Silo 49: Deep Dark

Chapter Sixteen

The days of counting backward continued but the gaps were just too much to overcome using just the books. Marina stayed with her previous tasks, filtering through the years of farm records until she overturned the last box and final filing cabinet and ran out of books to search. The pile was prodigious and her search wasn’t exhaustive but it would take an army of careful readers to truly search each book.

What she couldn’t overcome was the number that simply weren’t in the archives. Greta hadn’t been certain, but she had a notion that there might have been some purge in the past. Marina had found a sheaf of papers in a dusty drawer comprised of summary sheets for production and consumption that may have been related to the farms, but the identifiers were something she had no way of understanding. What could 2053 mean? 2051?

Greta was doing better with the maintenance reports, but like the farm reports, much was missing. Receipts for recycling started to outnumber the books. Piotr came up with a stunningly simple yet effective idea. They decided to average out the books in terms of years and then decide on the number of books between known books and count that way. It wouldn’t be highly accurate and Marina had a feeling that it would end in the same dead end she had encountered. Something fundamental had changed and she was pretty sure all the books of all kinds would lead back to the same undefined nowhere.

Marina checked in with the others and found Piotr and Greta with their heads together and working hard. Taylor was doing something else but related, his eyes flicking up and listening intently as they spoke. His easy smiles had disappeared somewhere. He appeared tense and drawn instead of the enthusiastic man of before. Something was going on with him and Marina wished she knew how to help him. It was a lot to take in, all that they had found so far, and she supposed that must be taking a toll.

The other end of the vast room was the one in the most disarray. It was the end where boxes were stacked in haphazard, leaning towers hiding filing cabinets with drawers that were crooked and permanently ajar. Marina walked toward them through the dim patches between the sparse bright lights. Only every other row of lights was lit, like every place in the silo that didn’t absolutely need brightness. It always sent a shiver along her spine when she walked such paths in quiet places.

She dismantled one of the leaning towers of boxes and sat amongst them, determined to sort them properly. Her reed pen was sharp and her ink pot full so there was no excuse not to finish the task. She gave a little grin and thought that she might even find something. So far she had been quite the lucky one.

The first box was filled with an uninteresting assortment of voter records and usage reports for power and water. She put them into piles and delved into the next, which held more disorganized bits though she did find a copy of a book she hadn’t read before. It looked like a fantasy novel about the outside. Something to do with a battle over some woman by the name of Helen in some place called Troy. It was neatly done, the writing almost as perfect as any she had seen. The binding needed work but it should be in the library so she set that aside.

The next tower was different. It was filled with books, with half a dozen copies of some of them in the boxes. She had never seen any of them before. She peeked inside one and immediately found herself embarrassed and looking around. It was a romance novel, heavy on the smut. The title was shocking enough, My Other Lover. It was a play on words as a quick read showed her. The other was an actual Other. “Yuck,” she said aloud in her corner.

As she piled through the boxes she found a single copy of a book that was machine printed. It was small and slender and bound in a way she had never seen before. The cover reminded her of the leather made from goats or rabbits but different. Thick and very beautiful, it invited touch. Along the outside edges of the paper there was a golden glimmer. She opened the pages to see and the gold appeared to have been painted along the edge of the paper. She couldn’t imagine such an extravagant use of the rare metal. The pages were supple and only slightly browned at the edges.

The book title was difficult to read. Also in gold, the script was strange. She teased out the letters until she could read it. In Memoriam by Alfred Lord Tennyson. She had never heard of him but the title was the same as the Memoriam so it must be related. She turned a few pages gingerly and found various attributions that wasted whole sheets of paper.

On the next page she found another wasted sheet and the words Copyright, 1897, 1900 and 1902. Her mind shot back to the papers they found with the numbers 2053 and so on instead of years. Was it possible that these were years in some past time?

She looked back and made sure that none of the others could see her. The path was clear and she could hear their voices rising above the sounds of air coming from the vents. The book was very small, no bigger than her hand, and would fit into a pocket in her coveralls without a problem. She knew it was wrong but she wanted to look this over privately. The little book had an air of illicitness to it. She would keep it just to see. Just for a little while.

She slipped the book into the front pocket of her coveralls and set to work on the other books, ever careful of the book next to her chest. She browsed the titles and found a pretty standard array. Some poetry, a few romances and an adventure or two.

She packed them up and took those boxes, one at a time, toward the staging area near the table. At Greta’s raised eyebrows, Marina let a box clunk to the floor and waved off any urgency. She said, “Books. But not that kind. It looks like books from the library. I thought they might go back. After you checked them, that is.” She stopped and thought about the smutty book, then added, “I think they might be banned books. Some of them are, umm, a little dirty.”

Greta nodded and said, “Sure. I’ll take a look.”

“How do you think they even got put in here?” Marina asked. She noticed that Piotr was looking over at the box with a bit more interest. She suppressed a smile.

The other woman shrugged, her interest reclaimed by what she was doing. She answered without looking up, “Who knows. How did half of this stuff wind up in here?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Taylor asked, unsmiling and with a strange tone to his voice. It sounded to Marina like he was asking it in a way that meant it should not be here at all. No one else seemed to notice.

Piotr gave Marina a little grin. He said, “In case you haven’t noticed, historians have a problem with sending things to recycling.”

Greta’s head came up sharply and she said, “We do not!”

His eyebrows gave a wiggle in Marina’s direction and she smiled at his successful ploy to get a rise out of Greta.

The woman in question motioned to all that lay before and around them in the room and said, “We wouldn’t have any of this if we had been too eager to recycle.”

“True,” Piotr said, drawing out the word while his eyes took in the piles.

They went back and forth, the two of them bantering like the fast friends they were becoming. Marina didn’t know how long the two of them had known each other but it was at least as long as the two served on the council. The queer formality of the council had been warming up since their mission had become a joint one. It was nice to see but Marina’s mind kept turning to her coverall pocket. The book pressed hard corners into her breasts and dragged her down with the weight of her decision to hide it.

She stopped herself from reaching up to touch the book. She rubbed her hands down the sides of her coveralls, like she would if she wiped off sweat or grime. She gave them one last smile, her face saying that all was fine, and went back to her messy corner of the archives.

It was all anticlimactic from there in her searching. Her hand came unbidden to the square form inside the pocket of her coveralls time and again. Several of the leaning towers were now organized and no longer leaning. They bore her neat Fabber script detailing the contents and several were empty and waiting for the results of further organization throughout the room.

By the time they were ready to break for dinner, Marina could barely control her desire to open the strange book and read. Pleading a headache, she escaped from the meal as soon as she could shovel it down her throat and went back to her room. She put the chair in front of the door and wedged it beneath the handle, then adjusted it several times, yanking the door to be sure it held.

On her bed, she pulled the book out with careful fingers. It was warm and that made it even more inviting, if that was possible. She felt the grainy green cover and depressed letters on the spine. There was a design on the front, also wastefully impressed in gold, that reminded her a little of the artifacts with the strange clawed animal. It wasn’t really the same, but it gave the same general impression.

She squished her pillow behind her head, took a fortifying breath and opened the cover. She could feel the strain of the old binding so she didn’t open it fully, just enough to turn a page and read. Beyond the blank and thick first pages, there was a page covered in a large and almost indecipherable script. A name, Catherine Meeks, and some gifting words that were so normal it made Marina smile. Then the words; June 16, 1907, Graduation Day.

What did that mean? It had the flavor of a date. Graduation was something she understood and there were always gifts given since it usually coincided with a first shadowing. It was the start of adulthood. This had that same feeling but if it was, what did it signify? What is June? What did 1907 actually relate to?

She shook her head and turned the page. Again, a full blank page but this time it had a much more understandable script. Rather than large and elaborate and loopy letters…a wasteful script… it was neat and very precise. It read:

“Hmm,” Marina hummed into the quiet room. “Even worlds, huh.”

The words somehow reeked of arrogance, a wink and a nod toward the catastrophe that was the silo, and it pissed Marina off. Whoever this T was, she was certain he was an asshole. That was the down deep of that.

She almost passed the next page. The two pages wanted to turn together. She separated the pages with a fingernail and found yet another page of writing, this time with the familiar neat and tiny letters of a silo person well acquainted with the value of paper. The letters were blurry so she held the book under the bedside light in her room and adjusted it further away from her eyes until it swam into sharp focus.

She touched the words as she finished. They were intimate words that imparted the feeling of a final goodbye, of some last bit of crucial advice. The signature may be only initials but Marina knew exactly who it was. Wallis Grant. It seemed like he was following her around the silo now, appearing over her shoulder to push her gently in one direction or another. Whoever Livy might be, she either never got the book or turned it in. Kept with those boxes of banned or distasteful books, this little treasure had languished. Was some part of Wallis around, even now, speaking so quietly that no one could hear?

Marina looked around her room and into the corners, half fearing and half hoping she would see some spectral Wallis pointing in the direction he wanted her to go next. She gave a shiver and sat up, trying to shake off the creepy feelings she was giving herself. There were no specters, no voices from the past, only this book and a sad letter that was either rejected or never reached the intended recipient. She held the book up to her face and breathed in the pleasant musty smell of old paper and the past and said into the leather that bound it, “I got it, Wallis.”

Reading the book for further clues yielded nothing. There were lots of underlined words or words with tick marks or numbers with circles around them, but none of it made any sense. Much was done at different times. She could tell by the fading of the ink or the strange greyish brown marks used instead of ink. On top of that the whole thing was poetry. She hated poetry. She would rather read that nasty book she had found about doing it with an Other before poetry.

While she was eating dinner with the group, Piotr and Greta teasing Taylor to break him out of yet another sour mood, the unidentifiable something that had been nagging at her finally clicked into place. “Shit! Of course!” she exclaimed, spattering dressing off her fork with her sudden gesture.

Everyone at the table stopped mid-sentence and looked at her, Greta wiping a drop of oily dressing from her cheek.

“Ah, yeah,” Marina stumbled with her words. She needed something —anything— reasonable. “I just remembered something I have to do.” She dropped her fork to her tray and shoved it toward Taylor, who could be relied upon to eat anything on anyone’s tray that was left over. “Can you eat that for me? I’ve got to go.”

He gave her a cool look she assumed was related to the tray, but nodded. Greta and Piotr just exchanged that “she’s weird” look with each other they always did and waved her off. Squeezing her fists to keep from flying out of the room, she left as casually as she could. The squeak of excitement that escaped when she got to the deserted hallway was a quiet one. She broke into a run at the corner but she kept her footfalls as light as possible in her heavy boots.

The door shoved closed and her chair beneath the knob once more, she opened the book and looked again. Yes, there is was. What she ignored at first as a date of some sort could not possibly be a date. Null day had no date and it sure wasn’t in the fifth month of the year. She considered the possibilities. Sometimes older people wrote dates by their age rather than the year and this could be that. The fourteenth day of the fifth month of the sixty-fourth year of his life. What about the spare after it? What did that mean? No, Marina was sure of one thing and that was that she was following a trail not laid by accident.

What did he mean by ‘I left it all for you’ in the letter? It had to mean there was more than this book. And the only thing that doesn’t fit in was the date and the word spare. That was the clue. But what in silo did it mean? Compartment numbers were one possibility but they weren’t labeled that way. Compartments were by level but then it was all one number. Her compartment was 95-0916R. Level 95, section 9 compartment 16. If it was a compartment then it would be Level 5, section 14 and compartment 64. That didn’t make sense unless the compartments up there were a whole lot smaller there than the rest of the silo. She couldn’t imagine how tiny the quarters would be to get at least 64 of them on a single section.

Still, it was possible. But where in any compartment could anything of any real size be hidden? Nowhere. The walls are concrete, ducts are cleaned regularly. She looked around her room, seeking where that she might hide things if she were Wallis. Sink, no. Floor, no, nothing large anyway. No, no and more no. Still, she would have to go look. Maybe it was just the next clue. She let out a wry chuckle when she considered that maybe he hid a clue under a floor tile just as she had. How in the silo would she get the resident of that space to let her search it or start pulling up tiles?

Marina tucked the book back into her coverall, patting it like a puppy or child after she buttoned up her pocket. She tucked her mussed hair back behind her ears, gave her ponytail a tightening tug, smoothed her coveralls and plastered her normal smile back on her face before she went back out of the room. There was no one there to see the performance so she dropped it and rushed back to the archives where everyone was probably already at work.

When the others asked her what was up, clearly referring to her abrupt departure, she passed it off as a forgotten special occasion that needed a note sent. Piotr had apparently been in that situation before because he mumbled, “That never works,” as he turned back to his work. Greta laughed at that and nudged his shoulder. She wasn’t married but she could guess as well as Marina could that Piotr was either a forgetter of birthdays or anniversaries, or both.

Only Taylor didn’t join in on the revelry. The way he looked at her made Marina feel uncomfortable, though it wasn’t a mean look or anything of that nature. It was just sort of a vague look that crept under her skin. She gave him a nervous smile and resisted the urge to pat the book again while she made her escape back to her corner of the archives.