Second Shift - Order

•1•

Deathdays were birthdays. That’s what they said to ease their pain, those who were left behind. An old man dies and a lottery is won. Children weep while hopeful parents cry tears of joy. Deathdays were birthdays, and no one knew this better than Mission Jones.

Tomorrow was his seventeenth. Tomorrow, he would grow a year older. It would also mark seventeen years since his mother died.

The cycle of life was everywhere—it wrapped around all things like the great spiral staircase—but nowhere was it more evident, nowhere could it be seen so clearly that a life given was one taken away. And so Mission approached his birthday without joy, with a heavy load on his young back, thinking on death and celebrating nothing.

Three steps below him and matching his pace, Mission could hear his friend Cam wheezing from his half of the load. When Dispatch assigned them a tandem, the two boys had flipped a coin, heads for heads, and Cam had lost. That left Mission with a clear view of the stairs. It also gave him rights to set the pace, and dark thoughts made for an angry one.

Traffic was light on the stairwell that morning. The children were not yet up and heading to school, those of them who still went anymore. A few bleary-eyed shopkeepers staggered toward work. There were service workers with grease stains on their bellies and patches sewn into their knees coming off late shifts. One man descended bearing more than a non-porter should, but Mission was in no mood to set down his burden and weigh another’s. It was enough to glare at the gentleman, to let him know that he’d been seen.

“Three more to go,” he huffed to Cam as they passed the twenty-fourth. His porter’s strap was digging into his shoulders, the load a great one. Heavier still was its destination. Mission hadn’t been back to the farms in near on four months, hadn’t seen his father in just as long. His brother, of course, he saw at the Nest now and then, but it’d still been a few weeks. To arrive so near to his birthday would be awkward, but there was no helping it. He trusted his father to do as he always had and ignore the occasion altogether, to ignore that he was getting any older.

Past the twenty-fourth they entered another gap between the levels full of graffiti. The noxious odor of home-mixed paint hung in the air. Recent work dribbled in places, parts of it done the night before. Bold letters wrapped across the curving wall of concrete far beyond the stairway railing that read:

The slang for silo felt dated, even though the paint was not yet dry. Nobody said that anymore. Not for years. Farther up and much older:

The rest was obscured in a slap of censoring paint. As if anyone could read it and not fill in the blank on their own. It was the first half that was a killing offense, anyway. The second was just a word.

Mission laughed at this one. He pointed it out to Cam. Probably painted by some kid born above the mids and full of self-loathing, some kid who couldn’t abide their own good fortune. Mission knew the kind. They were his kind. He studied all this graffiti painted over last year’s graffiti and all the many years before. It was here between the levels, where the steel girders stretched out from the stairwell to the cement beyond, that such slogans went back generations. Atop the angry words were pockmarks, scars, and burns of old wars. Atop these wounds lay ever more angry scribbles, on and on.

Mission marched past this one, unable to argue. The end was coming. He could feel it in his bones. He could hear it in the wheezing rattle of the silo with its loose bolts and its rusty joints, could see it in the way people walked of late with their shoulders up around their ears, their belongings clutched to their chests. The end was coming for certain.

His father would laugh and disagree, of course. Mission could hear his old man’s voice from all the levels away, could hear his father telling him how people had thought the same thing long before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that when they went, they wouldn’t go alone. Their hope was that no one would have the good fortune to come after.

Thoughts such as these made Mission’s neck itch. He held the hauling strap with one hand and adjusted the ‘chief around his neck with the other. It was a nervous habit, hiding his neck when he thought about the end of things. But that had been two birthdays ago.

“You doing okay up there?” Cam asked.

“I’m fine,” Mission called back, realizing he’d slowed. He gripped his strap with both hands and concentrated on his pace, on his job. There was a metronome in his head from his shadowing days, a tick-tock, tick-tock for tandem hauls. Two porters with good timing could fall into a rhythm and wind their way up a dozen flights, never feeling a heavy load. Mission and Cam weren’t there yet. Now and then one of them would have to shuffle his feet or adjust his pace to match the other. Otherwise, their load might sway dangerously.

Their load.

Mission’s grandfather came to mind, though Mission had never known the man. He had died in the uprising of ’78, had left behind a son to take over the farm and a daughter to become a chipper. Mission’s aunt had quit that job a few years back; she no longer banged out spots of rust and primed and painted raw steel like she used to. Nobody did. Nobody bothered. But his father was still farming that same plot of soil, that same plot generations of Jones boys had farmed, forever insisting that things would go on, that they would never change.

“That word means something else, you know,” his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. “It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.”

This was the sort of thing Mission’s father liked to say when the priests came to bury a man beneath his corn. His dad would pack the dirt with a shovel, say that’s how things go, and plant a seed in the neat depression his thumb made.

A few weeks later, Mission had told his friends this other meaning of revolution. He had pretended to come up with it himself. It was just the sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense they regaled each other with late at night on dark landings while they inhaled potato glue out of plastic bags.

His best friend Rodny had been the only one unimpressed. “Nothing changes until we make it change,” he had said with a serious look in his eye.

Mission wondered what his best friend was doing now. He hadn’t seen Rodny in months. Whatever he was shadowing for on thirty-four kept him from getting out much.

He thought back to better days, growing up in the Nest with friends tight as a fist. He remembered thinking they would all stay together and grow old in the Up Top. They would live along the same hallways, watch their eventual kids play the way they had.

But all had gone their separate ways. It was hard to remember who had done it first, who had shaken off the shadowing expected by their parents, but eventually most of them had. Like a group decision never discussed, like a dozen private revolutions. They had left home to choose a new fate. Sons of plumbers took up farming. Daughters of the cafe learned to sew. None of them bothered to ask how many of their parents had done the same. Everything felt new and unique, and so it had to be.

Mission remembered being angry when he left home. He remembered a fight with his father, throwing down his shovel, promising he’d never dig a trench again. He’d learned in the Nest that he could be anything he wanted, that he was in charge of his own fate. And so when he grew miserable, he assumed it was the farms that made him feel that way; he assumed it was his family.

He thought about his mother, about family he had never known, and a ring of fire burned around his neck, the remnants of a rope’s embrace.

He and Cam had flipped a dime back in Dispatch, heads for heads, and now Mission could feel a man’s shoulders pressed against his own. When he lifted his gaze to survey the steps ahead, the back of his skull met the crown of the dead man’s through the plastic bag—birthdays and deathdays pressed tight, two halves of a single coin.

Mission carried them both, that load meant for two. He took the stairs a pair at a time, a brutal pace, up toward the farm of his youth.

•2•

The coroner’s office was on the farm’s lower level, tucked away at the end of those dark and damp halls that wound their way beneath the roots. The ceiling was low in that half level. Pipes hung visible from above and rattled angrily as pumps kicked on and moved nutrients to distant and thirsty roots. Water dripped from dozens of small leaks into buckets and pots. A recently emptied pot banged metallic with each strike. Another overflowed. The floors were slick, the walls damp like sweaty skin.

Inside her office, the boys lifted the body onto a slab of dented metal, and the coroner signed Mission’s work log. She tipped them for the speedy delivery, and when Cam saw the extra chits, his grumpiness over the pace dissolved. Back in the hallway, he bid Mission good day and splashed toward the exit to find some vice to pair with the bonus.

Mission watched him go, feeling much more than a year older than his friend. Cam hadn’t been told of the evening’s plans, the midnight rendezvous of porters. This seemed to set them apart, his being privy to adult and dangerous things. It made him envy Cam for what the boy didn’t know.

Not wanting to arrive at the farms deadheading and have his father lecture him on laziness, Mission stopped by the maintenance room to see if anything needed carrying up. Winters was on duty, a dark man with a white beard and a knack with pumps. He regarded Mission suspiciously and claimed he hadn’t the budget for portering. Mission explained he was going up anyway and that he was glad to take anything.

“In that case,” Winters said. He hoisted a monstrous water pump onto his workbench.

“Just the thing,” Mission told him, smiling.

Winters narrowed his eyes as if Mission had worked a bolt loose.

The pump wouldn’t fit inside his porter’s pack, but the haul straps on the outside of the pack looped nicely across the jutting pipes and sharp fittings. Winters helped him get his arms through the straps and the pump secured to his back. He thanked the old man, which drew another worried frown, and set off and up the half level. Back at the stairwell, the odor of mildew from the wet halls faded, replaced by the smell of loam and freshly tilled soil, scents of home that yanked Mission back in time.

The landing on nineteen was crowded as a jam of people attempted to squeeze inside the farms for the day’s food. Standing apart from them was a mother in farmer green cradling a wailing child. She had the stains on her knees of a picker and the agitated look of one sent out of the grow plots to soothe her noisy brood. As Mission crowded past, he heard between the baby’s cries the words of a familiar nursery rhyme. The mother rocked the child frightfully close to the railing, the infant’s eyes wide with what looked to Mission like unadulterated fear.

He worked his way through the crowd, and the cries from the infant receded amid the general din. It occurred to Mission how few kids he saw anymore. It wasn’t like when he was young. There had been an explosion of newborns after the violence the last generation had wrought, but now it was just the trickle of natural deaths and the handful of lottery winners. It meant fewer babies crying and fewer parents rejoicing.

With much cajoling and claiming the passage of a porter, he eventually made it through the doors and into the main hall. Using his ‘chief, Mission wiped the sweat from his lips. He’d forgotten to top up his canteen a level below, and his mouth was dry. The reasons for pushing so swift a pace felt silly now. It was as if his looming birthday were some deadline to beat, and so the sooner he visited and got away the better. But now in the wash of sights and sounds from his childhood, his dark and angry thoughts melted. It was home, and Mission hated how good it felt to be there.

There were a few hellos and waves as he worked his way toward the gates. Some porters he knew were loading sacks of fruits and vegetables to haul up to the cafeteria. He saw his aunt working one of the vending stalls outside the security gate. After giving up chipping, she now performed the questionably legal act of vending, something she’d never shadowed for. Mission did his best not to catch her eye; he didn’t want to get sucked into a lecture or have his hair mussed and his ’chief straightened.

Beyond the stalls, a handful of younger kids clustered in the far corner where it was dark, probably dealing seeds, not looking nearly as inconspicuous as they likely thought. The entire scene in the entrance hall was one of a second bazaar, of farmers selling direct, of people crowding in from distant levels to get food they feared would never make it to their shops and stores. It was fear begetting fear, crowds becoming throngs, and it was easy to see how mobs were next.

Working the main security gate was Frankie, a tall and skinny kid Mission had grown up with. Mission wiped his forehead with the front of his undershirt, which was already cool and damp with sweat. “Hey, Frankie,” he called out.

“Mission.” A nod and a smile. No hard feelings from another kid who’d jumped shadows long ago. Frankie’s father worked in security, down in IT. Frankie had wanted to become a farmer, which Mission never understood. Their teacher, Mrs. Crowe, had been delighted and had encouraged Frankie to follow his dreams. And now Mission found it ironic that Frankie had ended up working security for the farms. It was as if he couldn’t escape what he’d been born to do.

Mission smiled and nodded at Frankie’s hair. “Did someone splash you with grow quick?”

Frankie tugged on his locks, which were nearly down to his shoulders. “I know, right? My mother threatens to come up here and knife it in my sleep.”

“Tell her I’ll hold you down while she does it,” Mission said, laughing. “Buzz me through?”

There was a wider gate to the side for wheelbarrows and trolleys. Mission didn’t feel like squeezing through the turnstiles with the massive pump strapped to his back. Frankie hit a button, and the gate buzzed. Mission pushed his way through.

“Whatcha haulin’?” Frankie asked.

“Water pump from Winters. How’ve you been?”

Frankie scanned the crowds beyond the gate. “Hold on a sec,” he said, looking for someone. Two farmers swiped their work badges and marched through the turnstiles, jabbering away. Sweat dripped from Mission’s nose. Frankie waved over someone in green and asked if they could cover for him while he went to the bathroom.

“C’mon,” Frankie told Mission. “Walk me.”

The two old friends headed down the main hall toward the bright aura of distant grow lights. The smells were intoxicating and familiar. Mission wondered what those same smells meant to Frankie, who had grown up six levels down near the fetid stink of the water plant. Perhaps this reeked to him the way the plant did to Mission. Perhaps the water plant brought back fond memories, instead.

“Things are going nuts around here,” Frankie whispered once they were away from the gates.

Mission nodded. “Yeah, I saw a few more stalls had sprouted up. More of them every day, huh?”

Frankie held Mission’s arm and slowed their pace so they’d have more time to talk. There was the smell of fresh bread from one of the offices. It was too far from the bakery for warm bread, but such was the new way of things. Probably ground the flour somewhere deep in the farms.

“You’ve seen what they’re doing up in the cafe, right?” Frankie asked.

“I took a load up that way a few weeks ago,” Mission said. He tucked his thumbs under his shoulder straps and wiggled the heavy pump higher onto his hips. “I saw they were building something by the wallscreens. Didn’t see what.”

“They’re starting sprouts up there,” Frankie said. “Corn, too, supposedly.” They stopped by the public restrooms. The sound of a loud flush on the other side of the wall flicked a switch inside Mission’s bladder and made him need to go.

“I guess that’ll mean fewer runs for us between here and there,” Mission said, thinking like a porter. He tapped the wall with the toe of his boot. “Roker’ll be pissed when he hears.”

Frankie bit his lip and narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, but wasn’t Roker the one who started growin’ his own beans down in Dispatch?”

Mission wiggled his shoulders. His arms were going numb. He wasn’t used to standing still with a load—he was used to moving. “That’s different,” he argued. He tried to remember why it was different. “That’s for climbing food.”

Frankie shook his head. “Yeah, but ain’t that hypercritical of him?”

“You mean hypocritical?”

“Whatever, man. All I’m saying is everyone has an excuse. We’re doing it because they’re doing it and someone else started it. So what if we’re doing it a little more than they are? That’s the attitude, man. But then we get in a twist when the next group does it a little more. It’s like a ratchet, the way these things work.”

Mission glanced down the hall toward the glow of distant lights. “I dunno,” he said. “The mayor seems to be letting things slide lately.”

Frankie laughed. “You really think the mayor’s in charge? The mayor’s scared, man. Scared and old.” Frankie glanced back down the hall to make sure nobody was coming. The nervousness and paranoia had been in him since his youth. It’d been amusing when he was younger; now it was sad and a little worrisome. “You remember when we talked about being in charge one day?” Frankie asked. “How things would be different?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Mission said. “By the time we’re in charge, we’ll be old like them and won’t care anymore. And then our kids can hate us for pulling the same crap.”

Frankie laughed, and the tension in his wiry frame seemed to subside. “I bet you’re right.”

“Yeah, well, I need to go before my arms fall off.” He shrugged the pump higher up his back.

Frankie slapped his shoulder. “Yeah. Good seeing you, man.”

“Same.” Mission nodded and turned to go.

“Oh, hey, Mish.”

He stopped and looked back.

“You gonna see the Crow anytime soon?”

“I’ll pass that way tomorrow,” he said, assuming he’d live through the night.

Frankie smiled. “Tell her I said hey, wouldja?”

“I will,” Mission promised.

One more name to add to the list. If only he could charge his friends for all the messages he ran for them, he’d have way more than the three-hundred eighty-four chits already saved up. Half a chit for every hello he passed to the Crow, and he’d have his own apartment by now. He wouldn’t need to stay in the waystations. He could ask Jenine to marry him. But messages from friends weighed far less than dark thoughts, so Mission didn’t mind them taking up space. They crowded out the other. And Lord knew, Mission hauled his fair share of the heavier kind.

•3•

It would’ve made more sense and been kinder on Mission’s back to drop off the pump before visiting his father, but the whole point of hauling it up was so his old man would see him with the load. And so he headed into the planting halls and toward the same growing station his grandfather had worked and supposedly his great-grandfather, too. Past the beans and the blueberry vines, beyond the squash and the lurking potatoes. In a spot of corn that looked ready for harvest, he found his old man on his hands and knees looking how Mission would always remember him. With a small spade working the soil, his hands picked at weeds like a habit, the way a girl might curl her fingers in her hair over and over without even knowing she was doing it.

“Father.”

His old man turned his head to the side, sweat glistening on his brow under the heat of the grow lights. There was a flash of a smile before it melted. Mission’s half-brother Riley appeared behind a back row of corn, a little twelve-year-old mimic of his dad, hands covered in dirt. He was quicker to call out a greeting, shouting “Mission!” as he hurried to his feet.

“The corn looks good,” Mission said. He rested a hand on the railing, the weight of the pump settling against his back, and reached out to bend a leaf with his thumb. Moist. The ears were a few weeks from harvest, and the smell took him right back. He saw a midge running up the stalk and killed the parasite with a deft pinch.

“Wadja bring me?” his little brother squealed.

Mission laughed and tussled his brother’s dark hair, a gift from the boy’s mother. “Sorry, bro. They loaded me down this time.” He turned slightly so Riley could see, but also for his father. His brother stepped onto the lowest rail and leaned over for a better look.

“Why dontcha set that down for a while?” his father asked. He slapped his hands together to keep the precious dirt on the proper side of the fence, then reached out and shook Mission’s hand. “You’re looking good.”

“You too, Dad.” Mission would’ve thrust his chest out and stood taller if it didn’t mean toppling back on his rear from the pump. “So what’s this I hear about the cafe starting in their own sprouts?”

His father grumbled and shook his head. “Corn, too, from what I hear. More goddamn up-sourcing.” He jabbed a finger at Mission’s chest. “This affects you lads, you know.”

His father meant the porters, and there was a tone of having told him so. There was always that tone. Riley tugged on Mission’s coveralls and asked to hold his porter knife. Mission slid the blade from its sheath and handed it over while he studied his father, a heavy silence brewing. His dad looked older. His skin was the color of oiled wood, an unhealthy darkness from working too long under the grow lights. It was called a “tan,” and you could spot a farmer two landings away because of it, could pick them out by their skin like burnt toast.

Mission could feel the intense heat radiating from the bulbs overhead, and the anger he felt when he was away from home melted into a hollow sadness. The spot of air his mother had left empty could be felt. It was a reminder to Mission of what his being born had cost. More was the pity that he felt for his old man with his damaged skin and dark spots on his nose from years of abuse. These were the signs of all those in green who toiled among the dead. And this was where his father would have Mission work as well, if it were up to him.

While his father studied him and Riley played with the knife, Mission flashed back to his first solid memory as a boy. Wielding a small spade that had in those days seemed to him a giant shovel, he had been playing between the rows of corn, turning over scoops of soil, mimicking his father, when without warning his old man had grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t dig there,” his father had said with an edge to his voice. This was back before Mission had witnessed his first funeral, before he had seen for himself what went beneath the seeds. After that day, he learned to spot the mounds where the soil was dark from being disturbed. He learned to study the way those same mounds gradually sank and leveled out as the worms carried off what lay beneath.

“They’ve got you doing the heavy lifting, I see,” his father said, breaking the quiet. He assumed the load Mission had begged for was instead assigned by Dispatch. Mission didn’t correct him.

“They let us carry what we can handle,” he said. “The older porters get mail delivery. We each haul what we can.”

“I remember when I first stepped out of the shadows,” his dad said. He squinted and wiped his brow, nodded down the line. “Got stuck with potatoes while my caster went back to plucking blueberries. Two for the basket and one for him.”

Not this again. Mission watched as Riley tested the tip of the knife with the pad of his finger. He reached to take back the blade, but his brother twisted away from him.

“The older porters get mail duty because they can get mail duty,” his father explained.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mission said. The sadness was gone, the anger back. “The old ports have bad knees is why we get the loads. Besides, my bonus pay is judged by the pound and the time I make, so I don’t mind.”

“Oh, yes.” His father waved at Mission’s feet. “They pay you in bonuses and you pay them with your knees.”

Mission could feel his cheeks tighten, could sense the burn of the whelp around his neck.

“All I’m saying, son, is that the older you get and the more seniority, you’ll earn your own choice of rows to hoe. That’s all. I want you to watch out for yourself.”

“I’m watching out for myself, Dad.” He nearly added: It isn’t like I have anyone else.

Riley climbed up, sat on the top rail, and flashed his teeth at his own reflection in the knife. The kid already had that band of spots across his nose, those freckles, the start of a tan. Damaged flesh from damaged flesh, father like son. And Mission could easily picture Riley years hence on the other side of that rail, could see his half-brother all grown up with a kid of his own, and it made Mission thankful that he’d wormed his way out of the farms and into a job he didn’t take home every night beneath his fingernails.

“Are you joining us for lunch?” his father asked, sensing perhaps that he was pushing Mission away. A change in subjects was as near to an apology as the old man dared.

“If you don’t mind,” Mission said. He felt a twinge of guilt that his father expected to feed him, but he appreciated not having to ask. “I’ll have to run afterward, though. I’ve got a… delivery tonight.”

His father frowned. “You’ll have time to see Allie though, right? She’s forever asking about you. The boys here are lined up to marry that girl if you keep her waiting.”

Mission wiped his face to hide his expression. Allie was a great friend—his first and briefest romance—but to marry her would be to marry the farms, to return home, to live among the dead. “Probably not this time,” he said. And he felt bad for admitting it.

“Okay. Well, go drop that off. Don’t squander your bonus sitting here jawing with us.” The disappointment in the old man’s voice was hotter than the lights and not so easy to shade. “We’ll see you in the feeding hall in half an hour?” He reached out, took his son’s hand one more time, and gave it a squeeze. “It’s good to see you, Son.”

“Same.” Mission shook his father’s hand, then clapped his palms together over the grow pit to knock loose any dirt. Riley reluctantly gave the knife back, and Mission slipped it into its sheath. He fastened the clasp around the handle, thinking on how he might need it that night. He pondered for a moment if he should warn his father, thought of telling him and Riley both to stay inside until morning, to not dare go out.

But he held his tongue, patted his brother on the shoulder, and made his way to the pump room. As he walked through rows of planters and pickers, he thought about farmers selling their own vegetables in makeshift stalls. He thought about the cafe growing its own sprouts. He thought of the plans recently discovered to move something heavy from one landing to another without involving the porters.

Everyone was trying to do it all in case the violence returned. Mission could feel it brewing, the suspicion and the distrust, the walls being built. Everyone was trying to get a little less reliant on the others, preparing for the inevitable, hunkering down.

He loosened the straps on his pack as he approached the pump room, and a dangerous thought occurred to him, a revelation: Everyone was trying to get to where they didn’t need one another. And how exactly was that supposed to help them all get along?

•4•

After the best meal he’d had in ages—as fresh as it was free—Mission hurried down four flights toward Sanitation to see Jenine. He felt light as a feather downbound and with the load off. With just his empty porter’s pack on his back, his canteen jouncing on one hip, his knife on the other, he skipped down the steps side-style with one hand on the rail. At times like these, descending after a long slog up, it felt as though he could leap over the rail and float unharmed to Mechanical like a mote of dust. He apologized to those he overtook, saying “porter, ma’am” and “porter, sir” by the book, even though he wasn’t carrying anything official.

Weightless as a bird, with his heart thrumming like one was trapped in his ribcage, it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t the descent that had him feeling giddy. Everyone expected him to grow up a farmer, to settle down with the girl who loved him, but Mission wanted the opposite of what was easily attainable. He wondered if this was a punishment of sorts, a slow strangulation, his thirst for distant things. Did he love the chase? Or was it that staying on the move made it more difficult for the past to catch up to him?

He arrived at Sanitation, a rumble of footfalls on steel treads, and pushed through doors in need of oil. Sanitation was one of the levels laid out in a spiral; a single hallway coiled its way from the landing and did three circuits before dead ending into the waste plant. Fresh water emerged near the landing and was piped out to the rest of the Up Top, while gray water and black water—euphemisms both—were pumped into the waste room. The gray came from showers, sinks, and drains, the black from toilets.

Such were the romantic and decidedly un-sexy conversations Mission had with the girl of his dreams that he could name the plant’s every phase of operation as he wound his way toward the waste room. If needed, he could also bore a porter to tears with rumors of who had said what about whom throughout the plant. This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.

The noise along the curving hallway grew louder the deeper he went. It started out as a background hum near the control rooms and offices, and just when he’d gotten used to this residual noise, another layer piled on top, more machines macerating, filtering, straining, and pumping. Mission never appreciated how loud the combined buzzing was until he left the plant with his hearing rattled and his throat sore from yelling over it all.

Inside the waste room, he spotted familiar faces all around the processing vats. Knowing who he was looking for, one of the workers pointed down the long row of low steel cylinders that held the gray and black water. Jenine was on top of one of the cylinders, which was almost as big around as his dad’s apartment and crisscrossed with pipes and valves. Crouched down, she worked a series of large valves while an older woman filled a glass vial with murky fluid and held it up to the light. Mission waited patiently. This was where the water eventually came from that his father was always cursing. He remembered his old man sitting around the dinner table, shaking his fist at the floor, grumbling about the supply of water, how it was more than he needed for his crops one day, never enough the next.

Jenine eventually felt his presence. She turned, smiled, and lifted a finger, asking him to wait a moment, then finished opening and closing the valves. The woman testing the waste water glanced up at the two of them, frowned at Mission, and carefully dispensed a dark dye into the tube before shaking it, a thumb unhygienically used to cork the end. These were dark arts, Mission thought, whatever they did to make shower water and urine safe to drink. Dark and noisy arts. But at least he had grown used to the smell, which wasn’t the foulness one would expect but rather something chemical, something caustic.

Jenine yelled to her supervisor that she was taking her break, wiped her palms on the seat of her pants, and hopped down. She led Mission away from the rows and rows of containers before digging the foam inserts out of her ears.

“Hey, Mish!” she yelled, as she pulled him into the hallway. She clasped his neck and kissed him on the cheek. By the time he thought to hug her back or return the gesture, it was already over, leaving him scrambling awkwardly at the air and feeling a fool.

She led him down two doors to the break room, which stank of microwaved soup and sweaty coveralls. It smelled almost exactly like the break room in Dispatch, fifty levels down, in fact. Mission wondered if every break room smelled just like this.

Jenine grabbed a dented metal cup from a pile of them by the sink and filled it with water. “Whadja bring me?” she asked, glancing at his shoulder.

Mission shook his head and turned to show her his empty pack. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like an ass.

She waved her hand and took a long pull on the tin cup. “It’s fine.” She refilled the cup from the sink, and Mission noticed that she waited for the faucet to stop dripping into the vessel, even tapped it twice with her fist to get the last drop, before pulling it away. Every profession had its quirks and habits, he supposed. Like how a porter never passed a landing without checking for a signal ’chief, nor missed a rumor whispered on the stairs.

“Sorry if I made it sound like it’s your duty to shower me with gifts.” She winked at him, and Mission laughed.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I like bringing you stuff. I was just weighed down with a tandem haul this time.” He swung his arms and twisted at the waist to stretch his spine. “They’ve been pouring it on us. But this is what I’ve been told to expect our first year.”

“Tell me about it.” Jenine leaned back against the counter and waved Mission toward the jumbled pile of cups. “I thought shadowing was bad, but first year is even worse.”

He accepted her offer and filled a cup with water. He reminded himself to top up his thermos before he left as well.

“It’s almost enough to make you miss school, isn’t it?” she asked.

Mission laughed. “Oh, hell yeah it is.”

“Here’s to better days.” She held her cup up.

Mission tinked his against hers, careful not to splash any water. “To better days.”

They watched each other over the lips of their cups while they drank. And in that breathless pause, in the time it took to swallow once, twice, three times, Mission felt an incredible rush of happiness that just as quickly plummeted away. It was like a memory of something that had not yet happened, a vivid image of him and Jenine sitting at a small table in a small apartment, and then a sense of the space between them brought on by their occupations. In this imaginary future, he would find himself leaving for another week of runs before he got his next day off. And so the same dread he felt right then in that break room, the desire to maximize their time together, to sip rather than gulp, would surely haunt him in a future he could only dream about. He swallowed and peered into his cup, searching for the courage to tell her how he felt.

“Speaking of better days,” Jenine said, “have you been by the Nest lately?”

Mission shook his head. He finished his water with another long pull and filled it halfway back up. “I will tomorrow.” He turned and studied his friend and had a sudden sense of how grown up they had become, standing around like that, both with jobs, sipping water from dented cups, swapping memories of the long ago. “You?”

She nodded. “I was up last weekend. A few of us are trying to go more regularly, help with the kids, though there aren’t as many of them around as there used to be.”

“A few of you? Did Rodny go?”

He braced himself for her reply. An old rumor had spread that the two of them had been spending time together, back before Rodny was swallowed up by his work. Jenine was going to tell him that yes, she and Rodny were in love, had made it official, had registered with the Pact. She was going to tell him and break his heart—

“I haven’t seen Rod in a while. I was going to ask you. Whatever they have him doing in IT, they don’t seem to let him out much.”

Mission shrugged and feigned indifference. In fact, he had grown concerned. The last two times he’d been through the thirties and stopped to see his friend, he’d been told Rodny was “unavailable.” Even when Mission insisted he didn’t mind waiting, they’d told him it wouldn’t happen. Mission worried his old friend was becoming a recluse or a workaholic, one more piece of his childhood wrested away. He used to laugh when Rodny boasted he’d be Mayor or a department head one day. It didn’t seem so funny anymore.

“I have to get back,” Jenine said. “I only get a ten.” She grabbed a small towel from a hanger over the sink and rubbed the cup inside and out. She set it back on the pile and held her hand out for Mission’s. “You got another delivery today, or are you done?”

“I’m done.” He finished his water and let her have the cup. “I’m crashing in the waystation on nineteen. I might do a run up-top before heading down to see the Crow tomorrow.”

“So what’re you doing tonight?” She waved her consent as Mission held up his thermos questioningly. “You wanna hang out? Me and some friends are going up to twenty-three to drop paint bombs.”

“I can’t tonight.” His metal thermos sang as it was filled, and he felt doubly bad for not bringing her anything. “I’ve got this thing later.”

“What thing? I thought you were gonna sack out.”

“I meant that I have to get up early. And haven’t you gotten a little old for paint bombs?”

Jenine smiled. “There’s this place on twenty-three where if you release at just the right spot, the bomb goes almost a hundred levels down before splatting at one-twenty-two.”

Mission shifted his weight to his other foot. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” He wanted to tell her that he walked through that spot on one-twenty-two all the time, that people he knew down there complained, that Sharen, another porter, had nearly been hit by a paint bomb dropped from the Mids a few weeks ago. Instead, he told Jenine about the time something had whistled by his head in the dead of night as he worked his way through the eighties. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” he told her.

Jenine’s smile melted. She didn’t say anything, didn’t have to—the silence was enough. It was as if she were beginning to understand something even better than Mission did: he was no longer just of the Up Top. He was a child of the entire silo, now. It meant more than being a target everywhere he went. It meant having no one to conspire with anymore, no one to pick out targets with in whispers.

“Well, you’ve gotta get up early tomorrow, anyway.”

“Yeah.” He brushed his hair off his forehead. All the barbers he passed in a typical week, never enough time to stop. He would look like Frankie soon enough. “Hey, it was good seeing you.”

“Same. For sure. Take care of yourself, Mish. Watch your steps.”

Mission smiled. And this time, when she leaned in to touch his neck and kiss his cheek, he was ready to reciprocate. “You know I will,” he said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. “You watch your steps as well.”

•5•

Later that night, Mission could still feel the soft touch of her hand on his neck and the press of her lips to his cheek. In the quiet and deathly darkness of the silo’s nighttime, he could hear Jenine whispering for him to be safe.

The lights had been dimmed so man and silo might sleep. It was those wee hours when children were long hushed with sing-song lullabies and only those with trouble in mind crept about. Mission held very still in that darkness and waited. He thought on love and other forbidden things. And somewhere in the dark, there came the chirp of rope wound tight and sliding against metal, the bird-like sound fibers made as they gripped steel and strained under some great burden.

A gang of porters huddled with him on the stairway. Mission pressed his cheek against the silo’s untrembling inner post, the cool steel touching him where Jenine’s lips had. He lost himself in his thoughts, controlling his breathing like he’d been shadowed how. And he listened for the rope. He knew well the sounds they made, could feel the burn on his neck, that raised weal healed over by the years, a mark glanced at by others but rarely mentioned aloud. And again in that thick gray of the dim-time there came a chirp like some caged bird flexing its beak.

He waited for the signal. He thought on rope, his own life, and secret love—all these forbidden things. There was a book in Dispatch down on seventy-four that kept accounts. In the main waystation for all the porters, a massive ledger fashioned out of a fortune in paper was kept under lock and key. On this year’s wage of pulp was a careful tally of certain types of deliveries, handwritten so the information couldn’t slip off into wires. Only a handful of porters knew for certain it existed—to the rest the book was legend.

Mission had heard that they kept track of certain kinds of pipe in this ledger, but he didn’t know why. Brass, too, and various types of fluids coming out of Chemical. Any of these or too much rope, and you were put on the watching list. Porters were the lords of rumor. They knew where everything went. And their whisperings gathered like condensation in Dispatch Main where they were written down.

Mission listened to the rope creak and sing in the darkness. He knew what it felt like to have a length of it cinched tightly around his neck. And it seemed strange to him—it seemed wrong—that if you ordered enough to hang yourself, nobody cared. Enough to span a few levels, and eyebrows were raised.

He adjusted his handkerchief and thought on this in the dim-time. A man may take his own life, he supposed, as long as he didn’t take another’s job.

“Ready yourself,” came the whisper from above.

Mission tightened the grip on his knife and concentrated on the task at hand. His eyes strained to see in the wan light. The steady breathing of his neighbors was occasionally heard. They would be squeezing their own knives or their empty and angry fists.

The knives came with the job—they were as much a part of porting as the inverted hearts that grew on practiced calves. A porter’s knife for slicing open delivered goods, for cutting fruit to eat on the climb, and for keeping peace as its owner strayed from all the heights and depths, taking the silo’s dangers two at a time. It was said that a porter’s knife shadowed for a thousand jobs, that its caster was its owner, its home a good sheath. Here waited but another job for Mission’s gleaming shadow. With the flick of a wrist, it would quiet the neck of that singing bird. It would part a rope that groaned under a darkened and illicit strain.

Up the stairwell two full turns, on a dim landing, a group of farmers argued in soft voices as they handled the other end of that rope, as they performed a porter’s job in the dark of night that they might save a hundred chits or two. Beyond the rail across from Mission, a black shape slid past. The rope was invisible in the inky void. He would have to lean out and grope for the chirping bird’s neck. He felt a ring of heat by his collar, and the hilt of his blade felt unsure in his sweating palm.

“Not yet,” Morgan whispered, and Mission felt his old caster’s hand on his shoulder, holding him back, still treating him like a shadow even now. Mission cleared his mind. Another soft chirp, the sound of line taking the strain of a heavy generator, and a dense patch of gray drifted through the black. The men above shouted in whispers as they handled the load, as they did in green the work of men in blue.

While the patch of gray inched past, Mission thought of the night’s danger and marveled at the fear in his heart. He possessed a sudden care for a life he had once labored to end, a life that never should’ve been. He thought of his mother and wondered what she was like, beyond her disobedience. That was all he knew of her. He knew the implant in her hip had failed, as one in ten thousand might. And instead of reporting the malfunction—and the pregnancy—she had hid him in loose clothes until it was past the time the Pact allowed a child to be treated as a cyst.

“Ready yourself,” Morgan hissed.

The gray mass of the generator crept down and out of sight. Mission clutched his knife and thought of how he should’ve been cut out of her and discarded. But past a certain date, and one life was traded for another. Such was the Pact. Born behind bars, Mission had been allowed free while his mother had been sent outside. In the middle of the night, she must’ve watched as they cleaned the blood from his wailing flesh. By the morning, she was cleaning for them all.

“Now,” Morgan commanded, and Mission startled. Soft and well-worn boots squeaked on the stairs above, the sounds of men lurching into action. Mission concentrated on his part. He pressed himself against the curved rail and reached out into the space beyond. His palm found rope as stiff as steel, and he thought of the great depths below him, how long the fall. He remembered less dangerous games with paint bombs and paper parachutes as he pressed his blade to the taut line.

There was a pop like sinew snapping, the first of the braids parting with just a touch of his sharp blade.

Mission had but a moment to think of those on the landing below, the accomplices waiting two levels down. Another pop, and the wounded bird sang at a different pitch. Men were storming up the staircase. Mission longed to join them. With the barest of sawing motions, the rope parted the rest of the way and let out a twangy cry. Mission thought he heard the heavy generator whistle as it picked up speed. There was a ferocious crash a moment later, men screaming in alarm down below, but those screams could’ve been coming from anywhere. The fighting had broken out above.

With one hand on the rail and another strangling his knife, Mission took the stairs three at a time. He rushed to join the melee above, this midnight lesson on breaking the Pact, on doing another’s job.

Grunts and groans and slapping thuds spilled from the landing, and Mission threw himself into the scuffle, thinking not where wars come from but only on this one battle. His feet tangled briefly in forbidden rope, all those shorter strands twisted and woven into something bigger, a line long enough to tangle a thousand souls.