19
"Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.”
“It would take ten lifetimes to read all these.”
Juliette looked up from the pile of scattered tins and stacks of thick books. There was more to marvel at in their text-heavy pages than in any of the children’s books of her youth.
Solo turned from the stove where he was heating soup and boiling water. He waved a dripping metal spoon at the scattered mess she’d made. “I don’t think they were meant to be read,” he told her. “At least, not like I’ve been reading them, front to back.” He touched his tongue to the spoon, then stuck it back in the pot and stirred. “Everything’s out of order. It’s more like a backup to the backup.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Juliette admitted. She looked down at her lap where pictures of animals called “butterflies” filled the pages. Their wings were comically bright. She wondered if they were the size of her hands or the size of people. She had yet to find any sense of scale for the beasts.
“The servers,” Solo said. “What did you think I meant? The backup.”
He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages?
She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.
“The backup of what exactly?” she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answers to come.
Solo found two bowls. He began wiping one out with the fabric in the belly of his coveralls. “The backup of everything,” he said. “All that we know. All that ever was.” He set the bowls down and adjusted a knob on the stove. “Follow me,” he said, waving his arm. “I’ll show you.”
Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin. She rose and followed Solo out of the room and into the next one.
“Don’t mind the mess,” he said, gesturing at a small hill of trash and debris piled up against one wall. It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and smelled like ten thousand. Juliette wrinkled her nose and fought the reflex to gag. Solo seemed unaffected. He stood beside a small wooden desk and flipped through diagrams hanging from the wall on enormous sheets of paper.
“Where’s the one I want?” he wondered aloud.
“What are these?” Juliette asked, entranced. She saw one that looked like a schematic of the silo, but unlike any they’d had in Mechanical.
Solo turned. He had several sheets flopped over one shoulder, his body practically disappearing between the layers of them. “Maps,” he said. “I want to show you how much is out there. You’ll shit yourself.”
He shook his head and muttered something to himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to say that.”
Juliette told him it was fine. She held the back of her hand to her nose, the stench of rotting food intolerable.
“Here it is. Hold this end.” Solo held out the corner of a half dozen sheets of paper. He took the other side and they lifted them away from the wall. Juliette felt like pointing out the grommets at the bottom of the maps and how there were probably sticks or hooks around here somewhere for propping them up, but held her tongue. Opening her mouth just made the smell of the rotting cans worse.
“This is us,” Solo said. He pointed to a spot on the paper. Dark, squiggly lines were everywhere. It didn’t look like a map or schematic of anything Juliette had ever seen. It looked like children had drawn it. Hardly a straight line existed anywhere.
“What’s this supposed to show?” she asked.
“Borders. Land!” Solo ran his hands over one uninterrupted shape that took up nearly a third of the drawing. “This is all water,” he told her.
“Where?” Juliette’s arm was getting tired of holding up her end of the sheet. The smell and the riddles were getting to her. She felt a long way from home. The thrill of survival was in danger of being replaced with the depression of a long and miserable existence looming for years and years before her.
“Out there! Covering the land.” Solo pointed vaguely at the walls. He narrowed his eyes at Juliette’s confusion. “The silo, this silo, would be as big around as a single hair on your head.” He patted the map. “Right here. All of them. Maybe all of us left. No bigger than my thumb.” He placed a finger in a knot of lines. Juliette thought he seemed so sincere. She leaned closer to see better, but he pushed her back.
“Let those go,” he said. He slapped at her hand holding the corners of paper. He smoothed the maps against the wall. “This is us.” He indicated one of the circles on the top sheet. Juliette eyeballed the columns and rows, figured there were four dozen or so of them. “Silo seventeen.” He slid his hand up. “Number twelve. This is eight. And silo one up here.”
“No.”
Juliette shook her head and reached for the desk, her legs weak.
“Yes. Silo one. You’re probably from sixteen or eighteen. Do you remember how far you walked?”
She grabbed the small chair and pulled it out. Sat down heavily.
“How many hills did you cross?”
Juliette didn’t answer. She was thinking about the other map and comparing the scales. What if Solo was right? What if there were fifty or so silos and all of them could be covered by a thumb? What if Lukas had been right about how far away the stars were? She needed something to crawl inside, something to cover her. She needed some sleep.
“I once heard from silo one,” Solo said. “A long time ago. Not sure how well any of these others are doing—”
“Wait.” Juliette sat up straight. “What do you mean, you heard from them?”
Solo didn’t turn from the map. He ran his hands from one circle to another, a childlike expression on his face. “They called. Checking in.” He looked away from the map and her, toward the far corner of the room. “We didn’t talk for long. I didn’t know all the procedures. They weren’t happy.”
“Okay, but how did you do this? Can we call someone now? Was it a radio? Did it have a little antennae, a small black pointy thing—” Juliette stood and crossed to him, grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. How much did this man know that could help her but that she couldn’t get out of him? “Solo, how did you talk to them?”
“Through the wire,” he said. He cupped his hands and covered his ears with them. “You just talk in it.”
“You need to show me,” she said.
Solo shrugged. He flipped up a few of the maps again, found the one he wanted and pressed the others against the wall. It was the schematic of the silo she had seen earlier, a side-on view of it divided into thirds, each third side by side. She helped him hold the other sheets out of the way.
“Here are the wires. They run every which way.” He traced thick branches of lines that ran from the exterior walls and off the edges of the paper. They were labeled with minuscule print. Juliette leaned closer to read; she recognized many of the engineering marks.
“These are for power,” she said, pointing at the lines with the jagged symbols above them.
“Yup.” Solo nodded. “We don’t get our own power anymore. Borrow it from others, I think. All automatic.”
“You get it from others?” Juliette felt her frustration rise. How many crucial things did this man know that he considered trifling? “Anything else you want to add?” she asked him. “Do you have a flying suit that can whisk me back to my silo? Or are there secret passages beneath all the floors so we can just stroll there as easy as we like?”
Solo laughed and looked at her like she was crazy. “No,” he said. “Then it would be one seed, not many. One bad day would ruin us all. Besides, the diggers are dead. They buried them.” He pointed at a nook, a rectangular room jutting off from the edge of Mechanical. Juliette peered closer. She recognized every floor of the down deep at a glance, but this room wasn’t supposed to exist.
“What do you mean, the diggers?”
“The machines that removed the dirt. You know, that made this place.” He ran his hand down the length of the silo. “Too heavy to move, I guess, so they poured the walls right over them.”
“Do they work?” Juliette asked. An idea formed. She thought of the mines, of how she’d helped excavate rock by hand. She thought of the sort of machine that could dig out an entire silo, wondered if it could be used to dig between them.
Solo clicked his tongue. “No way. Nothing down there does. All toast. Besides—” he chopped his hand partway up the down deep. “There’s flooding up to—” He turned to Juliette. “Wait. Are you wanting out? To go somewhere?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“I want to go home,” Juliette said.
His eyes widened. “Why would you go back? They sent you away, didn’t they? You’ll stay here. We don’t want to leave.” He scratched his beard and shook his head side to side.
“Someone has to know about all of this,” Juliette told him. “All these other people out there. All that space beyond. The people in my silo need to know.”
“People in your silo already do,” he said.
He studied her quizzically, and it dawned on Juliette that he was right. She pictured where they currently stood in this silo. They were in the heart of IT, deep inside the fortress room of the mythical servers, below the servers in a hidden passage, hidden probably even from the people who had access to the innermost kernels of the silo’s mysteries.
Someone in her own silo did know. He had helped keep these secrets for generations. Had decided, alone and without input from anyone, what they should and should not know. It was the same man who had sent Juliette to her death, a man who had killed who knew how many more—
“Tell me about these wires,” Juliette said. “How did you talk to the other silo? Give me every detail.”
“Why?” Solo asked, seemingly shrinking before her. His eyes were wet with fear.
“Because,” she said. “I have someone I very much wish to call.”
20
"This day's black fate on more days doth depend:
This but begins the woe others must end."
The waiting was interminable. It was the long silence of itchy scalps and trickling sweat, the discomfort of weight on elbows, of backs bent, of bellies flat against an unforgiving conference table. Lukas peered down the length of his fearsome rifle and through the conference room's shattered glass window. Little fragment jewels remained in the side of the jamb like transparent teeth. Lukas could still hear, ringing in his ears, the incredible bang from Sims's gun that had taken out the glass. He could still smell the acrid scent of gunpowder in the air, the looks of worry on the faces of the other techs. The destruction had seemed so unnecessary. All this preparation, the toting of massive black guns out of storage, the interruption of his talk with Bernard, news of people coming from the down deep, it all made little sense.
He checked the slide on the side of the rifle and tried to remember the five minutes of instruction he’d been given hours earlier. There was a round in the chamber. The gun was cocked. More bullets waited patiently in the clip.
And the boys in security gave him a hard time for his tech jargon. Lukas’s vocabulary had exploded with new terms. He thought about the rooms beneath the servers, the pages and pages of the Order, the rows of books he’d only gotten a glimpse of. His mind sagged under the weight of it all.
He spent another minute practicing his sighting, looking down the barrel and lining up the small cross in the tiny circle. He aimed at the cluster of conference chairs that had been rolled into an obstructing jumble by the door. For all he knew, they would be waiting like this for days and nothing would ever happen. It had been a while since any porter had brought an update on what was going on below.
For practice, he gently slid his finger into the guard and against the trigger. He tried to get comfortable with the idea of pulling that lever, of fighting the upward kick Sims had told them to expect.
Bobbie Milner—a shadow no more than sixteen—made a joke beside him, and Sims told them both to shut the f*ck up. Lukas didn't protest being included in the admonishment. He glanced over at the security gate where a bristle of black barrels poked through the stanchions and over the metal duty desk. Peter Billings, the new silo sheriff, was over there fiddling with his small gun. Bernard stood behind the sheriff, doling out instructions to his men. Bobbie Milner shifted his weight beside Lukas and grunted, trying to get more comfortable.
Waiting. More waiting. They were all waiting.
Of course, had Lukas known what was coming, he wouldn't have minded.
He would've begged to wait there forever.
Knox led his group through the sixties with just a few stops for water, a pause to secure their packs and tighten their laces. They passed several curious porters with overnight deliveries who prodded for details about where they were heading, about the blackouts. Each porter left unhappy. And hopefully, empty headed.
Pieter had been right: The stairwell was singing. It vibrated with the march of too many feet. Those who lived above were generally moving upward, away from the blackouts and toward the promise of power, of warm food and hot showers. Meanwhile, Knox and his people mobilized behind them to squelch a different kind of power.
At fifty-six, they had their first spot of trouble. A group of farmers stood outside the hydroponic farm lowering a cluster of power cables over the railing, presumably toward the small group they had seen the last landing down. When they spotted the blue coveralls of Mechanical, one of the farmers called out, “Hey, we keep you fed, why can’t you keep the juice on?”
“Talk to IT,” Marck replied from the front of the queue. “They’re the ones blowing fuses. We’re doing what we can.”
“Well, do it faster,” the farmer said. “I thought we just had a ratdamned power holiday to prevent this nonsense.”
“We’ll have it by lunchtime,” Shirly told them.
Knox and the others caught up with the head of the group, creating a jamb by the landing.
“The faster we get up there the faster you’ll get your juice,” Knox explained. He tried to hold his concealed gun casually, like it was any other tool.
“Well how about giving us a hand with this tap, then? They’ve had power on fifty-seven for most of the morning. We’d like enough to get our pumps cranking.” He indicated the trunk of wires coiling over the railing.
Knox considered this. What the man was asking was technically illegal. Calling him out on it would mean delays, but telling him to go ahead might look suspicious. He could sense McLain’s group several levels up, waiting on them. Pace and timing were everything.
“I can spare two of my men to help out. Just as a favor. As long as it doesn’t get back to me that Mechanical had shit to do with this.”
“Like I care,” the farmer said. “I just want water moving.”
“Shirly, you and Courtnee give them a hand. Catch up when you can.”
Shirly’s mouth dropped open. She begged with her eyes for him to reconsider.
“Get going,” he told her.
Marck came to her side. He lifted his wife’s pack and handed her his multi-tool. She begrudgingly accepted it, glowered at Knox a moment longer, then turned to go, not saying a word to him or her husband.
The farmer let go of the cables and took a step toward Knox. “Hey, I thought you said you’d lend me two of—”
Knox leveled a glare harsh enough to make the man pause. “Do you want the best I got?” he asked. “Because you’ve got it.”
The farmer lifted his palms and backed away. Courtnee and Shirly could already be heard stomping their way below to coordinate with the men on the lower landing.
“Let’s go,” Knox said, hitching up his pack.
The men and women of Mechanical and Supply lurched forward once more. They left behind a group of farmers on landing fifty-six, who watched the long column wind its way upward.
Whispers rose as the power cables were lowered. Powerful forces were merging over these people’s heads, bad intentions coming together and heading for something truly awful.
And anyone with eyes and ears could tell: some kind of reckoning was coming.
There was no warning for Lukas, no countdown. Hours of quiet anticipation, of insufferable nothingness, simply erupted into violence. Even though he had been told to expect the worst, Lukas felt like the waiting so long for something to happen just made it a fiercer surprise when it finally did.
The double doors of landing thirty-four blew open. Solid steel peeled back like curls of paper. The sharp ring made Lukas jump, his hand slip off the stock of his rifle. Gunfire erupted beside him, Bobbie Milner shooting at nothing and screaming in fear. Maybe excitement. Sims was yelling impossibly over the roar. When it died down, something flew through the smoke, a canister, bouncing toward the security gate.
There was a terrible pause—and then another explosion like a blow to the ears. Lukas nearly dropped his gun. The smoke by the security gate couldn't quite fog the carnage. Pieces of people Lukas had known came to a sick rest in the entrance hall of IT. The people responsible began to surge through before he could take stock, before he could become fearful of another explosion occurring right in front of him.
The rifle beside him barked again, and this time Sims didn't yell. This time, several other barrels partook. The people trying to push through the chairs tumbled into them instead, their bodies shaking as if pulled by invisible strings, arcs of red like hurled paint flying from their bodies.
More came. A large man with a throaty roar. Everything moved so slowly. Lukas could see his mouth part, a yell in the center of a burly beard, a chest as wide as two men. He held a rifle at his waist. He fired at the ruined security station. Lukas watched Peter Billings spin to the floor, clutching his shoulder. Bits of glass shivered from the window frame in front of Lukas as barrel after barrel erupted across the conference table, the shattered window seeming insignificant now. A prudent move.
The hail of bullets hit the man unseen. The conference room was an ambush, a side-on attack. The large man shook as some of the wild fire got lucky. His beard sagged open. His rifle was cracked in half, a shiny bullet between his fingers. He tried to reload.
The guns of IT loosed their own bullets too fast to count. Levers were held, and springs and gunpowder did the rest. The giant man fumbled with his rifle, but never got it reloaded. He tumbled into the chairs, sending them crashing across the floor. Another figure appeared through the door, a tiny woman. Lukas watched her down the length of his barrel, saw her turn and look right at him, the smoke from the explosion drifting toward her, her gray hair flowing like more of it wrapped in a halo around her.
He could see her eyes. He had yet to shoot his gun, had watched, jaw slack, as the fighting took place.
The woman bent her arm back and made to throw something his way.
Lukas pulled the trigger. His rifle flashed and lurched. In the time it took, the long and terrible time it took for the bullet to cross the room, he realized it was just an old woman. Holding something. A bomb.
Her torso spun and her chest blossomed red. The object fell. There was another awful wait, more attackers appearing, screaming in anger, until an explosion blew the chairs and the people among them apart.
Lukas wept while a second surge made a futile attempt. He wept until his clip was empty, wept as he fumbled for the clasp, shoved a spare into the butt, the salt bitter on his lips as he drew back that bolt and let loose with another menacing hail of metal—so much stouter and quicker than the flesh it met.
21
“I have seen the day
that I have worn a visor
and could tell a whispering tale.”
Bernard woke to shouting, to his eyes burning from the smoke, his ears ringing with a long-ago blast.
Peter Billings was shaking his shoulders, yelling at him, a look of fright in his wide eyes and soot-stained brow. Blood stained his coveralls in a wide rust-colored pool.
“Hrm?”
“Sir! Can you hear me?”
Bernard pushed Peter’s hands away and tried to sit up. He groped about his body, looking for anything bleeding or broken. His head throbbed. His hand came away from his nose wet with blood.
“What happened?” he groaned.
Peter crouched by his side. Bernard saw Lukas standing just behind the sheriff, rifle on his shoulder, peering toward the stairwell. There was shouting in the distance, and then the patter of gunfire.
“We’ve got three men dead,” Peter said. “A few wounded. Sims led a half dozen into the stairwell. They got it a lot worse than us. A lot worse.”
Bernard nodded. He checked his ears, was surprised they weren’t bleeding as well. He dotted his sleeve with blood from his nose and patted Peter on the arm. He nodded over his shoulder. “Get Lukas,” he said.
Peter frowned but nodded. He spoke with Lukas, and the young man knelt by Bernard.
“Are you okay?” Lukas asked.
Bernard nodded. “Stupid,” he said. “Didn’t know they’d have guns. Should’ve guessed about the bombs.”
“Take it easy.”
He shook his head. “Shouldn’t have had you here. Dumb. Could have been us both—”
“Well it was neither of us, sir. We’ve got ‘em running down the stairwell. I think it’s over.”
Bernard patted his arm. “Get me to the server,” he said. “We’ll need to report this.”
Lukas nodded. He seemed to know just the server Bernard meant. He helped Bernard to his feet, an arm around his back, Peter Billings frowning as the two of them staggered down the smoky hallway together.
“Not good,” Bernard told Lukas, once they were away from the others.
“But we won, right?”
“Not yet. The damage won’t be contained here. Not today. You’ll have to stay below a while.” Bernard grimaced and tried to walk alone. “Can’t risk something happening to us both.”
Lukas seemed unhappy about this. He entered his code into the great door, pulled out his ID, wiped someone else’s blood off it and his hand, then swiped it through the reader.
“I understand,” he finally said.
Bernard knew he’d picked the right man. He left Lukas to close the heavy door while he made his way to the rearmost server. He staggered once and fell against number eight, catching himself and resting a moment until the wooziness went away. Lukas caught up before he got to the back of the room, was pulling his copy of the master key out of his coveralls.
Bernard rested against the wall while Lukas opened the server. He was still too shaken up to notice the flashing code on the server’s front panel. His ears were too full of a false ringing to notice the real one.
“What’s that mean?” Lukas asked. “That noise?”
Bernard looked at him quizzically.
“Fire alarm?” Lukas pointed up at the ceiling. Bernard finally heard it as well. He swam toward the back of the server as Lukas opened the last lock, pushed the young man out of the way.
What were the chances? Did they already know? Bernard’s life had become unhinged in two short days. He reached inside the cloth pouch, grabbed the headset, and pulled it over his tender ears. He pushed the jack into the slot labeled “1” and was surprised to hear a beep. The line was ringing. He was making a call.
He pulled the jack out hurriedly, canceling the call, and saw that the light above “1” wasn’t blinking. The light above “17” was.
Bernard felt the room spin. A dead silo was calling him. A survivor? After all these years? With access to the servers? His hand trembled as he guided the jack into the slot. Lukas was asking something behind him, but Bernard couldn’t hear anything through the headphones.
“Hello?” he croaked. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“Hello,” a voice said.
Bernard adjusted his headphones. He waved for Lukas to shut the f*ck up. His ears were still ringing, his nose bleeding into his mouth.
“Who is this?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you,” the voice said. “Is this who I think it is?”
“Who the f*ck is this?” Bernard sputtered. “How do you have access to—?”
“You sent me out,” the voice said. “Is this Bernard? You sent me to die—”
Bernard slumped down, his legs numb. The cord on the headphones uncoiled and nearly pulled the cups from his head. He clutched the phones and fought to place this voice. Lukas was holding him by the armpits, keeping him from collapsing to his back.
“Are you there?” the voice asked. “Do you know who this is?”
“No,” he said. But he knew. It was impossible, but he knew.
“You sent me to die, you f*ck.”
“You knew the rules—!” Bernard cried, yelling at a ghost. “You knew—!”
“Shut up and listen, Bernard. Just shut the f*ck up and listen to me very carefully.”
Bernard waited. He could taste the copper of his own blood in his mouth.
“I’m coming for you. I’m coming home, and I’m coming to clean.”
?
“The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law.
Villain and he be many miles asunder.
And all these woes shall serve
for sweet discourses in our time to come.
He that is strucken blind cannot forget
the precious treasure of his eyesight lost.
One fire burns out another’s burning,
one pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.”
- The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliet.