Dust (36 page)

“There was a silo shut down a while back for broadcasting on a general channel. Not on my shift.” He pointed to Silo 10 on the table, which bore the remnants of a red X. “A burst of conscience broadcast on a handful of channels, and then it was shut down. But it was Silo 40 that kept Anna busy for the better part of a year.” He found the folder he was looking for, flipped it open. Seeing her handwriting blurred his vision. He hesitated, ran his hands across her words, remembering what he’d done. He had killed the one person trying to help him, the one person who loved him. The one person reaching out to these silos to help. All because of his own guilt and self-loathing for loving her back. “Here’s a rundown of the events,” he said, forgetting what he was looking for.

“Get to the point,” Darcy said. “What’s this all about? My shift is up in two hours, and it’ll be daylight soon. I’ll need both of you under lock and key before then.”

“I’m getting there.” Donald wiped his eyes and composed himself, waved his hand at a corner of the table. “All of these silos went dark a long time ago. A dozen or so of them. It started with 40. They must’ve had some kind of silent revolution. A bloodless one, because we never got any reports. They never acted strange. A lot like what’s going on in eighteen right now—”

“Was,” Charlotte said. “I heard from them. They’ve been shut down.”

Donald nodded. “Thurman told me. I meant to say ‘was’. Thurman also hinted that they were originally going to build fewer silos but kept adding more for redundancy. There are a few reports I found that suggested this as well. You know what I think? I think they added too many. They couldn’t monitor them all closely enough. It’s like having a camera on every street corner, but you don’t have enough people watching the feeds. And so this one slipped under the rails.”

“What do you mean when you say these silos went dark?” Darcy asked. He sidled closer to the table and studied the layout under the glass.

“All the camera feeds went out at the same time. They wouldn’t answer our calls. The Order mandated that we shut them down in case they’d gone rogue, so we gassed the place. Popped the doors. And then another silo went dark. And another. The heads on shift here figured that in addition to the camera feeds, they’d sorted out the gas lines as well. So they sent the collapse codes to all of these silos—”

“Collapse codes?”

Donald nodded and drowned a cough with a gulp of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was comforting to see all the notes out on the table. The pieces were fitting together.

“The silos were built to fail, and all but one of them will. There’s no gravity to take them down, so they had us build them – they had me design them – with great slabs of concrete between the levels.” He shook his head. “It never made sense at the time. It made the dig deeper, increased costs, it’s an insane amount of concrete. I was told it had something to do with bunker busters or radiation leaks. But it was worse than that. It was so they’d have something to take down. The walls aren’t going anywhere – they’re tied to the earth.” He took another sip of water. “That’s why the concrete. And it was because of the gas that they didn’t want lifts. Never understood why they had us take them out. Said they wanted the design more ‘open’. It’s harder to gas a place if you can block off the levels.”

He coughed into the crook of his arm, then drew a finger around a portion of the conference table. “These silos were like a cancer. Forty must’ve communicated with its neighbors, or they just took them offline as well, hacked them remotely. The heads on shift here in our silo started waking people up to deal with it. The collapse codes weren’t working, nothing was. Anna figured they’d discovered the blast charges in forty and had blocked the frequency – something like that.”

He paused and remembered the sound of static from her radio, the jargon she’d used that gave him headaches but made her seem so smart and confident. His gaze fell to the corner of the room where a cot once lay, where she used to sneak over in the middle of the night and slip into his arms. Donald finished his water and wished he had something stronger.

“She finally managed to hack the detonators and bring the silos down,” he said. “It was this or they were going to risk sending drones up or boots over, which is last-page Order stuff. Back of the book.”

“Which is what we’ve been doing,” Charlotte said.

Donald nodded. “I did even more of it before I woke you, back when this level was crawling with pilots.”

“So that’s what happened to these silos? They were collapsed?”

“That’s what Anna said. Everything looked good. The people in charge over here were relying on her, taking her word. We were all put back to sleep. I figured it was my last snooze, that I’d never wake up again. Deep Freeze. But then I was brought out for another shift, and people were calling me by a different name. I woke up as someone else.”

“Thurman,” Darcy said. “The Shepherd.”

“Yeah, except I was the sheep in that story.”

“You were the one who nearly got over the hill?”

Donald saw the way Charlotte stiffened. He returned his attention to the folders and didn’t answer.

“This woman you’re talking about,” Darcy said. “Was she the same one who messed up the database?”

“Yeah. They gave her full access to fix this problem they were having; it was that severe. And her curiosity got her looking in other places. She found this note about what her father and others had planned, realized these collapse codes and gas systems weren’t just for emergencies. We were all one big ticking time bomb, every single silo. She realized that she was going to be put in cryo and never wake up again. And even though she could change anything she wanted, she couldn’t change her gender. Couldn’t make it so that anyone would wake her up, and so she tried to get me to help. She put me in her father’s place.”

Donald paused and fought back the tears. Charlotte rested her hand on his back. The room was quiet for a long moment.

“But I didn’t understand what she wanted me to do. I started digging on my own. And meanwhile, Silo 40 isn’t gone at all. The place is still standing. I realize this when another silo goes dark.” Donald paused. “I was acting head at the time, wasn’t thinking straight, and I signed off on a bombing. Whatever it took to make it all go away. I didn’t care about the tremors, being spotted, just ordered it done. We cratered anything over there that was still standing. Drones and bombs started thinning them out.”

“I remember,” Darcy said. “That was about when I got on shift. There were pilots up in the cafeteria all the time. They worked a lot in the middle of the night.”

“And they worked down here. When they were done and went back under, I woke up my sister. I was just waiting for them to leave. I didn’t want to drop bombs. I wanted to see what was out there.”

Darcy checked the clock on the wall. “And now we’ve all seen it.”

“There’s another two hundred years or so before all the silos go down,” Donald said. “You ever think about why this silo only has lifts, doesn’t have any stairs? You want to know why they call it the express but the damn thing still takes forever to get anywhere?”

“We’re rigged to blow,” Darcy said. “There’s that same mass of concrete between every level.”

Donald nodded. This kid was fast. “If they let us walk up a flight of stairs, we’d see. We’d know. And enough people here would know what that was for, what this meant. They might as well put the countdown clock on every desk. People would go insane.”

“Two hundred years,” Darcy said.

“That might feel like a lot of time to others, but that’s a couple naps for us. But see, that’s the whole point. They need us dead so no one remembers. This whole thing—” Donald waved at the conference table with the depiction of the silos. “It’s as much a time machine as a ticking clock. It’s a way of wiping the earth clean and propelling some group of people, some tribe chosen practically at random, into a future where they inherit the world.”

“More like sending them back into the past,” Charlotte said. “Back into some primitive state.”

“Exactly. When I first learned about the nanos, it was something Iran was working on. The idea was to target an ethnic group. We already had machines that could work on a cellular level. This was just the next step. Going after a species is even easier than targeting a race. It was child’s play. Erskine, the man who came up with this, said it was inevitable, that someone would eventually do it, create a silent bomb that wipes out all of humanity. I think he was right.”

“So what’re you looking for in these folders?” Darcy asked.

“Thurman wanted to know if Anna ever left the armory. I’m pretty sure she did. Things would show up down here that I couldn’t find on the shelves. And he said something about gas lines—”

“We’ve got an hour and a half before I need to get you back,” Darcy said.

“Yeah, okay. So Thurman found something here in this silo, I think. Something his daughter did, something she snuck out and did. I think she left another surprise. When they gassed eighteen, Thurman mentioned that they did it right this time. That they undid someone’s mess. I thought he was talking about my mess, my fighting to save the place, but it was Anna who had changed things. I think she moved some valves around, or if it’s all computerized, just changed some code. There are two types of machines, both of which are in my blood right now. There are those that keep us together, like in the cryopods. And then there are the machines outside around the silos, those we pump inside them to break people down. It’s the ultimate haves versus the have-nots. I think Anna tried to flip this around, tried to rig it up so the next silo we shut down would get a dose of what we get. She was playing Robin Hood on a cellular level.”

He finally found the report. It was well-worn. It had been looked through hundreds of times.

“Silo seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t around when it was put down, but I looked into this. There was a guy there who answered a call after the place was gassed. But I don’t think it was gassed. Not correctly. I think Anna took what we get in our pods to stitch us up and sent that instead.”

“Why?” Charlotte asked.

Donald looked up. “To stop the world from ending. To not murder anyone. To show people some compassion.”

“So everyone at seventeen is okay?”

Donald flipped through the pages of the report. “No,” he said. “For whatever reason, she couldn’t stop the airlock from popping. That’s part of the procedure. And with the amount of gas outside, they didn’t stand a chance.”

“I spoke to someone at seventeen,” Charlotte said. “Your friend … that mayor is over there. There are people there. She said they tunneled their way over.”

Donald smiled. He nodded. “Of course. Of course. She wanted me to think she was coming after us.”

“Well, I think she’s coming after us now.”

“We need to get in touch with her.”

“What we need to do,” Darcy said, “is start thinking about the end of this shift. There’s going to be a helluva beating in about an hour.”

Donald and Charlotte turned to him. He was standing by the door, right near where Donald had been kicked over and over.

“I mean my boss,” Darcy said. “He’s gonna be pissed when he wakes up and discovers a prisoner escaped during my shift.”

Silo 17

53

Juliette and Raph stopped at the lower deputy station to look for another radio or a spare battery. They found neither. The charging rack was still on the wall, but it hadn’t been wired into the makeshift power lines trailing through the stairwell. Juliette weighed whether or not it was worth staying there and getting some juice in the portable or if she should just wait until they got to the Mids station or IT—

“Hey,” Raph whispered. “Do you hear something?”

Juliette shined her flashlight deep into the offices. She thought she heard someone crying. “C’mon,” she said.

She left the charger alone and headed back toward the holding cells. There was a dark form sitting in the very last cell, sobbing. Juliette thought it was Hank at first, that he had wandered up to the nearest thing like a home to him, only to realize what state this world was in. But the man wore robes. It was Father Wendel who peered up at them from behind the bars. The tears in his eyes caught in the glare of the flashlight. A small candle burned on the bench beside him, wax dripping to the ground.

The door to the holding cell wasn’t shut all the way. Juliette pulled it open and stepped inside. “Father?”

The old man looked awful. He had the tattered remains of an ancient book in his hands. Not a book, but a stack of loose pages. There were pages scattered all over the bench and on the floor. As Juliette cast her light down, she could see that she was standing on a carpet of fine print. There was a pattern of black bars across all the pages, sentences and words made unreadable. Juliette had seen pages like this once in a book kept inside a cage, a book where only one sentence in five could be read.

“Leave me,” Father Wendel said.

She was tempted to, but she didn’t. “Father, it’s me, Juliette. What’re you doing here?”

Wendel sniffled and sorted through the pages as though he were looking for something. “Isaiah,” he said. “Isaiah, where are you? Everything’s out of order.”

“Where’s your congregation?” Juliette asked.

“Not mine anymore.” He wiped his nose, and Juliette felt Raph tug on her elbow to leave the man be.

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “Do you have any food or water?”

“I have nothing. Go.”

“C’mon,” Raph hissed.

Juliette adjusted the heavy load on her back, those sticks of dynamite. Father Wendel laid out more pages around his boots, checking the front and back of each as he did so.

“There’s a group down below planning another dig,” she told him. “I’m going to find them a better place, and they’re going to get our people out of here. Maybe you could come to one of the farms with us and see about getting some food, see if you can help. The people down below could use you.”

“Use me for what?” Wendel asked. He slapped a page down on the bench, and several other pages scattered. “Hellfire or hope,” he said. “Take your pick. One or the other. Damnation or salvation. Every page. Take your pick. Take your pick.” He looked up at them, beseeching them.