Silo 1
32
Donald’s apartment had transformed into a cave, a cave where notes lay strewn like bleached bones, where the carcasses of folders decorated his walls, and where boxes of more notes were ordered up from archives like fresh kill. Weeks had passed. The stomping in the halls had dwindled. Donald lived alone with ghosts and slowly pieced together the purpose of what he’d helped to build. He was beginning to see it, the entire picture, zooming out of the schematic until the whole was laid bare.
He coughed into a pink rag and resumed examination of his latest find. It was a map he’d come across once before in the armory, a map of all the silos with a line coming out of each and converging at a single point. Here was one of many mysteries left. The document was labeled Seed, but he could find nothing else about it.
He shuffled through his piles—he had a system, the stacks had meaning—and found what he was looking for. A list similar to the one he’d uncovered on his last shift. A ranking of all the silos. Victor had spent a lot of time looking at this list before he killed himself. The ordering was different than Donald remembered. Different silos were near the top of this one. It was a version of the list that’d been updated weeks ago by Eren. Or generated by a computer and signed off by him. Donald had printed it from the Ops directory, which his Thurman account had access to. He scratched his beard. Silo 18 was near the bottom, down near the silos that no longer harbored life. Silos 12, 17, 40, and a dozen others were labeled N/A. He could tell the list was gravely important by who had access to it and who didn’t. Silo 6 was at the very top. The one hopeful egg in the basket.
Donald could hear Anna approaching while he worked; he could hear her whispers getting louder. She had been trying to tell him something. The note in Thurman’s account, she was trying to say, it had been left for him. So obvious, now. She could never be woken, not a woman. She needed him, needed his help. Donald imagined her piecing all of this together on some recent shift, alone and terrified, scared of her own father, no one left to turn to. So she had taken her father out of power, had entrusted Donald, had left him a note. And what did Donald do?
He heard her whispers and did not startle as she burst up through the film of white pages, a swimmer emerging from a frothy sea. Her arms flailed and splashed as she gasped for air, as she came back to life. Donald watched her struggle for a while. He imagined a hand on her head, pushing her back under. He willed the guilt to subside until the splashes and ripples settled and were pages once more.
Scratching his beard, he looked elsewhere. He nearly told himself that he wasn’t mad, but that would be a small consolation. Sane people never said that to themselves.
The reports. Anna had spent a year like this once, down in the armory, surrounded by notes. Living alone, meals delivered, lonely and wishing for company. He was only a few weeks into what she had suffered and already cracking. Anna had been so much stronger than he, but now she was dead. She’d been dead for over two weeks, and nobody knew. Maybe they never would.
Donald groaned and picked up a piece of paper, a distraction.
It was from his Silo 18 stack, an old mystery he no longer cared about. They had sent drones up to look for a wayward cleaner. They had sent drones up to bomb Silo 40 because of a connection he’d made. There was no cleaner out there on the hills. The hills were littered with cleaners.
Donald remembered the video feed he’d been shown of a woman disappearing over a gray dune. Because of this, the residents of 18 had been filled with a dangerous hope—the sort of hope that leads to violence. And in the halls outside of Donald’s door, scraps of conversation passed with squeaking boots, rumors and stories about this cleaner surviving, making it somewhere, joining another silo.
It was nothing but legends made up and circulated to entertain bored minds. Poison. It was stupid to hope. Crazy to dream. The less he did it—the more the nightmares guided him—the more clearly he saw the danger in others. He was becoming the man whose boots he wore. Even as he sorted out what they’d done and what they had planned, he was becoming him. Donald sometimes embraced this, sometimes raged against it.
He picked up the folder on Silo 17. As he did, he noticed the splotches on the back of his hand. Purplish and red, it looked like a rash. He held his hand up and studied the patterns, remembered tugging a glove off and watching it tumble down a windswept hill. Donald wanted to die up there with that view, anywhere but buried. Flexing his hand into a fist, squeezing the air and relaxing over and over, he waited for the blood to return to his hand, to normalize. He should see the doctor, but tell him what? When Donald coughed up blood, his greatest fear was that he would be discovered. Death was no longer a thing.
There was a knock on his door.
“Who is it?” Donald asked, his voice not sounding like his own.
The door opened a crack. “It’s Eren, sir. We’ve got a call from eighteen. The shadow is ready.”
“Just a second,” he said.
Donald coughed into his handkerchief. He rose slowly and moved to the bathroom, stepping over two trays of old dishes. He emptied his bladder, flushed, and studied himself in the mirror. Gripping the edge of the counter, he grimaced at his reflection, this man with scraggly hair and the start of a beard. He looked insane, and yet people trusted him. That made them crazier than he was. But he was in charge, and the small duties that came from being in charge disturbed his private digging. Donald smiled a yellowing smile and thought of the long history of madmen who remained in charge simply because they already were.
Hinges squealed as Eren poked his head in the door.
“I’m coming,” Donald said. He pushed away from a stranger, who pushed away from him in equal measure. Stomping across the reports, leaving a trail of footprints behind, he also left a bloody palm print on the edge of the counter, the mark of a man getting worse.