because the air over here was supposed to be poison. Now they wanted to tunnel to their death as badly as she had wanted to tunnel to hers.

She drank from the canteen, water splashing from her chin to her chest, and considered the lunacy of it all. And then she remembered the congregation that’d come over to exorcise this poisoned silo’s demons, or maybe to see the devil’s work for themselves. Lowering the canteen, she turned to her father, a looming silhouette in the spill of light from Raph’s torch.

“Father Wendel and his people,” Juliette said. “Was that… ? They were the ones who came earlier?”

“They were seen heading up and out of Mechanical,” Bobby said. “I heard they were looking for a place to worship. A bunch of the others went up to the farms, heard there was still something growing there. A lot of people are worried about what we’ll eat until we get out of here.”

“What we’ll eat,” Juliette muttered. She wanted to tell Bobby that they weren’t getting out of there. Ever. It was gone. Everything they had known. The only reason she knew and they didn’t is because she had stumbled through the piles of bones and over the mounds of the dead getting into this silo. She had seen what becomes of a fallen world, had heard Solo tell his story of dark days, had listened on the radio as those events played out all over again. She knew the threats, the threats that had now been carried out, all because of her daring.

Raph urged her to sip some more water, and Juliette saw in the flashlit faces around her that these survivors thought they were merely in a spot of trouble, that this was temporary. The truth was that this was likely all that remained of their people, this few hundred who had managed to get through, those lucky enough to live in the Deep, a startled mob from the lower Mids, a congregation of fanatics who had doubted this place. Now they were dispersing, looking to survive what they must hope would be over in a few days, a week, simply concerned with having enough to eat until they were saved.

They didn’t yet understand that they had been saved. Everyone else was gone.

She handed the canteen back to Raph and started to get up. Her father urged her to stay put, but Juliette waved him off. “We have to stop them from digging,” she said, getting to her feet. The seat of her coveralls was damp from the wet floor. There was a leak somewhere, pools of water trapped in the ceilings and the levels above them, slowly draining. It occurred to her that they would need to fix this. And just as quickly, she realized there was no point. Such planning was over. It was now about surviving the next minute, the next hour.

“Which way to the dig?” she asked.

Raph reluctantly pointed with his flashlight. She pulled him along, stopped short when she saw Jomeson, the old pump repairman, huddled against a wall of silent and rusted pumps, his hands cupped in his lap. Jomeson was sobbing to himself, his shoulders pumping up and down like pistons as he gazed into his hands.

Juliette pointed her father to the man and went to his side. “Jomes, are you hurt?”

“I saved this,” Jomeson blubbered. “I saved this. I saved this.”

Raph aimed his flashlight into the mechanic’s lap. A pile of chits glimmered in his palms. Several months’ pay. They clinked as his body shook, coins writhing like insects.

“In the mess hall,” he said between sniffles and sobs. “In the mess hall while everyone was running. I opened the till. Cans and cans and jars in the larder. And this. I saved this.”

“Shhh,” Juliette said, resting a hand on his trembling shoulder. She looked to her father, who shook his head. There was nothing to be done for him.

Raph aimed the flashlight elsewhere. Further down, a mother rocked back and forth and wailed. She clutched a baby to her chest. The child seemed to be okay, its small arm reaching up for its mother, its hand opening and closing, but making no noise. So much had been lost. Everyone had what they could carry and nothing more, just whatever they had grabbed. Jomeson sobbed for what he had grabbed as floodwater trickled from the ceiling, a silo weeping, all but the children crying.

41

Juliette followed Raph through the great digger and into the tunnel. They walked a long way over piles of rocks, scampered over avalanches of tailings cascading down from both sides, saw clothes, a single boot, and a half-buried blanket that’d been dropped. Someone’s canteen lay forgotten, which Raph collected; he shook it and smiled when it sloshed.

In the distance, open flames bathed rock in orange and red, the raw meat of the earth exposed. A fresh pile of rubble sloped down from a full cave-in of the ceiling, the result of Shirly’s sacrifice. Juliette pictured her friend on the other side of those rocks. She saw Shirly slumped over in the generator control room, asphyxiated or poisoned or simply disintegrating in the outside air. This image of a friend lost joined that of Lukas in his small apartment below the servers, his young and lifeless hand relaxed around a silent radio.

Juliette’s radio had gone silent as well. There had been that brief transmission in the middle of the night from someone above them, a transmission that woke her up and that she had ended by announcing that everyone was dead. After that call, she had tried to reach Lukas. She had tried him over and over, but it hurt too much to listen to the static. She was killing herself and her battery by trying, had finally switched the unit off, had briefly considered calling on channel 1 to yell at the fucker who had betrayed her, but she didn’t want them to know any of her people had survived, that there were more of them out there to kill.

Juliette vacillated between fuming over the evil of what they’d done and mourning the loss of those they’d taken. She leaned against her father and followed Raph and Bobby toward the clinks and thwacks and shouts of digging. Right then, she needed to buy time, to save what was left. Her brain was in survival mode, her body numb and staggering. What she knew for sure was that joining the two silos yet again would mean the death of them all. She had seen the white mist descending the stairwell, knew that this wasn’t some harmless gas, had seen what was left of the gasket and heat tape. This was how they poisoned the outside air. It was how they ended worlds.

“Watch yer toes!” someone barked. A miner trundled by with a barrow of rubble. Juliette found herself walking up a sloping floor, the ceiling getting closer and closer. She could make out Courtnee’s voice ahead. Dawson’s too. Piles of tailings had been hauled away from the collapse to mark the progress already made. Juliette felt torn between the urge to warn Courtnee to stop what she was doing and the desire to jump forward and dig with her own hands, to bend her nails back as she clawed her way toward whatever had happened over there, death be damned.

“Okay, let’s clear that top back before we go any further. And what’s taking so long with the jack? Can we please get some hydraulics from the genset fed back here? Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean I can’t see you dregs slackin’—”

Courtnee fell silent when she saw Juliette. Her face hardened, her lips pressed tight. And Juliette could sense her friend was wavering between slapping her and hugging her. It stung that she did neither.

“You’re up,” Courtnee said.

Juliette averted her gaze and studied the piles of stone and rock. Soot swirled and settled from the burning diesel torches. It made the cold air deep inside the earth feel dry and thin, and Juliette worried about the oxygen being burned and whether the sparse farms of Silo 17 could keep up with the demand. And what about all the new lungs — hundreds of pairs of them — sucking that oxygen down as well?

“We need to talk about this,” Juliette said, waving at the cave-in.

“We can talk about what the hell happened here after we dig our way back home. If you want to grab a shovel—”

“This rock is the only thing keeping us alive,” Juliette said.

Several of those digging had already stopped when they saw who was talking to Courtnee. Courtnee barked at them to get back to work, and they did. Juliette didn’t know how to do this delicately. She didn’t know how to do it at all.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at—” Courtnee started.

“Shirly brought the roof down and saved us. If you dig through this, we’ll die. I’m sure of it.”

“Shirly—?”

“Our home was poisoned, Court. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was. People were dying up top. I heard from Peter and—” She caught her breath. “From Luke. Peter saw the outside. The outside. The doors had opened and people were dying. And Luke—” Juliette bit her lip until the pain cleared her thoughts. “The first thing I thought of was to get everyone over here, because I knew it was safe here—”

A bark of laughter from Courtnee. “Safe? You think it’s…?” She took a step closer to Juliette, and suddenly no one was digging. Juliette’s father placed a hand on his daughter’s arm and tried to pull her back, but Juliette held her ground.

“You think it’s safe over here?” Courtnee hissed. “Where the hell are we? There’s a room back there that looks a goddamn lot like our gen room, except that it’s a rusted wreck. You think those machines will ever spin again? How much air do we have over here? How much fuel? What about food and water? I give us a few days if we don’t get back home. That’s a few days of dead-out digging, mostly by hand. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us, bringing us over here?”

Juliette withstood the barrage. She welcomed it. She longed to add a few stones of her own.

“I did this,” she said. She pulled away from her father and faced the diggers, whom she knew well. She turned and threw her voice down the dark pit from which she’d just come. “I did this!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, sending her words barreling toward those she’d damned and doomed. Again, she screamed: “I did this!” and her throat burned from the soot and the sting of the admission, her chest cracking open and raw with misery. She felt a hand on her shoulder, her father again. The only sounds, once her echoes died down, were the crackle and whisper of open flames.

“I caused this,” she said, nodding. “We shouldn’t have come here to begin with. We shouldn’t. Maybe my digging is the reason they poisoned us, or my going outside, but the air over here is clean. I promised you all that this place was here and that the air was fine. And now I’m telling you, just as surely, that our home is lost. It is poisoned. Opened to the outside. Everyone we left behind—” She tried to catch her breath, her heart empty, her stomach in knots. Again, her father propped her up. “Yes, it was my fault. My prodding. That’s why the man who did this—”

“Man?” Courtnee asked.

Juliette surveyed her former friends, men and women she had worked alongside for years. “A man, yes. From one of the silos. There are fifty silos just like ours—”

“So you’ve told us,” one of the diggers said gruffly. “So the maps say.”

Juliette searched him out. It was Fitz, an oilman and former mechanic. “And do you not believe me, Fitz? Do you now believe that there are only two in all the universe and that they were this near to one another? That the rest of that map is a lie? I am telling you that I stood on a ridge and I saw them with my own eyes. While we stand here in this dark pit choking on fumes, there are tens of thousands of people going about their days, days like we once knew—”

“And you think we should be digging toward them?”

Juliette hadn’t considered that. “Maybe,” she said. “That might be our only way out of this, if we can reach them. But first we need to know who is over there and if it’s safe. It might be as ruined as our silo. Or as empty as this one. Or full of people not at all happy to see us. The air could be toxic when we push through. But I can tell you that there are others.”

One of those digging slid down the rubble to join the conversation. “And what if everything is fine on the other side of this pile? Aren’t you the one who always has to go look and see?”

Juliette absorbed the blow. “If everything is fine over there, then they will come for us. We will hear from them. I would love for that to be true, for this to happen. I would love to be wrong. But I’m not.” She studied their dark faces. “I’m telling you that there’s nothing over there but death. You think I don’t want to hope? I’ve lost… we’ve all lost people we love. I listened as men I loved and cared about breathed their last, and you don’t think I want to get over there and see for myself? To bury them proper?” She wiped her eyes. “Don’t you think for a moment that I don’t want to grab a shovel and work three shifts until we’re through to them. But I know that I would be burying those of us who are left. We would be tossing this dirt and these rocks right into our own graves.”

No one spoke. Somewhere, gravity won a delicate struggle against a rock, and the loose stone tumbled with clacks and clatters toward their feet.

“What would you have us do?” Fitz asked, and Juliette heard an intake of air from Courtnee, who seemed to bristle at the thought of anyone taking advice from her ever again.

“We need a day or two to determine what happened. Like I said, there are a lot of worlds like our own out there. I don’t know what they hold, but I know one of them seems to think it’s in charge. They have threatened us before, saying they can push a button and end us, and I believe that’s what they’ve done. I believe it’s what they did to this other world as well.” She pointed down the tunnel to Silo 17. “And yes, it may have been because we dared to dig or because I went outside looking for answers, and you can send me to clean for those sins. I will gladly go. I will clean and die in sight of you. But first, let me tell you what little I know. This silo we’re in, it will flood. It is slowly filling even now. We need to power the pumps that keep it dry, and we need to make sure that the farms stay wet, the lights stay on, that we have enough air to breathe.” She gestured to one of the torches set into the wall. “We’re going through an awful lot of air.”

“And where are we supposed to get this power? I was one of the first through to the other side. It’s a heap of rust over there!”

“There’s power up in the thirties,” Juliette said. “Clean power. It runs the pumps and lights in the farms. But we shouldn’t rely on that. We brought our own power with us—”

“The backup generator,” someone said.

Juliette nodded, thankful to have them listening. For now, at least, they’d stopped digging.

“I’ll shoulder the burden for what I’ve done,” Juliette said, and the flames blurred behind a film of tears. “But someone else brought this hell on us. I know who it was. I’ve spoken with him. We need to survive long enough to make him and his people pay—”

“Revenge,” Courtnee said, her voice a harsh whisper. “After all the people who died trying to get some measure of that when you left to clean—”

“Not revenge, no. Prevention.” Juliette peered down the dark tunnel and into the gloom. “My friend Solo remembers when this world — his world — was destroyed. It wasn’t gods that brought this upon us, but men. Men close enough to talk to by radio. And there are other worlds standing out there beneath their thumbs. Imagine if someone else had acted before now. We would have gone about our lives, never knowing the threat that existed. Our loved ones would be alive right now.” She turned back to Courtnee and the others. “We shouldn’t go after these people for what they did. No. We should go after them for what they’re capable of doing. Before they do it again.”

She searched her old friend’s eyes for understanding, for acceptance. Instead, Courtnee turned her back on her. She turned away from Juliette and studied the pile of rubble they’d been clearing. A long moment passed, smoke filling the air, orange flames whispering.

“Fitz, grab that torch,” Courtnee ordered. There was a moment’s hesitation, but the old oilman complied. “Douse that thing,” she told him, sounding disgusted with herself. “We’re wasting air.”

42

Elise heard voices down the stairwell. There were strangers in her home. Strangers. Rickson used to frighten her and the twins into behaving by telling them stories of strangers, stories that made them never want to leave their home behind the farms. In a long time ago, Rickson used to say, anyone you didn’t know was out to kill you and take your things. Even some of those who did know you couldn’t be trusted. That’s what Rickson used to say late at night when the clicking timers made the grow lights go suddenly out.

Rickson told them the story over and over of how he was born because of two people in love — whatever that meant — and that his father had cut a poisoned pill out of his mother’s hip, and that’s how people had babies. But not all people had babies out of two people in love. Sometimes it was strangers, he said, who came and took whatever they wanted. It was men in those old days, and often what they wanted was for women to make babies, and so they cut poisoned pills right out of their flesh and the women had babies.

Elise didn’t have a poisoned pill in her flesh. Not yet. Hannah said they grew in there late like grown-up teeth, which was why it was important to have babies as early as you could. Rickson said this weren’t true at all, and that if you were born without a pill in your hip you’d never have one, but Elise didn’t know what to believe. She paused on the stairs and rubbed her side, feeling for any bumps there. Tonguing the gap between her teeth in concentration, she felt something hard beneath her gums and growing. It made her want to cry, knowing her body could do foolish things like growing teeth and pills beneath her flesh without her asking. She called up the stairs for Puppy, who had squirmed loose again and had bounded out of sight. Puppy was bad like this. Elise was starting to wonder if puppies were a thing you could own or if they were always running away. But she didn’t cry. She clutched the rail and took another step and another. She didn’t want babies. She just wanted Puppy to stay with her, and then her body could do whatever it wanted.

A man overtook her on the stairs — it wasn’t Solo. Solo had told her to stick close. “Tell Puppy to stick close,” she would say when Solo caught up to her. It paid to have excuses ready like this. Like pumpkin seeds in pockets. This man overtaking her looked back at her over his shoulder. He was a stranger, but he didn’t seem to want her things. He already had things, had a coil of the black and yellow wire that dipped from the ceiling in the farms that Rickson said never to touch. Maybe this man didn’t know the rules. It was peculiar to see people she didn’t know in her home, but Rickson lied sometimes and was wrong some other times and maybe he lied or was wrong with his scary stories and Solo had been right. Maybe it was a good thing, these strangers. More people to help out and make repairs and dig water trenches in the soil so all the plants got a good drink. More people like Juliette, who had come and made their home better, took them up to where the light was steady and you could heat water for a bath. Good strangers.

Another man spiraled into view with noisy boots. He had a sack bursting with green leaves, the smell of ripe tomatoes and blackberries trailing past. Elise stopped and watched him go. That’s too much to pick all at once, she could hear Hannah saying. Too much. More rules that nobody knew. Elise might have to teach them. She had a book that could teach people how to fish and how to track down animals. And then she remembered that all the fish were gone. And she couldn’t even track down one puppy.

Thinking of fish made Elise hungry. She very much wanted to eat right at that moment, and as much as possible. Before there wasn’t any left. This hunger was a feeling that came sometimes when she saw the twins eating. Even if she wasn’t hungry, she would want some. A lot. Before it was all gone.

She trundled up the steps, her bag with her memory book knocking against her thigh, wishing she’d stayed with the others or that Puppy would just stay put.

“Hey, you.”

A man on the next landing peered over the rails and down at her. He had a black beard, only not as messy as Solo’s. Elise paused a moment, then continued up the stairs. The man and the landing disappeared from view as she twisted beneath them. He was waiting for her as she reached the landing.

“You get separated from the flock?” the man asked.

Elise cocked her head to the side. “I can’t be in a flock,” she said.

The man with the dark beard and bright eyes studied her. He wore brown coveralls. Rickson had a pair like them that he wore sometimes. That boy from the bizarre had coveralls like that.

“And why not?” the man asked.

“I’m not a sheep,” said Elise. “Sheep make flocks, and there aren’t any of them left.”

“What’s a sheep?” the man asked. And then his bright eyes flashed even brighter. “I seen you. You’re one of the kids who lived here, aren’t you?”

Elise nodded.

“You can join our flock. A flock is a congregation of people. The members of a church. Do you go to church?”

Elise shook her head. She rested her hand on her memory book, which had a page on sheep, how to raise them and how to care for them. Her memory book and this man disagreed. She felt a hollow in her stomach as she tried to sort out which of them to trust. She leaned toward her book, which was right about so much else.

“Do you want to come inside?” The man waved an arm at the door. Elise peered past him and into the darkness. “Are you hungry?”

Elise nodded.

“We’re gathering food. We found a church. The others will be down from the farms soon. Do you want to come in, get something to eat or drink? I picked what I could carry. I’ll share it with you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and Elise found herself studying his forearm, which was thick with dark hair like Solo’s but not like Rickson’s. Her tummy grumbled, and the farms seemed so far away.

“I need to get Puppy,” she said, her voice small in that vast stairwell, a tiny puff of fog in the cool air.

“We’ll get your puppy,” the man said. “Let’s go inside. I want to hear all about your world. It’s a miracle, you know. Did you know that you are a miracle? You are.”

Elise didn’t know this at all. It weren’t in any of the books she’d made memories from. But she’d missed a lot of pages. Her stomach grumbled. Her stomach talked to her, and so she followed this man with the dark beard into the dark hall. There were voices ahead, a soothing and quiet mix of hums and whispers, and Elise wondered if this was what a flock sounded like.

43

Charlotte was back to living in a box. A box, but without the cold, without the frosted window, and without the line of bright blue plunged deep into her vein. This box was missing those things and the chance of sweet dreams and the nightmare of waking. It was a plain metal box that dented and sang as she adjusted her weight.

She had made a tidy home of the drone lift, a metal container too low to sit up in, too dark for her to see her hand in front of her face, and too quiet to hear herself think. Twice she had lain there listening to boots on the other side of the door as men hunted for her. She stayed in the lift that night. She waited for them to come back, but they must have many levels to prowl.

She moved every few minutes in a fruitless attempt to make herself comfortable. She went once to use the bathroom when she couldn’t hold it anymore, when she feared she would go in her coveralls. To flush or not to flush? Risk the noise or the evidence in the bowl? She flushed, and imagined pipes rattling in some far-off place, someone able to pinpoint where it was coming from.

At the end of the hall, she made sure they hadn’t discovered the radio. She expected to find it missing, Donald’s notes as well, but all was still there beneath the plastic sheet. Hesitating a moment, Charlotte gathered the folders. They were too valuable to lose. She hurried back to her hole and pushed her things into a corner. Curling up, she pictured boots landing on her brother.

She thought of Iraq. There were dark nights there, lying in her bunk, men coming and going on and off their shifts with whispers and the squeak of springs. Dark nights when she had felt more vulnerable than her drone ever did in the sky. The barracks had felt like an empty parking garage in the dead of night, footsteps in the distance, and her unable to find her car keys. Hiding in that small drone lift felt the same. Like sleeping at night in a darkened garage, in a barracks full of men, wondering what she might wake up to.

She slept little. With a flashlight cradled between her cheek and her shoulder, she went through Donald’s folders, hoping the dry reading might help her nod off. In the silence, words and snippets of conversation from the radio returned to her. Another silo had been destroyed. She had listened to their panicked voices, to reports of outer doors being opened, reports of the gas her brother had said he could unleash on these people. She had heard Juliette’s voice, heard her say that everyone was dead.

She found a small chart in one of the folders, a map of numbered circles with many of them crossed out. People lived in those circles, Charlotte thought. And now another of them was empty. One more X to scratch. Except Charlotte, like her brother, now felt some connection with these people. She had listened to their voices with him on the radio, had listened to Donald as he recounted his efforts to reach out to them, this one silo that was open to what he had to say, that was helping him hack into their computers to understand what was happening. She had asked him once why he didn’t reach out to other silos, and he had said something about those in charge not being safe. They would have turned him in. Somehow, her brother and these people were all rebelling, and now they were gone. This was what happened to those who rebelled. Now it was just Charlotte in darkness and silence.

She flipped through her brother’s notes, and her neck began to cramp from holding the flashlight like that. The temperature in the box rose until she was sweating in her coveralls. She couldn’t sleep. This was nothing like that other box they put her in. And the more she read, the more she understood her brother’s endless pacing, his desire to do something, to put an end to the system in which they were trapped.

Careful with the water and food, taking tiny sips and small bites, she stayed inside for what felt like days but may have been hours. When she needed to go to the bathroom again, she decided to sneak to the end of the hall and try the radio once more. The urge to pee was matched only by the need to know what was going on. There had been survivors. The people of 18 had managed to scamper over the hills and reach another silo. A handful had survived — but how long would they last?

She flushed and listened to the surge of reclaimed water gurgle through overhead pipes. Taking a chance, she went to the drone control room. She left the hall light off and uncovered the radio. There was nothing but static on 18. The same on 17. She turned through a dozen of the other channels until she heard voices and was sure the thing was working. Back to 17, she waited. She could wait forever, she knew. She could wait until they came and found her. The clock on the wall showed that it was just past three, the middle of the night, which she thought was a good thing. They might not be looking for her right then. But then nobody might be listening, either. She squeezed the mic anyway.

“Hello,” she said. “Can anyone hear me?”

She nearly identified herself, where she was calling from, but then wondered if the people in her silo were listening in as well, monitoring all the stations. And what if they were? They wouldn’t know where she was transmitting from. Unless they could trace her through the repeaters. Maybe they could. But wasn’t this one of the silos crossed off their list? They shouldn’t be listening at all. Charlotte moved her tools out of the way and looked for the piece of paper Donny had brought her, the ranking of the silos. It listed at the bottom all of the silos that’d been destroyed—

“Who is this?”

A man’s voice spilled from the radio. Charlotte grabbed the mic, wondering if this was someone in her silo transmitting on that frequency.

“I’m… Who is this?” she asked, unsure how to answer.

“You down in Mechanical? You know what time it is? It’s the middle of the night.”

Down in Mechanical. That was the layout of their silos, not hers. Charlotte assumed this was one of the survivors. She also assumed others might be listening in and decided to play it safe.

“Yes, I’m in Mechanical,” she said. “What’s going on over— I mean, up there?”

“I’m trying to sleep is what, but Court told us to keep this thing on in case she called. We’ve been wrestling with the water lines. People are staking claims in the farms, marking out plots. Who is this?”

Charlotte cleared her throat. “I’m looking for… I was hoping to reach your mayor. Juliette.”

“She ain’t here. I thought she was down with you. Try in the morning if it ain’t an emergency. And tell Court we could use a few more bodies up here. A decent farmer if we’ve got one. And a porter.”

“Uh… okay.” Charlotte glanced at the clock again, seeing how long she’d have to wait. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll try back.”

There was no response, and Charlotte wondered why she felt the urge to reach out in the first place. There was nothing she could do for these people. Did she think there was something they could do for her? She studied the radio she’d built, the extra screws and wire scattered around the base, the collection of tools. It was a risk being out and about, but it felt less terrifying than being alone in the drone lift. The risk of discovery was far outweighed by the chance of contact. She would try again in a few hours. Until then, she would try to get some sleep. She covered the radio and considered her old cot in the barracks down the hall, but it was the windowless metal box that claimed her.

44

Donald’s breakfast arrived with company. They had left him alone the previous day and made him skip a meal. He figured it was some sort of interrogation technique. Same with the boots stomping noisily past in the middle of the night, keeping him up. Anything to throw off his clock, perturb him, make him feel crazy. Or maybe that was day and this was the middle of the night and he hadn’t skipped a meal at all. Hard to tell. He had lost track of time. There was a clean circle on the wall and a protruding screw where a clock had once stood.

Two men in security coveralls arrived with Thurman and breakfast. Donald had slept in his coveralls. He pulled his feet up on his cot while the three men packed into his small room. The two security officers regarded him suspiciously. Thurman handed him his tray, which held a plate of eggs, a biscuit, water, and juice. Donald was in incredible pain, but he was also starving. He searched for silverware and saw none, started eating the eggs with his fingers. Hot food made his ribs feel better.

“Check the ceiling panels,” one of the security officers said. Donald recognized him. Brevard. He had been chief for almost as long as Donald had been up on shift. Donald could tell Brevard was not his friend.

The other man was younger. Donald didn’t recognize him. He was usually up late to avoid being seen, knew the night guard better than these guys. The younger officer scampered on top of the dresser welded to the wall and lifted a ceiling panel. He pulled a flashlight from his hip and shined the light in all directions. Donald had a good idea of what the man was seeing. He had already checked.

“It’s blocked,” the young officer said.

“You sure?”

“It wasn’t him,” Thurman said. He had never taken his eyes off of Donald. Thurman waved at the room. “There was blood everywhere. He’d be covered in it.”

“Unless he washed up somewhere and changed clothes.”

Thurman frowned at the idea. He stood a few paces from Donald, who no longer felt hungry. “Who was it?” Thurman asked.

“Who was what?”

“Don’t play dumb. One of my men was attacked, and someone dressed as a reactor tech logged through security right here on this level the same night. They came down this hall, looking for you is my guess. Went to comms, where I know you’ve been spending your time. There’s no way you’ve been pulling this off on your own. You took someone in, maybe someone from your last shift. Who?”

Donald broke off a piece of biscuit and put it in his mouth to give his lips something to do. Charlotte. What was she doing? Ranging the silo in search of him? Going to comms? She was out of her mind if it was her.

“He knows something,” Brevard said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Donald said. He took a sip of water and noticed his hand was shaking. “Who was attacked? Are they okay?” He thought of the possibility that it was his sister’s blood they had found. What had he done, waking her up? Again, he thought of coming clean and telling them where she was hiding, just so she wouldn’t be alone.

“It was Eren,” Thurman said. “He got off the late shift, ran for the lift, and was found thirty floors down in a pool of blood.”

“Eren’s hurt?”

“Eren’s dead,” Brevard said. “A screwdriver to his neck. One of the lifts is covered in his blood. I want to know where the man who did this—”

Thurman held up a hand, and Brevard fell silent. “Give us a minute,” Thurman said.

The young officer standing on the dresser adjusted the ceiling panel until it fell back into place. He jumped down and wiped his hands on his thighs, leaving the dresser covered in lint and snowflakes of styrofoam. The two security men waited outside. Donald recognized one of the office workers passing by before the door shut, nearly called out, wondered what the hell everyone must have thought when they found out he wasn’t who he had said he was.

Thurman reached into his breast pocket and procured a folded square of cloth, a fresh rag. He handed this to Donald, who accepted it gratefully. Strange what accounted for a gift. He waited for the need to cough, but it was a rare moment of respite. Thurman held out a plastic bag and kept it open for him. Donald realized what it was for and dug out his other rag, dropped the bloody mess into the bag.

“For analysis, right?”

Thurman shook his head. “There’s nothing here we don’t already know. Just a… gesture. I tried to kill you, you know. It was weak of me to try, and it was because I was weak that I didn’t succeed. It turns out you were right about Anna.”

“Is Eren really dead?”

Thurman nodded. Donald unfolded the cloth and folded it back up again. “I liked him.”

“He was a good man. One of my recruits. Do you know who killed him?”

Donald now saw the cloth for what it was. Bad cop had become good cop. He shook his head. He tried to imagine Charlotte doing these things and couldn’t. But then, he couldn’t picture her flying drones and dropping bombs or doing fifty push-ups. She was an enigma locked away in his childhood, constantly surprising. “I can’t imagine anyone I know killing a man like that. Other than you.”

Thurman didn’t react to this.

“When do I go under?”

“Today. I have another question.”

Donald lifted the water from the tray and took a long pull. The water was cold. It was incredible how good water could taste. He should tell Thurman about Charlotte right then. Or wait until he was going under. What he couldn’t do was leave her there alone. He realized Thurman was waiting on him. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Do you remember Anna leaving the armory while you were up? I realize you were only with her for a brief time.”

“No,” Donald said. And it hadn’t felt like a brief time. It had felt like a lifetime. “Why? What did she do?”

“Do you remember her talking about gas feeds?”

“Gas feeds? No. I don’t even know what that means. Why?”

“We found signs of sabotage. Someone tampered with the feeds between Medical and Population Control.” Thurman waved his hand, dismissing what he was about to say. “Like I said, I think you were right about Anna.” He turned to leave.

“Wait,” Donald said. “I have a question.”

Thurman hesitated, his hand on the door.

“What’s wrong with me?” Donald asked.

Thurman looked down at the red rag in the plastic bag. “Have you ever seen what the land looks like after a battle?” His voice had grown quiet. Subdued. “Your body is a battlefield now. That’s what’s going on inside of you. Armies with billions to a side are waging war with one another. Machines that mean to rip you apart and those that hope to keep you together. And their boots are going to turn your body into shrapnel and mud.”

Thurman coughed into his fist. He started to pull the door open.

“I wasn’t going over the crest that day,” Donald said. “I wasn’t going out there to be seen. I just wanted to die.”

Thurman nodded. “I thought as much later. And I should’ve let you. But they sounded the alarm. I came up and saw my men struggling with suits and you halfway gone. There was a grenade in my foxhole and years of knowing what I’d do if that ever happened. I threw myself on it.”

“You shouldn’t have,” Donald said.

Thurman opened the door. Brevard was standing on the other side, waiting.

“I know,” he said. And then he was gone.

45

Darcy worked on his hands and knees. He dunked his crimson rag into the bucket of red water and wrung it out until it was pink, then went back to scrubbing the mess inside the lift. The walls were already clean, the samples sent out for analysis. While he worked, he grumbled to himself in a mockery of Brevard’s voice: “Take samples, Darcy. Clean this up, Darcy. Fetch me a coffee, Darcy.” He didn’t understand how fetching coffee and mopping up blood had become part of his job description. What he missed were the uneventful night shifts; he couldn’t wait for things to get back to normal. Amazing what can begin to feel normal. He almost couldn’t smell the copper in the air anymore, and the metallic taste was gone from his tongue. It was like those daily doses in the paper cups, the bland food every day, even the infernal buzzing from the elevator with its doors jammed open. All these things to get used to until they disappeared. Things that faded into dull aches like memories from a former life.

Darcy didn’t remember much of his old life, but he knew he was good at this job. He had a feeling he used to work security a long time ago, back in a world no one talked about, a world trapped in old films and reruns and dreams. He vaguely remembered being trained to take a bullet for someone else. He had one solid and recurring dream of jogging in the morning, the way the air cooled the sweat from his brow and neck, the chirping of birds, running behind some older man in sweatpants and noticing how this man was going bald. Darcy remembered an earpiece that grew slick and wouldn’t stay in place, always falling out of his ear. He remembered watching crowds, the way his heart raced when balloons burst and relic scooters backfired, forever waiting for the chance to take a—

Bullet.

Darcy stopped scrubbing and dabbed his face with his sleeve. He stared at the crack between the floor and the wall of the lift where something bright was lodged, a little stone of metal. He tried to secure it with his fingers, but they wouldn’t fit in the crack. A bullet. He shouldn’t be touching it anyway.

The rag fell with a splash into the bucket. Darcy grabbed the sample kit from the hallway. The elevator continued to buzz and buzz, hating this standing still, wishing it could go places. “Cool your jets,” Darcy whispered. He pulled one of the sample bags from the small box inside the kit. The tweezers weren’t where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That’s what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged.

He used the tweezers to grab the bullet and drop it into the plastic bag. It was slightly misshapen but not severely. Hadn’t hit anything solid, but it’d hit something. Rubbing the bag around the bullet and holding it up to the light, he saw how a pink stain appeared on the plastic. There was blood on the bullet. He checked the floor to see if he’d slopped any of the bloody water near where the bullet had been wedged, if the blood had perhaps gotten there due to his carelessness.

It hadn’t. The man they’d found dead had been stabbed in the neck, but a gun had been discovered nearby. Darcy had sampled the blood inside the elevator in a dozen places. A med tech had picked the samples up, and Stevens and the chief had told him that all the samples matched the victim. But now Darcy very likely had a blood sample from the attacker, who was still at large. The man who’d killed Eren. A real clue.

He clutched the sample bag and waited for the express to arrive. He considered for a moment handing this over to Stevens, which would be protocol, but he had found the bullet, knew what it was, had been careful in collecting it. He ought to be the one to see the results.

The express arrived with a cheerful ding. An exhausted-looking man in purple coveralls guided a wheeled bucket out, steered it with the handle of a mop. Instead of calling in his find, Darcy had called down backup. The night custodian. The two men shook hands. Darcy thanked him for staying on shift late, said he owed him a big one. He took the man’s place inside the express.

He only had to go down two levels. It felt crazy, taking the express two levels. What the silo needed was stairs. There were so many times he just needed to go up or down a single level and found himself waiting five minutes for a blasted lift. It made no sense. He sighed and pressed the button for the medical wing. Before the doors shut, he heard a wet slap from the mop next door.

Dr. Whitmore’s office was crowded. Not with workers — it was just Whitmore and his two med techs busying about — but with bodies. Two extra bodies on slabs. One was the woman discovered dead the day before; Darcy remembered her name being Anna. The other was Eren, the former silo head. Whitmore was at his computer, typing up notes while the lab techs worked on the deceased.

“Sir?”

Whitmore turned. His eyes went from Darcy’s face to his hands. “Whatcha got?”

“One more sample. On a bullet. Can you run it for me?”

Whitmore waved at one of the men in the operating room, who exited with his hands held by his shoulders.

“Can you run this for the officer?”

The lab tech didn’t seem thrilled. He tugged his bloodstained gloves off with loud thwacks and threw them in the sink to be washed and sterilized. “Let’s see it,” he said.

The machine didn’t take long. It beeped and whirred and made purposeful sounds, and then spit out a piece of paper in jittery fits. The tech reached for the results before Darcy could. “Yup. Got a match. It belongs to… Huh. That’s weird.”

Darcy took the report. There was the bar graph, that unique UPC code of a man’s DNA. Amounts and percentages of various blood levels were written in inscrutable code: IFG, PLT, Hgb. But where the system should have listed the details of the matching personnel record, it simply said on one of the many lines: Emer. The rest of the bio fields were blank.

“Emer,” the lab tech said. He crossed to the sink and began washing the gloves and his hands. “That’s a weird name. Who would pick a name like that?”

“Where are those other results?” Darcy asked. “From earlier.”

The tech nodded to the recycle bin at Dr. Whitmore’s feet, who continued to clack away at his keyboard. Darcy sifted through the bin, found one of the results sheets from earlier. He held the two side by side.

“It’s not a name,” Darcy said. “That would be on the top line. This is where the location should be.” On the other report, the name Eren stood above a line listing the freeze hall and the coordinates of the dead man’s storage pod. Darcy remembered what one of the smaller freeze halls was called.

“Emergency Personnel,” he said with satisfaction. He had solved a small mystery. He smiled at the room, but the other men had already returned to their work.

Emergency Personnel was the smallest of the freeze halls. Darcy stood outside the metal door, his breath visible in the air and clouding the steel. He entered his code, and the keypad blinked red and buzzed its disapproval. He tried the master security code next, and the doors clunked open and slid into the walls.

His heart raced with a mix of fear and excitement. It wasn’t simply being on this trail of clues, it was where that trail was taking him. Emergency Personnel had been set aside for the most extreme of cases, for those times when Security was deemed insufficient. Through a dense haze, he remembered a time when cops stepped aside while heavily armored men emerged from vans and took down a building with military precision. Had that been him? In a former, former life? He couldn’t remember. And anyway, these men in the emergency hall were different. Many of them had been up and about recently. Darcy remembered from when he got on shift. They were pilots. He recalled seeing ripples in his mug of coffee one day and finding out that bombs had been dropped from drones. Moving from one pod to the next, he searched for an empty one. Someone had not gone back to sleep when they should have, he suspected. Or someone had been stirred to do bad things.

It was this last possibility that filled him with fear. Who had access to such personnel? Who had the ability to awaken them without anyone knowing? He suspected that no matter whom he reported his findings to, as those findings went up and up the chain of command, they would possibly reach the person or people responsible. It also occurred to him that the man who had been killed was the on-shift head of the entire silo, the head of all the silos. This was big. This was huge. A feud between silo heads? This could get him off coffee-brewing and blood-mopping duty forever.

He was two thirds of the way through the grid of cryopods, making a circuit back and forth, when he started to suspect that he might’ve been wrong. It was all so tenuous. He was playing at someone else’s job. There wouldn’t be anyone missing, no grand conspiracy, nobody up killing people—

And then he peered inside a pod with no face there, with no frost on the glass. A palm on the skin of the pod confirmed that it was off. It was the same temperature as the room: cool but not freezing. He checked the display, fearing that it would be off and blank as well, but it showed power. Just no name. Only a number.

Darcy pulled out his report pad and clicked a pen. Only a number. He suspected any name that went with the pod would be classified. But he had his man. Oh, he had his man. And even if he couldn’t get a name, he knew where these pilots spent their time when they were on shift. He had a very good idea of where this missing man with his bullet wound might be hiding.

46

Charlotte waited until morning before trying the radio again. This time, she knew what she wanted to say. She also knew her time was short. She had heard people outside the drone lift again that morning, looking for her.

Waiting until she was sure they were gone, she nosed about and saw that they’d cleaned out the rest of Donald’s notes in the conference room. She went to the bathroom and took the time to change her bandage, found her arm a scabbed mess. At the end of the hall, she expected to find the radio missing, but the control room was undisturbed. They probably never looked under the plastic sheet, just assumed that everything in the room was part of the drone operations. She uncovered the radio, and the unit buzzed when she powered it on. She arranged Donny’s folders across her scattering of tools.

Something Donny had told her came back. He had said they wouldn’t live forever, the two of them. They wouldn’t live long enough outside the pods to see the results of their actions. And that made it hard to know how best to act. What to do for these people, these three dozen or so silos that were left? Doing nothing doomed so many of them. Charlotte felt her brother’s need to pace. She picked up the mic and considered what she was about to do, reaching out to strangers like this. But reaching out was better than just listening. The day before, she had felt like a 911 operator who could only listen while a crime was being committed, unable to respond, powerless to send help.

She made sure the knob was on seventeen, adjusted the volume and squelch until she was rewarded with a soft hiss of static. Somehow, a handful of people had survived the destruction of their silo. Charlotte suspected they had crossed overland. Their mayor — this Juliette her brother had spoken with — had proved it was possible. Charlotte suspected it was this that had drawn her brother’s attention. She knew from the suit Donny had been working on that he had dreamed of escaping somehow. These people may have found a way.

She opened his folders and spread out her brother’s discoveries. There was a ranking of the silos sorted by their chance of survival. There was a note from the Senator, this suicide pact. And the map of all the silos, not with X’s but with the red lines radiating out to a single point. Charlotte arranged the notes and composed herself before making the call. She didn’t care if she was discovered. She knew damn well what she wanted to say, what she thought Donny was dying to say but didn’t know how.

“Hello, people of silo eighteen. People of silo seventeen. My name is Charlotte Keene. Can you hear me? Over.”

She waited, a rush of adrenaline and a flood of nerves from broadcasting her name, for being so bold. She had very likely just poked the hornets’ nest in which she hid. But she had truths to tell. She had been woken up by her brother into a nightmare, and yet she remembered the world from before, a world of blue skies and green grass. She had glimpsed that world with her drone. If she had been born into this, had never known anything else, would she want to be told? To be awoken? Would she want someone to tell her the truth? For a moment, the pain in her shoulder was forgotten. The throbbing was pushed aside by this mix of fear and excitement—

“I’m picking you up nice and clear,” someone answered, a man’s voice. “You’re looking for someone on eighteen? I don’t think anyone’s up there. Who did you say this was?”

Charlotte squeezed the mic. “My name is Charlotte Keene. Who is this?”

“This is Tom Higgins, head of the Planning Committee. We’re up here at the deputy station on seventy-five. We’re hearing there’s been some kind of collapse, that we shouldn’t head back down. What’s going on below?”

“I’m not below you,” Charlotte said. “I’m in another silo.”

“Say again. Who is this? Keene, you say? I don’t recognize your name from the census.”

“Yes, Charlotte Keene. Is your mayor there? Juliette?”

“You say you’re in our silo? Is this someone from the Mids?”

Charlotte started to say something, realized how difficult this was going to be, but another voice cut in. A familiar voice.

“This is Juliette.”

Charlotte leaned forward and adjusted the volume. She squeezed the mic. “Juliette, my name is Charlotte Keene. You’ve been speaking with my brother, Donny. Donald, I mean.” She was nervous. She paused to wipe her palms on the leg of her coveralls. When she let go of the mic, the man from earlier could be heard talking on the same frequency:

“—heard our silo is gone. Can you confirm? Where are you?”

“I’m in Mechanical, Tom. I’ll come see you when I can. Yes, our silo is gone. Yes, you should stay where you are. Now let me see what this person wants.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’? I don’t understand.”

“Dead, Tom. Everyone is dead. You can tear up your fucking census. Now please stay off the air. In fact, can we change channels?”

Charlotte waited to hear what the man would say. And then she realized the mayor was speaking to her. She hurriedly squeezed the mic before the other voice could step on her transmission.

“I… uh, yes. I can transmit on all frequencies.”

Again, the head of the planning committee, or whatever he’d called himself, stepped in: “Did you say dead? Was this your doing?”

“Channel eighteen,” Juliette said.

“Eighteen,” Charlotte repeated. She reached for the knob as a burst of questions spilled from the radio. The man’s voice was silenced by a twist of Charlotte’s fingers.

“This is Charlotte Keene on channel eighteen, over.”

She waited. It felt as though a door had just been pulled tight, a confidant pulled inside.

“This is Juliette. What’s this about me knowing your brother? What level are you on?”

Charlotte couldn’t believe how difficult this was to get across. She took a deep breath. “Not level. Silo. I’m in Silo 1. You’ve spoken with my brother a few times.”

“You’re in Silo 1. Donald is your brother.”

“That’s right.” And finally, it sounded as if this was established. It was a relief.

“Have you called to gloat?” Juliette asked. There was a sudden spark of life in her voice, a flash of violence. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? How many people you’ve killed? Your brother told me he was capable of this, but I didn’t believe him. I never believed him. Is he there?”

“No.”

“Well, tell him this. And I hope he believes me when I say it: My every thought right now is how best to kill him, to make sure this never happens again. You tell him that.”

A chill spread through Charlotte. This woman thought her brother had brought doom on them. Her palms felt clammy as she cradled the mic. She pressed the button, found it sticking, knocked it against the table until it clicked properly.

“Donny didn’t… He may already be dead,” Charlotte said, fighting back the tears.

“That’s a shame. I guess I’ll be coming for whoever’s next in line.”

“No, listen to me. Donny… it wasn’t him who did this. I swear to you. Some people took him. He wasn’t supposed to be talking to you at all. He wanted to tell you something and didn’t know how.” Charlotte released the mic and prayed that this was getting through, that this stranger would believe her.

“Your brother warned me he could press a button and end us all. Well, that button has been pressed, and my home has been destroyed. People I care about are now dead. If I wasn’t coming after you bastards before, I sure as hell am now.”

“Wait,” Charlotte said. “Listen. My brother is in trouble. He’s in trouble because he was talking to you. The two of us… we aren’t involved in this.”

“Yeah, right. You want us talking. Learn what you can. And then you destroy us. It’s all games with you. You send us out to clean, but you’re just poisoning the air. That’s what you’re doing. You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t— Listen, I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I… this will be hard for you to believe, maybe, but I remember when the world out there was very different. When we could live and breathe out there. And I think part of it can be like that again. Is like that right now. That’s what my brother wanted to tell you, that there’s hope out there.”

A pause. A heavy breath. Charlotte’s arm was back to throbbing.

“Hope.”

Charlotte waited. The radio hissed at her like an angry breath forced through clenched teeth.

“My home, my people, are dead and you would have me hope. I’ve seen the hope you dish out, the bright blue skies we pull down over our heads, the lie that makes the exiled do your bidding, clean for you. I’ve seen it, and thank God I knew to doubt it. It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?”

She was right. This Juliette was right. How could such a conversation as this take place? How did her brother manage it? It was alien races who somehow spoke the same tongue. It was gods and mortals. Charlotte was attempting to commune with ants, ants who worried about the twists of their warrens beneath the soil, not the layout of the wider land. She wouldn’t be able to get them to see—

But then Charlotte realized this Juliette knew nothing of her own hell. And so she told her.

“My brother was beaten half to death,” Charlotte said. “He could very well be dead. It happened before my own eyes. And the man who did it was like a father to us both.” She fought to hold it together, to not let the tears creep into her voice. “I’m being hunted right now. They will put me back to sleep or they will kill me, and I don’t know that there’s a difference. They keep us frozen for years and years while the men work in shifts. There are computers out there that play games and will one day decide which of your silos is allowed to go free. The rest will die. All of the silos but one will die. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

She fumbled through the folder for the notes, the list of the rankings, and couldn’t find it through her blurred vision. She grabbed the map instead. Juliette was saying nothing, was likely just as confused by Charlotte’s hell as Charlotte was of hers. But it needed to be said. These awful truths discovered needed to be told. It felt good.

“We… Donny and I were only ever trying to figure out how to help you, all of you, I swear. My brother… he had an affinity for your people.” Charlotte let go of the mic so this person couldn’t hear her cry.

“My people,” Juliette said, subdued.

Charlotte nodded. She took a deep breath. “Your silo.”

There was a long silence. Charlotte wiped her face with her sleeve.

“Why do you think I would trust you? Do you know what you all have done? How many lives you’ve taken? Thousands are dead—”

Charlotte reached to adjust the volume, to turn it back down.

“—and the rest of us will join them. But you say you want to help. Who the hell are you?”

Juliette waited for her to answer. Charlotte faced the hissing box. She squeezed the mic. “Billions,” she said. “Billions are dead.”

There was no response.

“We killed so many more than you could ever imagine. The numbers don’t even make sense. We killed nearly everyone. I don’t think… the loss of thousands… it doesn’t even register. That’s why they’re able to do it.”

“Who? Your brother? Who did this?”

Charlotte wiped fresh tears from her cheeks and shook her head. “No. Donny would never do this. It was… you probably don’t have the words, the vocabulary. A man who used to be in charge of the world the way it once was. He attacked my brother. He found us.” Charlotte glanced at the door, half expecting Thurman to kick it down and barge in, to do the same to her. She had poked the nest, she was sure of it. “He’s the one who killed the world and your people. His name is Thurman. He was a… something like a mayor.”

“Your mayor killed my world. Not your brother, but this other man. Did he kill this world that I’m standing in right now? It’s been dead for decades. Did he kill it as well?”

Charlotte realized this woman thought of silos as the entire world. She remembered an Iraqi girl she spoke with once while attempting to get directions to a different town. That was a conversation in a different language about a different world, and it had been simpler than this.

“The man who took my brother killed the wider world, yes.” Charlotte saw the memo in the folder, the note labeled The Pact. How to explain?

“You mean the world outside the silos? The world where crops grew aboveground and silos held seeds and not people?”

Charlotte let out a held breath. Her brother must’ve explained more than he let on.

“Yes. That world.”

“That world has been dead for thousands of years.”

“Hundreds of years,” Charlotte said. “And we… we’ve been around a long time. I… I used to live in that world. I saw it before it was ruined. The people here in this silo are the ones who did it. I’m telling you.”

There was silence. It was the sucking vacuum after a bomb. An admission, clearly stated. Charlotte had done it, what she thought her brother had always wanted to do. Admit to these people what they’d done. Paint a target. Invite retribution. All that they deserved.

“If this were true, I would want all of you dead. Do you understand me? Do you know how we live? Do you know what the world is like outside? Have you seen it?”

“Yes.”

“With your own eyes? Because I have.”

Charlotte sucked in a deep breath. “No,” she admitted. “Not with my own eyes. With a camera. But I’ve seen further out than any, and I can tell you that it’s better out there. I think you’re right about us poisoning the world, but I think it’s contained. I think there’s a great cloud around us. Beyond this cloud is blue skies and a chance at a life. You have to believe me, if I could help you get free, make this right, I would in a heartbeat.”

There was a long pause. A very long pause.

“How?”

“I’m not… I don’t think I’m in a position to help. I’m only saying if I could, I would. I know you’re in trouble over there, but I’m not in great shape over here. When they find me, they’ll probably kill me. Or something like it. I’ve done…” She touched the screwdriver on the bench. “… very bad things.”

“My people will want me dead for the part I played in this,” Juliette said. “They’ll send me to clean, and I won’t come back this time. So I guess we have something in common.”

Charlotte laughed and wiped her cheeks. “I’m truly sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for the things you’re going through. I’m sorry we did this to you all.”

There was silence.

“Thank you. I want to believe you, believe that you and your brother weren’t the ones who did this. Mostly because someone close to me wanted me to believe your brother was trying to help. So I hope you aren’t in the way when I get over there. Now, these bad things you say you’ve done, have you done them to bad people?”

Charlotte sat up straight. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Good. That’s a start. And now let me tell you about the world out there. I’ve loved two men in all my life, and both of them tried to convince me of this, that the world was a good place, that we could make it better. When I found out about the diggers, when I dreamed about tunneling here, I thought this was the way. But it only made things worse. And those two men with all that hope bursting from their breasts? Both of them are dead. That’s the world I live in.”

“Diggers?” Charlotte asked. She tried to make sense of this. “You got to that other silo through the airlocks. Over the hills.”

Juliette didn’t answer at first. “I’ve said too much,” she said. “I should go.”

“No, wait. Help me understand. You tunneled from one silo to another?” Charlotte leaned forward and spread the notes out again, grabbed the map. Here was one of those puzzles that made no sense until a new rule or piece of information was made available. She traced one of the red lines out beyond the silos to a point labeled SEED.

“I think this is important,” Charlotte said. She felt a surge of excitement. She saw how the game was supposed to play out, what was to become of this in two hundred years. “You have to believe me when I say this, but I am from the old world. I promise. I’ve seen it covered with crops that… like you say, that grow aboveground. And the world outside that looks ruined, I don’t think it stretches like that forever. I’ve seen a glimpse. And these diggers, you called them. I think I know what they’re for. Listen to me. I have a map here that my brother thought was important. It shows a bunch of lines leading to this place marked S-E-E-D.”

“Seed,” Juliette said.

“Yeah. These lines look like flight lines, which never made sense. But I think they lead to a better place. I think the digger you found wasn’t meant to go between silos. I think—”

There was a noise behind her. Charlotte had a difficult time processing it, even though she had expected it for hours, for days. She was so used to being alone, despite the fear that they were coming for her, the perfect knowledge that they were coming for her.

“You think what?” Juliette asked.

Turning, Charlotte watched the door to the drone control room fly open. A man dressed like those who had held her brother down stood in the hallway. He came at her, all alone, shouting for her to hold still, shouting for her to raise her hands. He trained a gun on her.

Juliette’s voice spilled from the radio. She asked Charlotte to go on, to tell her what the diggers were for, to answer. But Charlotte was too busy complying with this man, holding one hand over her head and the other as high as the pain would allow. And she knew it was all over.

47

The genset grumbled to life. There was a rattle deep in the belly of the great digger, and then a string of lights flickered on in Silo 17’s pump room, in the generator room, and down the main hall. There were whoops and applause from exhausted mechanics, and Juliette realized how important these small victories were. Light shone where once there was dark flood.

For her, every breath was a small victory. Lukas’s death was a weight on her chest, as were the losses of Peter and Marsha and Nelson. Everyone in IT she had come to know and forgive was gone. The cafeteria staff. Practically anyone above Supply, all those who hadn’t made a run for it. Weights on her chest, every one. She took another deep breath and marveled that breathing was still possible.

Courtnee had taken charge of the mechanics, stepping into the vacuum Shirly had left. She and her team were the ones stringing lights and wires and getting the pumps rigged and automated. Juliette moved about like a ghost. Only a handful seemed to see her. Just her father and a few of her closest friends, loyal to a fault.

She found Walker in the back of the digger, where the tight confines and reliable power made him feel closer to home. He looked over her radio and pronounced it both operational and out of juice. “I could rig up a charger in a few hours,” he told her apologetically.

Juliette surveyed the conveyor belt, which had been swept free of dirt and rubble and now served as a workbench for both Walker and the dig team. Walker had several projects underway for Courtnee: pumps to respool and what looked like disassembled mining detonators. Juliette thanked him but told him she was heading up soon; there were chargers in the deputy stations as well as in IT on thirty-four.

Further down the conveyor belt, she noticed members of the dig team poring over a schematic. Juliette gathered the radio and her flashlight from Walker’s station, patted him on the back, and joined them.

Erik, the old mine foreman, had a pair of dividers and was marking out distances on the schematic. Juliette squeezed in to get a closer look. It was the silo layout she’d brought down from IT all those weeks ago. It showed a grid of circles, a few of them crossed out. There were markings between two silos to show the route the digger had taken. The schematic had been used by the mining team to chart their way, buttressed by Juliette’s best guess on which direction she had walked and how far.

“We could make it to number sixteen in two weeks,” Erik calculated.

Bobby grunted. “C’mon. It took longer than that to get here.”

“I’m relying on your extra incentive to get out of this place,” Erik said.

Someone laughed.

“What if it ain’t safe over there?” Fitz asked.

“It probably isn’t,” Juliette said.

Grime-covered faces turned to acknowledge her.

“You got friends in all of these?” Fitz asked. He practically sneered at her. Juliette could feel the tension among the group. Most of them had gotten their families through, their loved ones and kids and brothers and sisters. But not all.

Juliette squeezed between Bobby and Hyla and tapped one of the circles on the map. “I’ve got friends right here,” she said.

Shadows swayed drunkenly across the map as the bulb overhead swung on its cord. Erik read the label on the circle Juliette had indicated. “Silo 1,” he said. He traced the three rows of silos between this location and where they currently stood. “That would take a lot longer.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m going alone.”

Eyes went from the map to her. The only sound was the rumbling of the genset at the other end of the digger.

“I’ll be going overland. And I know you need all the blast charges you can lay hands on, but I saw you had a few cases left over from the dig. I’d love to take enough to pop a hole in the top of this silo.”

“What are you talking about?” Bobby asked.

Juliette leaned over the map and traced a path with her finger. “I’m going overland in a modified suit. I’m going to strap as many sticks of blast charge as I can to the door of this silo, and then I’m going to open that motherfucker like a soup can.”

Fitz smiled a toothless smile. “What kind of friends you say you got over there?”

“The dead kind,” Juliette said. “The people who did this to us live right there. They’re the ones who make the world outside unlivable. I think it’s time they live in it.”

No one spoke for a beat. Until Bobby asked, “How thick are the airlock doors? I mean, you’ve seen ’em.”

“Three, four inches.”

Erik scratched his beard. Juliette realized half the men around that table were doing some kind of figuring. Not a one of them was going to talk her out of this.

“It would take twenty to thirty sticks,” someone said.

Juliette searched out the voice and saw a man she didn’t recognize. Someone from the Mids who had made it down, maybe. But he was wearing a mechanic’s coveralls.

“You all had one-inch plate welded up at the base of the stairwell. We used eight sticks to punch through it. I’d say plan on three to four times that.”

“You’re a transfer?” Juliette asked.

“Yes, ma’am.” He nodded. And looking past the grime to his cropped hair and bright smile, Juliette thought she could see the Up-Topper in there. One of the men sent from IT to bolster the shifts in Mechanical. Someone who had blown open the barrier her friends had erected during the uprising. He knew what he was talking about.

Juliette looked to the others. “Before I go, I’ll reach out to a few of these silos, see if any will harbor you. But I’ve got to warn you, the heads of these joints all work for these people. They’d as likely kill you when you come crashing through their walls as feed you. I don’t know what’s salvageable here, but you might be better off staying put. Imagine what we would’ve thought if a few hundred strangers cut their way inside our home and asked to be put up.”

“We would’ve let them,” Bobby said.

Fitz sneered. “Easy for you to say, you’ve got your two kids. What about those of us in the lottery?”

This got several people talking all at once. Erik slapped the conveyor belt with his hand to silence them. “That’s enough,” he said. He glared at those gathered. “She’s right. We need to know where we’re headed first. In the meantime, we can start staging. We’re gonna want all the supports in the mines of this place, which means a lot of water to pump out and exploring to do.”

“How exactly are we going to aim this thing?” Bobby asked. “She was a bitch to steer here. These things aren’t fond of turning.”

Erik nodded. “Already thought of that. We’ll dig around it and give her room enough to spin in place. Court says it’s possible to run a set of tracks at a time, a little forward on one side, a little back on the other. She’ll creep around as long as there’s no earth in the way.”

Raph appeared at Juliette’s side. He had been hanging back during the discussion. “I’m coming with you,” he said.

Juliette realized it wasn’t a question. She nodded.

When Erik was done explaining what they needed to do next, workers began to scatter. Juliette caught Erik’s attention and showed him her radio. “I’m going to go see Courtnee and my dad before I leave, and I’ve got some friends that headed off to the farms. I’ll have someone bring you down a radio as soon as I find another. And a charger. If I make contact with a silo that’ll have you, I’ll let you know.”

Erik nodded. He started to say something, scanned the faces of those still milling about, then waved her to the side. Juliette handed her radio to Raph and followed.

A few paces away, Erik glanced around and waved her further along. And then further. Until they were at the far end of the tailings facility where the very last bulb swayed and flickered.

“I’ve heard what some of them are sayin’,” Erik said. “I just want you to know it’s ratshit, okay?”

Juliette scrunched up her face in confusion. Erik took a deep breath, eyed his workers in the distance. “My wife was working in the one-twenties when this went down. Everyone around her was running up, and as much as she felt the urge to join them, she headed straight down here to our kids. Was the only one on her level to make it. She fought a helluva crowd to get here. People were acting crazy.”

Juliette squeezed his arm. “I’m glad she made it.” She watched the dangling lights shine in Erik’s eyes.

“Goddammit, Jules, listen to what I’m telling you. This morning, I woke up on a rusted sheet of plate steel, a crick in my neck I may live with for the rest of my life, two damn kids sleeping on me like a mattress, and my ass dead numb from the cold—”

Juliette laughed.

“—but Lesley is laying there watching me. Like she’s been watching me a long while. And my wife looks around us at this rusted hellhole, and she says thank God we had this place to come to.”

Juliette turned away and wiped at her eyes. Erik grabbed her arm and made her face him. He wasn’t going to let her retreat like that.

“She hated this dig. Hated it. Hated me taking on a second shift, hated it because of my bitchin’ and moanin’ over the struts you made me pull, what we did to number six. Hated it because I hated it. You understand?”

Juliette nodded.

“Now, I know the fix we’re in as well as most. I don’t reckon we’ll get anywhere with this next dig, but it’ll give us something to do until our time comes. Until then, I’m going to wake up sore next to the woman I love, and if I’m lucky I’ll do the same thing the next morning, and every one of those is a gift. This ain’t hell. This is what comes before. And you gave us that.”

Juliette wiped the tears from her cheeks. Some part of her hated herself for crying in front of him. Another part wanted to throw her arms around his neck and sob. She missed Lukas more powerfully in that moment than she thought herself capable.

“I don’t know about this fool’s errand you’re setting off on, but you take whatever of mine you need. If that means more digging with my bare hands, so be it. You get those fuckers. I want to see them in hell by the time I get there.”

48

Juliette found her father in the makeshift clinic he had set up in a cleared-out and rusted storeroom. Raylee, a second-shift electrician nine months pregnant, rested on a bedroll, her husband at her side, both of them with their hands on her belly. Juliette acknowledged the couple and realized their child would be the first — maybe ever — to be born in a different silo from its parents. That child would never know the gleaming Mechanical in which they worked and lived, would never travel up to the bazaar and hear music or see a play, may never gaze at a functioning wallscreen to know the outside world. And if it was a girl, she would face the danger of having children of her own like Hannah had, with no one to tell her otherwise.

“You setting off?” Juliette’s father asked.

She nodded. “Just came to tell you goodbye.”

“You say that like I’ll never see you again. I’ll be up to check on the kids once I get things sorted down here. Once we have our new arrival.” He smiled at Raylee and her husband.

“Just goodbye for now,” Juliette said. She had made the others swear not to tell anyone, especially Court and her father, about what she had planned. As she gave her father a final squeeze, she tried not to let her arms betray her.

“And just so you know,” she told him, letting go, “those kids are the nearest thing I’ll ever have to children of my own. So whenever I’m not there to look after them, if you can lend Solo a hand… Sometimes I think he’s the biggest kid of the lot.”

“I will. And I know. And I’m sorry about Marcus. I blame myself.”

“Don’t, Dad. Please don’t. Just… look after them when I’m too busy to. You know how I can get into some fool project.”

He nodded.

“I love you,” she said. And then she turned to go before she betrayed herself and her plans any further. In the hallway, Raph shouldered a heavy bag. Juliette grabbed the other. The two of them walked beyond the current string of lights and into the near-darkness, neither of them employing their flashlights, the halls familiar enough, their eyes soon adjusting.

They passed through an unmanned security station. Juliette spotted the breathing hose doubling back on itself, remembered swimming through that very spot. Ahead, the stairwell glowed a dull green from resilient emergency lights, and she and Raph began the long slog up. Juliette had a list in her head of who she needed to see and what she needed to grab on the way. The kids would be in the lower farms, back at their old home. Solo as well. She wanted to see them, and then head up and grab a charger and hopefully another radio at the deputy station. If they were lucky and made good time, she’d be in her old home in the cleaning lab later that night, assembling one last suit.

“You remember to grab the detonators from Walker?” Juliette asked. She felt as though she was forgetting something.

“Yup. And the batteries you wanted. And I topped up our canteens. We’re good.”

“Just checking.”

“How about for modding the suits?” Raph asked. “You sure you have everything up there you need? How many of them are left, anyway?”

“More than enough,” Juliette said. She wanted to tell him right then that two suits would be more than enough. She was pretty sure Raph thought he was coming with her the whole way. She was steeling herself for that fight.

“Yeah, but how many? I’m just curious. Nobody was allowed to talk about those things before…”

Juliette thought of the stores between thirty-four and thirty-five, the in-floor bunkers that seemed to go on forever. “Two… maybe three hundred suits,” she told him. “More than I could count. I only modded a couple.”

Raph whistled. “That’s enough for a few hundred years of cleanings, eh? Assuming you were sending ’em out one a year.”

Juliette thought that was about right. And she supposed, now that she knew how the outside air got poisoned, that this was probably the plan: a steady flow of the exiled. Not cleaning, but doing the exact opposite. Making the world dirty.

“Hey, do you remember Gina from Supply?”

Juliette nodded, and the past tense was a busted knuckle. Quite a few from Supply had made it down, but Gina hadn’t.

“Did you know we were seeing each other?”

Juliette shook her head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry, Raph.”

“Yeah.”

They made a turn of the staircase.

“Gina did an analysis once of a bunch of spares. You know they had this computer just to tally everything, where it was located, how many were on order, all of that? Well, IT had burned through a few chips for their servers, bang, bang, bang, just one of those weeks where failures crop up all in a row—”

“I remember those weeks,” Juliette said.

“Well, Gina wondered how long before they were gonna run out of these chips. This was one of those parts they couldn’t make more of, you know? Intricate things. So she looked at the average failure rate, how many they had in the pens, and she came up with two hundred and forty-eight years.”

Juliette waited for him to continue. “That number mean something?” she asked.

“Not at first, no. But the number got her curious because she’d run a similar report a few months prior, again out of curiosity, and the number had been close to that. A few weeks later, a bulb goes out in her office. Just a bulb. It winks out while she’s working on something, and it got her thinkin’. You’ve seen the storehouse of bulbs they’ve got, right?”

“I haven’t, actually.”

“Well, they’re vast. She took me down there once. And…”

Raph fell quiet for a few treads.

“Well, the storehouse is about half empty. So Gina runs the figures for a simple bulb for the whole silo and comes up with two hundred and fifty-one years’ supply.”

“About the same number.”

“That’s right. And now she’s real curious — you’d have loved this about her — she started running reports like this in her spare time, big-ticket items like fuel cells and pregnancy implants and timer chips. And they all converge at right about two-fifty. And that’s when she figures we’ve got that much time left.”

“Two hundred and fifty years,” Juliette said. “She told you this?”

“Yeah. Me and a few others over drinks. She was pretty drunk, mind you. And I remember…” Raph laughed. “I remember Jonny saying that she was remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, and speaking of forgetting the missus, he needed to get back to his. And one of Gina’s friends from Supply says that people’ve been saying stuff like this since her grandmother was around, and they would always be saying that. But Gina says the only reason this wasn’t occurring to everyone at once is because it’s early. She said to wait two hundred years or so, and people would be going down into empty caverns to get the last of everything, and then it would be obvious.”

“I’m truly sorry she’s not here,” Juliette said.

“Me too.” They climbed a few steps. “But that’s not why I’m bringing this up. You said there were a couple hundred suits. Seems like the same count, don’t it?”

“It was just a guess,” Juliette told him. “I only went down there the couple of times.”

“But it seems about right. Don’t it seem like a clock ticking down? Either the gods knew how much to stock away, or they don’t have plans for us past a certain date. Makes you feel like pig’s milk, don’t it? Anyhow, that’s how it seems to me.”

Juliette turned and studied her albino friend, saw the way the green emergency lights gave him a sort of eerie glow. “Maybe,” Juliette said. “Gina may’ve been on to something.”

Raph sniffed. “Yeah, but fuckit. We’ll be long dead before then.”

He laughed at this, his voice echoing up and down the stairs, but the sentiment made Juliette sad. Not just that everyone she knew would be dead before that date ever happened, but that this knowledge made it easier to stomach an awful and morbid truth: Their days were counted. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

49

The farms were dark, the overhead lights sleeping on their distantly clicking timers. Down a long and leafy hall, voices spilled as grow plots were claimed and those claims were just as quickly disputed. Things that were not owned by anyone became owned. It reminded Hannah of troubling times. She clutched her child to her chest and stuck close to Rickson.

Young Miles led the way with his dying flashlight. He beat it in his palm whenever it dimmed, which somehow coaxed more life out of it. Hannah glanced back in the direction of the stairwell. “What’s taking Solo so long?” she asked.

Nobody answered. Solo had chased after Elise. It was common enough for her to run off after some distraction, but it was different with all these people everywhere. Hannah was worried.

The child in her arms wailed. It did this when it was hungry. It was allowed to. Hannah clamped down on her own complaints; she was hungry too. She adjusted the child, unhooked one strap of her overalls, and gave the infant access to her breast. The hunger was worse with the pressure of eating for two. And where crops had once brushed against her arms along that hall — where an empty stomach was one of the few things she never need fear — burgeoning plots stood startlingly empty. Ravaged. Owned.

Stalk and leaf rustled like paper as Rickson climbed over the rail and explored the second and third rows, hunting for a tomato or cucumber or any of the berries that had gone wild and had spread through the other crops, their curly arms twining around the stalks of their brethren. He returned noisily and pressed something into Hannah’s hand, something small with a soft spot where it had rested on the ground for too long. “Here,” he said, and went back to searching.

“Why would they take so much all at once?” Miles asked, digging for food of his own. Hannah sniffed the small offering from Rickson, which smelled vaguely like squash, but underripe. The voices in the distance lifted in argument. She took a small bite and recoiled at the bitter taste.

“They took so much because they aren’t family,” Rickson said. His voice leaked from behind dark plants that trembled from his passing.

Young Miles aimed his flashlight toward Rickson, who emerged from the rows of cornstalks empty-handed. “But we aren’t family,” Miles said. “Not really. And we never did this.”

Rickson hopped over the rail. “Of course we’re family,” he said. “We live together and work together like families are supposed to. But not these people, haven’t you seen? Seen how they dress differently so they can be told apart? They don’t live together. These strangers will fight like our parents fought. Our parents weren’t family, either.” Rickson untied his hair and collected the loose strands around his face, then tied it all back up. His voice was hushed, his eyes peering into the darkness where voices argued. “They’ll do like our parents and fight over food and women until there aren’t any of them left. Which means we’ll have to fight back if we want to live.”

“I don’t want to fight,” Hannah said. She winced and pulled the baby away from her sore nipple, began working her overalls to switch breasts.

“You won’t have to fight,” Rickson said. He helped with her overalls.

“They left us alone before,” Miles said. “We lived back here for years, and they came and took what they needed and didn’t fight us. Maybe these people will do the same.”

“That was a long time ago,” Rickson said. He watched the baby settle into its mother’s breast, then ranged down the railing and into the darkness to forage some more. “They left us alone because we were young and we were theirs. Hannah and I were your age. You and your brother were toddlers. No matter how bad the fighting got, they left us kids alone to live or die by our own devices. It was a gift, the way they abandoned us.”

“But they used to come,” Miles said. “And bring us things.”

“Like Elise and her sister?” Hannah asked. And now she and Rickson had both brought up deceased siblings. That hall was full of the dead and gone, she realized, the plucked-from-above. “There will be fighting,” she told Miles, who still didn’t seem so sure. “Rickson and I aren’t kids any longer.” She rocked the baby in her arms, that suckling reminder of just how far from kids they had become.

“I wish they’d just leave,” Miles said morosely. He banged the flashlight, which gave forth like a burped baby. “I wish it could all go back to normal. I wish Marcus was here. It don’t feel right without him.”

“A tomato,” Rickson said, emerging victorious from the shadows. He held the red orb in the beam of Miles’s light, which threw a blush across all their faces. A knife materialized. Rickson cut the vegetable into thirds, with Hannah getting hers first. Red juice like blood dripped from his hand, from Hannah’s lips, and from the knife. They ate in relative quiet, the voices down the hall distant and scary, the knife dripping with life but capable of dripping with worse.

Jimmy cursed himself as he climbed the stairs. He cursed as he used to, with only himself to hear, with words that never had far to travel, moving from his lips to his own ears. He cursed himself and stomped around and around, sending vibrations up and down to mingle with others. Keeping an eye on Elise had turned into a bother. One glance in the other direction, and off she went. Like Shadow used to when all the grow lights popped on at once.

“No, not like Shadow,” he mumbled to himself. Shadow had stayed underfoot most days. He had always been tripping over Shadow. Elise was something else.

Another level went past, alone and empty, and Jimmy remembered that this wasn’t new. This wasn’t sudden. Elise was forever coming and going however she liked. He had just never worried about her when the silo was empty. It made him reconsider what made a place dangerous. Maybe it wasn’t the place at all.

“You!”

Jimmy rose to another landing, one-twenty-two. A man waved from the doorway. He had gold coveralls on, which meant something back when things had meaning. It was the first face Jimmy had seen in a dozen levels.

“Have you seen a girl?” Jimmy asked, ignoring the fact that this man seemed to have a question of his own. Jimmy held his hand at his hip. “This high. Seven years old. Missing a tooth.” He pointed past his beard at his own teeth.

The man shook his head. “No, but you’re the man who used to live here, right? The survivor?” The man had a knife in his hand, which flashed silver like a fish in water. The man in gold then laughed and peered beyond the landing’s rail. “I guess we’re all survivors, aren’t we?” Reaching out, he took hold of one of the rubber hoses Jimmy and Juliette had affixed to the wall to carry off the floods. With a deft swipe of the knife, the hose parted. He began hauling up the lower part, which dangled free far below.

“That was for the floods—” Jimmy began.

“You must know a lot about this place,” the man said. “I’m sorry. My name’s Terry. Terry Harlson. I’m on the Planning Commi—” He squinted at Jimmy. “Hell, you don’t know or care, do you? We’re all from the same place to you.”

“Jimmy,” he said. “My name’s Jimmy, but most people call me Solo. And that hose—”

“You have any idea where this power is coming from?” Terry jerked his head at the green lights that dotted the underside of the stairs. “We’re up another forty levels from here. Radio there’s got power. Some of these wires strung up all over the place got juice too. You do that?”

“Some of it,” Jimmy said. “Some was already like that. A little girl named Elise came this way. Did you—?”

“I reckon the power’s coming from above, but Tom told me to check down here. He says the power always came from below in our silo, should be the same in this one. Everything else is. But I saw the high-water mark down there where this place was full of water. I don’t think power’s been coming from there in a while. But you should know, right? This place got any secrets you can tell us about? Love to know about that power.”

The hose lay in a coil at the man’s feet. The knife was back out, glimmering in his hand. “You ever thought of being on a committee?”

“I need to find my friend,” Jimmy said.

Another swipe, but the electrical cord put up more resistance. It was the copper at the center. The man held a loop of the black wire in his hand and sawed back and forth, great muscles bulging beneath an undershirt stained with sweat. After some exertion, the knife burst free, the cord severed in two.

“If your friend ain’t with the men in the farms, she’s probably up with the chanters. I passed them on my way down. They found a chapel.” Terry jabbed the knife skyward before stuffing it away and looping wire around his arm.

“A chapel,” Jimmy said. He knew the one. “Thank you, Terry.”

“Only fair,” the man said, shrugging. “Thanks for telling me where all this power comes from.”

“The power—?”

“Yeah, you said it came from above. From level…”

“Thirty-four? I said that?”

The man smiled. “I believe you did.”

50

Elise had watched the people in the bottom where the floods used to be — the ones who were working to dig their way out and get the power going, get the lights on. She had also seen people at the farms harvesting a bunch of food and figuring out how to get people fed. And now there was this third group of people arranging furniture and sweeping the floors and making things tidy. She had no clue what they were trying to do.

The nice man who had last seen Puppy was off to one side, speaking with another man in a white outfit who had a bald circle in the center of his head even though he looked too young to be bald. The outfit was strange. Like a blanket. Instead of two legs, it had only one, and it was big enough that it swirled around him and made it so you couldn’t hardly see his feet. The nice man with the dark whiskers seemed to be arguing a point. The man in the white blanket just frowned and stood there. Now and then, one or both of them would glance at Elise, and she worried they were talking about her. Maybe they were talking about how to find Puppy.

The furniture grew into straight lines, all facing the same way. There weren’t any tables like the rooms she used to eat in behind the farms, the places where she would hide under furniture and pretend she was a rat with a whole rat family, all of them talking and twitching their whiskers. Here, it was just chairs and benches facing a wall where a colorful glass picture stood with some of the glass broken out. A man in coveralls worked behind that wall, was visible through the broken glass and hazy behind the part that remained. He spoke to someone else, who passed a black cord through a door. They were working on something, and then a light burst on back there, throwing colorful rays across the room, and a few people moving furniture stopped and stared. Some of them whispered. It sounded like they were all whispering the same thing.

“Elise.”

The man with the dark whiskers knelt down beside her. Elise startled and clutched her bag to her chest. “Yes?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

“Have you heard of the Pact?” the man asked. The other man with no hair on the center of his head and the white blanket around his shoulders stood behind, that same frown on his face. Elise imagined that he never smiled.

She nodded. “A pack is a bunch of animals, like deer and dogs and puppies.”

The man smiled. “Pact, not pack.” But it all sounded the same to Elise. “And dogs and puppies are the same animal.”

She didn’t feel like correcting him. She’d seen what dogs looked like in her book and in the bizarre, and they were scary. Puppies weren’t scary.

“Where did you hear about deer?” the man in the white blanket asked. “Do you have children’s books over here?”

Elise shook her head. “We have real books. I’ve seen deer. They’re tall and funny with skinny legs, and they live in the woods.”

The man with the whiskers in the orange coveralls didn’t seem to care about deer. Not as much as the other man. Elise looked to the door, wondered where everyone she knew was. Where was Solo? He should’ve been helping her find Puppy.

“The Pact is a very important document,” said the man in orange. She suddenly remembered his name was Mr. Rash. He had introduced himself, but she was bad with names. Only ever needed to know a few. Mr. Rash was very nice to her. “The Pact is like a book but only smaller,” he was saying. “Similar to how you’re like a woman but only smaller.”

“I’m seven,” Elise said. She wasn’t small anymore.

“And you’ll be seventeen before you know it.” The man with the whiskers reached out and touched Elise’s cheek. Elise pulled back, startled, which made the man frown. He turned and looked up at the man in the white blanket, who was studying Elise.

“What books were these?” the man in white asked. “The ones with these animals, they were here in this silo?”

Elise felt her hands drop to her bag and rest protectively there, rest on her Memory Book. She was pretty sure the page with the deer had gone into her book. She liked the things about the green world, the things about fishing and animals and the sun and stars. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything.

The man with the whiskers — Mr. Rash — knelt beside her. He had a sheet of paper and a purple stick of chalk in his hands. He set these on the bench by her leg and rested his hand on Elise’s knee. The other man stepped closer.

“If you know of books in this place, it is your duty to God to tell us where they lie,” the man in the blanket said. “Do you believe in God?”

Elise nodded. Hannah and Rickson had taught her about God and the night prayers. The world blurred around her, and Elise realized she had tears in her eyes. She swiped them away. Rickson hated it when she cried.

“Where are these books, Elise? How many of them are there?”

“A lot,” she said, thinking of all the books she’d stolen pages out of. Solo had been so angry with her when he’d found out she was taking pictures and the How-To’s from them. But the How-To’s showed her a better way to fish, and then Solo had shown her how to stitch the pages in and out of books proper and they had fished together.

The man in the white blanket knelt down in front of her. “Are these books all over the place?”

“This is Father Remmy,” Mr. Rash said, making room for the man with the bald patch and introducing him to Elise. “Father Remmy is going to guide us through these troubling times. We are a flock. We used to follow Father Wendel, but some leave the flock and some join. Like you.”

“These books,” Mr. Remmy said, who seemed young to be a father, didn’t seem all that much older than Rickson. “Are they near us? Where might we find them?” He swept his hand from the wall to the ceiling, had a strange way of talking, a loud voice that could be felt in Elise’s chest, a voice that made her want to answer. And his eyes — green like the flooded depths she and Solo used to fish in — made her want to tell the truth.

“All in one place,” Elise said, sniffling.

“Where?” the man whispered. He was holding her hands, and the other man was watching this with a funny expression. “Where are the books? It is so important, my daughter. There is only one book, you know. All these others are lies. Now tell me where they are.”

Elise thought of the one book in her bag. It was not a lie. But she didn’t want this man touching her book. Didn’t want him touching her at all. She tried to pull away, but his large hands gripped her more firmly. Something swam behind his eyes.

“Thirty-four,” she whispered.

“Level thirty-four?”

Elise nodded, and his hands loosened on hers. As he pulled away, Mr. Rash moved closer and rested a hand on Elise’s hand, covering the place the other man had hurt.

“Father, can we… ?” Mr. Rash asked.

The man with the bald circle nodded, and Mr. Rash picked up the piece of paper from the bench. One side was printed on. The other side had been written on by hand. There was a purple chalk, and Mr. Rash asked Elise if she could spell, if she knew her letters.

Elise bobbed her head. Her hand once again fell to her bag, guarding her book. She could read better than Miles. Hannah had made sure of that.

“Can you spell your name for me?” the man asked. He showed her the piece of paper. There were lines drawn at the bottom. Two names had already been signed. Another line was blank. “Right here,” he said, indicating that line. He pressed the chalk into Elise’s hand. She was reading some of the other words, but the writing was messy. It had been written quickly and on a rough surface. Plus, her vision was blurry. “Just your name,” he said once more. “Show me.”

Elise wanted to get away. She wanted Puppy and Solo and Jewel and even Rickson. She wiped her tears and swallowed a sob that was trying to choke her. If she did what they wanted, she would be free to go. There were more and more people in that room. Some of them were watching her and whispering. She heard a man say that someone else was lucky, that there were more men than women, that people would get left out if they weren’t careful. They were watching her and waiting, and the furniture was now straight, the floors swept, some green leaves from plucked plants scattered around the stage.

“Right here,” Mr. Rash said. He held her wrist and forced the chalk until it hovered over the line. “Your name.” And everyone was watching. Elise knew her letters. She could read better than Rickson. But she could hardly see. She was a fish like she used to catch, under the water, looking up at all these hungry people. But she printed her name. She hoped it would make them go away.

“Good girl.”

Mr. Rash bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. People started clapping. And then the man in the white blanket with the fascination for books chanted some words, that voice booming and pretty at the same time. His words felt deep within her chest as he pronounced someone in the name of the Pact, husband and wife.