18
? Silo 18 ?
The pot on the stove bubbled noisily, steam rising off the surface, tiny drops of water leaping to their hissing freedom over the edge. Lukas shook a pinch of tea leaves out of the resealable tin and into the tiny strainer. His hands were shaking as he lowered the little basket into his mug. As he lifted the pot, some water spilled directly on the burner; the drops made spitting sounds and gave off a burnt odor. He watched Bernard out of the corner of his eye as he tilted the boiling water through the leaves.
“I just don’t understand,” he said, holding the mug with both hands, allowing the heat to penetrate his palms. “How could anybody—? How could you do something like this on purpose?” He shook his head and peered into his mug where a few intrepid shreds of leaf had already gotten free and swam outside the basket. He looked up at Bernard. “And you knew about this? How—? How could you know about this?”
Bernard frowned. He rubbed his mustache with one hand, the other resting in the belly of his coveralls. “I wish I didn’t know it,” he told Lukas. “And now you see why some facts, some bits of knowledge have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground.” He looked down at his boots. “I pieced it together much as you did, just knowing what we have to know to do this job. This is why I chose you, Lukas. You and a few others have some idea what’s stored on these servers. You’re already prepped for learning more. Can you imagine if you told any of this to someone who wears red or green to work every day?”
Lukas shook his head.
“It’s happened before, you know. Silo ten went down like that. I sat back there—” He pointed toward the small study with the books, the computer, the hissing radio. “—and I listened to it happen. I listened to a colleague’s shadow broadcast his insanity to anyone who would listen—”
Lukas studied his steeping tea. A handful of leaves swam about on hot currents of darkening water; the rest remained in the grip of the imprisoning basket. “That’s why the radio controls are locked up,” he said.
“And it’s why you are locked up.”
Lukas nodded. He’d already suspected as much.
“How long were you kept in here?” He glanced up at Bernard, and an image flashed in his mind, one of Sheriff Billings inspecting his gun while he visited with his mother. Had they been listening in? Would he have been shot, his mother too, if he’d said anything?
“I spent just over two months down here until my caster knew I was ready, that I had accepted and understood everything I’d learned.” He crossed his arms over his belly. “I really wish you hadn’t asked the question, hadn’t put it together so soon. It’s much better to find out when you’re older.”
Lukas pursed his lips and nodded. It was strange to talk like this with someone his senior, someone who knew so much more, was so much wiser. He imagined this was the sort of conversation a man had with his father—only not about the planned and carried out destruction of the entire world.
Lukas bent his head and breathed in the smell of the steeping leaves. The mint was like a direct line through the trembling stress, a strike to the calm pleasure center in the deep regions of his brain. He inhaled and held it, finally let it out. Bernard crossed to the small stove in the corner of the storeroom and started making his own mug.
“How did they do it?” Lukas asked. “To kill so many. Do you know how they did it?”
Bernard shrugged. He tapped the tin with one finger, shaking out a precise amount of tea into another basket. “They might still be doing it for all I know. Nobody talks about how long it’s supposed to go on. There’s fear that small pockets of survivors might be holed up elsewhere around the globe. Operation fifty is completely pointless if anyone else survives. The population has to be homogenous—”
“The man I spoke to, he said we were it. Just the fifty silos—”
“Forty-seven,” Bernard said. “And we are it, as far as we know. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else being so well prepared. But there’s always a chance. It’s only been a few hundred years.”
“A few hundred?” Lukas leaned back against the counter. He lifted his tea, but the mint was losing its power to reach him. “So hundreds of years ago, we decided—”
“They.” Bernard filled his mug with the still-steaming water. “They decided. Don’t include yourself. Certainly don’t include me.”
“Okay, they decided to destroy the world. Wipe everything out. Why?”
Bernard set his mug down on the stove to let it steep. He pulled off his glasses, wiped the steam off them, then pointed them toward the study, toward the wall with the massive shelves of books. “Because of the worst parts of our Legacy, that’s why. At least, that’s what I think they would say if they were still alive.” He lowered his voice and muttered: “Which they aren’t, thank God.”
Lukas shuddered. He still didn’t believe anyone would make that decision, no matter what the conditions were like. He thought of the billions of people who supposedly lived beneath the stars all those hundreds of years ago. Nobody could kill so many. How could anyone take that much life for granted?
“And now we work for them,” Lukas spat. He crossed to the sink and pulled the basket out of his mug, set it on the stainless steel to drain. He cautioned a sip, slurping lest it burn him. “You tell me not to include us, but we’re a part of this now.”
“No.” Bernard walked away from the stove and stood in front of the small map of the world hanging above the dinette. “We weren’t any part of what those crazy f*cks did. If I had those guys, the men who did this, if I had them in a room with me, I’d kill every last goddamned one of them.” Bernard smacked the map with his palm. “I’d kill them with my bare hands.”
Lukas didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.
“They didn’t give us a chance. That’s not what this is.” He waved at the room around him. “These are prisons. Cages, not homes. Not meant to protect us, but meant to force us, by pain of death, to bring about their vision.”
“Their vision for what?”
“For a world where we’re too much the same, where we’re too tightly invested in each other to waste our time fighting, to waste our resources guarding those same limited resources.” He lifted his mug and took a noisy sip. “That’s my theory, at least. From decades of reading. The people who did this, they were in charge of a powerful country that was beginning to crumble. They could see the end, their end, and it scared them suicidal. As the time began to run out—over decades keep in mind—they figured they had one chance to preserve themselves, to preserve what they saw as their way of life. And so, before they lost the only opportunity they might ever have, they put a plan into motion.”
“Without anybody knowing? How?”
Bernard took another sip. He smacked his lips and wiped his mustache. “Who knows? Maybe nobody could believe it anyway. Maybe the reward for secrecy was inclusion. They built other things in factories bigger than you can imagine that nobody knew about. They built bombs in factories like these that I suspect played a part in all this. All without anyone knowing. And there are stories in the Legacy about men from a long time ago in a land with great kings, like mayors but with many more people to rule. When these men died, elaborate chambers were built below the earth and filled with treasure. It required the work of hundreds of men. Do you know how they kept the locations of these chambers a secret?”
Lukas lifted his shoulders. “They paid the workers a ton of chits?”
Bernard laughed. He pinched a stray tea leaf off his tongue. “They didn’t have chits. And no, they made perfectly sure these men would keep quiet. They killed them.”
“Their own men?” Lukas glanced toward the room with the books, wondering which tin this story was in.
“It is not beyond us to kill to keep secrets.” Bernard’s face hardened as he said this. “It’ll be a part of your job one day, when you take over.”
Lukas felt a sharp pain in his gut as the truth of this hit. He caught the first glimmer of what he’d truly signed on for. It made shooting people with rifles seem an honest affair.
“We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it’s up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.”
“We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”
“Wise words.” Bernard took another sip of tea.
“Yeah. I’m just beginning to appreciate them.”
Bernard set his cup in the sink and tucked a hand in the round belly of his coveralls. He stared at Lukas a moment, then looked again to the small map of the world.
“Evil men did this, but they’re gone. Forget them. Just know this: They locked up their brood as a f*cked-up form of their own survival. They put us in this game, a game where breaking the rules means we all die, every single one of us. But living by those rules, obeying them, means we all suffer.”
He adjusted his glasses and walked over to Lukas, patted him on the shoulder as he went past. “I’m proud of you, son. You’re absorbing this much better than I ever did. Now get some rest. Make some room in your head and heart. Tomorrow, more studies.” He headed toward the study, the corridor, the distant ladder.
Lukas nodded and remained silent. He waited until Bernard was gone, the muted clang of distant metal telling him that the grate was back in place, before walking through to the study to gaze up at the big schematic, the one with the silos crossed out. He peered at the roof of silo 1, wondering just who in the hell was in charge of all this and whether they too could rationalize their actions as having been foisted upon them, as not really being culpable but just going along with something they’d inherited, a crooked game with ratshit rules and most everyone kept ignorant and locked up.
Who the f*ck were these people? Could he see himself being one of them?
How did Bernard not see that he was one of them?
19
? Silo 18 ?
The door to the generator room slammed shut behind her, dulling the patter of gunfire to a distant hammering. Shirly ran toward the control room on sore legs, ignoring her friends and coworkers asking her what was going on outside. They cowered along the walls and behind the railing from the loud blast and the sporadic gunfire. Just before she reached the control room, she noticed some workers from second shift on top of the main generator toying with the rumbling machine’s massive exhaust system.
“I got it,” Shirly wheezed, slamming the control room door shut behind her. Courtnee and Walker looked up from the floor. The wide eyes and slack jaw on Courtnee’s face told Shirly she’d missed something.
“What?” she asked. She handed the two transmitters to Walker. “Did you hear? Walk, does she know?”
“How is this possible?” Courtnee asked. “How did she survive? And what happened to your face?”
Shirly touched her lip, her sore chin. Her fingers came away wet with blood. She used the sleeve of her undershirt to dab at her mouth.
“If this works,” Walker grumbled, fiddling with one of the transmitters, “we can ask Jules herself.”
Shirly turned and peered through the control room’s observation window. She lowered her sleeve away from her face. “What’s Karl and them doing with the exhaust feed?” she asked.
“They’ve got some plan to reroute it,” Courtnee said. She got up from the floor while Walker started soldering something, the smell reminding her of his workshop. He grumbled about his eyesight while Courtnee joined her by the glass.
“Reroute it where?”
“IT. That’s what Heline said, anyway. The cooling feed for their server room runs through the ceiling here before shooting up the mechanical shaft. Someone spotted the proximity on a schematic, thought of a way to fight back from here.”
“So, we choke them out with our fumes?” Shirly felt uneasy with the plan. She wondered what Knox would say if he were still alive, still in charge. Surely all the men and women riding desks up there weren’t the problem. “Walk, how long before we can talk? Before we can try and contact her?”
“Almost there. Blasted magnifiers—”
Courtnee rested her hand on Shirly’s arm. “Are you okay? How’re you holding up?”
“Me?” Shirly laughed and shook her head. She checked the bloodstains on her sleeve, felt the sweat trickling down her chest. “I’m walking around in shock. I have no idea what the hell’s going on anymore. My ears are still ringing from whatever they did to the stairwell. I think I screwed up my ankle. And I’m starving. Oh, and did I mention my friend isn’t as dead as I thought she was?”
She took a deep breath.
Courtnee continued to stare at her worryingly. Shirly knew none of this was what her friend was asking her about.
“And yeah, I miss Marck,” she said quietly.
Courtnee put her arm around her friend and pulled her close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
Shirly waved her off. The two of them stood quietly and watched through the window as a small crew from second shift worked on the generator, trying to reroute the outpouring of noxious fumes from the apartment-sized machine to the floors of the thirties high above.
“You know what, though? There are times when I’m glad he’s not here. Times when I know I won’t be around much longer either, not once they get to us, and I’m glad he’s not here to stress about it, to worry about what they’ll do to us. To me. And I’m glad I haven’t had to watch him do all this fighting, living on rations, this sort of craziness.” She dipped her chin at the crew outside. She knew Marck would either be up there leading that terrible work or outside with a gun pressed to his cheek.
“Hello. Testing. Hello, hello.”
The two women turned around to see Walker clicking the red detonate switch, the microphone from the headset held beneath his chin, furrows of concentration across his brow.
“Juliette?” he asked. “Can you hear me? Hello?”
Shirly moved to Walker’s side, squatted down, rested a hand on his shoulder. The three of them stared at the headphones, waiting for a reply.
“Hello?”
A quiet voice leaked out of the tiny speakers. Shirly clapped a hand to her chest, her breath stolen from the miracle of a reply. It was a fraction of a second later, after this surge of desperate hope, that she realized this wasn’t Juliette. The voice was different.
“That’s not her,” Courtnee whispered, dejected. Walker waved his hand to silence her. The red switch clicked noisily as he prepared to transmit.
“Hello. My name is Walker. We received a transmission from a friend. Is there anyone else there?”
“Ask them where they are,” Courtnee hissed.
“Where exactly are you?” Walker added, before releasing the switch.
The tiny speakers popped.
“We are nowhere. You’ll never find us. Stay away.”
There was a pause, a hiss of static.
“And your friend is dead. We killed him.”
20
? Silo 17 ?
The water inside the suit was freezing, the air cold, the combination lethal. Juliette’s teeth chattered noisily while she worked the knife. She slid the blade into the soggy skin of the suit, the feeling of having been here before, having done all this once, unmistakable.
The gloves came off first, the suit destroyed, water pouring out of every cut. Juliette rubbed her hands together, could barely feel them. She hacked away at the material over her chest, her eyes falling to Solo, who had gone deathly still. His large wrench was missing, she saw. Their supply bag was gone as well. The compressor was on its side, the hose kinked beneath it, fuel leaking from the loose filling cap.
Juliette was freezing. She could hardly breathe. Once the chest of the suit was cut open, she wiggled her knees and feet through the hole, spun the material around in front of herself, then tried to pry the velcro apart.
Her fingers were too senseless to do even this. She ran the knife down the joint instead, sawing the velcro apart until she could find the zipper.
Finally, squeezing her fingers until they were white, she pulled the small tab until it was free of the collar. The collar off, she threw the suit away from herself. The thing weighed double with all the water in it. She was left in two layers of black undersuit, still soaking wet and shivering, a knife in her trembling hand, the body of a good man lying beside her, a man who had survived everything this nasty world could throw at him except for her arrival.
Juliette moved to Solo’s side and reached for his neck. Her hands were icy; she couldn’t feel a pulse, wasn’t sure if she would be able to. She could barely feel his neck with her frozen fingers.
She struggled to her feet, nearly collapsed, hugged the landing’s railing. She teetered toward the compressor, knowing she needed to warm up. She felt the powerful urge to go to sleep but knew she’d never wake up if she did.
The gas can was still full. She tried to work the cap, but her hands were useless. They were numb and vibrating from the cold. Her breath fogged in front of her, a chilly reminder of the heat she was losing, what little heat she had left.
She grabbed the knife. Holding it in both hands, she pressed the tip into the cap. The flat handle was easier to grasp than the plastic cap; she spun the knife and cracked the lid on the jug of gas. Once the cap was loose, she pulled the blade out and did the rest with her palms, the knife resting in her lap.
She tilted the can over the compressor, soaking the large rubber wheels, the carriage, the entire motor. She would never want to use it again anyway, never rely on it or anything else for her air. She put the can down, still half full, and slid it away from the compressor with her foot. Gas dripped through the metal grating and made musical impacts in the water below, drips that echoed off the concrete walls of the stairwell, that added to the flood’s toxic and colorful slick.
Wielding the knife with the blade down, the dull side away from her, she smacked it against the metal fins of the heat exchanger. She yanked her arm back with each strike, expecting the whoosh of an immediate flame. But there was no spark. She hit it harder, hating to abuse her precious tool, her only defense. Solo’s stillness nearby was a reminder that she might need it if she were able to survive the deadly cold—
The knife struck with a snick, there was a pop, heat traveling up her arm, a wash of it against her face.
Juliette dropped the knife and waved her hand, but it wasn’t on fire. The compressor was. Part of the grating, too.
As it began to die down, she grabbed the can and sloshed some more, large balls of orange flame rewarding her, leaping up in the air with a hiss. The wheels crackled as they burned. Juliette collapsed close to the fire, felt the heat from the dancing flame as it burned all across the metal machine. She began to strip, her eyes returning now and then to Solo, promising herself that she wouldn’t leave his body there, that she would come back for him.
Feeling slowly returned to her extremities. Gradually, but then with a tingling pain. Naked, she curled into a ball next to the small and feeble fire and rubbed her hands together, breathing her warm and visible breath into her palms. Twice, she had to feed the hungry and stingy fire. Only the wheels burned reliably, but they kept her from needing another spark. The glorious heat traveled somewhat through the landing’s grated decking, warming her bare skin where it touched the metal.
Her teeth chattered violently. Juliette eyed the stairs, this new fear coursing through her that boots could rumble down at any moment, that she was trapped between these other survivors and the freezing water. She retrieved her knife, held it in front of her with both hands, tried to will herself to not shiver so violently.
Glimpses of her face in the blade caused her to worry more. She looked as pale as a ghost. Lips purple, eyes ringed dark and seeming hollow. She nearly laughed at the sight of her lips vibrating, the clacking blur of her teeth. She scooted closer to the fire. The orange light danced on the blade. The unburnt fuel dripped and formed silvery splashes of color below.
As the last of the gas burned and the flames dwindled, Juliette decided to move. She was still shaking, but it was cold in the depths of the shaft so far from the electricity of IT. She patted the black underlinings she’d stripped off. One of them had been left balled up and was still soaked. The other she’d been lucky to have dropped flat, hadn’t been thinking clearly or she would’ve hung it up. It was damp, but better to wear it and heat it up than allow the cold air to wick her body temperature away. She worked her legs in, struggled to get her arms through the sleeves, zipped up the front.
On bare, numb, and unsteady feet, she returned to Solo. She could feel his neck this time. He felt warm. She couldn’t remember how long a body stayed that way. And then she felt a weak and slow thrumming in his neck. A beat.
“Solo!” She shook his shoulders. “Hey—” What name had he whispered? She remembered: “Jimmy!”
His head lolled from side to side while she shook his shoulder. She checked his scalp beneath all that crazy hair, saw lots of blood. Most of it was dry. She looked around again for her bag—they had brought food, water, and dry clothes for when she got back up—but the satchel was gone. She grabbed her other undersuit instead. She wasn’t sure about the quality of the water in the fabric, but it had to be better than nothing. Wrenching the material in a tight ball, she dripped what she could against his lips. She squeezed more on his head, brushed his hair back to inspect the wound, probed the nasty cut with her fingers. As soon as the water hit the open gash, it was like pushing a button. Solo lurched to the side, away from her hand and the drip from the undersuit. His teeth flashed yellow in his beard as he hissed in pain, his hands rising from the landing and hovering there, arms tensed, still senseless.
“Solo. Hey, it’s okay.”
She held him as he came to, his eyes rolling around, lids blinking.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re gonna be okay.”
She used the balled-up undersuit to dab at his wound. Solo grunted and held her wrist but didn’t pull away.
“Stings,” he said. He blinked and looked around. “Where am I?”
“The down deep,” she reminded him, happy to hear him talking. She felt like crying with relief. “I think you were attacked—”
He tried to sit up, hissing between his teeth, a powerful grip pinching her wrist.
“Easy,” she said, trying to hold him down. “You’ve got a nasty cut on your head. A lot of swelling.”
His body relaxed.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Juliette said. “What do you remember? How many were there?”
He closed his eyes. She continued to dab at his wound.
“Just one. I think.” He opened his eyes wide as if shocked by the memory of the attack. “He was my age.”
“We need to get up top,” she told him. “We need to get where it’s warm, get you cleaned up, get me dry. Do you think you can move?”
“I’m not crazy,” Solo said.
“I know you’re not.”
“The things that moved, the lights, it wasn’t me. I’m not crazy.”
“No,” Juliette agreed. She remembered all the times she had thought the same thing of herself, always in the down deep of this place, usually while rummaging around Supply. “You aren’t crazy,” she said, comforting him. “You aren’t crazy at all.”
21
? Silo 18 ?
Lukas couldn’t force himself to study, not what he was supposed to be studying. The Order sat flopped open on the wooden desk, the little lamp on its thousand-jointed-neck bent over and warming it in a pool of light.
But Lukas stood before the wall schematics instead. He stared at the arrangement of silos, spaced out like the servers in the room above him, and listened to the radio crackle with the sounds of distant warring.
The final push was being made. Sims’s team had lost a few men in an awful explosion, something about a stairwell—but not the great stairwell—and now they were in a fight they hoped would be the last. The little speakers by the radio hissed with static as the men coordinated themselves, as Bernard shouted orders from his office one level up, always with the crackle of gunfire erupting behind the voices.
Lukas knew he shouldn’t listen, and yet he couldn’t stop. Juliette would call him anytime now and ask him for an update. She would want to know what had happened, how the end had come, and the only thing worse than telling her would be admitting he didn’t know, that he couldn’t bear to listen.
He reached out and touched the round roof of silo 17. It was as though he were a god surveying the structures from up high. He pictured his hand piercing the dark clouds above Juliette and spanning a roof built for thousands. He rubbed his fingers over the red X drawn across the silo, those two slashes that admitted to such a great loss. The marks felt waxy beneath his fingers like they’d been drawn with crayon or something similar. He tried to imagine getting the news one day that an entire people were gone, wiped out. He would have to dig in Bernard’s desk—his desk—and find the red stick, lash out another chance at their Legacy, another pod of buried hope.
Lukas looked up at the overhead lights, steady and constant, unblinking. Why hadn’t she called?
His fingernail caught on one of the red marks and flaked a piece of it away. The wax stuck under his fingernail, the paper beneath still stained blood red. There was no taking it back, no cleaning it off, no making it whole again—
Gunfire erupted from the radio. Lukas went to the shelf where the little unit was mounted and listened to orders being barked, men being killed. His forehead went clammy with sweat. He knew how that felt, to pull that trigger, to end a life. He felt an emptiness in his chest and a weakness in his knees. Lukas steadied himself with the shelf, palms slick, and looked at the transmitter hanging there inside its locked cage. How he longed to call those men and tell them not to do it, to stop all the insanity, the violence, the pointless killing. There could be a red X on them all. This was what they should fear, not each other.
He touched the metal cage that kept the radio controls locked away from him, feeling the truth of this and the silliness of broadcasting it to everyone else. It was naive. It wouldn’t change anything. The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.
His hand drifted across the metal grating. He peered inside at one of the dials, the arrow pointing to the number “18.” There were fifty numbers in a dizzying circle, one for each silo. Lukas gave the cage a futile tug, wishing he could listen to something else. What was going on in all those other distant lands? Harmless things, probably. Jokes and chatter. Gossip. He could imagine the thrill of breaking in on one of those conversations and introducing himself to people who weren’t in the know. “I am Lukas from silo eighteen,” he might say. And they would want to know why silos had numbers. And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.
He left the radio alone, left it to its war, and walked past the desk and its eager pool of light spilling across that dreary book. He checked the tins for something that might hold his attention. He felt restless, pacing like a pig in its pen. He should go for another jog among the servers, but that would mean showering, and somehow showering had begun to feel like an insufferable chore.
Crouching down at the far end of the shelves, he sorted through the loose, un-tinned stacks of paper there. Here was where the handwritten notes and the additions to the Legacy had amassed over the years. Notes to future silo leaders, instructions, manuals, mementos. He pulled out the generator control room manual, the one Juliette had written. He had watched Bernard shelve the papers weeks ago, saying it might come in handy if the problems in the down deep went from bad to worse.
And the radio was blasting the worse.
Lukas went to his desk and bent the neck of the lamp so he could read the handwriting inside. There were days that he dreaded her calling, dreaded getting caught or Bernard answering or her asking him to do things he couldn’t, things he would never do again. And now, with the lights steady overhead and nothing buzzing, all he wanted was a call. His chest ached for it. Some part of him knew that what she was doing was dangerous, that something bad could’ve happened. She was living beneath a red X, after all, a mark that meant death for anyone below it.
The pages of the manual were full of notes she’d made with sharp lead. He rubbed one of them, feeling the grooves with his fingers. The actual content was inscrutable. Settings for dials in every conceivable order, valve positions, electrical diagrams. Riffling the pages, he saw the manual as a project not unlike his star charts, created by a mind not unlike his own. This awareness made the distance between them worse. Why couldn’t they go back? Back to before the cleaning, before the string of burials. She would get off work every night and come sit with him while he gazed into the darkness, thinking and watching, chatting and waiting.
He turned the manual around and read some of the printed words from the play, which were nearly as indecipherable. In the margins sat notes from a different hand. Lukas assumed Juliette’s mother, or maybe one of the actors. There were diagrams on some pages, little arrows showing movement. An actor’s notes, he decided. Directions on a stage. The play must’ve been a souvenir to Juliette, this woman he had feelings for whose name was in the title.
He scanned the lines, looking for something poetic to capture his dark mood. As the text went by, his eyes caught a brief flash of familiar scrawl, not the actor’s. He flipped back, looking for it a page at a time until he found it.
It was Juliette’s hand, no mistaking. He moved the play into the light so he could read the faded marks:
George:
There you lay, so serene. The wrinkles in your brow
and by your eyes, nowhere seen.
A touch when others look away, look for a clue,
but only I know what happened to you.
Wait for me. Wait for me. Wait there, my dear.
Let these gentle pleas find your ear,
and bury them there, so this stolen kiss can grow
on the quiet love that no other shall know.
Lukas felt a cold rod pierce his chest. He felt his longing replaced by a flash of temper. Who was this George? A childhood fling? Juliette was never in a sanctioned relationship; he had checked the official records the day after they’d met. Access to the servers afforded certain guilty powers. A crush, perhaps? Some man in Mechanical who was already in love with another? To Lukas, this would be even worse. A man she longed for in a way she never would feel for him. Was that why she’d taken a job so far from home? To get away from the sight of this George she couldn’t have, these feelings she’d hidden in the margins of a play about forbidden love?
He turned and plopped down in front of Bernard’s computer. Shaking the mouse, he logged into the upstairs servers remotely, his cheeks feeling flush with this sick feeling, this new feeling, knowing it was called jealousy but unfamiliar with the heady rush that came with it. He navigated to the personnel files and searched the down deep for “George.” There were four hits. He copied the ID numbers of each and put them in a text file, then fed them to the ID department. While the pictures of each popped up, he skimmed their records, feeling a little guilty for the abuse of power, a little worried about this discovery, and a lot less agonizingly bored having found something to do.
Only one of the Georges worked in Mechanical. Older guy. As the radio crackled behind him, Lukas wondered what would become of this man if he was still down there. There was a chance that he was no longer alive, that the records were a few weeks out of date, the blockade a barrier to the truth.
A couple of the hits were too young. One wasn’t even a year old yet. The other was shadowing with a porter. It left one man, thirty two years old. He worked in the bazaar, occupation listed as “other,” married with two kids. Lukas studied the blurry image of him from the ID office. Mustache. Receding hair. A sideways smirk. His eyes were too far apart, Lukas decided, his brows too dark and much too bushy.
Lukas held up the manual and read the poem again.
The man was dead, he decided. Bury these words.
He did another search, this time a global one that included the closed records. Hundreds of hits throughout the silo popped up, names from all the way back to the uprising. This did not dissuade Lukas. He knew Juliette was thirty six, and so he gave her a twenty year window, figured if she were younger than sixteen when she’d had this crush, he wouldn’t stress, he would let the envious and shameful burn inside him go.
From the list of Georges, there were only three deaths in the down deep for the twenty year period. One was in his fifties, the other in his sixties. Both died of natural causes. Lukas thought to cross reference them with Juliette, see if there had been any work relations, if they shared a family tree perhaps.
And then he saw the third file. This was his George. Her George. Lukas knew it. Doing the math, Lukas saw he would be thirty eight if he were still alive. He had died just over three years earlier, had worked in Mechanical, had never married.
He ran the ID search, and the picture confirmed his fears. He was a handsome man, a square jaw, a wide nose, dark eyes. He was smiling at the camera, calm, relaxed. It was hard to hate the man. Difficult, especially, since he was dead.
Lukas checked the cause and saw that it was investigated and then listed as an industrial accident. Investigated. He remembered hearing something about Jules when the up top got its new sheriff. Her qualifications had been a source of debate and tension, a wind of whispers. Especially around IT. But there had been chatter that she’d helped out on a case a long time ago, that this was why she’d been chosen.
This was the case. Was she in love with him before he died? Or did she fall for the memory of the man after? He decided it had to be the former. Lukas searched the desk for a charcoal, found one, and jotted down the man’s ID and case number. Here was something to occupy his time, some way of getting to know her better. It would distract him, at least, until she finally got around to calling him back. He relaxed, pulled the keyboard into his lap, and started digging.