Shift

24 2212 • Silo 1 •

TROY STARTED AWAKE from a series of terrible dreams. The world was on fire, and the people who had been sent to extinguish it were all asleep. Asleep and frozen stiff, smoking matches still in their hands, wisps and grey curls of evil deeds.

He had been buried, was enveloped in darkness, could feel the tight walls of his small coffin hemming him in.

Dark shapes moved beyond the frosted glass, the men with their shovels trying to free him.

Troy’s eyelids seemed to rip and crack as he fought to open them fully. There was crust in the corners of his eyes, melting frost coursing down his cheeks. He tried to lift his arms to wipe it away, but they responded feebly. An IV tugged at his wrist as he managed to raise one hand. He was aware of his catheter. Every inch of his body tingled as he emerged from the numbness and into the cold.

The lid popped with a hiss of air. There was a crack of light to his side that grew as the shadows folded away.

A doctor and his assistant reached in to tend to him. Troy tried to speak but could only cough. They helped him up, brought him the bitter drink. Swallowing took effort. His hands were so weak, arms trembling, that they had to help him with the cup. The taste on his tongue was metallic. It tasted like death.

‘Easy,’ they said when he tried to drink too fast. Tubes and IVs were carefully removed by expert hands, pressure applied, gauze taped to frigid skin. There was a paper gown.

‘What year?’ he asked, his voice a dry rasp.

‘It’s early,’ the doctor said, a different doctor. Troy blinked against the harsh lights, didn’t recognise either man tending to him. The sea of coffins around him remained a hazy blur.

‘Take your time,’ the assistant said, tilting the cup.

Troy managed a few sips. He felt worse than last time. It had been longer. The cold was deep within his bones. He remembered that his name wasn’t Troy. He was supposed to be dead. Part of him regretted being disturbed. Another part hoped he had slept through the worst of it.

‘Sir, we’re sorry to wake you, but we need your help.’

‘Your report—’

Two men were talking at once.

‘Another silo is having problems, sir. Silo eighteen—’

Pills were produced. Troy waved them away. He no longer wished to take them.

The doctor hesitated; the two capsules rested in his palm. He turned to consult with someone else, a third man. Troy tried to blink the world into focus. Something was said. Fingers curled around the pills, filling him with relief.

They helped him up, had a wheelchair waiting. A man stood behind it, his hair as stark white as his overalls, his square jaw and iron frame familiar. Troy recognised him. This was the man who woke the freezing.

Another sip of water as he leaned against the pod, knees trembling from being weak and cold.

‘What about silo eighteen?’ Troy whispered the question as the cup was lowered.

The doctor frowned and said nothing. The man behind the wheelchair studied him intently.

‘I know you,’ Troy said.

The man in white nodded. The wheelchair was waiting for Troy. Troy felt his stomach twist as dormant parts of him stirred.

‘You’re the Thaw Man,’ he said, even though this didn’t sound quite right.

The paper gown was warm. It rustled as his arms were guided through the sleeves. The men working on him were nervous. They chattered back and forth, one of them saying a silo was falling, the other that they needed his help. Troy cared only about the man in white. They helped him towards the wheelchair.

‘Is it over?’ he asked. He watched the colourless man, his vision clearing, his voice growing stronger. He dearly hoped that he had slept through it all.

The Thaw Man shook his head sadly as Troy was lowered into the chair.

‘I’m afraid, son,’ a familiar voice said, ‘that it’s only begun.’

25 The year of the Great Uprising • Silo 18 •

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 to the day since his mother had 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, than in him. 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 out in front with a clear view of the stairs. It also gave him rights to set the pace, and his 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 any more. A few bleary-eyed shopkeeps staggered to 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 thirty-fifth. His porter’s strap was digging into his shoulders, the load a heavy 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 avoiding it. He trusted his father to do as he always had and ignore the occasion altogether, to ignore the fact that he was getting any older.

Past the thirty-fifth they entered another gap between the levels full of graffiti. The noxious odour 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 any more. Not for years. Further up and much older:

The rest was obscured in a wash of censoring paint. As if anyone could read it and not fill in the blank. It was the first half that was the killing offence, anyway.

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 that from 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.

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 them all.

His father would laugh and disagree, of course. Mission could hear his father’s voice from all the levels away, 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 and live a happy life without them.

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.

‘You doing okay up there?’ Cam asked.

‘I’m fine,’ Mission called back, realising he’d slowed. He gripped his strap with both hands and concentrated on his pace, on the 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. It was easier to think of it that way. Better not to think of it as a body — a dead man.

Mission thought of his grandfather, whom he’d never known. 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. 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 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.

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 in IT 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 they had all gone their separate ways. It was hard to remember who had done it first, who had shaken off the expectations of their parents to follow in their footsteps, but eventually most of them had. Each of them had left home to choose a new fate. Sons of plumbers took up farming. Daughters of the cafeteria learned to sew. Sons of farmers became porters.

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 and Cam had flipped a dime back in Dispatch, heads for heads, and Mission had wound up with a dead man’s shoulders pressed against his own. When he lifted his gaze to survey the steps ahead, the back of his skull touched a corpse’s crown through a plastic bag — birthdays and deathdays pressed tight, two halves of a single coin. Mission carried them both, this load meant for two. He took the stairs a pair at a time, a brutal pace, up towards the farm of his youth.

26 • Silo 18 •

THE CORONER’S OFFICE was on thirty-two, just below the dirt farm, 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 the coroner’s 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 towards the exit.

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. It made him envy the lad for what he 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 down the hall 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 whatever he had.

‘In that case…’ Winters said. He hoisted a huge 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 odour of mildew from the wet halls faded, replaced by the smell of loam and freshly tilled soil, scents of home that pulled Mission back in time.

The landing on thirty-one 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 the mother sing the words of a familiar nursery rhyme. She 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 any more. It wasn’t like when he was young. There had been an explosion of newborns after the violence the last generation had wrought, but these days it was just the trickle of natural deaths and the handful of lottery winners. It meant fewer babies crying and fewer parents rejoicing.

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 his father and departed, the better. But now, in the wash of sights and sounds from his childhood, his dark and angry thoughts melted away. 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 towards 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 and had no right to do. 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 came next.

Working the main security gate was Frankie, a tall, lanky 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 shoulder-length hair. ‘Did someone splash you with grow quick?’

Frankie tucked his hair behind his ear self-consciously. ‘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 wide 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. Frankie waved over someone in green and asked if they could cover for him.

‘C’mon,’ Frankie told Mission. ‘Walk me.’

The two old friends headed down the main hall towards 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 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 for Frankie, 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 on seven for warm bread, but such was the new way of things. The flour was probably ground somewhere deep in the farms.

‘You’ve seen what they’re doing up in the cafeteria, 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 wall screens. Didn’t see what.’

‘They’re starting to grow sprouts up there,’ Frankie said. ‘Corn too, supposedly.’

‘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. ‘That’s food for climbing.’

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 towards 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 with 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? 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 any more. 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.’ Mission 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, wouldya?’

‘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 and 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 way stations. 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.

27 • Silo 18 •

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 that his old man would see him with the load. And so he headed into the planting halls and towards 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 potatoes. In a spot of corn that appeared 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 picking 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.

‘Wadya 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 that Riley — and his father — could see. 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 hadn’t meant toppling back on his rear from the weight of the pump. ‘So what’s this I hear about the cafeteria 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 overalls and asked to hold his knife. Mission slid the blade from its sheath and handed it over while he studied his father, a silence brewing between them. His dad looked older. His skin was the colour 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.

An intense heat radiated from the bulbs overhead, and the anger Mission carried when he was away from home melted into a hollow sadness. The space 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 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 worked the soil, toiling among the silo’s dead.

Mission flashed back to his first solid memory as a boy: wielding a small spade that in those days had 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 was laid beneath the seeds. After that day, he learned to spot the mounds where the soil was darker from having been disturbed.

‘They’ve got you doing the heavy lifting, I see,’ his father said, breaking the quiet. He assumed the load Mission had carried had been 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 gone, the anger back. ‘The old ports have bad knees is why we get the heavy 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 have, 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.’

Riley climbed up, sat on the top rail and flashed his teeth at his reflection in the knife. The kid already had a freckled band of spots across his nose, the start of a farmer’s tan. Damaged flesh from damaged flesh, father like son. And Mission could easily picture Riley years hence, on the other side of that rail, all grown up with a kid of his own. It made him 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.

‘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. And it would hurt his stepmom’s feelings if he didn’t pay her a visit. ‘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 buried dead. ‘Probably not this time,’ he said. 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 to use 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, not to dare go out.

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

Everyone was trying to look after themselves 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: if everyone was trying to get to where they didn’t need one another, how exactly was that supposed to help them all get along?

28 • Silo 18 •

THE LIGHTS OF the great spiral staircase were dimmed at night so man and silo might sleep. It was in 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. Somewhere above him, there came the sound of rope wound tight and sliding across metal, the squeaking of fibres as they gripped steel and strained under some great weight.

A gang of porters huddled with him on the stairway. Mission pressed his cheek against the inner post, the steel cooling his skin. He controlled his breathing and listened for the rope. He well knew 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 grey of the dim-time there came a recognisable squeak as the load from above was steadily lowered.

He waited for the signal. He thought on rope, on his own life — and other forbidden things. There was a book in Dispatch down on seventy-four that kept accounts. In the main way station for all the porters, a massive ledger fashioned out of a fortune in paper was kept under lock and key. It contained a careful tally of certain types of deliveries, handwritten so the information couldn’t slip off into wires.

Mission had heard the senior porters kept track of certain kinds of pipe in this ledger, but he didn’t know why. Brass too, and various types of fluids and powders coming out of Chemical. Order these — or too much rope — and you were put on the watching list. Porters were the lords of rumour. 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. It seemed strange to him that if you ordered enough to hang yourself, nobody cared. Enough to span a few levels, and eyebrows were raised.

He adjusted his ’chief 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. He could hear the steady breathing of his fellow porters around him. No doubt they would be squeezing their own knives in anticipation.

The knives came with the job. 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 across all the silo’s heights and depths, taking its dangers two at a time. Now, Mission tensed his in his hand, waiting for the order.

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, performing a porter’s job in the dark of night to save a hundred chits or two. Beyond the rail, the rope was invisible in the darkness. He would have to lean out and grope blindly for it. He felt a ring of heat by his collar, and the hilt of his blade was unsure in his sweaty palm.

‘Not yet,’ Morgan whispered, and Mission felt his old caster’s hand on his shoulder, holding him back. Mission cleared his mind. Another soft squeak, the sound of line taking the strain of a heavy generator, and a dense patch of grey 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 grey inched past, Mission thought of the night’s danger and marvelled at the fear in his heart. He possessed a sudden care for a life he had once laboured to end, a life that never should have been. He thought of his mother and wondered what she had been like, beyond the disobedience that had cost her life. That was all he knew of his mom. 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 hidden 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 grey 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 to clean.

‘Now,’ Morgan commanded, and Mission started. 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. 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 farmers’ accomplices waiting two levels down. 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 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. Above, the fighting had broken out.

With one hand on the rail and another gripping 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 of consequences, but only of this one fight.

29 2212 • Silo 1 •

THE WHEELCHAIR SQUEAKED as its wheels circled around. With each revolution there was a sharp peal of complaint followed by a circuit of deathly silence. Donald lost himself in this rhythmic sound as he was pushed along. His breath puffed out into the air, the room harbouring the same deep chill as his bones.

There were rows and rows of pods stretched out to either side. Names glowed orange on tiny screens, made-up names designed to sever the past from the present. Donald watched them slide by as they pushed him to the exit. His head felt heavy, the weight of remembrance replacing the dreams that coiled away and vanished like wisps of smoke.

The men in the pale blue overalls guided him through the door and into the hallway. He was steered into a familiar room with a familiar table. The wheelchair shimmied as they removed his bare feet from the footrests. He asked how long it’d been, how long he’d been asleep.

‘A hundred years,’ someone said. Which would make a hundred and sixty since orientation. No wonder the wheelchair felt unsteady — it was older than he was. Its screws had worked loose over the long decades that Donald had been asleep.

They helped him stand. His feet were still numb from his hibernation, the cold fading to painful tingles. A curtain was drawn. They asked him to urinate in a cup, which came as glorious relief. The sample was the colour of charcoal, dead machines flushed from his system. The paper gown wasn’t enough to warm him, even though he knew the cold was in his flesh, not in the room. They gave him more of the bitter drink.

‘How long before his head is clear?’ someone asked.

‘A day,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’

They had him sit while they took his blood. An old man in white overalls with hair just as stark stood in the doorway, frowning. ‘Save your strength,’ the man in white said. He nodded to the doctor to continue his work and disappeared before Donald could place him in his faltering memory. He felt dizzy as he watched his blood, blue from the cold, being taken from him.

They rode a familiar lift. The men around him talked, but their voices seemed distant. Donald felt as though he had been drugged, but he remembered that he had stopped taking their pills. He reached for his bottom lip, finger and mouth both tingling, and felt for an ulcer, that little pocket where he kept his pills unswallowed.

But the ulcer wasn’t there. It would’ve healed in his sleep decades ago. The elevator doors parted, and Donald felt more of that dreamtime fade.

They pushed him down another hall, scuff marks on the walls the height of the wheels, black arcs where rubber had once met the paint. His eyes roamed the walls, the ceiling, the tiles, all bearing centuries of wear. It seemed like yesterday that they had been almost new. Now they were heaped with abuse, a sudden crumbling into ruin. Donald remembered designing halls just like these. He remembered thinking they were making something to last for ages. The truth was there all along. The truth was in the design, staring back at him, too insane to be taken seriously.

The wheelchair slowed.

‘The next one,’ a gruff voice behind him said, a familiar voice. Donald was pushed past one closed door to another. One of the orderlies bustled around the wheelchair, a ring of keys jangling from his hip. A key was selected and slotted into the lock with a series of neat clicks. Hinges cried out as the door was pushed inward. The lights inside were turned on.

It was a room like a cell, musky with the scent of disuse. The light overhead flickered before it came on. There was a narrow double bunk in the corner, a side table, a dresser, a bathroom.

‘Why am I here?’ Donald asked, his voice cracking.

‘This will be your room,’ the orderly said, putting away his keys. His young eyes darted up to the man steering the wheelchair as if seeking assurances for his answer. Another young man in pale blue hurried around and removed Donald’s feet from the stirrups and placed them on carpet worn flat by the years.

Donald’s last memory was of being chased by snarling dogs with leathery wings, chased up a mountain of bones. But that was a dream. What was his last real memory? He remembered a needle. He remembered dying. That felt real.

‘I mean—’ Donald swallowed painfully. ‘Why am I… awake?’

He almost said alive. The two orderlies exchanged glances as they helped him from the chair to the lower bunk. The wheelchair squeaked once as it was pushed back into the hallway. The man guiding it paused, his broad shoulders making the doorway appear small.

One of the orderlies held Donald’s wrist — two fingers pressing lightly on ice-blue veins, lips moving as he silently counted. The other orderly dropped two pills into a plastic cup and fumbled with the cap on a bottle of water.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the silhouette in the doorway said.

The orderly with the pills glanced over his shoulder as the older man stepped inside the small room and some of the air was displaced. The room shrank. It became more difficult for Donald to breathe.

‘You’re the Thaw—’ Donald whispered.

The old man with the white hair waved a hand at the two orderlies. ‘Give us a moment,’ he said. The one with a grip on Donald’s wrist finished his counting and nodded to the other. Unswallowed pills rattled in a paper cup as they were put away. The old man’s face had awoken something in Donald, pierced through the muddle of visions and dreams.

‘I remember you,’ Donald said. ‘You’re the Thaw Man.’

A smile was flashed, as white as his hair, wrinkles forming around his lips and eyes. The chair in the hallway squeaked as it was pushed away. The door clicked shut. Donald thought he heard the lock engage, but his teeth chattered occasionally and his hearing was still hazy.

‘Thurman,’ the man said, correcting him.

‘I remember,’ Donald said. He remembered his office, the one upstairs and some other office far away, someplace where it still rained, where the grass grew and the cherry blossoms came once a year. This man had been a senator, once.

‘That you remember is a mystery we need to solve.’ The old man tilted his head. ‘For now, it’s good that you do. We need you to remember.’

Thurman leaned against the metal dresser. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. His hair was unkempt, not quite how Donald remembered it. There were dark circles beneath his sad eyes. He seemed much… older, somehow.

Donald peered down at his own palms, the springs in the bed making the room feel as though it were swaying. He flashed again to the horrible sight of a man remembering his own name and wanting to be free.

‘My name is Donald Keene.’

‘So you do remember. And you know who I am?’ He produced a folded piece of paper and waited for an answer.

Donald nodded.

‘Good.’ The Thaw Man turned and placed the folded piece of paper on the dresser. He arranged it on its bent legs so it tented upward, towards the ceiling. ‘We need you to remember everything,’ he said. ‘Study this report when the fog clears, see if it jars anything loose. Once your stomach is settled, I’ll have a proper meal brought down.’

Donald rubbed his temples.

‘You’ve been gone for some time,’ the Thaw Man said. He rapped his knuckles on the door.

Donald wiggled his bare toes against the carpet. The sensation was returning to his feet. The door clicked before swinging open, and the Senator once again blocked the light from the hallway. He became a shadow for a moment.

‘Rest, and then we’ll get our answers together. There’s someone who wants to see you.’

The room was sealed tight before Donald could ask what that meant. And somehow, with the door shut and him gone, there was more air to breathe in that small space. Donald took a few deep breaths. Gathering himself, he grabbed the frame of the bed and struggled to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying.

‘Get our answers,’ he repeated aloud. Someone wanted to see him.

He shook his head, which made the world spin. As if he had any answers. All he had were questions. He remembered the orderlies who woke him saying something about a silo falling. He couldn’t remember which one. Why would they wake him for that?

He moved unsteadily to the door, tried the knob, confirmed what he already knew. He went to the dresser where the piece of paper stood on its remembered folds.

‘Get some rest,’ he said, laughing at the suggestion. As if he could sleep. He felt as though he’d been asleep for ever. He picked up the piece of paper and unfolded it.

A report. Donald remembered this. It was a copy of a report. A report about a young man doing horrible things. The room twisted around him as if he stood on some great pivot, the memory of men and women trampled and dying, of giving some awful order, faces peering in at him from a hallway somewhere far in the past.

Donald blinked away a curtain of tears and studied the trembling report. Hadn’t he written this? He had signed it, he remembered. But that wasn’t his name at the bottom. It was his handwriting, but it wasn’t his name.

Troy.

Donald’s legs went numb. He sought the bed — but collapsed to the floor instead as the memories washed over him. Troy and Helen. Helen and Troy. He remembered his wife. He imagined her disappearing over a hill, her arm raised to the sky where bombs were falling, his sister and some dark and nameless shadow pulling him back as people spilled like marbles down a slope, funnelling into some deep hole filled with white mist.

Donald remembered. He remembered all that he had helped do to the world. There was a troubled boy in a silo full of the dead, a shadow among the servers. That boy had brought an end to silo number twelve, and Donald had written a report. But Donald — what had he done? He had killed more than a silo full of people; he had drawn the plans that helped end the world. The report in his hand trembled as he remembered. And the tears that fell and struck the paper were tinged a pale blue.

30 • Silo 1 •

A DOCTOR BROUGHT soup and bread a few hours later, and a tall glass of water. Donald ate hungrily while the man checked his arm. The warm soup felt good. It slid to his centre and seemed to radiate its heat outward. Donald tore at the bread with his teeth and chased it with the water. He ate with the desperation of so many years of fasting.

‘Thank you,’ he said between bites. ‘For the food.’

The doctor glanced up from checking his blood pressure. He was an older man, heavyset, with great bushy eyebrows and a fine wisp of hair that clung to his scalp like a cloud to a hilltop.

‘I’m Donald,’ he said, introducing himself.

There was a wrinkle of confusion on the old man’s brow. His grey eyes strayed to his clipboard as if either it or his patient couldn’t be trusted. The needle on the gauge jumped with Donald’s pulse.

‘Who’re you?’ Donald asked.

‘I’m Dr Sneed,’ he finally said, though without confidence.

Donald took a long swig on his water, thankful they’d left it at room temperature. He didn’t want anything cold inside him ever again. ‘Where’re you from?’

The doctor removed the cuff from Donald’s arm with a loud rip. ‘Level ten. But I work out of the shift office on sixty-eight.’ He put his equipment back in his bag and made a note on the clipboard.

‘No, I mean where are you from? You know… before.’

Dr Sneed patted Donald’s knee and stood. The clipboard went on a hook on the outside of the door. ‘You might have some dizziness the next few days. Let us know if you experience any trembling, okay?’

Donald nodded. He remembered being given the same advice earlier. Or was that his last shift? Maybe the repetition was for those who had trouble remembering. He wasn’t going to be one of those people. Not this time.

A shadow fell into the room. Donald looked up to see the Thaw Man in the doorway. He gripped the meal tray to keep it from sliding off his knees.

The Thaw Man nodded to Dr Sneed, but these were not their names. Thurman, Donald told himself. Senator Thurman. He knew this.

‘Do you have a moment?’ Thurman asked the doctor.

‘Of course.’ Sneed grabbed his bag and stepped outside. The door clicked shut, leaving Donald alone with his soup.

He took quiet spoonfuls, trying to make anything of the murmurs on the other side of the door. Thurman, he reminded himself again. And not a senator. Senator of what? Those days were gone. Donald had drawn the plans.

The report stood tented on the dresser, returned to its spot. Donald took a bite of bread and remembered the floors he’d laid out. Those floors were now real. They existed. People lived inside them, raising their children, laughing, having fights, singing in the shower, burying their dead.

A few minutes passed before the knob tilted and the door swung inward. The Thaw Man entered the room alone. He pressed the door shut and frowned at Donald. ‘How’re you feeling?’

The spoon clacked against the rim of the bowl. Donald set the utensil down and gripped the tray with both hands to keep them from shaking, to keep them from forming fists.

‘You know,’ Donald hissed, teeth clenched together. ‘You know what we did.’

Thurman showed his palms. ‘We did what had to be done.’

‘No. Don’t give me that.’ Donald shook his head. The water in his glass trembled as if something dangerous approached. ‘The world…’

‘We saved it.’

‘That’s not true!’ Donald’s voice cracked. He tried to remember. ‘There is no world any more.’ He recalled the view from the top, from the cafeteria. He remembered the hills a dull brown, the sky full of menacing clouds. ‘We ended it. We killed everyone.’

‘They were already dead,’ Thurman said. ‘We all were. Everyone dies, son. The only thing that matters is—’

‘Stop.’ Donald waved the words away as if they were buzzing things that could bite him. ‘There’s no justifying this—’ He felt spittle form on his lips, wiped it away with his sleeve. The tray on his lap slid dangerously and Thurman moved quickly — quicker than one would expect of a man his age — to catch it. He placed what was left of the meal on the bedside table, and up close, Donald could see that he had gotten older. The wrinkles were deeper, the skin hanging from the bones. He wondered how much time Thurman had spent awake while Donald had slept.

‘I killed a lot of men in the war,’ Thurman said, looking down at the tray of half-eaten food.

Donald found himself focused on the old man’s neck. He closed his hands together to keep them still. This sudden admission about killing made it seem as if Thurman could read Donald’s mind, as though this was some kind of a warning for him to stay his murderous plans.

Thurman turned to the dresser and picked up the folded report. He opened it and Donald caught sight of the pale blue smudges, his ice-tinged tears from earlier.

‘Some say killing gets easier the longer you’re at it,’ he said. And he sounded sad, not threatening. Donald looked down at his own knees and saw that they were bouncing. He forced his heels against the carpet and tried to pin them there.

‘For me, it only got worse. There was a man in Iran—’

‘The entire goddamn planet,’ Donald whispered, stressing each word. This was what he said, but all he could think about was his wife Helen pulled down the wrong hill, everything that had ever existed crumbling to ruin. ‘We killed everyone.’

The Senator took in a deep breath and held it a moment. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘They were already dead.’

‘You’ll never convince me. You can drug me or kill me, but I promise you, you will never convince me.’

Thurman studied the report. He seemed unsure of something. The paper faintly shook, but maybe it was the vent overhead. Finally, he nodded as if he agreed. ‘Drugging you doesn’t work. I’ve read up on your first shift. There’s a small percentage of people with some kind of resistance. We’d love to know why.’

Donald could only laugh. He settled against the wall behind the cot and nestled into the darkness the top bunk provided. ‘Maybe I’ve seen too much to forget,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t think so.’ Thurman lowered his head so he could still make eye contact. Donald took a sip of water, both hands wrapped around the glass. ‘The more you see — the worse the trauma is — the better the medication works. It makes it easier to forget. Except for some people. Which is why we took a sample.’

Donald glanced down at his arm. A small square of gauze had been taped over the spot of blood left by the doctor’s needle. He felt a caustic mix of helplessness and fear well up inside him. ‘You woke me to take my blood?’

‘Not exactly.’ Thurman hesitated. ‘Your resistance to the meds is something I’m curious about but the reason you’re awake is because I was asked to wake you. We are losing silos—’

‘I thought that was the plan,’ Donald spat. ‘Losing silos. I thought that was what you wanted.’ He remembered crossing silo twelve out with red ink, all those many lives lost. They had accounted for this. Silos were expendable. That’s what he’d been told.

Thurman shook his head. ‘Whatever’s happening out there, we need to understand it. And there’s someone here who… who thinks you may have stumbled onto the answer. We have a few questions for you, and then we can put you back under.’

Back under. So he wasn’t going to be out for long. They had only woken him to take his blood and to peer into his mind, and would then put him back to sleep. Donald rubbed his arms, which felt thin and atrophied. He was dying in that pod. Only more slowly than he would like.

‘We need to know what you remember about this report.’ Thurman held it out. Donald waved the thing away.

‘I already looked it over,’ he said. He didn’t want to see it again. He could close his eyes and see the desperate people spilling out onto the dusty land, the people that he had ordered dead.

‘We have other medications that might ease the—’

‘No. No more drugs.’ Donald crossed his wrists and spread his arms out, slicing the air with both hands. ‘Look, I don’t have a resistance to your drugs.’ The truth. He was sick of the lies. ‘There’s no mystery. I just stopped taking the pills.’

It felt good to admit it. What were they going to do, anyway? Put him back to sleep? He took another sip of water while he let the confession sink in. He swallowed.

‘I kept them in my gums and spat them out later. It’s as simple as that. Probably the case with anyone else remembering. Like Hal, or Carlton, or whatever his name was.’

Thurman regarded him coolly. He tapped the report against his open palm, seeming to digest this. ‘We know you stopped taking the pills,’ he finally said. ‘And when.’

Donald shrugged. ‘Mystery solved, then.’ He finished his water and put the empty glass back on the tray.

‘The drugs you have a resistance to are not in the pills, Donny. The reason people stop taking the pills is because they begin to remember, not the other way around.’

Donald studied Thurman, disbelieving.

‘Your urine changes colour when you stop taking them. You develop sores on your gums where you hide them. These are the signs we look for.’

‘What?’

‘There are no drugs in the pills, Donny.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘We medicate everyone. There are those of us who are immune. But you shouldn’t be.’

‘Bullshit. I remember. The pills made me woozy. As soon as I stopped taking them, I got better.’

Thurman tilted his head to the side. ‘The reason you stopped taking them was because you were… I won’t say getting better. It was because the fear had begun leaking through. Donny, the medication is in the water.’ He waved at the empty glass on the tray. Donald followed the gesture and immediately felt sick.

‘Don’t worry,’ Thurman said. ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it.’

‘I don’t want to help you. I don’t want to talk about this report. I don’t want to see whoever it is you need me to see.’

He wanted Helen. All he wanted was his wife.

‘There’s a chance that thousands will die if you don’t help us. There’s a chance that you stumbled onto something with this report of yours, even if I don’t believe it.’

Donald glanced at the door to the bathroom, thought about locking himself inside and forcing himself to throw up, to expunge the food and the water. Maybe Thurman was lying to him. Maybe he was telling the truth. A lie would mean the water was just water. The truth would mean that he did have some sort of resistance.

‘I barely remember writing the damn thing,’ he admitted. And who would want to see him? He assumed it would be another doctor, maybe a silo head, maybe whoever was running this shift.

He rubbed his temples, could feel the pressure building between them. Perhaps he should just do as they wanted and be put back to sleep, back to his dreams. Now and then, he had dreamed of Helen. It was the only place he could be with her.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. But I still don’t understand what I could possibly know.’ He rubbed his arm where they’d taken the blood. There was an itch there. An itch so deep it felt like a bruise.

Senator Thurman nodded. ‘I tend to agree with you. But that’s not what she thinks.’

Donald stiffened. ‘She?’ He searched Thurman’s eyes, wondering if he’d heard correctly. ‘She who?’

The old man frowned. ‘The one who had me wake you.’ He waved his hand at the bunk. ‘Get some rest. I’ll take you to her in the morning.’

31 • Silo 1 •

HE COULDN’T REST. The hours were cruel, slow and unknowable. There was no clock to mark their passing, no answer to his frustrated slaps on the door. Donald was left to lie in his bunk and stare at the diamond patterns of interlocking wires holding the mattress above him, to listen to the gurgle of water in hidden pipes as it rushed to another room. He couldn’t sleep. He had no idea if it was the middle of the night or the middle of the day. The weight of the silo pressed down upon him.

When the boredom grew intolerable, Donald eventually gave in and looked over the report a second time. He studied it more closely. It wasn’t the original; the signature was flat, and he remembered using a blue pen.

He skimmed the account of the silo’s collapse and his theory that IT heads shadowed too young. His recommendation was to raise the age. He wondered if they had. Maybe so, but the problems were persisting. There was also mention of a young man he had inducted, a young man with a question. This young man’s great-grandmother was one of those who remembered, much like Donald. His report suggested allowing one question from each inductee. They were given the Legacy, after all. Why not show them, in that final stage of indoctrination, that there were more truths to be had?

The tiny clicks of a key entering a lock. Thurman opened the door as Donald folded the report away.

‘Feeling better?’ Thurman asked.

Donald didn’t say.

‘Can you walk?’

He nodded. A walk. When what he really wanted was to run screaming down the hallway and punch holes in walls. But a walk would do. A walk before his next long sleep.

They rode the lift in silence. Donald noticed Thurman had scanned his badge before pressing the button for level fifty-four. Its number stood bright and new while so many others had been worn away. There was nothing but supplies on that level if Donald remembered correctly, supplies they weren’t ever supposed to need. The lift slowed as it approached a level it normally skipped. The doors opened on a cavernous expanse of shelves stocked with instruments of death.

Thurman led him down the middle of it all. There were wooden crates with ‘AMMO’ stencilled on the side, longer crates beside them with military designations like ‘M22’ and ‘M19’. There were rows of shelves with armour and helmets, with boxes marked ‘MEDICAL’ and ‘RATIONS’, many more boxes unlabelled. And beyond the shelves, tarps covered bulbous and winged forms that he knew to be drones. UAVs. His sister had flown them in a war that now seemed pointless and distant, part of ancient history. But here these relics stood, oiled and covered, reeking of grease and fear.

Beyond the drones, Thurman led the way through a murky dimness that made the storehouse seem to go on for ever. At the far end of the wide room, a glow of light leaked from an open-doored office. There were sounds of paper stirring, a chair squeaking as someone turned. Donald reached the doorway and saw, inexplicably, her sitting there.

‘Anna?’

She sat behind a wide conference table ringed with identical chairs, looked up from a spread of paperwork and a computer monitor. There was no shock on her part, just a smile of acknowledgement and a weariness that her smile could not conceal.

Her father crossed the room while Donald gaped. Thurman squeezed her arm and kissed her on the cheek, but Anna’s eyes did not leave Donald’s. The old man whispered something to his daughter, then announced that he had work of his own to see to. Donald did not budge until the Senator had left the room.

‘Anna—’

She was already at the massive table, wrapping her arms around him. She began whispering things, comforting words as Donald sagged into her embrace, suddenly exhausted. He felt her hand caress the back of his head and come to a rest on his neck. His own arms interlocked around her back.

‘What’re you doing here?’ he whispered.

‘I’m here for the same reason you are.’ She pulled back from the embrace. ‘I’m looking for answers.’ She stepped away and surveyed the mess on the table. ‘To different questions, perhaps.’

A familiar schematic — a grid of fifty silos — covered the table. Each silo was like a small plate, all of them trapped under glass. A dozen chairs were gathered around. Donald realised that this was a war room, where generals stood and pushed plastic models and grumbled over lives lost by the thousands. He glanced up at the maps and schematics plastered on the walls. There was an adjoining bathroom, a towel hanging from a hook on the door. A cot had been set up in the far corner and was neatly made. There was a lamp beside it sitting on one of the wooden crates from the storeroom. Extension cords snaked here and there, signs of a room long converted into an apartment of sorts.

He turned to the nearest wall and flipped through some of the drawings. They were three layers deep in places and covered in notes. It didn’t look as if a war was being planned. It looked like a scene from the crime shows that used to lull him to sleep in a former life.

‘You’ve been up longer than me,’ he said.

Anna stood beside him. Her hand alighted on his shoulder, and Donald felt himself startle at being touched at all.

‘Almost a year now.’ Her hand slid down his back before falling away. ‘Can I get you a drink? Water? I also have a stash of Scotch down here. Dad doesn’t know half the stuff they hid away in these crates.’

Donald shook his head. He turned and watched as she disappeared into the bathroom and ran the tap. She emerged, sipping from a glass.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked. ‘Why am I up?’

She swallowed and waved her glass at the walls. ‘It’s—’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘I was about to say it’s nothing, but this is the hell that keeps me out of one box and in another. It doesn’t concern you, most of this.’

Donald studied the room again. A year, living like this. He turned his attention to Anna, the way her hair was balled up in a bun, a pen sticking out of it. Her skin was pale except for the dark rings beneath her eyes. He wondered how she was able to do this, live like this.

There was a printout on the far wall that matched the table, a grid of circles, the layout of the facilities. A familiar red X had been drawn across what he knew to be silo twelve in the upper left corner. There was another X nearby, a new one in what looked to be silo ten. More lives lost. And in the lower right-hand corner of the grid, a mess that made no sense. The room seemed to wobble as he took a step closer.

‘Donny?’

‘What happened here?’ he asked, his voice a whisper. Anna turned to see what he was looking at. She glanced at the table, and he realised that her paperwork was scattered around the same corner of the facility. The glass surface crawled with notes written in red and blue wax.

‘Donny—’ She stepped closer. ‘Things aren’t well.’

He turned and studied the scrawl of red marks on the wall schematic. There were Xs and question marks. There were notes in red ink with lines and arrows. Ten or a dozen of the silos were heavily marked up.

‘How many?’ he asked, trying to count, to figure the thousands of lives lost. ‘Are they gone?’

She took a deep breath. ‘We don’t know.’ She finished her water, walked down the long table and reached into one of the chairs pushed up against it. She procured a bottle and poured a few fingers into her plastic cup.

‘It started with silo forty,’ she said. ‘It went dark about a year ago—’

‘Went dark?’

Anna took a sip of the Scotch and nodded. She licked her lips. ‘The camera feeds went out first. Not at once, but eventually they got them all. We lost contact with the heads over there. Couldn’t raise anyone. Erskine was running the shift at the time. He followed the Order and gave the okay to shut the silo down—’

‘You mean kill everyone.’

Anna shot him a look. ‘You know what had to be done.’

Donald remembered silo twelve. He remembered making that same decision. As if there had been a decision to make. The system ran automatically. Wasn’t he just doing what came next, following a set of procedures written down by someone else?

He studied the poster with the red marks. ‘And the rest of them? The other silos?’

Anna finished the drink with one long pull and gasped for air afterward. Donald caught her eyeing the bottle. ‘They woke up Dad when forty-two went. Two more silos had gone dark by the time he came for me.’

Two more silos. ‘Why you?’ he asked.

She tucked a strand of loose hair behind her ear. ‘Because there was no one else. Because everyone who had a hand in designing this place was either gone or at their wits’ end. Because Dad was desperate.’

‘He wanted to see you.’

She laughed. ‘It wasn’t that. Trust me.’ She waved her empty cup at the arrangement of circles on the table and the spread of papers. ‘They were using the radios at high frequencies. We think it started with forty, that maybe their IT head went rogue. They hijacked their antenna and began communicating with the other silos around them, and we couldn’t cut them off. They had taken care of that as well. As soon as Dad suspected this, he argued with the others that wireless networks were my speciality. They eventually relented. No one wanted to use the drones.’

‘Argued with what others? Who knows you’re here?’ Donald couldn’t help but think how dangerous this could get, but maybe that was his own weakness screaming at him.

‘My dad, Erskine, Dr Sneed, his assistants who brought me out. But those assistants won’t work another shift—’

‘Deep freeze?’

Anna frowned and splashed her cup, and it struck Donald how much had been lost while he had slept. Entire shifts had gone by. Another silo had gone dark, another red X drawn on the map. An entire corner of silos had run into some kind of trouble. Thurman, meanwhile, had been awake for a year, dealing with it. His daughter as well. Donald waved his arm at the room. ‘You’ve been stuck in here for a year? Working on this?’

She jerked her head at the door and laughed. ‘I’ve been cooped up in worse for a lot longer. But yeah, it sucks. I’m sick of this place.’ She took another sip, her cup hiding her expression, and Donald wondered if perhaps he was awake because of her weakness just as she might be awake because of her father’s. What was next? Him searching the deep freeze for his sister Charlotte?

‘We’ve lost contact with eleven silos so far.’ Anna peered into her cup. ‘I think I’ve got it contained, but we’re still trying to figure out how it happened or if anyone’s still alive over there. I personally don’t think so, but Dad wants to send scouts or drones. Everyone says that’s too big a risk. And now it looks like eighteen is going to burn itself to the ground.’

‘And I’m supposed to help? What does your father think I know?’ He stepped around the planning table and waved for the bottle. Anna splashed her cup and handed the drink to him; she reached for another cup by her monitor while Donald collapsed onto her cot. It was a lot to take in.

‘It’s not Dad who thinks you know anything. He didn’t want you up at all. No one’s supposed to come out of deep freeze.’ She screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘It was his boss.’

Donald nearly choked on his first sip of the Scotch. He sputtered and wiped his chin with his sleeve while Anna looked on with concern.

‘His boss?’ he asked, gasping for air.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘Dad told you why you’re here, right?’

He fumbled in his pocket for the report. ‘Something I wrote during my last… during my shift. Thurman has a boss? I thought he was in charge.’

Anna laughed humourlessly. ‘Nobody’s in charge,’ she told him. ‘The system’s in charge. It just runs. We built it to just go.’ She got up from her desk and walked over to join him on the cot. Donald slid over to give her more room.

‘Dad was in charge of digging the holes, that was his job. There were three of them who planned most of this. The other two had ideas for how to hide this place. Dad convinced them they should just build it in plain sight. The nuclear containment facility was his idea, and he was in a position to make it happen.’

‘You said three. Who were the others?’

‘Victor and Erskine.’ Anna adjusted a pillow and leaned back against the wall. ‘Not their real names, of course. But what does it matter? A name is a name. You can be anyone down here. Erskine was the one who discovered the original threat, who told Victor and Dad about the nanos. You’ll meet him. He’s been on a double shift with me, working on the loss of these silos, but it’s not his area of expertise. Do you need more?’ She nodded at his cup.

‘No. I’m already feeling dizzy.’ He didn’t add that it wasn’t from the alcohol. ‘I remember a Victor from my shift. He worked across the hall from me.’

‘The same.’ She looked away for a moment. ‘Dad refers to him as the boss, but I’ve been working with Victor for a while, and he never thought of himself that way. He thought of himself as a steward, joked once about feeling like Noah. He wanted to wake you months ago because of what’s happening in silo eighteen, but Dad vetoed the idea. I think Victor was fond of you. He talked about you a lot.’

‘Victor talked about me?’ Donald remembered the man across the hall from him, the shrink. Anna reached up and wiped underneath her eyes.

‘Yes. He was a brilliant man, could tell what you were thinking, what anyone was thinking. He planned most of this. Wrote the Order, the original Pact. It was all his design.’

‘What do you mean was?’

Her lip trembled. She tipped her cup, but there was little left in the bottom.

‘Victor’s dead,’ she said. ‘He shot himself at his desk two days ago.’

32 • Silo 1 •

‘VICTOR? SHOT HIMSELF?’ Donald tried to imagine the composed man who had worked across the hall from him doing such a thing. ‘Why?’

Anna sniffed and slid closer to Donald. She twisted the empty cup in her hands. ‘We don’t know. He was obsessed with that first silo we lost. Obsessed. It broke my heart to see how he blamed himself. He used to say that he could see certain things coming, that there were… probabilistic certainties.’ She said these two words in a mimic of his voice, which brought the old man’s face even more vividly to Donald’s mind.

‘But it killed him not to know the precise when and where.’ She dabbed her eyes. ‘He would’ve been better off if it’d happened on someone else’s shift. Not his. Not where he’d feel guilty.’

‘He blamed me,’ Donald said, staring at the floor. ‘It was on my shift. I was such a mess. I couldn’t think straight.’

‘What? No. Donny, no.’ She rested a hand on his knee. ‘There’s no one to blame.’

‘But my report—’ He still had it in his hand, folded up and dotted here and there with pale blue.

Anna’s eyes fell to the piece of paper. ‘Is that a copy?’ She reached for it, brushed the loose strands of hair off her face. ‘Dad had the courage to tell you about this but not about what Vic did.’ She shook her head. ‘Victor was strong in some ways, so weak in others.’ She turned to Donald. ‘He was found at his desk, surrounded by notes, everything he had on this silo, and your report was on top.’

She unfolded the page and studied the words. ‘Just a copy,’ she whispered.

‘Maybe it was—’ Donald began.

‘He wrote notes all over the original.’ She slid her finger across the page. ‘Right about here, he wrote: “This is why.”’

‘This is why? As in why he did it?’ Donald waved his hand at the room. ‘Shouldn’t this be why? Maybe he realised he’d made a mistake.’ He held Anna’s arm. ‘Think about what we’ve done. What if we followed a crazy man down here? Maybe Victor had a sudden bout of sanity. What if he woke up for a second and saw what we’d done?’

‘No.’ Anna shook her head. ‘We had to do this.’

He slapped the wall behind the cot. ‘That’s what everyone keeps saying.’

‘Listen to me.’ She placed a hand on his knee, tried to soothe him. ‘You need to keep it together, okay?’ She glanced at the door, a fearful look in her eyes. ‘I asked him to wake you because I need your help. I can’t do this alone. Vic was working on the situation in silo eighteen. If Dad has his way, he’ll just terminate the place not to have to deal with it. Victor didn’t want that. I don’t want that.’

Donald thought of silo twelve, which he’d terminated. But it was already falling, wasn’t it? It was already too late. They had opened the airlock. He looked at the schematic on the wall and wondered if it was too late for silo eighteen as well.

‘What did he see in my report?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. But he wanted to wake you weeks ago. He thought you had touched on something.’

‘Or maybe it was just because I was around at the time.’

Donald looked at the room of clues. Anna had been digging, tearing into a different problem. So many questions and answers. His mind was clear, not like last time. He had questions of his own. He wanted to find his sister, find out what had happened to Helen, dispel this crazy thought that she was still out there somewhere. He wanted to know more about this damnable place he’d helped build.

‘You’ll help us?’ Anna asked. She rested her hand on his back, and her comforting touch brought back the memory of his wife, of the moments she would soothe and care for him. He started as if bitten, some part of him thinking for a moment that he was still married, that she was alive out there, maybe frozen and waiting for him to wake her.

‘I need…’ He jumped up and glanced around the room. His eyes fell to the computer on the desk. ‘I need to look some things up.’

Anna rose beside him. ‘Of course. I can fill you in with what we know so far. Victor left a series of notes. He wrote all over your report. I can show you. And maybe you can convince Dad that he was on to something, that this silo is worth saving—’

‘Yes,’ Donald said. He would do it. But only so he could stay awake. And he wondered for a moment if that was Anna’s intention as well. To keep him around, near to her.

An hour earlier, all he had wanted was to go back to sleep, to escape the world he had helped create. But now he wanted answers. He would look into silo eighteen, but he would find Helen as well. Find out what had happened to her, where she was. He thought of Mick, and Tennessee flashed in his mind. He turned to the wall schematic with all the silos and tried to remember which state went with which number.

‘What can we access from here?’ he asked. His skin flushed with heat as he thought of the answers at his disposal.

Anna turned towards the door. There were footsteps out there in the darkness.

‘Dad. He’s the only one with access to this level any more.’

‘Any more?’ He turned back to Anna.

‘Yeah. Where do you think Victor got the gun?’ She lowered her voice. ‘I was in here when he came down and cracked open one of the crates. I never heard him. Look, my father blames himself for what happened to Victor, and he still doesn’t believe this has anything to do with you or your report. But I knew Vic. He wasn’t crazy. If there’s anything you can do, please. For me.’

She squeezed his hand. Donald looked down, didn’t realise she’d been holding it. The folded report was in her other hand. The footsteps approached. Donald nodded his assent.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She dropped his hand, grabbed his empty cup from the cot and nested hers with it. She tucked the cups and the bottle into one of the chairs and slid it under the table. Thurman arrived at the door and rapped the jamb with his knuckles.

‘Come in,’ Anna said, brushing loose hair off her face.

Thurman studied the two of them for a moment. ‘Erskine is planning a small ceremony,’ he said. ‘Just us. Those of us who know.’

Anna nodded. ‘Of course.’

Thurman narrowed his eyes and glanced from his daughter to Donald. Anna seemed to take it as a question.

‘Donny thinks he can help,’ she said. ‘We both think it’s best for him to work down here with me. At least until we make some progress.’

Donald turned to her in shock. Thurman said nothing.

‘We’ll need another computer,’ she added. ‘If you bring one down, I can set it up.’

That, Donald liked the sound of.

‘And another cot, of course,’ Anna added with a smile.

33 • Silo 18 •

MISSION SLUNK AWAY after the scuffle with the farmers, and the rest of the porters scattered. He stole a few hours of sleep at the upper way station on level ten, his nose numb and lips throbbing from a blow he’d taken. Tossing and turning, too restless to stay put, he rose in the dim-time and realised it was too early yet to go to the Nest; the Crow would still be asleep. And so he headed to the cafeteria for a sunrise and a decent breakfast, the coroner’s bonus burning in his pockets the way his knuckles burned from their scrapes.

He nursed his aches with a welcome hot meal, eating with those coming off a midnight shift, and watched the clouds boil and come to life across the hills. The towering husks in the distance — the Crow called them skyscrapers — were the first to catch the rising sun. It was a sign that the world would wake one more day. His birthday, Mission realised. He left his dishes on the table, a chit for whoever cleaned after him, and tried not to think of cleaning at all. Instead, he rushed down the eight flights of stairs before the silo fully woke. He headed towards the Nest, feeling not a day older at all.

Familiar words greeted him at the landing on level thirteen. There, above the door, rather than a level number it read:

The words were painted in bright and blocky letters. They followed the outlines from years and generations prior, colour piled on colour and letters crooked from more than one young hand’s involvement. The children of the silo came and went and left their marks with bristles, but the Old Crow remained.

Her nest comprised the nursery, day school and classrooms that served the up top. She had been perched there for longer than any alive could remember. Some said she was as old as the silo itself, but Mission knew that was just a legend. Nobody knew how old the silo was.

He entered the Nest to find the hallways empty and quiet, the hour early still. There was a soft screech from one classroom as desks were put back into order. Mission caught a glimpse of two teachers conferring in another classroom, their faces scrunched up with worry, probably wondering what to do with a younger version of himself. The scent of strong tea mixed with the odour of paste and chalk. There were rows of metal lockers in dire need of paint and stippled with dents from tiny fists; they transported Mission back to another age. It felt like just yesterday that he had terrorised that hall. He and all his friends whom he didn’t see any more — or at least not as often as he’d like.

The Crow’s room was at the far end and adjoined the only apartment on the entire level. The apartment had been built especially for her, converted from a classroom, or so they said. And while she taught only the youngest children any more, the entire school was hers. This was her nest.

Mission remembered coming to her at various stages of his life. Early on, for comfort, feeling so very far from the farms. Later, for wisdom, when he was finally old enough to admit he had none. And more than once he had come for both, like the day he had learned the truth of his birth and his mother’s death — that she had been sent to clean because of him. Mission remembered that day well. It was the only time he’d ever seen the Old Crow cry.

He knocked on her classroom door before entering and found her at the blackboard that had been lowered so she could write on it from her chair. Mrs Crowe stopped erasing yesterday’s lessons, turned and beamed at him.

‘My boy,’ she croaked. She waved with the eraser to beckon him closer. A chalky haze filled the air. ‘My boy, my boy.’

‘Hello, Mrs Crowe.’ Mission passed between the handful of desks to get to her. The power line for her electric chair drooped from the centre of the ceiling to a pole that rose up from the chair’s back. Mission ducked beneath it as he got closer and bent to give the Crow a hug. His hands wrapped around her, and he breathed in her smell — one of childhood and innocence. The yellow gown she wore, spotted with flowers, was her outfit for Wednesdays, as good as any calendar. It had faded since Mission’s time, as all things had.

‘I do believe you’ve grown,’ she said, smiling up at him. Her voice was barely a whisper, and he recalled how it kept even the young ones quiet so they could hear what was being said. She brought her hand up and touched her own cheek. ‘What happened to your face?’

Mission laughed and shrugged off his porter’s pack. ‘Just an accident,’ he said, lying to her like old times. He placed his pack at the foot of one of the tiny desks, could imagine squeezing into the thing and staying for the day’s lesson.

‘How’ve you been?’ he asked. He studied her face, the deep wrinkles and dark skin like a farmer’s but from age rather than grow lights. Her eyes were rheumy, but there was life still behind them.

‘Not so good,’ Mrs Crowe said. She twisted the lever on her armrest, and the chair built for her decades ago by some long-gone former student whirred around to face him better. Pulling back her sleeve, she showed Mission a gauze bandage taped to her thin and splotchy arm. ‘Those doctors came and took my blood away.’ Her hand shook as she indicated the evidence. ‘Took half of it, by my reckoning.’

Mission laughed. ‘I’m pretty sure they didn’t take half your blood, Mrs Crowe. The doctors are just looking out for you.’

She twisted up her face, an explosion of wrinkles. She didn’t seem so sure. ‘I don’t trust them,’ she said.

Mission smiled. ‘You don’t trust anyone. And hey, maybe they’re just trying to figure out why you can’t die like everyone else does. Maybe they’ll come up with a way for everyone to live as long as you someday.’

Mrs Crowe rubbed the bandage on her withering arm. ‘Or they’re figuring out how to kill me,’ she said.

‘Oh, don’t be so sinister.’ Mission reached forward and pulled her sleeve down to keep her from messing with the bandage. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’

She frowned and declined to answer. Her eyes fell to his near-empty pack. ‘Day off?’ she asked.

Mission turned and followed her gaze. ‘Hmm? Oh, no. I dropped something off last night. I’ll pick up another delivery in a little bit, take it wherever they tell me to.’

‘Oh, to be so young and free again.’ Mrs Crowe spun her chair around and steered it behind her desk. Mission ducked beneath the pivoting wire out of habit; the pole at the back of the chair was made with younger heads in mind. She picked up a container of the vile vegetable pulp she preferred over water and took a sip. ‘Allie stopped by last week.’ She set the greenish-black fluid down. ‘She was asking about you. Wanted to know if you were still single.’

‘Oh?’ Mission could feel his temperature shoot up. Mrs Crowe had caught them kissing once, back before he knew what kissing was for. She had left them with a warning and a knowing smile. ‘Everyone’s so spread out,’ Mission said, changing the subject, hoping she might take the hint.

‘As it should be.’ The Crow opened a drawer on her desk and rummaged around, came out with an envelope. Mission could see a half-dozen names scratched out across the thing. It had been used a handful of times. ‘You’re heading down from here? Maybe you could drop off something for Rodny?’

She held out the letter. Mission took it, saw his best friend’s name written on the outside, all the other names crossed out.

‘I can leave it for him, sure. But the last two times I stopped by there, they said he was unavailable.’

Mrs Crowe nodded as if this was to be expected. ‘Ask for Jeffery, he’s the head of Security down there, one of my boys. You tell him that this is from me and that I said you should hand it to Rodny yourself. In person.’ She waved her hands in the air, little trembling blurs. ‘I’ll write Jeffery a note.’

Mission glanced up at the clock on the wall while she dug into her desk for a pen and ink. Soon the hallways would begin filling with youthful chatter and the opening and slamming of lockers. He waited patiently while she scratched her note and scanned old posters and banners on the walls, the ‘motivators’, as Mrs Crowe liked to call them.

You can be anything, one of them said. It featured a crude drawing of a boy and a girl standing on a huge mound. The mound was green and the sky blue, just like in the picture books. Another one said: Dream to your heart’s delight. It had bands of colour in a graceful arcing sweep. The Crow had a name for the shape, but he’d forgotten what it was called. Another familiar one: Go new places. It featured a drawing of a crow perched in an impossibly large tree, its wings spread as if it were about to take flight.

‘Jeffery is the bald one,’ Mrs Crowe said. She waved a hand over her own white and thinning hair to demonstrate.

‘I know,’ Mission said. It was a strange reminder that so many of the adults and elders throughout the silo had been her students as well. A locker was slammed in the hallway. Mission remembered when he was a kid how the rows and rows of tiny desks had filled the room. There were cubbies full of rolled mats for nap time, reminding him of the daily routine of clearing a space in the middle of the floor, finding his mat, and drifting off to sleep while the Crow sang forgotten songs. He missed those days. He missed the Old Time stories about a world full of impossible things. Leaning against that little desk, Mission suddenly felt as ancient as the Crow, just as impossibly distant from his youth.

‘Give Jeffery this, and then see that Rodny gets my note. From you personally, okay?’

He grabbed his pack and slid both pieces of correspondence into his courier pouch. There was no mention of payment, just the twinge of guilt Mission felt for even thinking of it. Digging into the pack reminded him of the items he had brought her, forgotten due to the previous night’s brawl.

‘Oh, I brought you these from the farm.’ He pulled out a few small cucumbers, two peppers and a large tomato, bearing a bruise. He placed them on her desk. ‘For your veggie drinks,’ he said.

Mrs Crowe clasped her hands together and smiled with delight.

‘Is there anything else you need next time I’m passing by?’

‘These visits,’ she said, her face a wrinkle of smiles. ‘All I care about are my little ones. Stop by whenever you can, okay?’

Mission squeezed her arm, which felt like a broomstick tucked into a sleeve. ‘I will,’ he said. ‘And that reminds me: Frankie told me to tell you hello.’

‘He should come more often,’ she told him, her voice aquiver.

‘Not everyone gets around like I do,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’d like to see you more often as well.’

‘You tell him,’ she said. ‘Tell him I don’t have much time left—’

Mission laughed and waved off the morbid thought. ‘You probably told my grandfather the same thing when he was young, and his father before him.’

The Crow smiled as if this were true. ‘Predict the inevitable,’ she said, ‘and you’re bound to be right one day.’

Mission smiled. He liked that. ‘Still, I wish you wouldn’t talk about dying. Nobody likes to hear it.’

‘They may not like it, but a reminder is good.’ She held out her arms, the sleeves of her flowered dress falling away and revealing the bandage once more. ‘Tell me, what do you see when you look at these hands?’ She turned them over, back and forth.

‘I see time,’ Mission blurted out, not sure where the thought came from. He tore his eyes away, suddenly finding her skin to be grotesque. Like shrivelled potatoes found deep in the soil long after harvest time. He hated himself for feeling it.

‘Time, sure,’ Mrs Crowe said. ‘There’s time here aplenty. But there’s remnants too. I remember things being better, once. You think on the bad to remind yourself of the good.’

She studied her hands a moment longer, as if looking for something else. When she lifted her gaze and peered at Mission, her eyes were shining with sadness. Mission could feel his own eyes watering, partly from discomfort, partly due to the sombre pall that had been cast over their conversation. It reminded him that today was his birthday, a thought that tightened his neck and emptied his chest. He was sure the Crow knew what day it was. She just loved him enough not to say.

‘I was beautiful, once, you know.’ Mrs Crowe withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap. ‘Once that’s gone, once it leaves us for good, no one will ever see it again.’

Mission felt a powerful urge to soothe her, to tell Mrs Crowe that she was still beautiful in plenty of ways. She could still make music. Could paint. Few others remembered how. She could make children feel loved and safe, another bit of magic long forgotten.

‘When I was your age,’ the Crow said, smiling, ‘I could have any boy I wanted.’

She laughed, dispelling the tension and casting away the shadows, but Mission believed her, even though he couldn’t picture it, couldn’t imagine away the wrinkles and the spots and the long strands of hair on her knuckles. Still, he believed her. He always did.

‘The world is a lot like me.’ She lifted her gaze to the ceiling and perhaps beyond. ‘The world was beautiful once too.’

Mission sensed an Old Time story brewing like a storm of clouds. More lockers were slammed in the hallway, little voices gathering.

‘Tell me,’ Mission said, remembering the hours that had passed like eyeblinks at her feet, the songs she sang while children slept. ‘Tell me about the old world.’

The Old Crow’s eyes narrowed and settled on a dark corner of the room. Her lips, furrowed with the wrinkles of time, parted and a story began, a story Mission had heard a thousand times before. But it never got old, visiting this land of the Crow’s imagination. And as the little ones skipped into the room and slipped into their tiny desks, they too fell silent and gathered around, following along with the widest of eyes and the most open of minds these tales of a world, once beautiful, and now fairly forgotten.

34 • Silo 18 •

THE STORIES MRS Crowe made up were straight from the children’s books. There were blue skies and lands of green, animals like dogs and cats but bigger than people. Juvenile stuff. And yet, these fantastic tales of a better place left Mission angry at the world he lived in. As he left the up top behind and wound his way down, past the farms and the levels of his youth, he thought of this better world and was dismayed at the one he knew. The promise of an elsewhere highlighted the flaws of the familiar. He had gone off to be a porter, to fly away and be all that he wished, and now what he wished was to be further away than this world would allow.

These were dangerous thoughts. They reminded him of his mother and where she had been sent seventeen years ago to the day.

Past the farms, Mission noted a hint of something burning further down the silo. The air was hazy, and there was the bitter tinge of smoke on the back of his tongue. A trash pile, maybe. Someone who didn’t want to pay the fee to have it ported to recycling. Or someone who didn’t think the silo would be around long enough to need to recycle.

It could be an accident, of course, but Mission doubted it. Nobody thought that way any more. He could see it on the faces of those on the stairwell. He could see by the way belongings were clutched, children sheltered, that the future of the silo hung in the balance. Last night’s fight seemed to prove it.

Mission adjusted his pack and hurried down to the IT levels on thirty-four. When he arrived, there was a crowd gathering on the landing. It was mostly boys his age or a little older, many that he recognised, a lot from the mids. Several stood with computers tucked under their arms, wires dangling, jostling with the throng. Mission picked his way through. Inside, he found a barrier had been set up just beyond the door. Two men from Security manned the temporary gate and allowed only crumpled IT workers through.

‘Delivery,’ Mission shouted. He worked his way to the front, carefully extracting the note Mrs Crowe had written. ‘Delivery for Officer Jeffery.’

One of the security men took the note. Mission was pressed against the barrier by the crush behind him. A woman was waved through. She hurried towards the proper security gate leading into the main hall, smoothing her overalls with obvious relief. There were crowds of young men being given instructions in one corner of the wide hall. They stood to attention in neat rank and file, but their wide eyes gave away their obvious fear.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Mission asked as the barrier was parted for him.

‘What the hell isn’t?’ one of the security guards answered. ‘Power spike last night took out a load of computers. Every one of our techs is pulling a double. There’s a fire down in Mechanical or something, and some kinda violence up in the farms. Did you get the wire?’

Mechanical. That was a long way away to nose a fire. And word was out about last night’s raid, making him self-conscious of the cut on his nose. ‘What wire?’ he asked.

The security guard pointed to the groups of boys. ‘We’re hiring. New techs.’

All Mission saw were young men, and the guy talking to them was with Security, not IT. The security guard handed the note back to Mission and pointed towards the main gate. The woman from earlier was already beeping her way through, a large and familiar bald head swivelling to watch her ass as she headed down the hall.

‘Sir?’ Mission called out as he approached the gate.

Jeffery turned his head, the deep wrinkles and folds of flesh disappearing from his neck.

‘Hmm? Oh—’ he snapped his fingers, trying to place the name.

‘Mission.’

He wagged his finger. ‘That’s right. You need to leave something with me, porter?’ He held out a palm but seemed disinterested.

Mission handed him the note. ‘Actually, I have orders from Mrs Crowe to deliver something in person.’ He pulled the sealed envelope with the crossed-out names from his courier pouch. ‘Just a letter, sir.’

The old guard glanced at the envelope, then continued reading the note addressed to him. ‘Rodny isn’t available.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t give you a timeframe, either. Could be weeks. You wanna leave it with me?’

Again, an outstretched palm, but this time with more interest. Mission pulled the envelope back warily. ‘I can’t. There’s no way I can just hand it to him? This is the Crow, man. If it were the mayor asking me, I’d say no problem.’

Jeffery smiled. ‘You were one of her boys too?’

Mission nodded. The head of Security looked past him at a man approaching the gate with his ID out. Mission stepped aside as the gentleman scanned his way through, nodding good morning to Jeffery.

‘Tell you what. I’m taking Rodny his lunch in a little bit. When I do, you can come with me, hand him the letter with me standing there, and I won’t have to worry about the Crow nipping my hide later. How’s that sound?’

Mission smiled. ‘Sounds good, man. I appreciate it.’

The officer pointed across the noisy entrance hall. ‘Why don’t you go grab yourself some water and hang in the conference room. There’s some boys in there filling out paperwork.’ Jeffery looked Mission up and down. ‘In fact, why don’t you fill out an application? We could use you.’

‘I… uh, don’t know much about computers,’ Mission said.

Jeffery shrugged as if that were irrelevant. ‘Suit yourself. One of the lads will be relieving me in a little bit. I’ll come get you.’

Mission thanked him again. He crossed the large entrance hall where neat columns and rows of young men listened to barked instructions. Another guard waved him inside the conference room while holding out a sheet of paper and a shard of charcoal. Mission saw that the back of the paper was blank and took it with no plan for filling it out. Half a chit right there in usable paper.

There were a few empty chairs around the wide table. He chose one. A number of boys scribbled with their charcoals on the pages, faces scrunched up in concentration. Mission sat with his back to the only window and placed his sack on the table, kept the letter in his hands. He slid the application inside his pack for future use and studied the Crow’s letter for the first time.

The envelope was old but addressed only a handful of times. One edge was worn tissue thin, a small tear revealing a folded piece of paper inside. Peering more closely, Mission saw that it was pulp paper, probably made in the Crow’s Nest by one of her kids — water and handfuls of torn paper blended up, pressed down on screens and left overnight to dry.

‘Mission,’ someone at the table hissed.

He looked up to see Bradley sitting across from him. The fellow porter had his blue ’chief tied around his biceps. Mission had thought he was running a regular route in the down deep.

‘You applying?’ Bradley hissed.

One of the other boys coughed into his fist as if he were asking for quiet. It looked as though Bradley was already done with his application.

Mission shook his head. There was a knock on the window behind him and he nearly dropped the letter as he whirled around. Jeffery stuck his head in the door. ‘Two minutes,’ the security guard said to Mission. He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. ‘I’m just waiting on his tray.’

Mission bobbed his head as the door was pulled shut. The other boys looked at him curiously.

‘Delivery,’ Mission explained to Bradley loud enough for the others to hear. He pulled his pack closer and hid the envelope behind it. The boys went back to their scribbling. Bradley frowned and watched the others.

Mission studied the envelope again. Two minutes. How long would he have with Rodny? He tickled the corner of the sealed flap. The milk paste the Crow had used didn’t stick very well to the months-old — maybe years-old — dried glue from before. He worked one corner loose without glancing down at the envelope. Instead, he watched Bradley as he disobeyed the third cardinal rule of porting, telling himself this was different, that this was two old friends talking and he was just in the room with them, overhearing.

Even so, his hands trembled as he pulled the letter out. He glanced down, keeping the note hidden. Purple and red string lay strewn in with the dark grey of cheap paper. The writing was in chalk. It meant the words had to be big. White powder gathered in the folds as it shivered loose from the words like dust falling from old pipes:

Part of an old nursery rhyme. Beat your wings, Mission whispered silently, remembering the rest, a story about a young crow learning to be free.

He started to check the back for a real note, something beyond this fragment of a rhyme, when someone banged on the window again. Several of the other boys dropped their charcoals, visibly startled. One boy cursed under his breath. Mission whirled around to see Jeffery on the other side of the glass, a covered meal tray balanced on one palm, his bald head jerking impatiently.

Mission folded the letter up and stuffed it back in the envelope. He raised his hand over his head to let Jeffery know he’d be right there, licked one finger and ran it across the sticky paste, resealing the envelope as best he could. ‘Good luck,’ he told Bradley, even though he had no clue what the kid thought he was doing. He dragged his pack off the table, was careful to wipe away the chalk dust that had spilled, and hurried out of the conference room.

‘Let’s go,’ Jeffery said, clearly annoyed.

Mission hurried after him. He glanced back once at the window, then over at the noisy crowd jostling against the temporary barriers by the door. An IT tech approached the crowd with a computer, wires coiled neatly on top, and a woman reached out desperately from behind the barrier like a mother yearning for her baby.

‘Since when did people start bringing their own computers up?’ he asked, his profession having made him curious about how things got from there to here and back again. It felt as though this was yet another loop the porters were being cut out of. Roker would have a fit.

‘Yesterday. Wyck decided he wouldn’t be sending his techs out to fix them any more. Says it’s safer this way. People are being robbed out there and there’s not enough security to go around.’

They were waved through the gates and wound in silence through the hallways, every office full of clacking sounds or people arguing. Mission saw electrical parts and paper strewn everywhere. He wondered which office Rodny was in and why nobody else was having their food delivered. Maybe his friend was in trouble. That was it. That would make sense of everything. Maybe he had pulled one of his stunts. Did they have a holding cell on thirty-four? He didn’t think so. He was about to ask Jeffery if Rodny was in the pen when the old security guard stopped at an imposing steel door.

‘Here.’ He held the tray out to Mission, who stuck the letter between his lips and accepted it. Jeffery glanced back, blocked Mission’s view of the door’s keypad with his body and tapped in a code. A series of clunks sounded in the jamb of the heavy door. Fucking right, Rodny was in trouble. What kind of pen was this?

The door swung inward. Jeffery grabbed the tray and told Mission to wait there. Mission still had the taste of milk paste on his lips as he watched the Security chief step inside a room that seemed to go back quite a way. The lights in-side pulsed as if something was wrong, red warning lights like a fire alarm. Jeffery called out for Rodny while Mission tried to peek around the guard for a better look.

Rodny arrived a moment later, almost as if he were expecting them. His eyes widened when he saw Mission standing there. Mission fought to close his own mouth, which he could feel hanging open at the sight of his friend.

‘Hey.’ Rodny pulled open the heavy door a little further and glanced down the hallway. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Good to see you too,’ Mission said. He held out the letter. ‘The Crow sent this.’

‘Ah, official business.’ Rodny smiled. ‘You’re here as a porter, eh? Not a friend?’

Rodny smiled, but Mission could see that his friend was beat. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. His cheeks were sunk in, dark rings under his eyes, and there was the shadow of a beard on his chin. Hair that Rodny had once taken pains to keep in style had been chopped short. Mission glanced into the room, wondering what they had him doing in there. Tall black metal cabinets were all he could see. They stretched out of sight, neatly spaced.

‘You learning to fix refrigerators?’ Mission asked.

Rodny glanced over his shoulder. He laughed. ‘Those are computers.’ He still had that condescending tone. Mission nearly reminded his friend that today was his birthday, that they were the same age. Rodny was the only one he ever felt like reminding. Jeffery cleared his throat impatiently, seemed annoyed by the chatter.

Rodny turned to the Security chief. ‘You mind if we have a few seconds?’ he asked.

Jeffery shifted his weight, the stiff leather of his boots squeaking. ‘You know I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably get chewed out for allowing even this.’

‘You’re right.’ Rodny shook his head as if he shouldn’t have asked. Mission studied the exchange. Even though it had been months since he’d last seen him, he sensed that Rodny was the same as always. He was in trouble for something, probably being forced to do the most reviled task in all of IT for a brash thing he’d said or done. He smiled at the thought.

Rodny tensed suddenly, as though he’d heard something deep inside the room. He held up a finger to the others and asked them to wait there. ‘Just a second,’ he said, rushing off, bare feet slapping on the steel floors.

Jeffery crossed his arms and looked Mission up and down unhappily. ‘You two grow up down the hall from each other?’

‘Went to school together,’ Mission said. ‘So what did Rod do? You know, Mrs Crowe used to make us sweep the entire Nest and clean the blackboards if we cut up in class. We did our fair share of sweeping, the two of us.’

Jeffery appraised him for a moment. And then his expressionless face shattered into tooth and grin. ‘You think your friend is in trouble?’ he said. He seemed on the verge of laughing. ‘Son, you have no idea.’

Before Mission could question him, Rodny returned, smiling and breathless.

‘Sorry,’ he said to Jeffery. ‘I had to get that.’ He turned to Mission. ‘Thanks for coming by, man. Good to see you.’

That was it?

‘Good to see you too,’ Mission sputtered, surprised that their visit would be so brief. ‘Hey, don’t be a stranger.’ He went to give his old friend a hug, but Rodny stuck out a hand instead. Mission looked at it for a pause, confused, wondering if they’d grown apart so far, so fast.

‘Give my best to everyone,’ Rodny said, as if he expected never to see any of them again.

Jeffery cleared his throat, clearly annoyed and ready to go.

‘I will,’ Mission said, fighting to keep the sadness out of his voice. He accepted his friend’s hand. They shook like strangers, the smile on Rodny’s face quivering, the folds of the note hidden in his palm digging sharply into Mission’s hand.

35 • Silo 18 •

IT WAS A miracle Mission didn’t drop the note as it was passed to him, a miracle that he knew something was amiss, to keep his mouth closed, to not stand there like a fool in front of Jeffery and say, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ Instead, he kept the wad of paper balled in his fist as he was escorted back to the security station. They were nearly there when someone called ‘Porter!’ from one of the offices.

Jeffery placed a hand on Mission’s chest, forcing him to a stop. They turned, and a familiar man strode down the hallway to meet them. It was Mr Wyck, the head of IT, familiar to most porters. The endless shuffle of broken and repaired computers kept the Upper Dispatch on ten as busy as Supply kept the Lower Dispatch on one-twenty. Mission gathered that may have changed since yesterday.

‘You on duty, son?’ Mr Wyck studied the porter’s ’chief knotted around Mission’s neck. He was a tall man with a tidy beard and bright eyes. Mission had to crane his neck to meet Wyck’s gaze.

‘Yessir,’ he said, hiding the note from Rodny behind his back. He pressed it into his pocket with his thumb, like a seed going into soil. ‘You need something moved, sir?’

‘I do.’ Mr Wyck studied him for a moment, stroked his beard. ‘You’re the Jones boy, right? The zero.’

Mission felt a flash of heat around his neck at the use of the term, a reference to the fact that no lottery number had been pulled for him. ‘Yessir. It’s Mission.’ He offered his hand. Mr Wyck accepted it.

‘Yes, yes. I went to school with your father. And your mother, of course.’

He paused to give Mission time to respond. Mission ground his teeth together and said nothing. He let go of the man’s hand before his sweaty palms had a chance to speak for him.

‘Say I wanted to move something without going through Dispatch.’ Mr Wyck smiled. His teeth were white as chalk. ‘And say I wanted to avoid the sort of nastiness that took place last night a few levels up…’

Mission glanced over at Jeffery, who seemed disinterested in the conversation. It was strange to hear this sort of offer from a man of authority, especially in front of a member of Security, but there was one thing Mission had discovered since emerging from his shadowing days: things only got darker.

‘I don’t follow,’ Mission said. He fought the urge to turn and see how far they were from the security gate. A woman emerged from an office down the hall, behind Mr Wyck. Jeffery made a gesture with his hand and she stopped and kept her distance, out of earshot.

‘I think you do, and I admire your discretion. Two hundred chits to move a package a half-dozen levels from Supply.’

Mission tried to remain calm. Two hundred chits. A month’s pay for half a day’s work. He immediately feared this was some sort of test. Maybe Rodny had gotten in trouble for flunking a similar one.

‘I don’t know—’ he said.

‘It’s an open invitation,’ Wyck said. ‘The next porter who comes through here will get the same offer. I don’t care who does it, but only one will get the chits.’ Wyck raised a hand. ‘You don’t have to answer me. Just show up and ask for Joyce at the Supply counter. Tell her you’re doing a job for Wyck. There’ll be a delivery report detailing the rest.’

‘I’ll think about it, sir.’

‘Good.’ Mr Wyck smiled.

‘Anything else?’ Mission asked.

‘No, no. You’re free to go.’ He nodded to Jeffery, who snapped back from wherever he’d checked out to.

‘Thank you, sir.’ Mission turned and followed the chief.

‘Oh, and happy birthday, son,’ Mr Wyck called out.

Mission glanced back, didn’t say thanks, just hurried after Jeffery and through the security gate, past the crowds and out onto the landing, down two turns of stairs, where he finally reached into his pocket for the note from Rodny. Paranoid that he might drop it and watch it bounce off the stairs and through the rail, he carefully unfolded the scrap of paper. It looked like the same rag blend Mrs Crowe’s note had been written on, the same threads of purple and red mixed in with the rough grey weave. For a moment, Mission feared the note would be addressed to the Crow rather than to him, maybe more lines of old nursery rhymes. He worked the piece of paper flat. One side was blank; he turned it over to read the other.

It wasn’t addressed to anyone. Just two words, which reminded Mission of the way his friend’s smile had quivered when they shook hands.

Mission felt suddenly alone. There was a burning smell lingering in the stairwell, a tinge of smoke that mixed with the paint from drying graffiti. He took the small note and tore it into ever smaller pieces. He kept tearing until there was nothing left to shred, and then sprinkled the dull confetti over the rail to drift down and disappear into the void. The evidence was gone, but the message lingered vividly in his mind. The hasty scrawl, the shadowy scratch the edge of a coin or a spoon had made as it was dragged across the paper, two words barely legible from his friend who never needed anybody or asked for anything.

And that was all.

36 • Silo 1 •

FINDING THE RIGHT silo was easy enough. Donald could study the old schematic and remember standing on those hills, peering down into the wide bowls that held each facility. The sound of grumbling ATVs came back, the plumes of dust kicked up as they bounced across the ridges where the grass had not yet filled in. He remembered that they had been growing grass over those hills, straw and seed spread everywhere, a task hindsight made both unnecessary and sad.

Standing on that ridge in his memory, he was able to picture the Tennessee delegation. It would be silo two. Once he had this, he dug deeper. It took a bit of fumbling to remember how the computer program worked, how to sift through lives that lived in databases. There was an entire history there of each silo if you knew how to read it, but it only went so far. It went back to made-up names, back to the orientation. It didn’t stretch to the Legacy beyond. The old world was hidden behind bombs and a fog of mist and forgetting.

He had the right silo, but locating Helen might prove impossible. He worked frantically while Anna sang in the shower.

She had left the bathroom door open, steam billowing out. Donald ignored what he took to be an invitation. He ignored the throbbing, the yearning, the hormonal rush of being near an ex-lover after centuries of need, and searched instead for his wife.

There were four thousand names in that first generation of silo two. Four thousand exactly. Roughly half were female. There were three Helens. Each had a grainy picture taken for her work ID stored on the servers. None of the Helens matched what he remembered his wife looking like, what he thought she looked like. Tears came unbidden. He wiped them away, furious at himself. From the shower, Anna sang a sad song from long ago while Donald flipped through random photos. After a dozen, the faces of strangers began to meld together and threaten to erode the vision he held of Helen in his memory. He went back to searching by name. Surely he could guess the name she would’ve chosen. He had picked Troy for himself those many years ago, a clue leading him back to her. He liked to think she would’ve done the same.

He tried Sandra, her mother’s name, but neither of the two hits were right. He tried Danielle, her sister’s name. One hit. Not her.

She wouldn’t come up with something random, would she? They had talked once of what they might name their kids. It was gods and goddesses, a joke at first, but Helen had fallen in love with the name Athena. He did a search. Zero hits in that first generation.

The pipes squealed as Anna turned off the shower. Her singing subsided back into a hum, a hymn for the funeral they were about to attend. Donald tried a few more names, anxious to discover something, anything. He would search every night if he had to. He wouldn’t sleep until he found her.

‘Do you need to shower before the service?’ Anna called out from the bathroom.

He didn’t want to go to the service, he nearly said. He only knew Victor as someone to fear: the grey-haired man across the hall, always watching, dispensing drugs, manipulating him. At least, that’s how the paranoia of his first shift made it all seem.

‘I’ll go like this,’ he said. He still wore the beige overalls they’d given him the day before. He flipped through random pictures again, starting at the top of the alphabet. What other name? The fear was that he’d forget what she looked like. Or that she’d look more and more like Anna in his mind. He couldn’t let that happen.

‘Find anything?’

She snuck up behind him and reached for something on the desk. A towel was wrapped around her breasts and reached the middle of her thighs. Her skin was wet. She grabbed a hairbrush and walked, humming, back to the bathroom. Donald forgot to answer. His body responded to Anna in a way that made him furious and full of guilt.

He was still married, he reminded himself. He would be until he knew what’d happened to Helen. He would be loyal to her for ever.

Loyalty.

On a whim, he searched for the name Karma.

One hit. Donald sat up straight. He hadn’t imagined a hit. It was their dog’s name, the nearest thing he and Helen ever had to a child of their own. He brought up the picture.

‘I guess we’re all wearing these horrid outfits to the funeral, right?’ Anna passed the desk as she snapped up the front of her white overalls. Donald only noticed in the corner of his tear-filled vision. He covered his mouth and felt his body tremble with suppressed sobs. On the monitor, in a tiny square of black and white pixels in the middle of a work badge, was his wife.

‘You’ll be ready to go in a few minutes, won’t you?’

Anna disappeared back into the bathroom, brushing her hair. Donald wiped his cheeks, salt on his lips while he read.

Karma Brewer. There were several occupations listed, with a badge photo for each. Teacher, School Master, Judge — more wrinkles in each picture but always the same half-smile. He opened the full file, thinking suddenly what it would’ve been like to have been on the very first shift in silo one, to watch her life unfold next door, maybe even reach out and contact her somehow. A judge. It’d been a dream of hers to be a judge one day. Donald wept while Anna hummed, and through a lens of tears, he read about his wife’s life without him.

Married, it said, which didn’t throw up any flags at first. Married, of course. To him. Until he read about her death. Eighty-two years old. Survived by Rick Brewer and two children, Athena and Mars.

Rick Brewer.

The walls and ceiling bulged inward. Donald felt a chill. There were more pictures. He followed the links to other files. To her husband’s files.

‘Mick,’ Anna whispered behind him.

Donald started and turned to find her reading over his shoulder. Drying tears streaked his face, but he didn’t care. His best friend and his wife. Two kids. He turned back to the screen and pulled up the daughter’s file. Athena’s. There were several pictures from different careers and phases of her life. She had Helen’s mouth.

‘Donny. Please don’t.’

A hand on his shoulder. Donald flinched from it and watched an animation wrought by furious clicks, this child growing into an approximation of his wife, until the girl’s own children appeared in her file.

‘Donny,’ Anna whispered. ‘We’re going to be late for the funeral.’

Donald wept. Sobs tore through him as if he were made of tissue. ‘Late,’ he cried. ‘A hundred years too late.’ He sputtered this last, overcome with misery. There was a granddaughter on the screen that was not his, a great-granddaughter one more click away. They stared out at him, all of them, none with eyes like his own.

37 • Silo 1 •

DONALD WENT TO Victor’s funeral numb. He rode the lift in silence, watched his boots kick ahead of himself as he teetered forward, but what he found on the medical level wasn’t a funeral at all — it was body disposal. They were storing the remains back in a pod because they had no dirt in which to bury their dead. The food in silo one came from cans. Their bodies returned to the same.

Donald was introduced to Erskine, who explained unprompted that the body would not rot. The same invisible machines that allowed them to survive the freezing process and turned their waking piss the colour of charcoal would keep the dead as soft and fresh as the living. The thought wasn’t a pleasant one. He watched as the man he had known as Victor was prepped for deep freeze.

They wheeled the body down a hall and through a sea of pods. The deep freeze was a cemetery, Donald saw. A grid of bodies laid flat, only a name to feebly encapsulate all that lay within. He wondered how many of the pods contained the dead. Some men must die on their shifts from natural causes. Some must break down and take their own lives as Victor had.

Donald helped the others move the body into the pod. There were only five of them present, only five who could know how Victor had died. The illusion that someone was in charge must be maintained. Donald thought of his last job, sitting at a desk, hands on a rudderless wheel, pretending. He watched Thurman as the old man kissed his palm and pressed his fingers to Victor’s cheek. The lid was closed. The cold of the room fogged their breath.

The others took turns eulogising, but Donald paid no heed. His mind was elsewhere, thinking of a woman he had loved long ago, of children he had never had. He did not cry. He had sobbed in the lift, with Anna gently holding him. Helen had died over a century ago. It had been longer than that since he’d lost her over that hill, since missing her messages, since not being able to get through to her. He remembered the national anthem and the bombs filling the air. He remembered his sister, Charlotte being there.

His sister. Family.

Donald knew Charlotte had been saved. He was overcome with a fierce urge to find her and wake her, to bring someone he loved back to life.

Erskine paid his final respects. Only five of them present to mourn this man who had killed billions. Donald felt Anna’s presence beside him and realised the lack of a crowd was in fact due to her. The five present were the only ones who knew that a woman had been woken. Her father, Dr Sneed, who had performed the procedure, Anna, Erskine, whom she spoke of as a friend, and himself.

The absurdity of Donald’s existence, of the state of the world, swooped down on him in that gathering. He did not belong. He was only there because of a girl he had dated in college, a girl whose father was a senator, whose affections had likely gotten him elected, who had dragged him into a murderous scheme, and had now pulled him from a frozen death. All the great coincidences and marvellous achievements of his life disappeared in a flash. In their place were puppet strings.

‘A tragic loss, this.’

Donald emerged from his thoughts to discover that the ceremony was over. Anna and her father stood two rows of pods away discussing something. Dr Sneed was down by the base of the pod, the panel beeping as he made adjustments. That left Donald with Erskine, a thin man with glasses and a British accent. He surveyed Donald from the opposite side of the pod.

‘He was on my shift,’ Donald said inanely, trying to explain why he was present for the service. There was little else he could think to say of the dead man. He stepped closer and peered through the little window at the calm face within.

‘I know,’ Erskine said. This wiry man, probably in his early to mid-sixties, adjusted the glasses on his narrow nose and joined Donald in peering through the small window. ‘He was quite fond of you, you know.’

‘I didn’t. I mean… he never said as much to me.’

‘He was peculiar that way.’ Erskine studied the deceased with a smile. ‘Brilliant perhaps for knowing the minds of others, just not so keen on communicating with them.’

‘Did you know him from before?’ Donald asked. He wasn’t sure how else to broach the subject. The before seemed taboo with some, freely spoken of by others.

Erskine nodded. ‘We worked together. Well, in the same hospital. We orbited each other for quite a few years until my discovery.’ He reached out and touched the glass, a final farewell to an old friend, it seemed.

‘What discovery?’ He vaguely remembered Anna mentioning something.

Erskine glanced up. Looking closer, Donald thought he may have been in his seventies. It was hard to tell. He had some of the agelessness of Thurman, like an antique that patinas and will grow no older.

‘I’m the one who discovered the great threat,’ he said. It sounded more an admission of guilt than a proud claim. His voice was tinged with sadness. At the base of the pod, Dr Sneed finished his adjustments, stood and excused himself. He steered the empty gurney towards the exit.

‘The nanos.’ Donald remembered; Anna had said as much. He watched Thurman debate something with his daughter, his fist coming down over and over into his palm, and a question came to mind. He wanted to hear it from someone else. He wanted to see if the lies matched, if that meant they might contain some truth.

‘You were a medical doctor?’ he asked.

Erskine considered the question. It seemed a simple enough one to answer.

‘Not precisely,’ he said, his accent thick. ‘I built medical doctors. Very small ones.’ He pinched the air and squinted through his glasses at his own fingers. ‘We were working on ways to keep soldiers safe, to keep them patched up. And then I found someone else’s handiwork in a sample of blood. Little machines trying to do the opposite. Machines made to fight our machines. An invisible battle raging where no one could see. It wasn’t long before I was finding the little bastards everywhere.’

Anna and Thurman headed their way. Anna donned a cap, her hair in a bun that bulged noticeably through the top. It was little disguise for what she was, useful perhaps at a distance.

‘I’d like to ask you about that sometime,’ Donald said hurriedly. ‘It might help my… help me with this problem in silo eighteen.’

‘Of course,’ Erskine said.

‘I need to get back,’ Anna told Donald. She set her lips in a thin grimace from the argument with her father, and Donald finally appreciated how trapped she truly was. He imagined a year spent in that warehouse of war, clues scattered across that planning table, sleeping on that small cot, not able even to ride up to the cafeteria to see the hills and the dark clouds or have a meal at the time of her own choosing, relying on others to bring her everything.

‘I’ll escort the young man up in a bit,’ Donald heard Erskine say, his hand resting on Donald’s shoulder. ‘I’d like to have a chat with our boy.’

Thurman narrowed his eyes but relented. Anna squeezed Donald’s hand a final time, glanced at the pod and headed towards the exit. Her father followed a few paces behind.

‘Come with me.’ Erskine’s breath fogged the air. ‘I want to show you someone.’

38 • Silo 1 •

ERSKINE PICKED HIS way through the grid of pods with purpose as though he’d walked the route dozens of times. Donald followed after, rubbing his arms for warmth. He had been too long in that crypt-like place. The cold was leaching back into his bones.

‘Thurman keeps saying we were already dead,’ he told Erskine, attacking the question head-on. ‘Is that true?’

Erskine looked back over his shoulder. He waited for Donald to catch up, seemed to consider this question.

‘Well?’ Donald asked. ‘Were we?’

‘I never saw a design with a hundred per cent efficiency,’ Erskine said. ‘We weren’t there yet with our own work, and everything from Iran and Syria was much cruder. Now, North Korea had some elegant designs. I had my money on them. What they had already built could’ve taken out most of us. That part’s true enough.’ He resumed his walk through the field of sleeping corpses. ‘Even the most severe epidemics burn themselves out,’ he said, ‘so it’s difficult to say. I argued for countermeasures. Victor argued for this.’ He spread his arms over the quiet assembly.

‘And Victor won.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Do you think he… had second thoughts? Is that why… ?’

Erskine stopped at one of the pods and placed both hands on its icy surface. ‘I’m sure we all have second thoughts,’ he said sadly. ‘But I don’t think Vic ever doubted the rightness of this mission. I don’t know why he did what he did in the end. It wasn’t like him.’

Donald peered inside the pod Erskine had led him to. There was a middle-aged woman inside, her eyelids covered in frost.

‘My daughter,’ Erskine said. ‘My only child.’

There was a moment of silence. It allowed the faint hum of a thousand pods to be heard.

‘When Thurman made the decision to wake Anna, all I could dream about was doing the same. But why? There was no reason, no need for her expertise. Caroline was an accountant. And besides, it wouldn’t be fair to drag her from her dreams.’

Donald wanted to ask if it would ever be fair. What world did Erskine expect his daughter to ever see again? When would she wake to a normal life? A happy life?

‘When I found nanos in her blood, I knew this was the right thing to do.’ He turned to Donald. ‘I know you’re looking for answers, son. We all are. This is a cruel world. It’s always been a cruel world. I spent my whole life looking for ways to make it better, to patch things up, dreaming of an ideal. But for every sot like me, there’s ten more out there trying to tear things down. And it only takes one of them to get lucky.’

Donald flashed back to the day Thurman had given him the Order. That thick book was the start of his plummet into madness. He remembered their talk in that huge chamber, the feeling of being infected, the paranoia that something harmful and invisible was invading him. But if Erskine and Thurman were telling the truth, he’d been infected long before that.

‘You weren’t poisoning me that day.’ He looked from the pod to Erskine, piecing something together. ‘The interview with Thurman, the weeks and weeks he spent in that chamber having all of those meetings. You weren’t infecting us.’

Erskine nodded ever so slightly. ‘We were healing you.’

Donald felt a sudden flash of anger. ‘Then why not heal everyone?’ he demanded.

‘We discussed that. I had the same thought. To me, it was an engineering problem. I wanted to build countermeasures, machines to kill machines before they got to us. Thurman had similar ideas. He saw it as an invisible war, one we desperately needed to take to the enemy. We all saw the battles we were accustomed to fighting, you see. I saw it in the bloodstream, Thurman in the war overseas. It was Victor who set the two of us straight.’

Erskine pulled a cloth from his breast pocket and removed his glasses. He rubbed them while he talked, his voice echoing in whispers from the walls. ‘Victor said there would be no end to it. He pointed to computer viruses to make his case, how one might run rampant through a network and cripple hundreds of millions of machines. Sooner or later, some nano attack would get through, get out of control, and there would be an epidemic built on bits of code rather than strands of DNA.’

‘So what? We’ve dealt with plagues before. Why would this be different?’ Donald swept his arms at the pods. ‘Tell me how the solution isn’t worse than the problem?’

As worked up as he felt, he also sensed how much angrier he would be if he heard this from Thurman. He wondered if he’d been set up to have a kindlier man, a stranger, take him aside and tell him what Thurman thought he needed to hear. It was hard not to be paranoid about being manipulated, not to feel the strings knotted to his joints.

‘Psychology,’ Erskine replied. He put his glasses back on. ‘This is where Victor set us straight, why our ideas would never work. I’ll never forget the conversation. We were sitting in the cafeteria at Walter Reed Hospital. Thurman was there to hand out ribbons, but really to meet with the two of us.’ He shook his head. ‘It was crowded in there. If anyone knew the things we were discussing—’

‘Psychology,’ Donald reminded him. ‘Tell me how this is better. More people die this way.’

Erskine snapped back to the present. ‘That’s where we were wrong, just like you. Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made — the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?’ Erskine interlocked his fingers. ‘We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.’ He frowned. ‘A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.’

He spread his hands open. ‘When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.’

Donald shook his head. He didn’t know what to believe. But then he thought about the fear and rage he’d felt when he thought he’d been infected by something in that chamber. Meanwhile, he never worried about the billions of creatures swimming in his gut and doing so since the day he was born.

‘We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,’ Erskine said. ‘We can pick and choose until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Of course he was perfectly right. It was the man-made part that would’ve caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.’

Erskine paused for a moment. Donald’s mind was racing.

‘You know, Vic once said that if these terrorists had an ounce of sense, they would’ve simply announced what they were working on and then sat back to watch things burn on their own. He said that’s all it would take, us knowing that it was happening, that the end of any of us could come silent, invisible and at any time.’

‘And so the solution was to burn it all to the ground ourselves?’ Donald ran his hands through his hair, trying to make sense of it all. He thought of a firefighting technique that always seemed just as confusing to him, the burning of wide swathes of forest to prevent a fire from spreading. And he knew in Iran, when oil wells were set ablaze during the first war, that sometimes the only cure was to set off a bomb, to fight the inferno with something greater.

‘Believe me,’ Erskine said, ‘I came up with my own complaints. Endless complaints. But I knew the truth from the beginning, it just took me a while to accept it. Thurman was won over more easily. He saw at once that we needed to get off this ball of rock, to start over. But the cost of travel was too great—’

‘Why travel through space,’ Donald interrupted, ‘when you can travel through time?’ He remembered a conversation in Thurman’s office. The old man had told him what he was planning that very first day, but Donald hadn’t heard.

Erskine’s eyes widened. ‘Yes. That was his argument. He’d seen enough war, I suppose. Me, I didn’t have Thurman’s experiences or the professional… distance Vic enjoyed. It was the analogy of the computer virus that wore me down, seeing these nanos like a new cyber war. I knew what they could do, how fast they could restructure themselves, evolve, if you will. Once it started, it would only stop when we were no longer around. And maybe not even then. Every defence would become a blueprint for the next attack. The air would choke with our invisible armies. There would be great clouds of them, mutating and fighting without need of a host. And once the public saw this and knew…’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘Hysteria,’ Donald muttered.

Erskine nodded.

‘You said it might not ever end, even if we were gone. Does that mean they’re still out there? The nanos?’

Erskine glanced up at the ceiling. ‘The world outside isn’t just being scrubbed of humans right now, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s being reset. All of our experiments are being removed. By the grace of God, it’ll be a very long time indeed before we think to perform them again.’

Donald remembered from orientation that the combined shifts would last five hundred years. Half a millennium of living underground. How much scrubbing was necessary? And what was to keep them from heading down that same path a second time? How would any of them unlearn the potential dangers? You don’t get the fire back in the box once you’ve unleashed it.

‘You asked me if Victor had regrets—’ Erskine coughed into his fist and nodded. ‘I do think he felt something close to that once. It was something he said to me as he was coming off his eighth or ninth shift, I don’t remember which. I think I was heading into my sixth. This was just after the two of you worked together, after that nasty business with silo twelve—’

‘My first shift,’ Donald said, since Erskine seemed to be counting. He wanted to add that it was his only shift.

‘Yes, of course.’ Erskine adjusted his glasses. ‘I’m sure you knew him well enough to know that he didn’t show his emotions often.’

‘He was difficult to read,’ Donald agreed. He knew almost nothing of the man he had just helped to bury.

‘So you’ll appreciate this, I think. We were riding the lift together, and Vic turns to me and says how hard it is to sit there at that desk of his and see what we’re doing to the men across the hall. He meant you, of course. People in your position.’

Donald tried to imagine the man he knew saying such a thing. He wanted to believe it.

‘But that’s not what really struck me. I’ve never seen him sadder than when he said the following. He said…’ Erskine rested a hand on the pod. ‘He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you — he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge.’

‘People like me?’ Donald shook his head. ‘What does that even mean?’

Erskine smiled. ‘I asked him precisely that. His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.’

39 • Silo 1 •

THAT NIGHT, ANNA came to him. After a day of numbness and dwelling on death, of eating meals brought down by Thurman and not tasting a bite, of watching her set up a computer for him and spread out folders of notes, she came to him in the darkness.

Donald complained. He tried to push her away. She sat on the edge of the cot and held his wrists while he sobbed and grew feeble. He thought of Erskine’s story, on what it meant to do the right thing rather than the correct thing, what the difference was. He thought this as an old lover draped herself across him, her hand on the back of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder, lying there against him while he wept.

A century of sleep had weakened him, he thought. A century of sleep and the knowledge that Mick and Helen had lived a life together. He felt suddenly angry at Helen for not holding out, for not living alone, for not getting his messages and meeting him over the hill.

Anna kissed his cheek and whispered that everything would be okay. Fresh tears flowed down Donald’s face as he realised that he was everything Victor had assumed he wasn’t. He was a miserable human being for wishing his wife to be lonely so that he could sleep at night a hundred years later. He was a miserable human being for denying her that solace when Anna’s touch made him feel so much better.

‘I can’t,’ he whispered for the dozenth time.

‘Shhh,’ Anna said. She brushed his hair back in the darkness. And the two of them were alone in that room where wars were waged. They were trapped together with those crates of arms, with guns and ammo, and far more dangerous things.

40 • Silo 18 •

MISSION WOUND HIS way towards Central Dispatch and agonised over what to do for Rodny. He felt afraid for his friend but powerless to help. The door they had him behind was unlike any he’d ever seen: thick and solid, gleaming and daunting. If the trouble his friend had caused could be measured by where they were keeping him—

He shuddered to continue that line of thought. It’d only been a few months since the last cleaning. Mission had been there, had carried up part of the suit from IT, a more haunting experience than porting a body for burial. Dead bodies at least were placed in the black bags the coroners used. The cleaning suit was a different sort of bag, tailored to a living soul that would crawl inside and be forced to die within.

Mission remembered where they had picked up the gear. It’d been a room right down the hall from where Rodny was being kept. Weren’t cleanings run by the same department? He shivered. One slip of a tongue could land a body out there, rotting on the hills, and his friend Rodny was known to wag his dangerously.

First his mother, and now his best friend. Mission wondered what the Pact said about volunteering to clean in one’s stead, if it said anything at all. Amazing that he could live under the rules of a document he’d never read. He just assumed others had, all the people in charge, and that they were operating by its codes in good faith.

On fifty-eight, a porter’s ’chief tied to the downbound railing caught his attention. It was the same blue pattern as the ’chief worn around his neck, but with a bright red merchant’s hem. Duty beckoned, dispelling thoughts that were spiralling nowhere. Mission unknotted the ’chief and searched the fabric for the merchant’s stamp. It was Drexel’s, the apothecarist down the hall. Light loads and lighter pay, normally. But at least it was downbound, unless Drexel had been careless again with which rail he tied it to.

Mission was dying to get to Central where a shower and a change of clothes awaited, but if anyone spotted him with a flat pack marching past a signal ’chief, he’d hear it from Roker and the others. He hurried inside to Drexel’s, praying it wasn’t a round of meds going to several dozen individual apartments. His legs ached just at the thought of it.

Drexel was at the counter as Mission pushed open the apothecarist’s squeaky door. A large man with a full beard and a balding head, Drexel was something of a fixture in the mids. Many came to him rather than to the doctors, though Mission wasn’t sure how sound a choice that was. Often, it was the man with the most promises who got the chits, not the one who made people better.

A handful of the seemingly sick sat on Drexel’s waiting-room bench, sniffling and coughing. Mission felt the urge to cover his mouth with his ’chief. Instead, he innocuously held his breath and waited while Drexel filled a small square of paper with ground powder, folding it neatly before handing it to the woman waiting. The woman slid a few chits across the counter. When she walked away, Mission tossed the signal ’chief on top of the money.

‘Ah, Mish. Good to see you, boy. Looking fit as a fiddle.’ Drexel smoothed his beard and smiled, yellow teeth peering out from cornrows of drooping whiskers.

‘Same,’ Mission said politely, braving a breath. ‘Got something for me?’

‘I do. One sec.’

Drexel disappeared behind a wall of shelves crammed full of tiny vials and jars. The apothecarist reappeared with a small sack. ‘Meds for down below,’ he said.

‘I can take them as far as Central and have Dispatch send them from there,’ Mission told him. ‘I’m just finishing up a shift.’

Drexel frowned and rubbed his beard. ‘I suppose that’ll do. And Dispatch’ll bill me?’

Mission held out a palm. ‘If you tip,’ he said.

‘Aye, a tip. But only if you solve a riddle.’ Drexel leaned on the counter, which seemed to sag beneath his bulk. The last thing Mission wanted to hear was another of the old man’s riddles and then not get paid. Always an excuse with Drexel to keep a chit on his side of the counter.

‘Okay,’ the apothecarist began, tugging on his whiskers. ‘Which one weighs more, a bag full of seventy-eight pounds of feathers, or a bag full of seventy-eight pounds of rocks?’

Mission didn’t hesitate with his answer. ‘The bag of feathers,’ he declared. He’d heard this one before. It was a riddle made for a porter, and he had thought on it long enough between the levels to come up with his own answer, one different from the obvious.

‘Incorrect!’ Drexel roared, waving a finger. ‘It isn’t the rocks—’ His face dimmed. ‘Wait. Did you say the feathers?’ He shook his head. ‘No, boy, they weigh the same.’

‘The contents weigh the same,’ Mission told him. ‘The bag of feathers would have to be bigger. You said they were both full, which means a bigger bag with more material, and so it weighs more.’ He held out his palm. Drexel stood there, chewing his beard for a moment, thrown off his game. Begrudgingly, he took two coins from the lady’s pay and placed them in Mission’s hand. Mission accepted them and stuffed the sack of meds into his pack before cinching it up tight.

‘The bigger bag—’ Drexel muttered, as Mission hurried off, past the benches, holding his breath again as he went, the pills rattling in his sack.

The apothecarist’s annoyance was worth far more than the tip, but Mission appreciated both. The enjoyment faded, however, as he spiralled down through a tense silo. He saw deputies on one landing, hands on their guns, trying to calm down fighting neighbours. The glass on the windows peeking into a shop on sixty-two was broken and covered with a sheet of plastic. Mission was pretty sure that was recent. A woman on sixty-four sat by the rails and sobbed into her palms, and Mission watched as people passed her by without stopping. On down he went as well, the stairway trembling, the graffiti on the walls warning him of what was yet to come.

He arrived at Central Dispatch to find it eerily quiet, made his way past the sorting rooms with their tall shelves of items needing delivery and went straight to the main counter. He would drop off his current package and pick out his next job before changing and showering. Katelyn was working the counter. There were no other porters queued up. Off licking their wounds, perhaps. Or maybe seeing to their families during this recent spate of violence.

‘Hey, Katelyn.’

‘Mish.’ She smiled. ‘You look intact.’

He laughed and touched his nose, which was still sore. ‘Thanks.’

‘Cam just passed through asking where you were.’

‘Yeah?’ Mission was surprised. He figured his friend would be taking a day off with the bonus from the coroner. ‘Did he pick something up?’

‘Yup. He requested anything heading towards Supply. Was in a better mood than usual, though he seemed miffed to have been left out of last night’s adventures.’

‘He heard about that, huh?’ Mission sorted through the delivery list. He was looking for something upbound. Mrs Crowe would know what to do about Rodny. Maybe she could find out from the mayor what he was being punished for, perhaps put in a good word for him.

‘Wait,’ he said, glancing up at Katelyn. ‘What do you mean he was in a good mood? And he was heading for Supply?’ Mission thought of the job he’d been offered by Wyck. The head of IT had said Mission wouldn’t be the last to hear of the offer. Maybe he hadn’t been the first, either. ‘Where was Cam coming from?’

Katelyn touched her fingers to her tongue and flipped through the old log. ‘I think his last delivery was a broken computer heading to—’

‘That little rat.’ Mission slapped the counter. ‘You got anything else heading down? Maybe to Supply or Chemical?’

She checked her computer, fingers clacking furiously, the rest of her perfectly serene. ‘We’re so slow right now,’ she said apologetically. ‘I’ve got something from Mechanical back up to Supply. Forty-five pounds. No rush. Standard freight.’ She peered across the counter at Mission, seeing if he was interested.

‘I’ll take it,’ he said. But he didn’t plan on heading straight to Mechanical. If he raced, maybe he could beat Cam to Supply and do that other job for Wyck. That was the way in he was looking for. It wasn’t the money he wanted, it was having an excuse to go back to thirty-four to collect his pay, another chance to see Rodny, see what kind of help his friend needed, what sort of trouble he was truly in.

41 • Silo 18 •

MISSION MADE RECORD time downbound. It helped that traffic was light, but it wasn’t a good sign that he didn’t pass Cam on the way. The kid must’ve had a good head start. Either that, or Mission had gotten lucky and had overtaken him while he was off the stairway for a bathroom break.

Pausing for a moment on the landing outside of Supply, Mission caught his breath and dabbed the sweat from his neck. He still hadn’t had his shower. Maybe after he found Cam and took care of this job in Mechanical, he could get cleaned up and get some proper rest. Lower Dispatch would have a change of clothes for him, and then he could figure out what to do about Rodny. So much to think about. A blessing that it took his mind off his birthday.

Inside Supply, he found a handful of people waiting at the counter. No sign of Cam. If the boy had come and gone already, he must’ve flown, and the delivery must have been heading further down. Mission tapped his foot and waited his turn. Once at the counter, he asked for Joyce, just like Wyck had said. The man pointed to a heavyset woman with long braids at the other end of the counter. Mission recognized her. She handled a lot of the flow of equipment marked special for IT. He waited until she was done with her customer, then asked for any deliveries under the name of Wyck.

She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You got a glitch at Dispatch?’ she asked. ‘Done handed that one off.’ She waved for the next person in line.

‘Could you tell me where it was heading?’ Mission asked. ‘I was sent to relieve the other guy. His… his mother is sick. They’re not sure if she’s gonna make it.’

Mission winced at the lie. The lady behind the counter twisted her mouth in disbelief.

‘Please,’ he begged. ‘It really is important.’

She hesitated. ‘It was going six flights down to an apartment. I don’t have the exact number. It was on the delivery report.’

‘Six down.’ Mission knew the level. One-sixteen was residential except for the handful of less-than-legal businesses being run out of a few apartments. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He slapped the counter and hurried towards the exit. It was on his way to Mechanical, anyway. He might be too late for Wyck’s delivery, but he could ask Cam if he might pick up the pay for him, offer him a vacation chit in return. Or he could just flat out tell him an old friend was in trouble, and he needed to get through security. If not, he’d have to wait for an IT request to hit Dispatch and be the first to jump on it. And he’d have to hope that Rodny had that much time.

He was four levels down, formulating a dozen such plans, when the blast went off.

The great stairwell lurched as if thrown sideways. Mission slammed against the rail and nearly went over. He wrapped his arms around the trembling steel and held on.

There was a shriek, a chorus of groans. He watched, his head out in the space beyond the railing, as the landing two levels below twisted away from the staircase. The metal sang and cried out as it was ripped free and went tumbling into the depths.

More than one body plummeted after. The receding figures performed cartwheels in space.

Mission tore himself away from the sight. A few steps down from him, a woman remained on her hands and knees, looking up at Mission with wild and frightened eyes. There was a distant crash, impossibly far below.

I don’t know, he wanted to say. There was that question in her eyes, the same one pounding in his skull, echoing with the sound of the blast. What the hell just happened? Is this it? Has it begun?

He considered running up, away from the explosion, but there were screams coming from below and a porter had a duty to those on the stairwell in need. He helped the woman to her feet and bid her upward. Already the smell of something acrid and the haze of smoke were filling the air. ‘Go,’ he urged, and then he spiralled down against the sudden flow of upward traffic. Cam was down there. Where his friend had gone with the package and where the blast had occurred were still coincidence in Mission’s rattled mind.

The landing below held a crush of people. Residents and shopkeeps crowded out of the doors and fought for a spot at the rail that they might gaze over at the wreckage one flight further down. Mission fought his way through, yelling Cam’s name, keeping an eye out for his friend. A bedraggled couple staggered up to the crowded landing with hollow eyes, clutching the railing and each other. He didn’t see Cam anywhere.

He raced down five turns of the central post, his normally deft feet stumbling on the slick treads, around and around. It’d been the level Cam was heading towards, right? Six down. Level one-sixteen. He would be okay. He must be okay. And then the sight of those people tumbling through the air flashed in Mission’s mind. It was an image he knew he’d never forget. Surely Cam wasn’t among them. The boy was late or early to everything, never right on time.

He made the last turn, and where the next landing should have been was empty space. The rails of the great spiral staircase had been ripped outward before parting. A few of the steps sagged away from the central post, and Mission could feel a pull towards the edge, the void clawing at him. There was nothing there to stop him from going over. The steel felt slick beneath his boots.

Across a gap of torn and twisted steel, the doorway to one-sixteen was missing. In its place stood a pocket of crumbling cement and dark iron bars bent outward like hands reaching for the vanished landing. White powder drifted down from the ceiling beyond the rubble. Unbelievably, there were sounds beyond the veil of dust: coughs and shouts. Screams for help.

‘Porter!’ someone yelled from above.

Mission carefully slid to the edge of the sloping and bent steps. He held the railing where it had been torn free. It was warm to the touch. Leaning out, he studied the crowd fifty feet above him at the next landing, searching for the person who had called out for him.

Someone pointed when they spotted him leaning out, spotted the ’chief around his neck.

‘There he is!’ a woman shrieked, one of the mad-eyed women who had staggered past him as he hurried down, one of those who had survived. ‘The porter did it!’ she yelled.

42 • Silo 18 •

MISSION TURNED AND ran as the stairway thundered and clanged with the descending mob. He stumbled downward, a hand on the inner post, watching for the return of the railing. So much had been pulled away. The stairs were unstable from the damage. He had no idea why he was being chased. It took a full turn of the staircase for the railing to reappear and for him to feel safe at such speeds. It took just as long to realize that Cam was dead. His friend had delivered a package, and now he was dead. He and many others. One glance at his blue ’chief and someone above must’ve thought it was Mission who’d made the delivery. It very nearly had been.

Another crowd at landing one-seventeen. Tear-streaked faces, a woman trembling, her arms wrapped around herself, a man covering his face, all looking up or down beyond the rails. They had seen the wreckage tumble past. Mission hurried on. Lower Dispatch on one-twenty was the only haven between him and Mechanical. He hurried there as a violent scream approached from above and came much too fast.

Mission started and nearly fell as the wailing person flew towards him. He waited for someone to tackle him from behind, but the sound whizzed past beyond the rail. Another person. Falling, alive and screaming, plummeting towards the depths. The loose steps and empty space above had claimed one of those chasing him.

He quickened his pace, leaving the inner post for the outer rail where the curve of the steps was broader and smoother, where the force of his descent tugged him against the steel bar. Here, he could move faster. He tried not to think of what would happen if he came across a gap in the steel. He ran, smoke stinging his eyes, the clang and clamour of his own feet and that of the others above, not realising at first that the haze in the air wasn’t from the ruin he had left behind. The smoke all around him was rising.

43 • Silo 1 •

DONALD’S BREAKFAST OF powdered eggs and shredded potatoes had long grown cold. He rarely touched the food brought down by Thurman and Erskine, preferring instead the bland stuff in the unlabelled silver cans he had discovered among the storeroom’s vacuum-sealed crates. It wasn’t just the matter of trust — it was the rebelliousness of it all, the empowerment that came from taking command of his own survival. He stabbed a yellowish-orange gelatinous blob that he assumed had once been part of a peach and put it in his mouth. He chewed, tasting nothing. He pretended it tasted like a peach.

Across the wide table, Anna fiddled with the dials on her radio and sipped loudly from a mug of cold coffee. A nest of wires ran from a black box to her computer, and a soft hiss of static filled the room.

‘It’s too bad we can’t get a better station,’ Donald said morosely. He speared another wedge of mystery fruit and popped it into his mouth. Mango, he told himself, just for variety.

‘No station is the best station,’ she said, referring to her hope that the towers of silo forty and its neighbours would remain silent. She had tried to explain what she was doing to cut off any unlikely survivors, but little of it made any sense to Donald. A year ago, supposedly, silo forty had hacked the system. It was assumed to have been a rogue head of IT. No one else could be expected to possess the expertise and access required of such a feat. By the time the camera feeds were cut, every failsafe had already been severed. Attempts had been made to terminate the silo, but there was no way to verify them. It became obvious these attempts had failed when the darkness started to spread to other silos.

Thurman, Erskine and Victor had been woken according to protocol, one after the other. Further failsafes proved ineffective, and Erskine worried the hacking had progressed to the level of the nanos, that the machines in the air were being reprogrammed, that everything was in jeopardy. After much cajoling, Thurman had convinced the other two that Anna could help. Her research at MIT had been in wireless harmonics; remote charging technology; the ability to assume control of electronics via radio.

She’d eventually been able to commandeer the collapse mechanism of the afflicted silos. Donald still had nightmares thinking about it. While she described the process, he had studied the wall schematic of a standard silo. He had pictured the blasts that freed the layers of heavy concrete between the levels, sending them like dominoes down to the bottom, crushing everything and everyone in-between. Stacks of concrete fifty feet thick had been cut loose to turn entire societies into rubble. These underground buildings had been designed from the beginning so they could be brought down like any other — and remotely. That such a failsafe was even needed seemed as sick to Donald as the solution was cruel.

All that now remained of those silos was the hiss and crackle of their dead radios, a chorus of ghosts. The silo heads in the rest of the facilities hadn’t even been told of the calamity. There would be no red Xs on their schematics to haunt their days. The various heads had little contact with each other as it was. The greater worry was of the panic spreading.

But Victor had known. And Donald suspected it was this heavy burden that had led him to take his own life, rather than any of the theories Thurman had offered. Thurman was so in awe of Victor’s supposed brilliance that he searched for purpose behind his suicide, some conspiratorial cause. Donald was verging on the sad realisation that humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going.

He took a sip of tomato juice from a punctured can and reached for two pieces of paper amid the carpet of notes and reports around his keyboard. The fate of silo eighteen supposedly rested on something in these two pages. They were copies of the same report. One was a virgin printout of the report he’d written long ago on the fall of silo twelve. Donald barely remembered writing it. And now he had stared at it so long, the meaning had been squeezed out of it, like a word that, repeated too often, devolves into mere noise.

The other copy showed the notes Victor had scrawled across the face of this report. He had used a red pen, and someone upstairs had managed to pull just this colour off in order to make both versions more legible. By copying the red, however, they had also transferred a fine mist and a few splatters of his blood. These marks were gruesome reminders that the report had been atop Victor’s desk in the final moments of his life.

After three days of study, Donald was beginning to suspect that the report was nothing more than a scrap of paper. Why else write across the top of it? And yet Victor had told Thurman several times that the key to quelling the violence in silo eighteen lay right there, in Donald’s report. Victor had argued for Donald to be pulled from the deep freeze, but hadn’t been able to get Erskine or Thurman to side with him. So this was all Donald had: a liar’s account of what a dead man had said.

Liars and dead men — two parties unskilled at dispensing the truth.

The scrap of paper with the red ink and rust-coloured bloodstains offered little help. There were a few lines that resonated, however. They reminded Donald of how horoscopes were able to land vague and glancing blows, which gave credence to all their other feints.

The One who remembers had been written in bold and confident letters across the centre of the report. Donald couldn’t help but feel that this referred to him and his resistance to the medication. Hadn’t Anna said that Victor spoke of him frequently, that he wanted him awake for testing or questioning? Other musings were vague and dire in equal measure. This is why, Victor had written. Also: An end to them all.

Had he meant the why of his suicide or the why of silo eighteen’s violence? And an end to all of what?

In many ways, the cycle of violence in silo eighteen was no different than what took place elsewhere. Beyond being more severe, it was the same waxing and waning of the mobs, of each generation revolting against the last, a fifteen-to-twenty-year cycle of bloody upheaval.

Victor had written much on the subject. He’d left reports behind about everything from primate behaviour to the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There was one that Donald found especially disturbing. It detailed how primates came of age and attempted to overthrow their fathers, the alpha males. It told of chimps that committed infanticide, males snatching the young from their mothers and taking them into the trees where their arms and legs were ripped, limb from limb, from their small bodies. Victor had written that this put the females back into oestrus. It made room for the next generation.

Donald had a hard time believing any of this was true. He had a harder time making sense of a report about frontal lobes and how long they took to develop in humans. Maybe this was important to unravelling some mystery. Or perhaps it was the ravings of a man losing his mind — or a man discovering his conscience and coming to grips with what he’d done to the world.

Donald studied his old report and searched through Victor’s notes, looking for the answer. He fell into a routine that Anna had long ago perfected. They slept, ate and worked. They emptied bottles of Scotch at night, one burning sip at a time, and left them standing like factory smokestacks amid the diagram of silos. In the mornings, they took turns in the shower, Anna brazen with her nakedness, Donald wishing she wouldn’t be. Her presence became an intoxicant from the past, and Donald began to assemble a new reality in his mind: he and Anna were working on one more secret project together; Helen was back in Savannah; Mick wasn’t making it to the meetings; Donald couldn’t raise either of them because his phone wouldn’t work.

It was always that his phone didn’t work. Just one text getting through on the day of the convention and Helen might be down in the deep freeze, asleep in her pod. He could visit her the way Erskine visited his daughter. They would be together again once all the shifts were over.

In another version of the same dream, Donald imagined that he was able to crest that hill and make it to the Tennessee side. Bombs exploded in the air; frightened people dived into their holes; a young girl sang with a voice so pure. In this fantasy, he and Helen disappeared into the same earth. They had children and grandchildren and were buried together.

Dreams such as these haunted him when he allowed Anna to touch him, to lie in his cot for an hour before bedtime, just the sound of her breathing, her head on his chest, the smell of alcohol on both their breaths. He would lie there and tolerate it, suffer how good it felt, her hand resting on his neck, and only fall asleep after she grew uncomfortable from the cramped quarters and moved back to her own cot.

In the morning, she would sing in the shower, steam billowing into the war room, while Donald returned to his studies. He would log on to her computer where he was able to dig through the files in Victor’s personal directories. He could see when these files had been created, accessed and how often. One of the oldest and most recently opened was a list with all the silos ranked in order. Number eighteen was near the top, but it wasn’t clear if this was a measure of trouble or worth. And why rank them to begin with? For what purpose?

He also used Anna’s computer to search for his sister Charlotte. She wasn’t listed in the pods below, nor under any name or picture that he could find. But she had been there during orientation. He remembered her being led off with the other women and being put to sleep. And now she seemed to have vanished. But to where?

So many questions. He stared at the two reports, the awful, dead sound of static leaking from the radio, the weight of all the earth above pushing down upon him, and he began to wonder, if he fixated on Victor’s notes too closely, if perhaps he would reach the same conclusion.

44 • Silo 1 •

WHEN HE COULD no longer look at the notes, Donald went for what had become his customary stroll among the guns and drones in the storeroom. This was his escape from the hiss of the radio static and the cramped confines of their makeshift home, and it was during these laps that he came nearest to clearing his head from his dreams, from the prior night’s bottle of Scotch, and from the mix of emotions he was beginning to feel for Anna.

Most of all, he walked those laps and tried to make sense of this new world. He puzzled over what Thurman and Victor had planned for the silos. Five hundred years below ground, and then what? Donald desperately wanted to know. And here was when he felt truly alive: when he was taking action, when he was digging for answers. It was the same fleeting sense of power he had felt from refusing their pills, from staining his fingers blue and tonguing the ulcers that formed in his cheeks.

During these aimless wanderings, he looked through the many plastic crates lining the floors and walls of the huge room. He found the one with the missing firearm, the one he assumed Victor had stolen. The airtight seal was broken and the other guns inside reeked of grease. Some crates, he discovered, contained folded uniforms and suits like astronauts wore, vacuum sealed in thick plastic; others held helmets with large domes and metal collars. There were flashlights with red lenses, food and medical kits, backpacks, rounds and rounds of ammo, and myriad other devices and gadgets he could only guess at. He had found a laminated map in one crate, a chart of the fifty silos. There were red lines that radiated from the silos, one from each, and met at a single point in the distance. Donald had traced the lines with his finger, holding the map up to catch the light spilling from the distant office. He had puzzled over it and then put it back in its place, clues to a mystery he couldn’t define.

This time, he stopped during his lap to perform a set of jumping jacks in the wide aisles between the sleeping drones. The exercise had been a struggle just two days ago, but the chill seemed to be melting from his veins. And the more he pushed himself, the more awake and alert he seemed to become. He did seventy-five, ten more than yesterday. After catching his breath, he dropped down to see how many push-ups he could do on his atrophied muscles. And it was here, on the third day of his captivity, his face barely an inch above the steel floor, that he discovered the launch lift, a garage door that barely came to his waist but was wide enough to handle the wingspan of the drones lurking beneath the tarps.

Donald rose from his push-up and approached the low door. The entire storehouse was kept incredibly dim, this wall almost pitch black. He thought about going for one of the flashlights when he saw the red handle. A tug, and the corrugated door slid up into the wall. On his hands and knees, Donald explored the cavity beyond, which went back over a dozen feet. There were no buttons or levers that he could feel along the walls, no method of operating the lift.

Curious, he crawled out to grab a flashlight. As he turned, he spotted another door along the darkened wall. Donald tried the handle and found it unlocked, a dim hallway beyond. He fumbled for a light switch and the overhead bulbs flickered hesitantly. He crept inside and pulled the door shut behind him.

The hallway ran fifty paces to a door at the far end, a pair of doors on either side. More offices, he assumed, similar to the home Anna had carved out in the back of the warehouse. He tried the first door and the odour of mothballs wafted out. Inside, there were rows of bunks, the shuffle of recent footsteps in a layer of dust, and a gap where two small beds formerly lay. The absence of people could be felt. He peeked into the door across the hall and found bathroom stalls and a cluster of showers.

The next two doors were more of the same, except for a row of urinals in the bathroom. Perhaps people had lived down there to keep up with the munitions, but Donald didn’t remember anyone coming to that level during his first shift. No, these were quarters kept for another time, much like the machines beneath the tarps. He left the bathroom to the ghosts and checked the door at the end of the hall.

Inside, he found sheets of plastic thrown over tables and chairs, a fine mist of dust settled on top. Donald approached one of the tables and saw the computer display beneath the sheet. The chairs were attached to the desks, and there was something familiar about the knobs and levers. He knelt and fumbled for the edge of the plastic and peeled it up noisily.

The flight controls took him back to another life. Here was the stick his sister had called a yoke, the pedals beneath the seat she had called something else, the throttle and all the other dials and indicators. Donald remembered touring her training facility after she graduated from flight school. They had flown to Colorado for her ceremony. He remembered watching a screen just like this as her drone took to the air and joined a formation of others. He remembered the view of Colorado from the nose of her graceful machine in flight.

He glanced around the room at the dozen or so stations. The obvious need for the place slammed into him. He imagined voices in the hallway, men and women showering and chatting, towels being snapped at asses, someone looking to borrow a razor, a shift of pilots sitting at these desks where coffee could lie perfectly still in steaming mugs as death was rained down from above.

Donald returned the plastic sheet. He thought of his sister, asleep and hidden some levels below where he couldn’t find her, and he wondered if she hadn’t been brought there as a surprise for him at all. Maybe she had been brought as a surprise for some future others.

And suddenly, thinking of her, thinking of a time lost to dreams and lonely tears, Donald found himself patting his pockets in search of something. Pills. An old prescription with her name on it. Helen had forced him to see a doctor, hadn’t she? And Donald suddenly knew why he couldn’t forget, why their drugs didn’t work on him. The realisation came with a powerful longing to find his sister. Charlotte was the why. She was the answer to one of Thurman’s riddles.

45 • Silo 1 •

‘I WANT TO see her first,’ Donald demanded. ‘Let me see her, and then I’ll tell you.’

He waited for Thurman or Dr Sneed to reply. The three of them stood in Sneed’s office on the cryopod wing. Donald had bargained his way down the lift with Thurman, and now he bargained further. He suspected it was his sister’s medication that explained why he couldn’t forget. He would exchange this discovery for another. He wanted to know where she was, wanted to see her.

Something unspoken passed between the two men. Thurman turned to Donald with a warning. ‘She will not be woken,’ he said. ‘Not even for this.’

Donald nodded. He saw how only those who made the laws were allowed to break them.

Dr Sneed turned to the computer on his desk. ‘I’ll look her up.’

‘No need,’ Thurman said. ‘I know where she is.’

He led them out of the office and down the hall, past the main shift rooms where Donald had awoken as Troy all those years ago, past the deep freeze where he had spent a century asleep, all the way to another door just like the others.

The code Thurman entered was different; Donald could tell by the discordant four-note song the buttons made. Above the keypad in small stencilled letters he made out the words Emergency Personnel. Locks whirred and ground like old bones, and the door gradually opened.

Steam followed them inside, the warm air from the hallway hitting the mortuary cool. There were fewer than a dozen rows of pods, perhaps fifty or sixty units in total, little more than a full shift. Donald peered into one of the coffin-like units, the ice a spiderweb of blue and white on the glass, and saw inside a thick and chiselled visage. A frozen soldier, or so his imagination told him.

Thurman led them through the rows and columns before stopping at one of the pods. He rested his hands on its surface with something like affection. His exhalations billowed into the air. It made his white hair and stark beard appear as though they were frosted with ice.

‘Charlotte,’ Donald breathed, peering in at his sister. She hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged a bit. Even the blue cast of her skin seemed normal and expected. He was growing used to seeing people this way.

He rubbed the small window to clear the web of frost and marvelled at his thin hands and seemingly fragile joints. He had atrophied. He had grown older while his sister had remained the same.

‘I locked her away like this once,’ he said, gazing in at her. ‘I locked her away in my memory like this when she went off to war. Our parents did the same. She was just little Charla.’

Glancing away from her, he studied the two men on the other side of the pod. Sneed started to say something, but Thurman placed a hand on the doctor’s arm. Donald turned back to his sister.

‘Of course, she grew up more than we knew. She was killing people over there. We talked about it years later, after I was in office and she’d figured I’d grown up enough.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘My kid sister, waiting for me to grow up.’

A tear plummeted to the frozen pane of glass. The salt cut through the ice and left a clear track behind. Donald wiped it away with a squeak, then felt frightened he might disturb her.

‘They would get her up in the middle of the night,’ he said. ‘Whenever a target was deemed… what did she call it? Actionable. They would get her up. She said it was strange to go from dreaming to killing. How none of it made sense. How she would go back to sleep and see the video feeds in her mind — that last view from an incoming missile as she guided it into its target—’

He took a breath and gazed up at Thurman.

‘I thought it was good that she couldn’t be hurt, you know? She was safe in a trailer somewhere, not up there in the sky. But she complained about it. She told her doctor that it didn’t feel right, being safe and doing what she did. The people on the front lines, they had fear as an excuse. They had self-preservation. A reason to kill. Charlotte used to kill people and then go to the mess hall and eat a piece of pie. That’s what she told her doctor. She would eat something sweet and not be able to taste it.’

‘What doctor was this?’ Sneed asked.

‘My doctor,’ Donald said. He wiped his cheek, but he wasn’t ashamed of the tears. Being by his sister’s side had him feeling brave and bold, less alone. He could face the past and the future, both. ‘Helen was worried about my re-election. Charlotte already had a prescription, had been diagnosed with PTSD after her first tour, and so we kept filling it under her name, even under her insurance.’

Sneed waved his hand, stirring the air for more information. ‘What prescription?’

‘Propra,’ Thurman said. ‘She’d been taking propra, hadn’t she? And you were worried about the press finding out that you were self-medicating.’

Donald nodded. ‘Helen was worried. She thought it might come out that I was taking something for my… wilder thoughts. The pills helped me forget them, kept me level. I could study the Order, and all I saw were the words, not the implications. There was no fear.’ He looked at his sister, understanding finally why she had refused to take the meds. She wanted the fear. It was necessary somehow, had made her feel more human.

‘I remember you telling me she was on them,’ Thurman said. ‘We were in the bookstore—’

‘Do you remember your dosage?’ Sneed asked. ‘How long were you on it?’

‘I started taking it after I was given the Order to read.’ He watched Thurman for any hint of expression and got nothing. ‘I guess that was two or three years before the convention. I took them nearly every day right up until then.’ He turned to Sneed. ‘I would’ve had some on me during orientation if I hadn’t lost them on the hill that day. I think I fell. I remember falling—’

Sneed turned to Thurman. ‘There’s no telling what the complications might be. Victor was careful to screen psychotropics from administrative personnel. Everyone was tested—’

‘I wasn’t,’ Donald said.

Sneed faced him. ‘Everyone was tested.’

‘Not him.’ Thurman studied the surface of the pod. ‘There was a last-minute change. A switch. I vouched for him. And if he was getting them in her name, there wouldn’t have been anything in his medical records.’

‘We need to tell Erskine,’ Sneed said. ‘I could work with him. We might come up with a new formulation. This could explain some of the immunities in other silos.’ He turned away from the pod as if he needed to get back to his office.

Thurman looked to Donald. ‘Do you need more time down here?’

Donald studied his sister for a moment. He wanted to wake her, to talk to her. Maybe he could come back another time just to visit.

‘I might like to come back,’ he said.

‘We’ll see.’

Thurman walked around the pod and placed a hand on Donald’s shoulder, gave him a light, sympathetic squeeze. He led Donald towards the door and Donald didn’t glance back, didn’t check the screen for his sister’s new name. He didn’t care. He knew where she was, and she would always be Charlotte to him. She would never change.

‘You did good,’ Thurman said. ‘This is real good.’ They stepped into the hall, and he shut the thick door behind them. ‘You may have stumbled on why Victor was so obsessed with that report of yours.’

‘I did?’ Donald didn’t see the connection.

‘I don’t think he was interested in what you wrote at all,’ Thurman said. ‘I think he was interested in you.’

46 • Silo 1 •

THEY RODE THE lift to the cafeteria rather than drop Donald off on fifty-four. It was almost dinnertime, and he could help Thurman with the trays. While the lights behind the level numbers blinked on and off, following their progress up the shaft, Thurman’s hunch about Victor haunted him. What if Victor had only been curious about his resistance to the medication? What if there wasn’t anything in that report at all?

They rode past level forty, its button winking bright and then going dark, and Donald thought of the silo that had done the same. ‘What does this mean for eighteen?’ he asked, watching the next number flash by.

Thurman stared at the stainless steel doors, a greasy palm print there from where someone had caught their balance.

‘Vic wanted to try another reset on eighteen. I never saw the point. But maybe he was right. Maybe we give them one more chance.’

‘What’s involved in a reset?’

‘You know what’s involved.’ Thurman faced him. ‘It’s what we did to the world, just on a smaller scale. Reduce the population, wipe the computers, their memories, try it all over again. We’ve done that several times before with this silo. There are risks involved. You can’t create trauma without making a mess. At some point, it’s simpler and safer to just pull the plug.’

‘End them,’ Donald said, and he saw what Victor had been up against, what he had worked to avert. He wished he could speak to the old man. Anna said Victor had spoken of him often. And Erskine had said Victor had wished people like Donald were in charge.

The lift opened on the top level. Donald stepped out and immediately felt strange to be walking among those on their shifts, to be present and at the same time removed from the day-to-day life of silo one.

He noticed that no one here looked to Thurman with deference. He was not that shift’s head, and no one knew him as such. Just two men, one in white and one in beige, grabbing food and glancing at the ruined wasteland on the wall screen.

Donald took one of the trays and noticed again that most people sat facing the view. Only one or two ate with their backs to it. He followed Thurman to the lift while longing to speak to these handful, to ask them what they remembered, what they were afraid of, to tell them that it was okay to be afraid.

‘Why do the other silos have screens?’ he asked Thurman, keeping his voice down. The parts of the facility he’d had no hand in designing made little sense to him. ‘Why show them what we did?’

‘To keep them in,’ Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. ‘It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—’

The lift arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two of them. They boarded and Thurman fumbled for his badge. ‘Fear,’ he said. ‘Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was out there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done as a race.’

Donald considered this. He thought about his own compulsion to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete, even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation inside was worse.

‘I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,’ Donald said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. A reset would mean a world of loss and heartache, but there would be a chance at life afterwards. The alternative was death for them all.

‘I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,’ Thurman admitted. ‘When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honour his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.’

The lift stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars of old were like this. He remembered two wars in Iran, a new generation unremembering so that sons marched into the battles their fathers had already fought.

The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.

‘It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,’ Thurman said. The lift slid towards fifty-four. ‘Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure that he had the last word.’ Thurman glanced at Donald. ‘Hell, it’s what finally motivated me to wake you.’

Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.

They got off on fifty-four and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.

They ate at the table in the war room. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him — just scraps of paper, he thought. No mystery contained within. He had been looking at the wrong thing, assuming there was a clue in the words, but it was just Donald’s existence that Victor had remarked upon. He had sat across the hall from Donald and watched him react to whatever was in their water or their pills. And now when Donald looked at his notes, all he saw was a piece of paper with pain scrawled across it amid specks of blood.

Ignore the blood, he told himself. The blood wasn’t a clue. It had come after. There were several splatters in a wide space left in the notes. Donald had been studying the senseless. He had been looking for something that wasn’t there. He may as well have been staring off into space.

Space. Donald set his fork down and grabbed the other report. Once he ignored the large spots of blood, there was a gap in the notes where nothing had been written. This was what he should’ve been focused on. Not what was there, but what wasn’t.

He checked the other report — the corresponding location of that blank space — to see what was written there. When he found the right spot, his excitement vanished. It was the paragraph that didn’t belong, the one about the young inductee whose great-grandmother remembered the old times. It was nothing.

Unless—

Donald sat up straight. He took the two reports and placed them on top of each other. Anna was telling Thurman about her progress with jamming the radio towers, that she would be done soon. Thurman was saying that they could all get off shift in the next few days, get the schedule back in order. Donald held the overlapping reports up to the lights. Thurman looked on curiously.

‘He wrote around something,’ Donald muttered. ‘Not over something.’

He met Thurman’s gaze and smiled. ‘You were wrong.’ The two pieces of paper trembled in his hands. ‘There is something here. He wasn’t interested in me at all.’

Anna set down her utensils and leaned over to have a look.

‘If I had the original, I would’ve seen it straight away.’ He pointed to the space in the notes, then slid the top page away and tapped his finger on the one paragraph that didn’t belong. The one that had nothing to do with silo twelve at all.

‘Here’s why your resets don’t work,’ he said. Anna grabbed the bottom report and read about the shadow Donald had inducted, the one whose great-grandmother remembered the old days, the one who had asked him a question about whether those stories were true.

‘Someone in silo eighteen remembers,’ Donald said with confidence. ‘Maybe a bunch of people, passing the knowledge in secret from generation to generation. Or they’re immune like me. They remember.’

Thurman took a sip of his water. He set down the glass and glanced from his daughter to Donald. ‘More reason to pull the plug,’ he said.

‘No,’ Donald told him. ‘No. That’s not what Victor thought.’ He tapped the dead man’s notes. ‘He wanted to find the one who remembers, but he didn’t mean me.’ He turned to Anna. ‘I don’t think he wanted me up at all.’

Anna looked up at her father, a puzzled expression on her face. She turned to Donald. ‘What are you suggesting?’

Donald stood and paced behind the chairs, stepping over the wires that snaked across the tiles. ‘We need to call eighteen and ask the head there if anyone fits this profile, someone or some group sowing discord, maybe talking about the world we—’ He stopped himself from saying destroyed.

‘Okay,’ Anna said, nodding her head. ‘Okay. Let’s say they do know. Let’s say we find these people over there like you. What then?’

He stopped his pacing. This was the part he hadn’t considered. He found Thurman studying him, the old man’s lips pursed.

‘We find these people—’ Donald said.

And he knew. He knew what it would take to save these people in this distant silo, these welders and shopkeeps and farmers and their young shadows. He remembered being the one on a previous shift to kill in order to save.

And he knew he would do it again.

47 • Silo 18 •

MISSION’S THROAT ITCHED and his eyes stung, the smoke growing heavier and the stench stronger as he approached one-twenty and Lower Dispatch. The pursuit from above seemed to have faltered, perhaps from the gap in the rails that had claimed a life.

Cam was dead, of that he felt certain. And how many others had suffered the same fate? A twinge of guilt accompanied the sick thought that the fallen would have to be carried up to the farms in plastic bags. A porter would have to do that job, and it wouldn’t be a pretty one.

He shook this thought away as he got within a level of Dispatch. Tears streamed down his face and mixed with the sweat and grime of the long day’s descent. He bore bad news. A shower and clean clothes would do little to alleviate the weariness he felt, but there would be protection there, help in clearing up the confusion about the blast. He hurried down the last half-flight and remembered, perhaps due to the rising ash that reminded him of a note torn to confetti, the reason he’d been chasing after Cam in the first place.

Rodny. His friend was locked away in IT, and his plea for help had been lost in the din and confusion of the explosion.

The explosion. Cam. The package. The delivery.

Mission wobbled and clutched the railing for balance. He thought of the ridiculous fee for the delivery, a fee that perhaps was never meant to be paid. He gathered himself and hurried on, wondering what was going on in that locked room in IT, what kind of trouble Rodny might be in and how to help him. How, even, to get to him.

The air grew thick and it burned to breathe as he arrived at Dispatch. A small crowd huddled on the stairway. They peered across the landing and into the open doors of one-twenty. Mission coughed into his fist as he pushed his way through the onlookers. Had the wreckage from above landed here? Everything seemed intact. Two buckets lay on their sides near the door, and a grey fire hose snaked over the railing and trailed inside. A blanket of smoke clung to the ceiling; it trailed out and up the wall of the stairwell shaft, defying gravity.

Mission pulled his ’chief up over his nose, confused. The smoke was coming from inside Dispatch. He breathed in through his mouth, the fabric pressing against his lips and lessening the sting in his throat. Dark shapes moved inside the hallway. He unsnapped the strap that held his knife in place and crossed the threshold, keeping low to stay away from the smoke. The floors were wet and squished with the traffic from deeper inside. It was dark, but beams of light from flashlights danced around further down the hallway.

Mission hurried towards the lights. The smoke was thicker, the water on the floor deeper. Bits of pulp floated on the surface. He passed one of the dormitories, the sorting hall, the front offices.

Lily, an elder porter, ran by in slaps and spray, recognisable only at the last moment as the beam from her flashlight briefly lit her face. There was someone lying in the water, pressed up against the wall. As Mission approached and a passing light played over the form, he saw that they weren’t lying there at all. It was Hackett, one of the few dispatchers who treated the young shadows with respect and never seemed to take delight in their burdens. Half of his face remained unscathed, the other half was a seething red blister. Deathdays. Lottery numbers flashed in Mission’s vision.

‘Porter! Get over here.’

It was Morgan’s voice, Mission’s former caster. The old man’s cough joined a chorus of others. The hallway was full of ripples and waves, splashes and hacks, smoke and commands. Mission hurried towards the familiar silhouette, his eyes burning.

‘Sir? It’s Mission. The explosion—’ He pointed at the ceiling.

‘I know my own shadows, boy.’ A light was trained on Mission’s eyes. ‘Get in here and give these lads a hand.’

The smell of cooked beans and burned and wet paper was overpowering. There was a hint of fuel behind it all, a smell Mission knew from the down deep and its generators. And there was something else: the smell of the bazaar during a pig roast, the foul and unpleasant odour of burned flesh.

The water in the main hall was deep. It lapped up over Mission’s halfboots and filled them with muck. Drawers of files were being emptied into buckets. An empty crate was shoved into his hands, beams of light swirling in the mist, his nose burning and running, tears on his cheeks unbidden.

‘Here, here,’ someone said, urging him forward. They warned him not to touch the filing cabinet. Piles of paper went into the crate, heavier than they should be. Mission didn’t understand the rush. The fire was out. The walls were black where the flames must have licked at them, and the grow plots along the far wall where rows of beans had run up tall trestles had turned to ash. The trestles stood like black fingers, those that stood at all.

Amanda from Dispatch was there at the filing cabinets, her ’chief wrapped around her hand, managing the drawers as they were emptied. The crate filled up fast. Mission spotted someone emptying the wall safe of its old books as he turned back towards the hallway. There was a body in the corner covered by a sheet. Nobody was in much of a hurry to remove it.

He followed the others to the landing, but they did not go all the way out. The emergency lights in the dorm room were on, mattresses stacked up in the corner. Carter, Lyn and Joel were spreading the files out on the springs. Mission unloaded his crate and went back for another load.

‘What happened?’ he asked Amanda as he reached the filing cabinets. ‘Is this some sort of retribution?’

‘The farmers came for the beans,’ she said. She used her ’chief to wrestle with another drawer. ‘They came for the beans and they burned it all.’

Mission took in the wide swathe of damage. He recalled how the stairwell had trembled during the blast, could still see in his mind the people falling and screaming to their deaths. The months of growing violence had sparked alive as if a switch had been flipped.

‘So what do we do now?’ Carter asked. He was a powerful porter, in his early thirties, when men find their strength and have yet to lose their joints, but he looked absolutely beat. His hair clung to his forehead in wet clumps. There were black smears on his face, and you could no longer tell what colour his ’chief had been.

‘Now we burn their crops,’ someone suggested.

‘The crops we eat?’

‘Just the upper farms. They’re the ones who did this.’

‘We don’t know who did this,’ Morgan said.

Mission caught his old caster’s eye. ‘In the main hall,’ he said. ‘I saw… Was that… ?’

Morgan nodded. ‘Roker. Aye.’

Carter slapped the wall and barked profanities. ‘I’ll kill ’em!’ he yelled.

‘So you’re…’ Mission wanted to say Lower chief, but it was too soon for that to make sense.

‘Aye,’ Morgan said, and Mission could tell it made little sense to him either.

‘People will be carrying whatever they like for a few days,’ Joel said. ‘We’ll appear weak if we don’t strike back.’ Joel was two years older than Mission and a good porter. He coughed into his fist while Lyn looked on with concern.

Mission had other concerns besides appearing weak. The people above thought a porter had attacked them. And now this assault from the farmers, so far from where they’d been hit the night before. Porters were the nearest thing to a roaming sentry and they were being taken out by someone, purposefully, he thought. Then there were all those boys being recruited into IT. They weren’t being recruited to fix computers; they were being hired to break something. The spirit of the silo, perhaps.

‘I need to get home,’ Mission said. It was a slip. He meant to say up top. He worked to unknot his ’chief. The thing reeked of smoke, as did his hands and his overalls. He would have to find different overalls, a different colour to wear. He needed to get in touch with his old friends from the Nest.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Morgan asked. His former caster seemed ready to say something else as Mission tugged the ’chief away. Instead, the old man’s eyes fell to the bright red weal around Mission’s neck.

‘I don’t think this is about us at all,’ Mission said. ‘I think this is bigger than that. A friend of mine is in trouble. He’s at the heart of all that’s going wrong. I think something bad is going to happen to him or that he might know something. They won’t let him talk to anyone.’

‘Rodny?’ Lyn asked. She and Joel had been two years ahead at the Nest, but they knew Mission and Rodny, both.

Mission nodded. ‘And Cam is dead,’ he told the others. He explained what’d happened on his way down, the blast, the people chasing him, the gap in the rails. Someone whispered Cam’s name in disbelief. ‘I don’t think anyone cares that we know,’ Mission added. ‘I think that’s the point. Everyone’s supposed to be angry. As angry as possible.’

‘I need time to think,’ Morgan said. ‘To plan.’

‘I don’t think there is much time,’ Mission said. He told them about the new hires at IT. He told Morgan about seeing Bradley there, about the young porter applying for a different job.

‘What do we do?’ Lyn asked, looking to Joel and the others.

‘We take it easy,’ Morgan said, but he didn’t seem so sure. The confidence he displayed as a senior porter and caster seemed shaken now that he was a chief.

‘I can’t stay down here,’ Mission said flatly. ‘You can have every vacation chit I own, but I’ve got to get up top. I don’t know how, but I have to.’

48 • Silo 18 •

BEFORE HE WENT anywhere, Mission needed to get in touch with friends he could trust, anyone who might be able to help, the old gang from the Nest. As Morgan urged everyone on the landing back to work, Mission slunk down the dark and smoky hallway towards the sorting room, which had a computer he might be able to use. Lyn and Joel followed, more eager to find out about Rodny than to clean up after the fire.

They checked the monitor at the sorting counter and saw that the computer was down, possibly from the power outage the night before. Mission remembered all those people with their broken computers earlier that morning at IT and wondered if there would be a working machine anywhere on five levels. Since he couldn’t send a wire, he picked up the hard line to the other Dispatch offices to see if they could get a message out for him.

He tried Central first. Lyn stood with him at the counter, her flashlight illuminating the dials, piercing the haze of smoke in the room. Joel splashed among the shelves, moving the reusable sorting crates on the bottom higher up to keep them from getting wet. There was no response from Central.

‘Maybe the fire got the radio too,’ she whispered.

Mission didn’t think so. The power light was on and the speaker was making that crackling sound when he squeezed the button. He heard Morgan splash past in the hallway, yelling and complaining that his workforce was disappearing. Lyn cupped her hand over her flashlight. ‘Something is going on at Central,’ he told Lyn. He had a bad feeling.

The second way station he tried up top finally won a response. ‘Who’s this?’ someone asked, their voice shaking with barely concealed panic.

‘This is Mission. Who’s this?’

‘Mission? You’re in big trouble, man.’

Mission glanced up at Lyn. ‘Who is this?’

‘This is Robbie. They left me alone up here, man. I haven’t heard from anybody. But everyone’s looking for you. What’s going on down there in Lower?’

Joel stopped with the crates and trained his flashlight on the counter.

‘Everyone’s looking for me?’ Mission asked.

‘You and Cam, a few of the others. There was some kind of fight at Central. Were you there for that? I can’t get word from anyone!’

‘Robbie, I need you to get in touch with some friends of mine. Can you send out a wire? Something’s wrong with our computers down here.’

‘No, ours are all kind of sideways. We’ve been having to use the terminal up at the mayor’s office. It’s the only one working.’

‘The mayor’s office? Okay, I need you to send a couple of wires, then. You got something to write with?’

‘Wait,’ Robbie said. ‘These are official wires, right? If not, I don’t have the authority—’

‘Dammit, Robbie, this is important! Grab something to write with. I’ll pay you back. They can dock me for it if they want.’ Mission glanced up at Lyn, who was shaking her head in disbelief. He coughed into his fist, the smoke tickling his throat.

‘All right, all right,’ Robbie said. ‘Who’m I sending this to? And you owe me for this piece of paper because that’s all I have to write on.’

Mission let go of the transmit button to curse the kid. He thought about who would be most likely to get a wire and send it along to the others. He ended up giving Robbie three names, then told him what to write. He would have his friends meet him at the Nest, or meet each other if he couldn’t make it there himself. The Nest had to be safe. Nobody would attack the school or the Crow. Once the gang was together, they could figure out what to do. Maybe the Crow would know what to do. The hardest part for Mission would be working out how to join them.

‘You got all that?’ he asked Robbie when the boy didn’t reply.

‘Yeah, yeah, man. I think you’re gonna be over the character limit, though. This better come out of your pay.’

Mission shook his head in disbelief.

‘Now what?’ Lyn asked as he hung up the receiver.

‘I need overalls,’ Mission said. He splashed around the counter and joined Joel by the shelves, began searching through the nearest crates. ‘They’re looking for me, so I’m gonna need new colours if I’m getting up there.’

‘We,’ Lyn told him. ‘We need new colours. If you’re going to the Nest, I’m coming with you.’

‘Me too,’ Joel said.

‘I appreciate that,’ Mission said, ‘but company might make it more dangerous. We’d be more conspicuous.’

‘Yeah, but they’re looking for you,’ Lyn said.

‘Hey, we have a ton of these new whites.’ Joel pulled the lid off a sorting bin. ‘But they’ll just make us stand out, won’t they?’

‘Whites?’ Mission headed over to see what Joel was talking about.

‘Yeah. For Security. We’ve been moving a ton of these lately. Came down from Garment a few days ago. No idea why they made up so many.’

Mission checked the overalls. The ones on top were covered in soot, more grey than white. There were dozens of them stacked in the sorting crate. He remembered all the new hires. It was as if they wanted half the silo dressed in white and the other half fighting one another. It made no sense. Unless the idea was to get everyone killed.

‘Killed,’ Mission said. He splashed down the shelves to another crate. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ He found the right bin — he and Cam had been given one of these just a few days ago. He reached in and pulled out a bag. ‘How would you two like to make some money?’

Joel and Lyn hurried over to see what he’d found and Mission held up one of the heavy plastic bags with the bright silver zipper and the hauling straps.

‘Three hundred and eighty-four chits to divide between you,’ he promised. ‘Every chit I own. I just need you for one last tandem.’

The two porters played their lights across the object in his hands. It was a black bag. A black bag made for carrying the dead.

49 • Silo 18 •

MISSION SAT ON the counter and worked the laces on his boots free. They were soaked, his socks as well. He shucked them off to keep the water out of the bag and to save the weight. Always a porter, thinking about weight. Lyn handed him one of the Security overalls, an extra precaution. He wiggled out of his porter blues and tugged the whites on while Lyn looked the other way. His knife he strapped back to his waist.

‘You guys sure you’re up for this?’ he asked.

Lyn helped him slide his feet into the bag and worked the inside straps around his ankles. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, cinching the straps.

Mission laughed, his stomach fluttering with nerves. He stretched out and let them work the top straps under his shoulders. ‘Have you both eaten?’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Joel said. ‘Stop worrying.’

‘If it gets late—’

‘Lie your head back,’ Lyn told him. She worked the zipper up from his feet. ‘And don’t talk unless we tell you it’s okay.’

‘We’ll take a break every twenty or so,’ Joel said. ‘We’ll bring you into a bathroom with us. You can stretch and get some water.’

Lyn worked the zipper up over his chest to his chin, hesitated, then kissed the pads of her fingers and touched his forehead the same way he’d seen countless loved ones and priests bless the dead. ‘May your steps rise to the heavens,’ she whispered.

Her wan smile caught in the spill of Joel’s flashlight before the bag was sealed up over Mission’s face.

‘Or at least until Upper Dispatch,’ Joel added.

They carried him outside and down the hall, and the porters made way for the dead. Several hands reached out and touched Mission through the black plastic, showing respect, and he fought not to flinch or cough. It felt as though the smoke was trapped in the bag with him.

Joel took the lead, which meant Mission’s shoulders were pressed against his. He faced upward, his body swaying in time to their steps, the straps beneath his armpits pulling the opposite way from what he was used to. It grew more comfortable as they hit the stairs and began the long spiral up. His feet were lowered until the blood no longer pooled in his head. Lyn carried her half of his weight from several steps below.

The dark and quiet overtook him as they left the chaos of Lower Dispatch. The two porters didn’t talk as some tandems might. They saved their breath and kept their thoughts to themselves. Joel set an aggressive pace. Mission could sense it in the gentle swaying of his body, suspended above the steel treads.

As the steps passed, the journey grew more and more uncomfortable. It wasn’t the difficulty breathing, for he had been shadowed well to manage his lungs on a long climb. He could also handle the stuffiness from the plastic pressed against his face. Nor was it the dark, for his favourite hour for porting had always been the dim-time, time alone with his thoughts while others slept. It wasn’t the stench of plastic and smoke, the tickle in his throat or the pain of the straps.

It was the act of lying still. Of being carried. Of being a burden.

The straps pinched his shoulders until his arms fell numb, and he swayed in the darkness, the sounds of boots on steel, of Joel and Lyn’s heavy breathing, as he was lifted up the stairwell. Too great a burden, he thought.

He thought of his mother carrying him for all those months with no one to confide in and no one to support her. Not until his father had found out, and by then it was too late to terminate the pregnancy. He wondered how long his father had hated the bulge in her belly, how long he had wanted to cut Mission out like some kind of cancer. Mission had never asked to be carried like that. And he had never wanted to be ported by anyone ever again.

Two years ago to the day. That was the last time he had felt this, this sense of being a burden to all. Two years since he had proved too much for even a rope to bear.

It was a poor knot he had tied. But his hands had been trembling and he had fought to see the knot through a film of tears. When it failed, the knot didn’t come free so much as slide, and it left his neck afire and bleeding. His great regret was having jumped from the lower stairwell in Mechanical, the rope looped over the pipes above. If he had gone from a landing, the slipping knot wouldn’t have mattered. The fall would’ve claimed him.

Now he was too scared to try again. He was as scared of trying again as he was of being a burden to another. Was that why he avoided seeing Allie, because she longed to care for him? To help support him? Was that why he ran away from home?

The tears finally came. His arms were pinned, so he couldn’t wipe them away. He thought of his mother, about whom he could only piece together a few details. But he knew this of her: she hadn’t been afraid of life or death. She had embraced both in an act of sacrifice, giving her own blood for his, a trade he would never feel worthy of.

The silo spun slowly around him; the steps sank one at a time; and Mission endured the suffering. He laboured not to sob, seeing himself for the first time in that utter darkness, knowing his soul more fully in that deathly ritual of being ported to his grave, this sad awakening on his birthday.

50 • Silo 1 •

FINDING ONE AMONG ten thousand should’ve been more difficult. It should have taken months of crawling through reports and databases, of querying the head of eighteen and asking for personality profiles, of looking at arrest histories, cleaning schedules, who was related to whom, and all the gossip and chatter compiled from monthly reports.

But Donald found an easier way. He simply searched the database for a facsimile of himself.

One who remembered. One full of fear and paranoia. One who tries to blend in but is subversive. He looked for a fear of doctors, teasing out those residents who never went to see them. He looked for someone who shunned medication and found one who did not even trust the water. A part of him expected he might find several people to be causing so much havoc, a pack, and that locating one among them would lead to the rest. He expected to find them young and outraged with some way of handing down what they knew from generation to generation. What he found instead was both eerily similar and not like him at all.

The next morning, he showed his results to Thurman, who stood perfectly still for a long while.

‘Of course,’ he finally said. ‘Of course.’

A hand on Donald’s shoulder was all the congratulations he got. Thurman explained that the reset was well underway. He admitted that it had been underway since Donald had been woken, that the head of eighteen had taken on new recruits, had sown the seeds of discord. Erskine and Dr Sneed were working through the night to make changes, to come up with a new formulation, but this component might take weeks. Looking over what Donald had found, he said he was going to make a call to eighteen.

‘I want to come with you,’ Donald said. ‘It’s my theory after all.’

What he wanted to say was that he wouldn’t take the coward’s way. If someone was to be executed on his account — one life for the sake of many — he didn’t want to hide from the decision.

Thurman agreed.

They rode the lift almost as equals. Donald asked why Thurman had started the reset, but he thought he knew the answer.

‘Vic won,’ was Thurman’s reply.

Donald thought of all the lives in the database that were now thrown into chaos. He made the mistake of asking how the reset was going, and Thurman told him about the bombs and the violence, how the groups who wore different colours were warring with one another, how these things typically went downhill fast with the barest of nudges, that the formula was as old as time.

‘The combustibles are always there,’ Thurman said. ‘You’d be surprised at how few sparks it takes.’

They exited the lift and walked down a familiar hallway. This was Donald’s old commute. Here, he had worked under a different name. He had worked without knowing what he was doing. They passed offices full of people tapping on keyboards and chatting with one another. Half a millennium of people coming on and off shifts, doing what they were told, following orders.

He couldn’t help himself as they approached his old office: he paused at the door and peered in. A thin man with a halo of hair that wrapped from ear to ear, just a few wisps on top, looked up at him. He sat there, mouth agape, hand resting on his mouse, waiting for Donald to say or do something.

Donald nodded a sympathetic hello. He turned and looked through the door across the hall where a man in white sat behind a similar desk. The puppeteer. Thurman spoke to him, and he got up from his desk and joined them in the hall. He knew that Thurman was in charge.

Donald followed the two of them to the comm room, leaving the balding man at his old desk to his game of solitaire. He felt a mix of sympathy and envy for the man — for those who didn’t remember. As they turned the corner, Donald thought back to those initial bouts of awareness on his first shift. He remembered speaking with a doctor who knew the truth, and having this sense of wonder that anyone could cope with such knowledge. And now he saw that it wasn’t that the pain grew tolerable or the confusion went away. Instead, it simply became familiar. It became a part of you.

The comm room was quiet. Heads swivelled as the three of them entered. One of the operators in orange hurriedly removed his feet from his desk. Another took a bite of his protein bar and turned back to his station.

‘Get me eighteen,’ Thurman said.

Eyes turned to the other man in white, the one supposedly in charge, and he waved his consent. A call was patched through. Thurman held half a headset to one ear while he waited. He caught the expression on Donald’s face and asked the operator for another set. Donald stepped forward and took it while the cable was slotted into the receiver. He could hear the familiar beeping of a call being placed, and his stomach fluttered as doubts began to surface. Finally, a voice answered. A shadow.

Thurman asked him to get Mr Wyck, the silo head.

‘He’s already coming,’ the shadow said.

When Wyck joined the conversation, Thurman told the head what Donald had discovered, but it was the shadow who responded. The shadow knew the one they were after. He said he knew the person well. There was something in his voice, some shock or hesitation, and Thurman waved at the operator to get the sensors in his headset going. Suddenly, the monitors were providing feedback like a Rite of Initiation. Thurman conducted the questioning and Donald watched a master at work.

‘Tell me what you know,’ he said. Thurman leaned over the operator and peered at a screen that monitored skin conductivity, pulse and perspiration. Donald was no expert at reading the charts, but he knew something was up by the way the lines spiked up and down when the shadow spoke. He feared for the young man. He wondered if someone would die then and there.

But Thurman took a softer approach. He got the boy speaking of his childhood, had him admitting to the rage he harboured, a sense of not belonging. The shadow spoke of an upbringing both ideal and frustrating, and Thurman was like a gentle but firm drill sergeant working with a troubled recruit: tearing him down, building him back up.

‘You’ve been fed the truth,’ he told the young man, referring to the Legacy. ‘And now you see why the truth must be divvied out carefully or not at all.’

‘I do.’

The shadow sniffed as though he were crying. And yet: the jagged lines on the screen formed less precipitous peaks, less dangerous valleys.

Thurman spoke of sacrifice, of the greater good, of individual lives proving meaningless in the far stretch of time. He took that shadow’s rage and redirected it until the torture of being locked up for months with the books of the Legacy was distilled down to its very essence. And through it all, it didn’t sound as though the silo head breathed once.

‘Tell me what needs to be fixed,’ Thurman said, after their discussion. He laid the problem at the shadow’s feet. Donald saw how this was better than simply handing him the solution.

The shadow spoke of a culture forming that overvalued individuality, of children that wanted to get away from their families, of generations living levels apart and independence stressed until no one relied on anyone and everyone was dispensable.

The sobs came. Donald watched as Thurman’s face tightened, and he wondered again if he was about to see the young man put out of his misery. Instead, Thurman released the radio and said to those gathered around, simply, ‘He’s ready.’

And what started as an inquiry, a test of Donald’s theory, concluded this boy’s Rite of Initiation. A shadow became a man. Lines on a screen settled into steel cords of resolve as his anger was given a new focus, a new purpose. His childhood was seen differently. Dangerously.

Thurman gave this young man his first order. Mr Wyck congratulated the boy and told him he would be allowed to go, would be given his freedom. And later, as Donald and Thurman rode the lift back towards Anna, Thurman declared that in the years to come, this Rodny would make a fine silo head. Even better than the last.

51 • Silo 1 •

THAT AFTERNOON, DONALD and Anna worked to restore order to the war room. They made it ready in case it was called upon in a future shift. All their notes were taken off the walls and filed away into airtight plastic crates, and Donald imagined these would sit on another level somewhere, in another storeroom, to gather dust. The computers were unplugged, all the wiring coiled up, and these were hauled off by Erskine on a cart with squeaky wheels. All that was left were the cots, a change of clothes and the standard-issue toiletries. Enough to get them through the night and to their meeting with Dr Sneed the following day.

Several shifts were about to come to a close. For Anna and Thurman, it had been a long time coming. Two full shifts. Almost a year awake. Erskine and Sneed would need a few weeks to finish their work, and by that time the next head would come on, and the schedule would return to normal. For Donald, it had been less than a week awake after a century of sleep. He was a dead man who had blinked his eyes open for a brief moment.

He took his last shower and his first dose of the bitter drink so that no one would think anything was amiss. But Donald didn’t plan on going under again. If he went back to the deep freeze, he knew they would never wake him again. Unless things were so bad that he wouldn’t want to be woken anyway. Unless it were Anna once more, lonely, wishing for company and willing to subject him to abuse in order to get it.

That wasn’t sleep. That was a body and a mind stored away. There were other choices, more final escapes. Donald had discovered this resolve by following the trail of clues left behind by Victor, and he would soon join him in death.

He walked a final lap amid the guns and drones before finally retiring to his cot. He thought of Helen as he lay there listening to Anna sing in the shower one last time. And he realised the anger he had felt for his wife having lived and loved without him had now dissipated, wiped away by his guilt for coming to find solace in Anna’s embrace. And when she came to him that night, straight from the shower with water beading on her flesh, he could not resist any longer. They had the same bitter drink on their breath, that concoction that prepped their veins for the deep sleep, and neither of them cared. Donald succumbed. And then he waited until she had returned to her cot and her breathing had softened before he cried himself to sleep.

When he woke, Anna was already gone, her cot neatly made. Donald did the same, tucking the sheets beneath the mattress and leaving the corners crisp, even though he knew the sheets would be mussed as the cots were returned to their rightful place in the barracks. He checked the time. Anna had been put under during the early morning so as not to be spotted. He had less than an hour before Thurman would come for him. More than enough time.

He went out to the storeroom and approached the drone nearest the hangar door. Yanking the tarp off sent a cloud of dust into the air. He dragged out the empty bin from under one of the wings, opened the low hangar door, and arranged the bin so that it was slightly inside the lift. He lowered the door onto the bin to keep the hangar open.

Hurrying down the hallway, past the empty barracks, he pulled the plastic sheet off the station at the very end. Flipping the plastic cover off the lift switch, he threw it into the up position. The first time he’d done this, the door to the lift would no longer open, but he could hear the platform rumbling upward on the other side of the wall. It hadn’t taken long to figure out a solution.

Replacing the plastic sheet, he hurried down the hall, turned the light off and shut the door. He pulled the other bin from under the drone’s left wing. Donald stripped and tossed his clothes under the drone. He pulled the thick plastic suit from the bin and sat down to work his feet into the legs. The boots went on next, Donald being careful to seal the cuffs around them. Standing up, he gripped the dangling shoelace stolen from an extra boot. The end had been tied to the zipper on the back of the suit. He pulled it over his shoulder and tugged upward, made sure the zipper went to the top before grabbing the gloves, flashlight and helmet from the bin.

Suited up, he closed the bin and slid it back under the wing, covered the drone with the tarp. There would only be a single bin out of place when Thurman arrived. Victor had left a mess to discover. Donald would hardly leave a trace.

He crawled inside the lift, pushing the flashlight ahead of him. He could hear the motor straining against the pinned bin like an angry hive of bees. Turning on the flashlight, he took a last look at the storeroom, braced himself, then kicked the plastic tub with both boots.

It budged. He kicked again and there was a thunderous racket as the door slammed shut, and then the shudder of movement. The flashlight jittered and danced. Donald corralled it between his mitts and watched his exhalations fog the inside of his helmet. He had no idea what to expect, but he was causing it. He would control his own fate.

52 • Silo 1 •

THE RIDE UP took much longer than he anticipated. There were moments when he wasn’t sure whether or not he was moving. He grew worried that his plan had been discovered, that the misplaced bin had led them to his tracks in the dust, that he was being recalled. He urged the lift to hurry along.

His flashlight gave out. Donald tapped the cylinder in his mitt and worked the switch back and forth. It must’ve been on a weak charge from its long storage. He was left in the dark, no way of knowing which way was up or down, whether he was rising or falling. All he could do was wait. He knew that this was the right decision. There was nothing worse than being trapped in the darkness, in that pod, unable to do anything more than wait.

Arrival came with a jarring clank. The persistent hum of the motor disappeared, the ensuing quiet haunting. There was a second clank, and then the door opposite the one he’d entered rose slowly. A metal attachment the size of a fist slid forward on a track. Donald scrambled after this, seeing how the drone might be guided forward.

He found himself in a sloping launch bay. He hadn’t known what to expect, thought maybe he’d simply arrive above the soil on a barren landscape. But he was in a shaft. Above him, up the slope, a slit was opening, a dim light growing stronger. Beyond this slit, Donald spotted the roiling clouds he knew from the cafeteria. They were the bright grey that came with the sunrise. The doors at the top of the slope continued to slide apart like a maw opening wide.

Donald crawled up the steep slope as quickly as he could. The metal car in the track stopped and locked into place. Donald hurried, imagining he didn’t have much time. He stayed off the track in case the launch sequence was automated, but the car never moved, never raced by. He arrived at the open doors exhausted and perspiring and pulled himself out.

The world spread out before him. After a week of living in a windowless chamber, the scale and openness were inspiring. Donald felt like tearing off his helmet and sucking in deep breaths. The oppressive weight of his silo imprisonment had been lifted. Above him were only clouds.

He stood on a round concrete platform. Behind the opening for the launch ramp was a cluster of antennae. He went to these, held on to one of them and lowered himself to the wide ledge below. From here it was a scramble on his belly, trying to hold on to the slick edge with bulky gloves, and then a graceless drop to the dirt.

He scanned the horizon for the city — had to work his way around the tower to find it. From there, he aimed forty-five degrees to the left. He had studied the maps to make sure, but now that he was there, he realised he could’ve done it by memory. Over there was where the tents had stood, and here the stage, and beyond them the dirt tracks through the struggling beginnings of grass as ATVs buzzed up the hillside. He could almost smell the food that’d been cooking, could hear the dogs barking and children playing, the anthems in the air.

Donald shook off thoughts of the past and made his time count. He knew there was a chance — a very good chance — that someone was sitting at breakfast in the cafeteria. At this very moment, they would be dropping their spoon and pointing at the wall screen. But he had a head start. They would have to wrestle with suits and wonder if the risk was worth it. By the time they got to him, it would be too late. Hopefully, they would simply leave him be.

He worked his way up the hillside. Movement was a struggle inside the bulky suit. He slipped and fell several times in the slick soil. When a gust of wind hammered the landscape, it peppered his helmet with grit and made a noise like the hiss of Anna’s radio. There was no telling how long the suit would last. He knew enough of the cleaning to suspect it wouldn’t be for ever, but Anna had told him that the machines in the air were designed to attack only certain things. That’s why they didn’t destroy the sensors, or the concrete, or a properly built suit. And he suspected the suits in silo one would have been built properly.

All he hoped for as he laboured up the hill was a view. He was so obsessed and determined to win this that he never thought to look behind him, slipping and scrambling, crawling on his hands and knees the last fifty feet, until he was finally at the summit. He stood and staggered forward, exhausted, breathing heavily. Reaching the edge, he peered down into the adjacent bowl. There, a concrete tower stood like a gravestone, like a monument to Helen. She was buried beneath that tower. And while he could never go to her, never be buried alongside her, he could lie down underneath the clouds and be close enough.

He wanted his helmet off. First, though, his gloves. He tugged one of them free — popping the seal — and dropped it to the soil. The heavy winds sent the glove tumbling down the slope, and the swirling grit stung his hand. The peppering of fine particles burned like a day on a windy beach. Donald began tugging on his other glove, resigned to what would come next, when suddenly he felt a hand grip his shoulder — and he was pulled back from the edge of that gentle rise and the view of his wife’s last resting place.

53 • Silo 1 •

DONALD STUMBLED AND fell. The shock of being touched sent his heart into his throat. He waved his arms to free himself but someone had a grip on his suit. More than one person. They dragged him back until he could no longer see beyond the ridge.

Screams of frustration filled his helmet. Couldn’t they see that it was too late? Couldn’t they leave him be? He flailed and tried to lunge out of their grip, but he was being pulled inexorably down the hill, back towards silo one.

When he fell the next time, he was able to roll over and face them, to get his arms up to defend himself. And there was Thurman standing over him — wearing nothing more than his white overalls, dust from the dead earth gathering in the old man’s grey brow.

‘It’s time to go!’ Thurman yelled into the heavy wind. His voice seemed as distant as the clouds.

Donald kicked his feet and tried to crawl back up the hill but there were three of them there, blocking his way. All in white, squinting against the ferocity of the driving wind and pelting soil.

Donald screamed as they seized him again. He tried to grab rocks and fistfuls of soil as they pulled him along by his boots. His helmet knocked against the lifeless pack of dirt. He watched the clouds boil overhead as his fingernails were bent back and broken in his struggle for some purchase.

By the time they got him to the flats, Donald was spent. They carried him down a ramp and through the airlock where more men were waiting. His helmet was tossed aside before the outer door fully shut. Thurman stood in a far corner and watched as they undressed him. The old man dabbed at the blood running from his nose. Donald had caught him with his boot.

Erskine was there, Dr Sneed as well, both of them breathing hard. As soon as they got his suit off, Sneed plunged a needle into Donald’s flesh. Erskine held his hand and seemed sad as the liquid spread through Donald’s veins.

‘A bloody waste,’ someone said as the fog settled over him.

‘Look at this mess.’

Erskine placed a hand on Donald’s cheek as Donald drifted deeper into the black. His lids grew heavy and his hearing distant.

‘Be better if someone like you were in charge,’ he heard Erskine say.

But it was Victor’s voice he heard. It was a dream. No, a memory. A thought from an earlier conversation. Donald couldn’t be sure. The waking world of boots and angry voices was too busy being swallowed by the mist of sleep and the fog of dreams. And this time — rather than with a fear of death — Donald went into that darkness gladly. He embraced it, hoping it would be eternal. He went with a final thought of his sister, of those drones beneath their tarps, all those things he hoped would never be woken.

54 • Silo 18 •

MISSION FELT BURIED alive. He fell into an uncomfortable trance, the bag growing hot and slick as it trapped his heat and exhalations. Part of him feared he would pass out in there and Joel and Lyn would discover him dead. Part of him hoped.

The two porters were stopped for questioning on one-seventeen, the landing below the blast that took Cam. Those working to repair the stairwell were on the lookout for a certain porter. Their description was part Cam, part Mission. Mission held deathly still while Joel complained of being stopped with so sensitive and heavy a load. It seemed that they might ask for the bag to be opened, but there were some things nearly as taboo as talk of the outside. And so they were sent on their way with a warning that the rail was out above and that one person had already fallen to their death.

Mission fought off a coughing fit as the voices receded below. He wiggled his shoulders and struggled to cover his mouth to muffle the sound. Lyn hissed at him to be quiet. In the distance, Mission could hear a woman wailing. They passed through the wreckage from hours earlier, and Joel and Lyn gasped at the sight of an entire landing torn free from the stairwell.

Above Supply, on one-zero-seven, they carried Mission into a bathroom, opened the bag and let him work the blood back into his arms. Mission used one of the stalls, took a few sips of water and assured Joel and Lyn that he was fine in there. All three of them were damp with sweat, and there were still thirty-odd levels to go to Central Dispatch. Joel especially seemed weary from the climb, or perhaps from seeing the damage wrought by the blast. Lyn was holding up better but was anxious to get going again. She fretted for Rodny and seemed as eager as Mission to get to the Nest.

Mission caught a glance of himself in the mirror with his white overalls and his porter’s knife strapped to his waist. He was the one they were looking for. He drew his knife, held a handful of his hair and cut through a clump close to his scalp. Lyn saw what he was doing and helped with her own knife. Joel grabbed the trash can from the corner to collect the hair.

It was a rough job, but he looked less like the one they wanted. Before putting his knife away, he cut a few slits in the black bag, right by the zipper. He peeled off his undershirt and wiped the inside of the bag dry before throwing the shirt in the trash can. It reeked of smoke and sweat anyway. Crawling back inside, helping with the straps, they zipped him up and carried him back to the stairway to resume their ascent. Mission was powerless to do anything but worry.

He ran over the events of a very long day. That morning, he had watched the clouds brighten over breakfast, had visited the Crow and delivered her note to Rodny. And then Cam — he had lost a friend. The exhaustion of it all caught up with him and Mission found himself sliding into unconsciousness.

When he started awake, it felt but a moment later. His overalls were damp, the inside of the bag slick with condensation. Joel must have felt him jerk, as he quickly shushed Mission and told him they were coming up on Central.

Mission’s heart pounded as he came to and remembered where he was, what they were doing. It felt difficult to breathe. The slits he had cut were lost in the folds of the plastic. He wanted the zipper cracked, just a slice of light, a whisper of fresh air. His arms were pinned and numb from the straps around his shoulders. His ankles were sore from where Lyn was hoisting him from below.

‘Can’t breathe,’ he gasped.

Lyn told him to be quiet. But there was a pause, an end to the swaying. Someone fumbled with the bag over his head, a series of tiny clicks from the zipper being lowered a dozen notches.

Mission sucked in cool gasps. The world resumed its swaying, boots striking the stairs in the distance — a commotion somewhere above or below, he couldn’t tell. More fighting. More dying. He pictured bodies spinning through the air. He saw Cam leaving the farm sublevels just the day before, a bonus in his pocket, no thought of how little time he had left for spending it.

They rested at Central Dispatch. Mission was let out in the main hallway, which was frighteningly empty. ‘What the hell happened here?’ Lyn asked. She dug her finger into a hole in the wall surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks. There were hundreds of holes like them. Boots rang on the landing and continued past.

‘What time is it?’ Mission asked, keeping his voice down.

‘It’s after dinner,’ Joel said. It meant they were making good time.

Down the hall, Lyn studied a dark patch of what looked to be rust. ‘Is this blood?’ she hissed.

‘Robbie said he couldn’t reach anyone down here,’ Mission said. ‘Maybe they scattered.’

Joel took a sip from his canteen. ‘Or were driven off.’ He wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

‘Should we stay here for the night? You two look beat.’

Joel shook his head. He offered Mission his canteen. ‘I think we need to get past the thirties. Security is everywhere. Hell, you could probably dash up with what you’ve got on the way they’re running about. Might need to clean up your hair a bit.’

Mission rubbed his scalp and thought about that. ‘Maybe I should,’ he said. ‘I could be up there before the dim-time.’ He watched as Lyn disappeared into one of the bunk rooms down the hall. She emerged almost immediately with her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.

‘What is it?’ Mission asked, pushing up from a crouch and joining her.

She threw her arms around him and held him away from the door, buried her face into his shoulder. Joel risked a look.

‘No,’ he whispered.

Mission pulled away from Lyn and joined his fellow porter by the door.

The bunks were full. Some lay sprawled on the floor, but it was obvious by the tangle of their limbs — the way arms hung useless from bunks or were twisted beneath them — that these porters weren’t sleeping.

They discovered Katelyn among them. Lyn shook with silent sobs as Joel and Mission retrieved Katelyn’s body and loaded her into the bag. Mission felt a pang of guilt that she’d been chosen as much for her size as how well loved she’d been. While they were securing the straps and zipping her up, the power in the hallway went out, leaving them in the pitch black.

‘What the hell?’ Joel hissed.

A moment later, the lights returned but flickered as though an unsteady flame burned in each bulb. Mission wiped the sweat from his forehead and wished he still had his ’chief.

‘If you can’t make it all the way to the Nest tonight,’ he said to the others, ‘stop and stay at the way station and check on Robbie.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Joel assured him.

Lyn squeezed his arm before he went. ‘Watch your steps,’ she said.

‘And you,’ Mission told them.

He hurried towards the landing and the great stairway beyond. Overhead, the lights flickered like little flames. A sign that something, somewhere, was burning.

55 • Silo 18 •

MISSION HURRIED UPBOUND amid a fog of smoke, his throat on fire. An explosion in Mechanical was whispered to have been the reason for the blackout. Talk swirled of a bent or broken shaft and that the silo was on backup power. He heard such things from half a spiral away as he took the steps two and sometimes three at a time. It felt good to be out and moving, good to have his muscles aching rather than sitting still, to be his own burden.

And he noticed that when anyone saw him, they either fell silent or scattered beyond their landings, even those he knew. At first, he feared it was from recognition. But it was the Security white he wore. Young men just like him thundered up and down the stairwell terrorising everyone. Only yesterday, they had been farmers, welders and pumpmen — now they brought order with their dark weapons.

More than once, a group of them stopped Mission and asked where he was going, where his rifle was. He told them that he had been a part of the fighting below and was reporting back. It was something he’d heard another claim. Many of them seemed to know as little as he did and so they let him pass. As ever, the colour you wore said everything. People thought they could know you at a glance.

The activity grew thicker near IT. A group of new recruits filed past, and Mission watched over the railing as they kicked in the doors to the level below and stormed inside. He heard screams and then a sharp bang like a heavy steel rod falling to metal decking. A dozen of these bangs, and then less screaming.

His legs were sore, a stitch in his side, as he approached the farms. He caught sight of a few farmers out on the landing with shovels and rakes. Someone yelled something as he passed. Mission quickened his pace, thinking of his father and brother, seeing the wisdom for once in his old man’s unwillingness to leave that patch of dirt.

After what seemed like hours of climbing, he reached the quiet of the Nest. The children were gone. Most families were probably holed up in their apartments, cowering together, hoping this madness would pass like others had. Down the hall, several lockers stood open, and a child’s backpack lay on the ground. Mission staggered forward on aching legs towards the sound of a familiar, singing voice and the horrid screech of steel on tile.

At the end of the hall, her door stood as welcome and open as always. The singing came from the Crow, whose voice seemed stronger than usual. Mission saw that he wasn’t the first to arrive, that his wire had gone out. Frankie and Allie were there, both in the green and white of farm security. They were arranging desks while Mrs Crowe sang. The sheets had been thrown off the stacks of desks kept in storage along one wall. Those desks now filled the classroom the way Mission remembered from his youth. It was as though the Crow were expecting them to be filled at any time.

Allie was the first to notice Mission’s arrival. She turned and spotted him at the door, her bright eyes shining amid her farmer freckles, her dark hair tied back in a bun. She rushed over, and Mission saw how her overalls were bunched up around her boots, the straps knotted at her shoulders to make them shorter. They must’ve been Frankie’s overalls. As she threw herself into his arms, he wondered what the two of them had risked to meet him there.

‘Mission, my boy.’ Mrs Crowe stopped her singing, smiled and waved him by her side. After a moment, Allie reluctantly loosened her grip.

Mission shook Frankie’s hand and thanked him for coming. It took a moment to realise something was different, that his hair had been cut short as well. They both rubbed their scalps and laughed. Humour came easy in humourless times.

‘What is this I hear about my Rodny?’ the Crow asked. Her chair twitched back and forth, her hand working the controls, her faded blue nightgown tucked under her narrow bones.

Mission drew a deep breath, smoke lingering in his lungs, and told them everything he had seen on the stairwell, about the bombs and the fires and what he had heard of Mechanical, the security forces armed with rifles — until the Crow dispelled his frenzied chatter with a wave of her frail arms.

‘Not the fighting,’ she said. ‘The fighting I’ve seen. I could paint a picture of the fighting and hang it from my walls. What of Rodny? What of our boy? Has he got them? Has he made them pay?’ She made a small fist and held it aloft.

‘No,’ Mission said. ‘Got who? He needs our help.’

The Crow laughed, which took him aback. He tried to explain. ‘I gave him your note, and he passed me one in return. It begged for help. They have him locked up behind these great steel doors—’

‘Not locked up,’ the Crow said.

‘—like he’d done something wrong—’

‘Something right,’ she said, correcting him.

Mission fell silent. He could see knowledge shining behind her old eyes, a sunrise on the day after a cleaning.

‘Rodny is in no danger,’ she said. ‘He is with the old books. He’s with the people who took the world from us.’

Allie squeezed Mission’s arm. ‘She’s been trying to tell us,’ she whispered. ‘Everything’s going to be okay. Come, help with the desks.’

‘But the note…’ Mission said, wishing he hadn’t turned it to confetti.

‘The note you gave him was to give him strength. To let him know it was time to begin. Our boy is in a place to hurt them good for what they’ve done.’ There was a wildness in the Crow’s eyes.

‘No,’ Mission said. ‘Rodny was afraid. I know my friend, and he was afraid of something.’

The Crow’s face hardened. She relaxed her fist and smoothed the front of her faded dress. ‘If that be the case,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘then I judged him most wrongly.’

56 • Silo 18 •

THE DIM-TIME approached while they arranged desks and the Crow resumed her singing. Allie told him a curfew had been announced, and so Mission lost hope that the others would show up that night. They pulled out mats from the cubbies to rest and plan, and decided to give the others until daybreak. There was much Mission wanted to ask the Crow, but she seemed distracted, her thoughts elsewhere, possessed with a joyousness that made her giddy.

Frankie felt certain he could get them through security and deeper into IT if only he could reach his father. Mission told them how well he’d been able to move about with the whites on. Maybe he could reach Frankie’s dad in a pinch. Allie produced fresh fruits harvested from her plot and passed them around. The Crow drank one of her dark green concoctions. Mission grew restless.

He wandered out to the landing, torn between waiting for the others and his anxiety to get going. For all he knew, Rodny was being marched up to his death already. Cleanings tended to settle people down, to follow bouts of unrest, but this was unlike any of the spates of violence he had seen before. This was the burning his father spoke of, the embers of distrust and crumbling trade that jumped up all at once. He had seen this coming, but it had approached with the swiftness of a knife plummeting from the up top.

Out on the landing, he heard the sounds of a mob echoing from far below. Holding the landing rail, he could feel the hum of marching boots. He returned to the others and said nothing of it. There was no reason to suspect those boots were coming for them.

Allie looked as though she’d been crying when he got back. Her eyes were moist, her cheeks flushed. The Crow was telling them an Old Time story, her hands painting a scene in the air.

‘Is everything all right?’ Mission asked.

Allie shook her head as if she’d rather not say.

‘What is it?’ he said. He held her hand, heard the Crow speaking of Atlantis, another tale of the crumbling and lost city of magic beyond the hills, a bygone day when those ruins shone like a wet dime.

‘Tell me,’ he said. He wondered if the stories were affecting her the way they sometimes did him, making her sad and not knowing why.

‘I didn’t want to say anything until after,’ she cried, fresh tears welling up. She wiped them away and the Crow fell silent, her hands dropping into her lap. Frankie sat quietly. Whatever it was, the two of them knew as well.

‘Father,’ Mission said. It had to do with his father. He was gone, he knew it instantly. Allie was close to his father in a way that Mission had never been. And suddenly, he felt a powerful regret for ever having left home. While she wiped her eyes, the words unable to form on her trembling lips, Mission imagined himself on his hands and knees, in the dirt, digging for forgiveness.

Allie bawled, and the Crow hummed a tune of aboveground days. Mission thought of his father, gone, all he longed to say, and wanted nothing more than to hurl himself at the posters on the walls, to tear them down and rip to shreds their urgings to go and be free.

‘It’s Riley,’ Allie finally said. ‘Mish, I’m so sorry.’

The Crow ceased her humming. All three of them watched him.

‘No,’ Mission whispered.

‘You shouldn’t have told him—’ Frankie began.

‘He ought to know!’ Allie demanded. ‘His father would want him to know.’

Mission gazed at a poster of green hills and blue skies. That world blurred with tears as surely as it might with dust. ‘What happened?’ he whispered.

She told him that there’d been an attack on the farms. Riley had begged to go and help fight, had been told no, and had then disappeared. He’d been found with a knife from the kitchen still clutched in his hands.

Mission stood and paced the room, tears splashing from his cheeks. He shouldn’t have left. He should have been there. He hadn’t been there for Cam, either. Death preceded him in all the places he couldn’t be. He had done the same to his mother. And now the end was coming for them all.

A rumble grew from the landing and filled the hallway — the sound of approaching boots. Mission wiped his cheeks. He had given up on any of the others coming and thought it might be Security with their guns. They would ask him where his own gun was before realising he was an impostor, before shooting them all.

He pushed the door shut, saw that the Crow had no lock on the thing, and wedged a desk under the handle. Frankie hurried to Allie, told her to get behind the Crow’s desk. He grabbed the back of the Crow’s wheelchair — the overhead wire swinging dangerously — but she insisted she could manage herself, that there was nothing to be afraid of.

Mission knew better. This was Security coming for them — Security or some other mob. He’d travelled the stairwell, knew what was out there.

There was a knock on the door. The handle jiggled. The boots outside quietened as they gathered around. Frankie pressed his finger to his lips, his eyes wide. The wire overhead creaked as it swung back and forth.

The door budged. Mission hoped for a moment that they would go away, that they were just making their rounds. He thought about hiding under the sheets used to cover the desks, but the thought came too late. The door was shoved open, a desk screeching as it skittered across the floor. The first person through was Rodny.

His appearance was as sudden and jarring as a slapped cheek. Rodny wore white overalls with the creases still in them. His hair had been cut short, his face newly shaved, a nick on his chin.

Mission felt as though he were staring into a mirror, the two of them in costume. More men in white crowded behind Rodny in the hallway, rifles in hand. Rodny ordered them back and stepped into the room where all those empty desks lay neatly arranged.

Allie was the first to respond. She gasped with surprise and hurried forward, arms wide as if for an embrace. Rodny held up a palm and told her to stop. His other hand held a small gun, the same the deputies wore. His eyes were not on his friends but on the Old Crow.

‘Rodny—’ Mission began. His brain attempted to grasp his friend’s presence. They had all come together to rescue him, but he looked in little need of it.

‘The door,’ Rodny said over his shoulder.

A man twice Rodny’s age hesitated before doing as he was asked and pulling the door shut. This was not the demeanour of a prisoner. Frankie lurched forward before the door shut all the way, calling ‘Father!’ as if he’d seen his old man in the hall with the others.

‘We were coming for you,’ Mission said. He wanted to approach his friend, but there was something dangerous in Rodny’s eyes. ‘Your note—’

Rodny finally looked away from the Crow.

‘We were coming to help—’ Mission said.

‘Yesterday, I needed it,’ Rodny said. He circled around the desks, the gun at his side, his eyes flicking from face to face. Mission backed up and joined Allie in standing close to the Crow — whether to protect her or feel protected, he couldn’t say.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Mrs Crowe said with a lecturing tone. ‘This is not where your fight is. You should be hurting them.’ A thin finger pointed at the door.

The gun in Rodny’s hand rose a little.

‘What’re you doing?’ Allie asked, her wide eyes on the gun.

Rodny pointed at the Crow. ‘Tell them,’ he said. ‘Tell them what you’ve done. What you do.’

‘What’ve they done to you?’ Mission asked. His friend had changed. It was more than the haircut and uniform. It was in his eyes.

‘They showed me—’ Rodny swept his gun at the posters on the wall. ‘That these stories are true.’ He laughed and turned to the Crow. ‘And I was angry, just like you said I would be. Angry at what they did to the world. I wanted to tear it all down.’

‘So do it,’ the Crow insisted. ‘Hurt them.’ Her voice creaked like a door about to slam.

‘But now I know. They told me. We got a call. And now I know what you’ve been doing here—’

‘What’s this about?’ Frankie asked, still in the middle of the room. He moved towards the door. ‘Why is my father—’

‘Stay,’ Rodny told him. He pushed one of the desks out of the way and moved down the aisle. ‘Don’t you move.’ His gun swung from Frankie to the Crow, whose chair shivered in time with her palsied hand. ‘These sayings on the wall, the stories and songs — you made us what we are. You made us angry.’

‘You should be,’ she screeched. ‘You damn well should be!’

Mission moved closer to the Crow. He kept his eye on the gun. Allie knelt and held the old woman’s hand. Rodny stood ten paces away, the gun angled at their feet.

‘They kill and they kill,’ the Crow said. ‘And this will go the way it always has. Wipe it all clean. Bury and burn the dead. And these desks—’ Her arm shot up, her quivering finger aimed at the empty desks newly arranged. ‘These desks will be full again.’

‘No,’ Rodny said. He shook his head. ‘No more. It ends here. You won’t terrify us any more—’

‘What’re you saying?’ Mission asked. He stepped close to the Crow, a hand on her chair. ‘You’re the one with the gun, Rodny. You’re the one scaring us.’

Rodny turned to Mission. ‘She makes us feel this way. Don’t you see? The fear and hope go hand in hand. What she sells is no different than the priests, only she gets to us first. This talk of a better world. It just makes us hate this one.’

‘No—’ Mission hated his friend for uttering such a thing.

‘Yes,’ Rodny said. ‘Why do you think we hate our fathers? It’s because she makes us hate them. Gives us ideas to break free from them. But this won’t make it better.’ He waved his hand. ‘Not that it matters. What I knew yesterday had me terrified for my life. For all of us. What I know now gives me hope.’ His gun came up. Mission couldn’t believe it. His friend pointed the barrel at the Old Crow.

‘Wait—’ Mission raised a hand.

‘Stand back,’ Rodny said. ‘I have to do this.’

‘No!’

His friend’s arm stiffened. The barrel was levelled at a defenceless woman in a mechanical chair, the mother to them all, the one who sang them to sleep in their cribs and on their mats, whose voice followed them through their sha-dowing days and beyond.

Frankie shoved a desk aside and lurched towards Rodny. Allie screamed. Mission threw himself sideways as the gun roared and flashed. There was a punch to his stomach, a fire in his gut. He crashed to the floor as the gun thundered a second time, the Crow’s chair lurching to the side as a spasm gripped her hand.

Mission landed heavily, clutching his stomach. His hands came away sticky and wet.

Lying on his back, he saw the Crow slump over in her chair, a chair that no longer moved. Again, the gun roared. Needlessly. Her body twitched as it was struck. Frankie flew into Rodny and the two men went tumbling. Boots stormed into the room, summoned by the noise.

Allie was there, crying. She kept her hands on Mission’s stomach, pressing so hard, and looked back at the Crow. She wailed for them both. Mission tasted blood in his mouth. It reminded him of the time Rodny had punched him as a kid, only playing. They’d only ever been playing. Costumes and pretending to be their fathers.

There were boots everywhere. Shiny and black boots on some, scuffed with wear on others. Those who had fought before and those just learning.

Rodny appeared above Mission, his eyes wide with worry. He told him to hang in there. Mission wanted to say he’d try, but the pain in his stomach was too great. He couldn’t speak. They told him to stay awake, but all he’d ever wanted was to sleep. To not be. To not be a burden to anyone.

57 Three Years Later • Silo 18 •

MISSION CHANGED OUT of his work overalls while Allie readied dinner. He washed his hands, scrubbed the dirt from beneath his fingernails and watched the mud slide down the drain. The ring on his finger was getting more and more difficult to remove, his knuckles sore and stiff from the hoeing of planting season.

He soaped his hands and finally managed to work the ring off. Remembering the last time he’d lost it down the drain, he set it aside carefully. Allie whistled in the kitchen while she tended the stove. When she cracked the oven, he smelled the pork roast inside. He’d have to say something. They couldn’t go buying roasts on no occasion.

His overalls went into the wash. There were lighted candles on the table when he got back to the kitchen. They were for emergencies, for the times when the fools below switched generators and worked on the busted main. Allie knew this. But before he could say anything about the roast or the candles, or tell her that the bean crop wouldn’t be what he’d hoped come harvest, he saw the way she was beaming at him. There was only one thing to be that happy about — but it was impossible.

‘No,’ he said. He couldn’t allow himself to believe it.

Allie nodded. There were tears in her eyes. By the time he got to her, they were coursing down her cheeks.

‘But our ticket is up,’ he whispered, holding her against him. She smelled like sweet peppers and sage. He could feel her trembling.

Allie sobbed. Her voice broke from being overfull of joy. ‘Doc says it happened last month. It was in our window, Mish. We’re gonna have a baby.’

A surge of relief filled Mission to the brim. Relief, not excitement. Relief that everything was legal. He kissed his wife’s cheek, salt to go with the pepper and sage. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

‘The roast.’ She pulled away and hurried to the stove. ‘I was gonna tell you after dinner.’

Mission laughed. ‘You were gonna tell me now or have to explain the candles.’

He poured two glasses of water, hands trembling, and set them out while she fixed the plates. The smell of cooked meat made his mouth water. He could anticipate the way the roast would taste. A taste of the future, of what was to come.

‘Don’t let it get cold,’ Allie said, setting the plates.

They sat and held hands. Mission cursed himself for not putting his ring back on.

‘Bless this food and those who fed its roots,’ Allie said.

‘Amen,’ said Mission. His wife squeezed his hands before letting go and grabbing her utensils.

‘You know,’ she said, cutting into the roast, ‘if it’s a girl, we’ll have to name her Allison. Every woman in my family as far back as we can remember has been an Allison.’

Mission wondered how far back her family could remember. It’d be unusual if they could remember very far.

He chewed and thought on the name. ‘Allison it is,’ he said. And he thought that eventually they would call her Allie too. ‘But if it’s a boy, can we go with Cam?’

‘Sure.’ Allie lifted her glass. ‘That wasn’t your grandfather’s name, was it?’

‘No. I don’t know any Cams. I just like the way it sounds.’

He picked up his glass of water, studied it awhile. Or did he know a Cam? Where did he know that name from? There were bits of his past shrouded and hidden from him. There were things like the mark on his neck and the scar on his stomach that he couldn’t remember coming to be. Everyone had their share of these things, parts of their bygone days they couldn’t recall, but Mission more than most. Like his birthday. It drove him crazy that he couldn’t remember when his birthday was. What was so hard about that?