14
“These violent delights have violent ends.”
The countertop in Supply rattled with the implements of war. Guns, freshly milled and wholly forbidden, were lined up like so many sticks of steel. Knox picked one up—could felt the heat in a barrel recently bored and rifled—and hinged the stock to expose the firing chamber. He reached into one of the buckets of shiny bullets, the casings chopped from thin tubes of pipe and packed with blasting powder, and slotted one into the brand new gun. The operation of the machine seemed simple enough. Point and pull the lever.
“Careful where you aim that,” one of the men of Supply said, leaning out of the way.
Knox raised the barrel toward the ceiling and tried to picture in his mind what one of these could do. He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.
One of the Supply workers emerged from the stacks with a tub in his hands. The bend of his back and sag of his shoulders told Knox the thing was heavy. “Just two dozen of these so far,” the man said, hoisting the bin to the counter.
Knox reached inside and pulled out one of the heavy cylinders. His mechanics and even some of the men and women in yellow eyed the bin nervously.
“Slam that end on something hard—” the man behind the counter said, just as calmly as if he were doling out an electrical relay to a customer and giving some last-minute installation advice. “—like a wall, the floor, the butt of your gun—anything like that. And then get rid of it.”
“Are they safe to carry?” Shirly asked as Knox stuffed one into his hip pocket.
“Oh yeah, it takes some force.”
Several people reached their arms in and clattered around for one. Knox caught McLain’s eyes as she took one for herself and slotted it into a pocket on her chest. The look on her face was one of cool defiance. She must see how disappointed he was in her coming, and he could tell at a glance that there would be no reasoning with her.
“Alright,” she said, turning her gray-blue eyes toward the men and women gathered around the counter. “Listen up. We’ve got to get back open for business, so if you’re carrying a gun, grab some ammo. There are strips of canvas over there. Wrap these things up as best you can to keep them out of sight. My group is leaving in five minutes, got that? Those of you in the second wave can wait in the back, out of sight.”
Knox nodded. He glanced over at Marck and Shirly, both of whom would join him in the second wave; the slower climbers would go first and act casual. The stouter legs would follow and make a strong push, hopefully converging on thirty-four at the same time. Each group would be conspicuous enough—combined, and they might as well sing their intentions while they marched.
“You okay, Boss?” Shirly rested her rifle on her shoulder and frowned at him. He rubbed his beard and wondered how much of his stress and fear was shining through.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “Yeah.”
Marck grabbed a bomb, stashed it away, and rested a hand on his wife’s shoulder. Knox felt a pang of doubt. He wished the women didn’t have to get involved. At least the wives. He continued to hope that none of this violence would be necessary, but it was getting harder and harder to pretend as eager hands took up arms. They were, all of them, now capable of taking lives, and he reckoned they were angry enough to do so.
McLain stepped through the opening in the counter and sized him up. “This is it, then.” She reached out a hand.
Knox accepted it. He admired the strength in the woman. “We’ll see you on thirty-five and go up the last level together,” he said. “Don’t have all the fun without us.”
She smiled. “We won’t.”
“And good climbing.” He looked to the men and women gathering up behind her. “All of you. Good luck and see you soon.”
There were stern nods and clenched jaws. The small army in yellow began to file for the door, but Knox held McLain back.
“Hey,” he said. “No trouble until we catch up, okay?”
She slapped his shoulder and smiled.
“And when this does go down,” Knox said, “I expect you at the very back, behind the—”
McLain stepped closer, a hand gripping Knox’s sleeve. Her wrinkled face had suddenly hardened.
“And tell me, where will you be, Knox of Mechanical, when the bombs fly? When these men and women who look up to us are facing their gravest test, where will you be?”
Knox was taken aback by the sudden attack, this quiet hiss that landed with all the force of a shout.
“You know where I’ll—” he started to answer.
“Damn straight,” McLain said, releasing his arm. “And you’d better well know that I’ll see you there.”
15
"I dreamt my lady came and found me dead"
Juliette stood perfectly still and listened to the sound of footsteps retreating down the stairwell. She could feel the vibrations in the railing. Goose bumps rushed up her legs and down her arms. She wanted to call out, to yell for the person to stop, but the sudden rush of adrenaline made her chest feel cold and empty. It was like a chill wind had forced itself deep into her lungs, crowding out her voice. People were alive and in the silo with her. And they were running away.
She pushed away from the railing and dashed across the landing, hit the curved steps at a dead run and took them as fast as her legs could take her. A flight down, as the adrenaline subsided, she found the lungs to yell, “Stop!,” but the racket of her bare feet on the metal stairs likely drowned out her voice. She could no longer hear the person running, dared not stop and listen for fear they would get too far ahead, but as she passed the doorway on thirty-one, she felt the panic that they might slip inside some level and get away. And if there were only a handful of them hiding in the vast silo, she may never find them. Not if they didn’t want to be found.
Somehow, this was more terrifying than anything else: that she might live the rest of her days foraging and surviving in a dilapidated silo, talking to inanimate objects, while a group of people did the same and stayed out of sight. It so stressed her that it took a while to consider the opposite: that this might instead be a group who would seek her out, and not have the best intentions.
They wouldn’t have the best intentions, but they would have her knife.
She stopped on thirty-two to listen. Holding her breath to keep quiet was almost impossible—her lungs were crying out for deep gulps of air. But she remained still, the pulse in her palms beating against the cool railing, the distinct sound of footsteps still below her and louder now. She was catching up! She took off again, emboldened, taking the steps three at a time, her body sideways as she danced down the stairs as she had in youth, one hand on the curving railing, the other held out in front of her for balance, the balls of her feet just barely touching a tread before she was flying down to the next, concentrating lest she slip. A spill could be deadly at such speeds. Images of casts on arms and legs and stories of the unfortunate elderly with broken hips came to mind. Still, she pushed her limits, positively flying. Thirty three went by in a blaze. Half a spiral later, over her footfalls, she heard a door slam. She stopped and looked up. She leaned over the railing and peered down. The footfalls were gone, leaving just the sound of her panting for air.
Juliette hurried down another rotation of the steps and checked the door on thirty-four. It wouldn’t open. It wasn’t locked, though. The handle clicked down and the door moved, but caught on something. Juliette tugged as hard as she could—but to no avail. She yanked again and heard something crack. With a foot braced on the other door, she tried a third time, yanking sharply, snapping her head back, pulling her arms toward her chest and kicking with her foot—
Something snapped. The door flew open, and she lost her grip on the handle. There was an explosion of light from inside, a bright burst of illumination spilling out the door before it slammed shut again.
Juliette scrambled across the landing and grabbed the handle. She pulled the door open and struggled to her feet. One broken half of a broom stick lay inside the hallway—the other half hung from the handle of the neighboring door. Both stood out in the blinding light all around her. The overhead lamps inside the room were fully lit, the bright rectangles in the ceiling marching down the hall and out of sight. Juliette listened for footsteps, but heard little more than the buzzing of the bulbs. The turnstile ahead of her winked its red eye over and over, like it knew secrets but wouldn’t tell.
She got up and approached the machine, looked to the right where a glass wall peeked into a conference room, the lights full-on in there as well. She hopped over the stile, the motion a habit already, and called out another hello. Her voice echoed back, but it sounded different in the lit air, if that were possible. There was life in here, electricity, other ears to hear her voice, which made the echoes somehow fainter.
She passed offices, peeking in each one to look for signs of life. The place was a mess. Drawers dumped on the floor, metal filing cabinets tipped over, precious paper everywhere. One of the desks faced her, and Juliette could see that the computer was on, the screen full of green text. It felt as though she’d entered a dreamworld. In two days—assuming she’d slept that long—her brain had gradually acclimated to the pale green glow of the emergency lights, had grown used to a life in the wilderness, a life without power. She still had the taste of brackish water on her tongue, and now she strolled through a disheveled but otherwise normal workplace. She imagined the next shift—did offices like these have shifts?—returning, laughing, from the stairwell, shuffling papers and righting furniture and getting back to work.
The thought of work had her wondering what they did here. She had never seen such a layout. She almost forgot about her flight down the stairs as she poked about, as curious about the rooms and power as the footsteps that had brought her there. Around a bend she came to a wide metal door that, unlike the others, wouldn’t open. Juliette heaved on it and felt it barely budge. She pressed her shoulder against the metal door and pushed it, a few inches at a time, until she could squeeze through. She had to step over a tall metal filing cabinet that had been yanked down in front of the heavy door in an attempt to hold it closed.
The room was massive, at least as big as the generator room and far larger than the cafeteria. It was full of tall pieces of furniture bigger than filing cabinets but with no drawers. Instead, their fronts were covered with blinking lights, red, green, and amber.
Juliette shuffled through paper that had spilled from the filing cabinet. And she realized, as she did so, that she couldn’t be alone in the room. Someone had pulled the cabinet across the door, and they had to have done this from inside.
“Hello?”
She passed through the rows of tall machines, for that’s what she figured they were. They hummed with electricity, and now and then seemed to whir or clack like their innards were busy. She wondered if this were some sort of exotic power plant—providing the lighting perhaps? Or did these have stacks of batteries inside? Seeing all the cords and cables at the backs of the units had her leaning toward batteries. No wonder the lights were blaring. This was like twenty of Mechanical’s battery rooms combined.
“Is anyone here?” she called out. “I mean you no harm.”
She worked her way through the room, listening for any movement, until she came across one of the machines with its door hinged open. Peering inside, she saw not batteries but boards like the kind Walker was forever soldering on. In fact, the guts of this machine looked eerily similar to the inside of the dispatch room’s computer—
Juliette stepped back, realizing what these were. “The servers,” she whispered. She was in this silo’s IT. Level thirty-four. Of course.
There was a scraping sound near the far wall, the sound of metal sliding on metal. Juliette ran in that direction, darting between the tall units, wondering who the hell this was running from her, and where they planned to hide.
She rounded the last row of servers to see a portion of the floor moving, a section of metal grate sliding to cover a hole. Juliette dove for the floor, her tablecloth garb wrapping up her legs, her hands seizing the edge of the cover before it could close. Right in front of her, she saw the knuckles and fingers of a man’s hands gripping the edge of the grate. There was a startled scream, a grunt of effort. Juliette tried to yank back on the grate, but had no leverage. One of the hands disappeared. A knife took its place, snicking against the grate, hunting for her fingers.
Juliette swung her feet beneath her and sat up for leverage. She yanked on the grate and felt the knife bite into her finger as she did so.
She screamed. The man below her screamed. He emerged and held the knife between them, his hand shaking, the blade catching and reflecting the overhead lights. Juliette tossed the metal hatch away and clutched her hand, which was dripping blood.
“Easy!” she said, scooting out of reach.
The man ducked his head down, then poked it back up. He looked past Juliette as if others were coming up behind her. She fought the urge to check—but decided to trust the silence just in case he was trying to fool her.
“Who are you?” she asked. She wrapped part of her garment around her hand to bandage it. She noticed the man, his beard thick and unkempt, was wearing gray coveralls. They could’ve been made in her silo, with just slight differences. He stared at her, his dark hair wild and hanging shaggy over his face. He grunted, coughed into his hand, seemed prepared to duck down under the floor and disappear.
“Stay,” Juliette said. “I mean you no harm.”
The man looked at her wounded hand and at the knife. Juliette glanced down to see a thin trace of blood snaking toward her elbow. The wound ached, but she’d had worse in her time as a Mechanic.
“S-s-sorry,” the man muttered. He licked his mouth and swallowed. The knife was trembling uncontrollably.
“My name’s Jules,” she said, realizing this man was much more frightened of her than the other way around. “What’s yours?”
He glanced at the knife blade held sideways between them, almost as if checking a mirror. He shook his head.
“No name,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “No need.”
“Are you alone?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Solo,” he said. “Years.” He looked up at her. “Where did—” He licked his lips again, cleared his throat. His eyes watered and glinted in the light. “—you come from? What level?”
“You’ve been by yourself for years?” Juliette said in wonder. She couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t come from any level,” she told him. “I came from another silo.” She enunciated this last softly and slowly, worried what this news might do to such a seemingly fragile man.
But Solo nodded as if this made sense. It was not the reaction Juliette had expected.
“The outside—” Solo looked again at the knife. He reached out of the hole and set it on the grating, slid it away from both of them. “—is it safe?”
Juliette shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had a suit. It wasn’t a far walk. But still, I shouldn’t be alive.”
Solo bobbed his head. He looked up at her, wet tracks running from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his beard. “None of us should,” he said. “Not a one.”
16
“Give leave awhile,
we must talk in secret.”
“What is this place?” Lukas asked Bernard. The two of them stood before a large chart hanging on the wall like a tapestry. The diagrams were precise, the lettering ornate. It showed a grid of circles evenly spaced with lines between them and intricacies inside each. Several of the circles were crossed out with thick red marks of ink. It was just the sort of majestic diagramming he hoped to one day achieve with his star charts.
“This is our legacy,” Bernard said simply.
Lukas had often heard him speak similarly of the mainframes upstairs.
“Are these supposed to be the servers?” he asked, daring to rub his hands across a continuous piece of paper the size of a small bed sheet. “They’re laid out like the servers.”
Bernard stepped beside him and rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Interesting. So they are. I never noticed that before.”
“What are they?” Lukas looked closer and saw each was numbered. There was also a jumble of squares and rectangles in one corner with parallel lines spaced between them, keeping the blocky shapes separate and apart. These figures contained no detail within them, but the word “Atlanta” was written large beneath.
“We’ll get to that. Come, let me show you something.”
At the end of the room was a door. Bernard led him through this, turning on more lights as he went.
“Who else comes down here?” Lukas asked, following along.
Bernard glanced back over his shoulder. “No one.”
Lukas didn’t like that answer. He glanced back over his own shoulder, feeling like he was descending into something people didn’t return from.
“I know this must seem sudden,” Bernard said. He waited on Lukas to join him, threw his small arm around Lukas’s shoulder. “But things changed this morning. The world is changing. And she rarely does it pleasantly.”
“Is this about . . . the cleaning?” He nearly said “Juliette.” The picture of her felt hot against his breastbone.
Bernard’s face grew stern. “There was no cleaning,” he said abruptly. “And now all hell will break loose, and people will die. And the silos, you see, were designed from the ground down to prevent this.”
“Designed—” Lukas repeated. His heart beat once, twice. His brain whirred its old circuits and finally computed something Bernard had said that had made no sense.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you say silos?”
“You’ll want to familiarize yourself with this.” Bernard gestured toward a small desk which had a fragile-looking wooden chair tucked up against it. There was a book on the desk unlike any Lukas had ever seen, or even heard of. It stood nearly as high as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are to never remove from your neck. Come down when you can and read. Our history is in here, as well as every action you are to take in any emergency.”
Lukas approached the book, a lifetime’s worth of paper, and hinged open the cover. The contents were machine printed, the ink pitch-black. He flipped through a dozen pages of listed contents until he found the first page of the body. Oddly, he recognized the opening lines immediately.
“It’s the Pact,” he said, looking up at Bernard. “I already know quite a bit of—”
“This is the pact,” Bernard told him, pinching the first half inch of the thick book. “The rest is the Order.”
He stepped back.
Lukas hesitated, digesting this, then reached forward and flopped the tome open near its middle.
? In the event of an earthquake:
? For casement cracking and outside seepage, turn to AIRLOCK BREACH (p.2180)
? For collapse of one or more levels, see SUPORT COLUMNS under SABOTAGE (p.751)
? For fire outbreak, see—
“Sabotage?” Lukas flipped a few pages and read something about air handling and asphyxiation. “Who came up with all this stuff?”
“People who have experienced many bad things.”
“Like . . . ?” He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say this, but it felt like taboos weren’t allowed down there. “Like the people before the uprising?”
“The people before those people,” Bernard said. “The one people.”
Lukas closed the book. He shook his head, wondering if this was all a gag, some kind of initiation. The priests usually made more sense than this. The children’s books, too.
“I’m not really supposed to learn all this, am I?”
Bernard laughed. His countenance had fully transformed from earlier. “You just need to know what’s in there so you can access it when you need to.”
“What does it say about this morning?” He turned to Bernard, and it dawned on him suddenly that no one knew of his fascination, his enchantment, with Juliette. The tears had evaporated from his cheeks, the guilt of possessing her forbidden things had overpowered his shame for falling so hard for someone he hardly knew. And now this secret had wandered out of sight. It could only be betrayed by the flush he felt on his cheeks as Bernard studied him and pondered his question.
“Page seventy-two,” Bernard said, the humor draining from his face and replaced with the frustration from earlier.
Lukas turned back to the book. This was a test. A shadowing rite. It had been a long time since he’d performed under a caster’s glare. He began flipping through the pages and saw at once that the section he was looking for came right after the Pact, was at the very beginning of this new Order.
He found the page. At the very top, in bold print, it said:
? In Case of a Failed Cleaning:
And below this rested terrible words strung into awful meaning. Lukas read the instructions several times, just to make sure. He glanced over at Bernard, who nodded sadly, before Lukas turned back to the print.
? In Case of a Failed Cleaning:
? Prepare for War.
17
“Poor living corpse, closed in a dead man’s tomb!”
Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.
“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress in one corner resting directly on the floor, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing off. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.
“You live here alone?” Juliette asked. “Is there no one else?” She couldn’t help but hear the thin hope in her voice.
Solo shook his head.
“What about further down?” Juliette inspected her wound. The bleeding had almost stopped.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I’ll find a tomato missing, but I figure it’s the rats.” He stared at the corner of the room. “Can’t catch them all,” he said. “More and more of them—”
“Sometimes you think there’s more of you, though? More survivors?” She wished he would focus.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his beard, looked around the room like there was something he should be doing for her, something you offered guests. “I find things moved sometimes. Find things left out. The grow lights left on. Then I remember I did them.”
He laughed to himself. It was the first natural thing she’d seen him do, and Jules figured he’d been doing a lot of it over the years. You either laughed to keep yourself sane or you laughed because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.
“Thought the knife in the door was something I did. Then I found the pipe. Wondered if it was left behind by a really, really big rat.”
Juliette smiled. “I’m no rat,” she said. She adjusted her tablecloth, patted her head and wondered what had happened to her other scrap of cloth.
Solo seemed to consider this.
“So how many years has it been?” she asked.
“Thirty four,” he said, no pause.
“Thirty four years? Since you’ve been alone?”
He nodded, and the floor seemed to fall away from her. Her head spun with the concept of that much time with no other person around.
“How old are you?” she asked. He didn’t seem all that much older than her.
“Fifty,” he said. “Next month, I’m pretty sure.” He smiled. “This is fun, talking.” He pointed around the room. “I talk to things sometimes, and whistle.” He looked straight at her. “I’m a good whistler.”
Juliette realized she probably wasn’t even born when whatever happened here took place. “How exactly have you survived all these years?” she asked.
“I dunno. Didn’t set out to survive for years. Tried to last hours. They stack up. I eat. I sleep. And I—” He looked away, went to one of the shelves and sorted through some cans, many of them empty. He found one with the lid hinged open, no label, and held it out toward her. “Bean?” he asked.
Her impulse was to decline, but the eager look on his poor face made it impossible. “Sure,” she said, and she realized how hungry she was. She could still taste the brackish water from earlier, the tang of stomach acid, the unripe tomato. He stepped closer, and she dug into the wet juice in the can and came out with a raw green bean. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.
“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”
“In apartments?” Juliette asked.
Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of other garbage and bachelor debris.
“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.
“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty four years ago?”
He lifted his arms. “What always happens. People go crazy. It only takes once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”
He suddenly sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, and twisted the fabric of his coveralls where they bunched up at his knees. “Our silo had one bad day. Was all it took.” He looked up at Juliette. “No credit for all the years before that. Nope. You wanna sit?”
He waved at the floor. Again, she couldn’t say no. She sat down, away from the reeking bed, and rested her back against the wall. There was so much to digest.
“How did you survive?” she asked. “That bad day, I mean. And since.”
She immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t important to know. But she felt some need, maybe to glimpse what awaited her, maybe because she feared that surviving in this place could be worse than dying on the outside.
“Staying scared,” he said. “My dad’s caster was the head of IT. Of this place.” He nodded. “My dad was a big shadow. Knew about these rooms, one of maybe two or three who did. In just the first few minutes of fighting, he showed me this place, gave me his keys. He made a diversion, and suddenly I became the only one who knew about this place.” He looked down at his lap a moment, then back up. Juliette realized why he seemed so much younger. It wasn’t just the fear, the shyness, that made him seem that way—it was in his eyes. He was locked in the perpetual terror of his teenage ordeal. His body was simply growing old around the frozen husk of a frightened little boy.
He licked his lips. “None of them made it, did they? The ones who got out?” Solo searched her face for answers. She could feel the dire hope leaking out of his pores.
“No,” she said sadly, remembering what it felt like to wade through them, to crawl over them. It felt like weeks ago rather than days.
“So you saw them out there? Dead?”
She nodded.
He dipped his chin. “The view didn’t stay on for long. I only snuck up once in the early days. There was still a lot of fighting going on. As time went by, I went out more often and further. I found a lot of the mess they made. But I haven’t found a body in—” He thought carefully. “—maybe twenty years?”
“So there were others in here for a while?”
He pointed toward the ceiling. “Sometimes they would come in here. With the servers. And fight. They fought everywhere. Got worse as it went along, you know? Fight over food, fight over women, fight over fighting.” He twisted at the waist and pointed back through another door. “These rooms are like a silo in a silo. Made to last ten years. But it lasts longer if you’re solo.” He smiled.
“What do you mean? A silo in a silo?”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry. I’m used to talking with someone who knows everything I know.” He winked at her, and Juliette realized he meant himself. “You don’t know what a silo is.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I was born and raised in a place just like this. Only, I guess you could say that we’re still having good days and not giving ourselves credit for them.”
Solo smiled. “Then what’s a silo?” he asked, that teenage defiance bubbling to the surface.
“It’s—” Juliette searched for the words. “It’s our home. A building like those over the hill, but underground. The silo is the part of the world you can live in. The inside,” she said, realizing it was harder to define than she thought.
Solo laughed.
“That’s what the word means to you. But we use words all the time without really knowing them.” He pointed toward the shelf with all the metal canisters. “All the real knowing is in those. Everything that ever happened.” He shot her a look. “You’ve heard the term ‘raging bull?’ Or someone being ‘bull-headed?’”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“But what’s a bull?” he asked.
“Someone who’s careless. Or mean, like a bully.”
Solo laughed. “So much we don’t know,” he said. He studied his fingernails. “A silo isn’t the world. It’s nothing. The term, this word, comes from a long time ago, back when crops grew in the outside farther than you could see—” He waved his hand over the floor like it was some vast terrain. “—back when there were more people than you could count, back when everyone had lots of kids—” He glanced up at her. His hands came together and kneaded one another, almost as if embarrassed to bring up the making of kids around a woman.
“They grew so much food,” he continued, “that even for all these people they couldn’t eat it all, not at once. So they stored it away in case times got bad. They took more seeds of grain than you could count and they would pour them into these great silos that stood aboveground—”
“Aboveground,” Juliette said. “Silos.” She felt as though he must be making this up, some delusion he’d concocted over the lonely decades.
“I can show you pictures,” he said petulantly, as if upset by her doubt. He got up and hurried to the shelf with the metal canisters. He read the small white labels on the bottom, running his fingers across them.
“Ah!” He grabbed one—it looked heavy—and brought it to her. The clasp on the side released the lid, revealing a thick object inside.
“Let me,” he said, even though she hadn’t moved a muscle to help. He tilted the box and let the heavy object fall onto his palm, where it balanced expertly. It was the size of a children’s book, but ten or twenty times as thick. Still, it was a book. She could see the edges of miraculously fine-cut paper.
“I’ll find it,” he said. He flipped pages in large chunks, each flap a fortune in pressed paper clapping solidly against more fortunes. Then he whittled his search down more finely, a pinch at a time, before moving to a single page at a time.
“Here.” He pointed.
Juliette moved closer and looked. It was like a drawing, but so exact as to almost seem real. It was like looking at the view of the outside from the cafeteria, or the picture of someone’s face on an ID, but in color. She wondered if this book had batteries in it.
“It’s so real,” she whispered, rubbing it with her fingers.
“It is real,” he said. “It’s a picture. A photograph.”
Juliette marveled at the colors, the green field and blue sky reminding her of the lie she had seen in her visor’s false video. She wondered if this was false as well. It looked nothing like the rough and smeared photos she’d ever seen.
“These buildings,” he pointed to what looked like large white cans sitting on the ground. “These are silos. They hold seed for during the bad times. For when the times get good again.”
He looked up at her. They were just a few feet apart, Juliette and him. She could see the wrinkles around his eyes, could see how much the beard concealed his age.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” she told him.
He pointed at her. Pointed at his own chest. “We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times.”
“Who? Who put us here? And what bad times?”
He shrugged. “But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope.”
He glanced up from the book and bit his lip, water welling up in his eyes. “Seeds don’t go crazy,” he told her. “They don’t. They have bad days and lots of good ones, but it doesn’t matter. You leave them and leave them, however many you bury, and they do what seeds do when they’re left alone too long—”
He stopped. Closed the book and held it to his chest. Juliette watched as he rocked back and forth, ever so slightly.
“What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him.
He frowned.
“We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.”
18
“If you had the strength of twenty men,
it would dispatch you straight.”
The waiting beyond the stacks of Supply was the worst. Those who could, napped. Most engaged in nervous banter. Knox kept checking the time on the wall, picturing all the pieces moving throughout the silo. Now that his people were armed, all he could hope for was a smooth and bloodless transfer of power. He hoped they could get their answers, find out what’s been going on in IT—those secretive bastards—and maybe vindicate Jules. But he knew bad things could happen.
He saw it on Marck’s face, the way he kept looking at Shirly. The worry there was evident in the man’s frown, the tilt of his eyebrows, the wrinkles above the bridge of his nose. Knox’s shift leader wasn’t hiding the concern for his wife as well as he probably thought he was.
Knox pulled out his multi-tool and checked the blade. He flashed his teeth in the reflection to see if anything from his last meal was stuck there. As he was putting it away, one of Supply’s shadows emerged from behind the stacks to let them know they had visitors.
“What color visitors?” Shirly asked, as the group gathered their guns and lurched to their feet.
The young girl pointed at Knox. “Blue. Same as you.”
Knox rubbed the girl’s head as he slipped between the shelving units. This was a good sign. The rest of his people from Mechanical were running ahead of schedule. He made his way to the counter while Marck gathered the others, waking a few, the extra rifles clattering as they were gathered up.
As Knox rounded the counter, he saw Pieter enter through the front door, the two Supply workers guarding the landing having allowed him past.
Pieter smiled as he and Knox clasped hands. Members of Pieter’s refinery crew filed in behind, their customary black coveralls replaced with the more discrete blue.
“How goes it?” Knox asked.
“The stairs sing with traffic,” Pieter said. His chest swelled as he took in and held a deep breath, then blew it out. Knox imagined the pace they’d maintained to shave off so much time.
“Everyone’s underway?” He and Pieter slid to the side while their two groups merged, members of Supply introducing themselves or embracing those they already knew.
“They are.” He nodded. “I’d give the last of them another half hour. Though I fear the whispers on porters’ lips travel even faster than we do.” He looked toward the ceiling. “I’d wager they echo above our heads even now.”
“Suspicions?” Knox asked.
“Oh, aye. We had a run-in by the lower market. People wanted to know the fuss. Georgie gave them lip, and I thought it’d come to blows.”
“God, and not in the mids yet.”
“Aye. Can’t help but think a smaller incursion would’ve had a greater chance of success.”
Knox frowned, but he understood Pieter thinking so. The man was used to doing a great deal with only a handful of strong backs. But it was too late for them to argue over plans already in action. “Well, the blackouts have likely begun,” Knox said. “There’s nothing to it but for us to chase them up.”
Pieter nodded gravely. He looked around the room at the men and women arming themselves and re-packing their gear for another quick climb. “And I suppose we mean to bludgeon our way up.”
“Our plan is to be heard,” Knox said. “Which means making some noise.”
Pieter patted his boss on the arm. “Well then, we are already winning.”
He left to pick out a gun and top up his canteen. Knox joined Marck and Shirly by the door. Those without guns had armed themselves with fearsome shanks of flattened iron, the edges bright silver from the shrill work of the grinder. It was amazing to Knox that they all knew, instinctively, how to build implements of pain. It was something even shadows knew how to do at young ages, knowledge somehow dredged up from the brutal depths of their imagination, this ability to deal harm to one another.
“Are the others running behind?” Marck asked Knox.
“Not too bad,” Knox said. “More that these guys made good time. The rest’ll catch up. You guys ready?”
Shirly nodded. “Let’s get moving,” she said.
“Alright, then. Onward and upward, as they say.” Knox scanned the room and watched his mechanics meld with members of Supply. More than a few faces were turned his way, waiting for some sign, maybe another speech. But Knox didn’t have another one in him. All he had was the fear that he was leading good people to their slaughter, that the taboos were falling in some runaway cascade, and it was all happening much too quickly. Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.
“On me,” he growled, and the chatter began to die down. Packs rustled into place, pockets jangling with danger. “On me,” he said again to the quieting room, and his soldiers began to form up in columns. Knox turned to the door, thinking this was certainly all on him. He made sure his rifle was covered, tucked it under his arm, and squeezed Shirly’s shoulder as she pulled the door open for him.
Outside, two workers from Supply stood by the railing. They had been turning the sparse traffic away with a made-up power outage. With the doors open, bright light and the noise of Supply’s machinery leaked out into the stairwell, and Knox saw what Pieter meant by whispers traveling swifter than feet. He adjusted his pack of supplies—the tools, candles, and flashlights that made it seem as if he were marching to aid rather than war. Beneath this beguiling layer hid more bullets and an extra bomb, bandages and pain salve for just in case. His rifle was wrapped in a strip of cloth and remained tucked under his arm. Knowing what it was, he found the concealment ridiculous. Looking at the others marching with him, some in welding smocks, some holding construction helmets, he saw their intentions were all too obvious.
They left the landing and the light spilling from Supply behind and began their climb. Several of his people from Mechanical had changed into yellow coveralls, the better to blend in the mids. They moved noisily up the dimmed nighttime glow of the stairwell, the shiver of traffic from below giving Knox hope that the rest of his people would be catching up soon. He felt sorry for their weary legs but reminded himself that they were traveling light.
He tried his damnedest to picture the coming morning as positively as he could. Perhaps the clash would conclude before any more of his people arrived. Maybe they would end up being nothing more than a wave of supporters coming to join in the celebrations. Knox and McLain would have already entered the forbidden levels of IT, would have yanked the cover off the inscrutable machinery inside, exposing those evil whirring cogs once and for all.
They made good progress while Knox dreamed of a smooth overthrow. They passed one landing where a group of women were hanging laundry over the metal railing to dry. The women spotted Knox and his people in their blue coveralls and complained of the power outages. Several of his workers stopped to hand out supplies and to spread lies. It wasn’t until after they had left and had wound their way up to the next level that Knox saw the cloth had come unwrapped from Marck’s barrel. He pointed this out and it was fixed before the next landing.
The climb turned into a silent, grueling ordeal. Knox let others take the lead while he slid back and checked on the status of his people. Even those in yellow, he considered his responsibility. Their lives were hanging in the balance of decisions he’d made. It was just as Walker had said, that crazy fool. This was it. An uprising, just like the fables of their youth. And Knox suddenly felt a dire kinship with those old ghosts, those ancestors of myth and lore. Men and women had done this before. Maybe for different reasons, with a less noble anger caught in their throats, but somewhen, on some level, there had been a march like this. Similar boots on the same treads. Maybe some of the same boots, just with new soles. All with the jangle of mean machines in hands not afraid to use them.
It startled Knox, this sudden link to a mysterious past. And it wasn’t that terribly long ago, was it? Less than two hundred years? He imagined, if someone lived as long as Jahns had, or McLain for that matter, that three long lives could span that distance. Three handshakes to go from that uprising to this one. And what of the years between? That long peace sandwiched between two wars?
Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking on these things. Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of something awful. And yet it felt so right. So necessary. What if that former clash had felt the same? Had felt the same in the breasts of the men and women who’d waged it?