Silo 49: Deep Dark

Chapter Twenty-Three

Marina paced their room again. She’d been shifting from pacing to sitting to lying down for hours. Greta was ensconced with the rest of the council making decisions that would impact them all, even if only in that they made no impact because no one would know.

For herself, she couldn’t decide what was best. If what Taylor and Greta thought was true — and Marina had read the journal of Graham and his words of uprisings and death in other silos — then they might inflict such a cycle on their own people. On the other hand, knowing where they came from and how they came to be would free them from uncertainty of another sort. It might give them all a goal for the future.

If she couldn’t make up her mind on the subject, she couldn’t imagine a room full of people deciding on the same course of action. How could they make such a decision? Of course, Marina thought, they could always change their minds later if they chose not to share and circumstances made it a better choice in the future. But if they shared now, they could not stuff it back into the deep if they realized later they shouldn’t have.

Greta looked weary beyond belief when she finally arrived. She flopped face down on the bed she had taken for herself in their shared room. Her arms outstretched and hanging over the edges, she groaned into the covers. She turned her head to the side so she could see Marina and said, “It’s over.”

Marina arched an eyebrow. “And?”

“And, we’re going to hold back most of it. The Legacy will be shared to some extent, but carefully. We’ll put out as much information as is safe, but not necessarily in full context. And nothing about the other silos,” she answered, her voice weary.

“Ah.”

“I can’t tell if that means you agree or disagree with the decision,” Greta said.

Marina tried to decide that herself, but she still felt ambivalent. “I wouldn’t have entirely agreed with either decision, I don’t think,” she answered.

Greta let out a short and bitter laugh. “You should be on the council. All of us feel that way.” She rolled into a sitting position and motioned for Marina to sit. After she perched carefully on the edge of her own bed, the flutters in her stomach returning full force, Greta leaned across the space between them and gave her arm a squeeze. “Are you ready?”

There could be no question that whatever Taylor found so compelling and the rest of them so uncomfortable was the subject of her question. Marina nodded.

“You know what the Watch is, correct?” Greta asked.

“Of course. They come to talk to every class before graduation. To recruit,” Marina replied.

“Your parents were members of the Watch, Marina.”

Marina shook her head. “No. My father was a paper maker and copyist. My mother was an electrician.”

Greta inclined her head in agreement but said, “Yes, but they were also members of the Watch.” She sighed a sigh full of meaning. “This is going to be difficult. Will you just listen?”

“I’ll try,” Marina answered and laced her fingers together on her lap.

“The Watch was a little different then. It was what happened to your parents that tightened things back up. Do you know how it works?”

“Sort of. The recruiter said we would work Up Top one week in so many weeks or something like that.”

“Right,” Greta confirmed. “As of now it is one week in eight. Back then things had gotten pretty lax. Nothing had ever happened that anyone knew of and people sort of looked at it as a vacation. Couples would serve their week together and bring their kids.”

Marina’s thoughts went back to those memories of her father showing her all the things on the screen. Dim memories of a room with bars instead of a wall and playing with other children in front of a screen flicked through her mind. She nodded understanding and said, “My parents were like that?”

“Yes. Two people are on watch at a time. Two shifts a day. A night shift and a day shift. Your parents were on the dim shift. Another couple had the day shift.” Greta’s voice was soft but firm. She was watching Marina for a response. “Does any of this sound familiar?”

“Not really,” Marina answered, shaking her head. “I sort of remember the sun and the view and my parents, but nothing specific.”

“That’s understandable. You were very young. I was a brand new shadow when it happened so you would have been a few years old at most. Are you okay for me to continue?”

“Did my family get killed by Others? Is that what Taylor was talking about?” Marina asked, getting right to the point.

Greta sighed heavily and answered her. “That is what we thought at the time. Given what we know now, about the other silos, we may be wrong.”

“But it was people from somewhere else? How did it happen?”

****

What followed was almost too strange to believe but it made sense of the discordant images she had in her memories, like the one of the frightened face of her mother saying that she loved her. Greta had been patient with her and as complete as she could be. The truth was that there would be no way to ever know the entire truth since everyone involved was dead aside from the children.

What was known was that her parents were like all the other young people who joined the watch at the time. They served their week together, brought their young child with them, and had a good time while they were doing their duty. The other shifts were the same and all agreed that it had been so long since anything happened that it wasn’t even a concern anymore. It was good duty and gave them a whole week away from the drudgery of work while getting paid to enjoy the view.

What wasn’t known were the details of that night, the night her parents died. The day shift had been woken by her mother, frantic and claiming that an Other was walking down the ridge toward them. The day shift had, in their turn, used the terminal to send an emergency wire to the Sheriff that stated just that. By the time the sheriff and deputies had arrived, both shifts were either outside or in the airlock and a lone cafeteria worker was trying to operate the airlock without knowing what to do.

The cafeteria worker, an unlucky bystander, had been trying to recover her parents, who were in the airlock. Even then the silo had been trying to figure out a way to bring people back inside once they cleaned. So far, not one had been successful in a long term sense. Whether it was because only the terminally ill were allowed to volunteer or because the system wasn’t yet working was hard to parse out. Back then it was still an entirely new process and no one had been recovered at all.

The Memoriam writings of the First Heroes directed no repairs to the airlock purification system, which was somehow disabled during the battle, were to ever be attempted. Instead, they were to find another method of cleansing the cleaner with the eternal aim of bringing them safely back into the silo while allowing nothing from the outside in with the cleaner. Many things had been tried, without success, but the newest idea was to fill the entire airlock with water and wash whatever it was away. It was not working particularly well.

For her parents, it didn’t work either. Both had breached suits and the water that filled the chamber in an attempt to wash away whatever it was that killed people drowned them instead. The cafeteria worker had also cycled the airlock too quickly in his attempt to retrieve them after the day shift went out. He hadn’t released water into the airlock to clean it first, exposing himself to the toxic air.

Aside from the evidence of her drowned parents, he told them little else before he died. Some contamination had leaked through and the sheriff and deputies had also begun to claim that their skin was burning. A quick thinking deputy had turned a fire hose on all of them and the whole cafeteria. That had finally halted the spread but didn’t save the cafeteria worker.

The day shift had dragged the blood soaked corpse of the “Other” in front of the screen and tried to pantomime coming back. They and their dead Other were lost from view and that was all that Greta knew of them. The next cleaner had written the message that they were on “the ramp” but that was all.

Greta had tried to be kind but there was no escaping the truth. Her parents had gone outside and then drowned trying to come back. When she asked about her memory of a dark room, Greta confirmed that the day shift had two children and that they, as well as she, had been crammed into a storage room within the cafeteria. The fourth child was the child of the cafeteria worker, whose mate had pre-deceased him.

Finally, she had her answers. The council had covered up the incident as a way to spare the silo worry, since no one really knew what happened. The sheriff had seen the limp body of someone in a different style of suit but that was all they knew. The Watch was re-structured so that no children came with a parent and no couples served together. It was a more serious watch from that day forward and had remained such. They still worked on a system for recovery and would continue to do so. That was some comfort to Marina.

That her parents died trying to defend the silo was some comfort as well, but Greta was right about that, too. Given that they now knew there were other silos and not all of them necessarily harbored Others, might that have been someone coming to try to meet them? What a terrible idea, Marina thought and shuddered for the poor person if that was what they were and not an Other at all.

Greta stayed with her and did her best to comfort her and answer her questions, but in the end all Marina wanted was to be alone to think. She lay on her little bed in the medical quarters and tried to decide what she would do. When she decided, she sought out Greta.