“I’ll stay here and fly it.” She saw the look on his face and frowned. “Better that one of us gets out,” she said. “You know I’m right. We could launch before daylight, just send you as far as you can go. At least live a day away from this place.”
Donald tried to imagine a flight on the back of one of those birds, the wind pelting his helmet, tumbling off in a rough landing, lying in the grass and staring up at the stars. He pulled his rag out and filled it with blood, shook his head as he put it away. “I’m dying,” he told her. “Thurman said I have another day or two. He told me that a day or two ago.”
Charlotte was silent.
“Maybe we could wake another pilot,” he suggested. “I could hold a gun to his head. We could get you and Darcy both out of here.”
“I’m not leaving you,” his sister said.
“But you would have me go out there alone?”
She shrugged. “I’m a hypocrite.”
Donald laughed. “Must be why they recruited you.”
They listened to the radio.
“What do you think is going on in all those other silos right now?” Charlotte asked. “You dealt with them. Is it as bad there as it is here?”
Donald considered this. “I don’t know. Some of them are happy enough, I suppose. They get married and have kids. They have jobs. They don’t know anything beyond their walls, so I guess they don’t have some of the stress about what’s out there that you and I feel. But I think they have something else that we don’t have, this deep feeling that something is wrong with how they’re living. Buried, you know. And we understand that, and it chokes us, but they just have this chronic anxiety, I think. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen men happy enough here to get through their shifts. I’ve watched others go mad. I used to … I used to play solitaire for hours on my computer upstairs, and that’s when my brain was truly off and I wasn’t miserable. But then, I wasn’t really alive, either.”
Charlotte reached out and squeezed his hand.
“I think some of the silos that went dark have it best—”
“Don’t say that,” Charlotte whispered.
Donald looked up at her. “No, not that. I don’t think they’re dead, not all of them. I think some of them withdrew and are living how they want quietly enough that no one will come after them. They just want to be left alone, not controlled, free to choose how they live and die. I think it’s what Anna wanted them to have. Living down here on this level for a year, trying to find some life without being able to go outside, I think it changed how she viewed all this.”
“Or maybe it was being out of that box for a little while,” Charlotte said. “Maybe she didn’t like what it felt like to be put away.”
“Or that,” Donald agreed. Again, he thought how things would’ve been different had he woken her with some trust, had heard her out. If Anna was there to help, everything would be better. It pained him, but he missed her as much as he missed Helen. Anna had saved him, had tried to save others, and Donald had misunderstood and had hated her for both actions.
Charlotte let go of his hand to adjust the radio. She tried hailing someone on both channels, ran her fingers through her hair and listened to static.
“There was a while there when I thought this was a good thing,” Donald said. “What they did, trying to save the world. They had me convinced that a mass extinction was inevitable, that a war was about to break out and claim everyone. But you know what I think? I think they knew that if a war broke out between all these invisible machines, that some pockets of people would survive here and there. So they built this. They made sure the destruction was complete so they could control it.”
“They wanted to make sure the only pockets of people who survived were in their pockets,” Charlotte said.
“Exactly. They weren’t trying to save the world – they were trying to save themselves. Even if we’d gone extinct, the world would’ve gone right on along without us. Nature finds a way.”
“People find a way,” Charlotte said. “Look at the two of us.” She laughed. “We’re like weeds, aren’t we, the two of us? Nature sneaking out along the edge. We’re like those silos that wouldn’t behave. How did they think they would ever contain all this? That something like this wouldn’t happen?”
“I don’t know,” Donald said. “Maybe the kinds of people who try to shape the world feel like they’re smarter than chaos itself.”
Charlotte switched the channels back and forth in case someone was answering on one or the other. She seemed exasperated. “They should just let us be,” she said. “Just stop and let us grow however we must.”
Donald lurched out of his chair and stood up straight.
“What is it?” Charlotte asked. She reached for the radio. “Did you hear something?”
“That’s it,” Donald told her. “Leave us be.” He fumbled for his rag and coughed. Charlotte stopped playing with the radio. “C’mon,” he said. He waved at the desk. “Bring your tools.”
“For the drone?” she asked.
“No. We need to put together another suit.”