She aimed her flashlight toward the elevators, afraid of what they could disgorge without warning. In the silence, she could hear her heartbeat. Charlotte turned and headed for the conference room, for the last place she’d seen him.
There was no sign of struggle on the floor. Inside the conference room, the table was still scattered with notes. Maybe not as many as before. And the several bins scattered among the chairs were gone. Someone had done a poor job of cleaning up. Someone would be back.
Charlotte doused the lights and turned to go. Stepping through the place where he’d been attacked, she saw this time the splattered blood on the wall. She felt the sobs she’d wrestled down before falling asleep rise up to seize her throat, constricting it, wondered if her brother was still alive. She could see the man with the white hair standing there, kicking and kicking, an unholy rage in him. And now she had no one. She hurried through the dark warehouse toward the glowing drone. Pulled from sleep, shown a frightening world, and now she’d been left alone.
The light from the drone’s beak spilled across the floor and illuminated a door.
Not quite alone.
Charlotte gathered her wits. She reached into the access panel and turned the drone’s headlamp off. She carefully rearranged the tarp. It would no longer do to leave things amiss – she must always assume she might have visitors. With her worklight bobbing, she made for the door, stopped, went back for her tool bag. The drone was now a distant priority. With her tools and light, she hurried past the barracks and to the end of the hall, into the flight room. The workbench on the far wall held a radio pieced together over the weeks. It worked. She and her brother had listened to the chatter from distant worlds. Maybe there was a way to make it transmit. She pawed through the spare parts he had left for her, searching. If nothing else, she could listen. Maybe she could find out what they’d done to him. Maybe she could hear from him – or reach out to another soul.
31
With every cough, Donald’s ribs exploded into a thousand splinters. This shrapnel pierced his lungs and his heart and sent a tidal wave up his spinal column. He was convinced this was taking place inside his body, these bombs of bone and nerve. Already, he missed the simple torture of burning lungs and searing throat. His bruised and cracked ribs now made a mockery of old torments. Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.
He lay on his cot, bleeding and bruised, having given up on escape. The door was sound, and the space above the ceiling panels led nowhere. He didn’t think he was on the admin levels. Maybe Security. Perhaps residential. Or someplace he wasn’t familiar with. The hallway outside remained eerily quiet. It could be the middle of the night. Banging on the door was brutal on his aching ribs, and shouting hurt his throat. But the worst pain was imagining what he’d dragged his sister into, what would become of her. When the guards or Thurman came back, he should tell them she was down there, beg for them to be merciful. She had been like a daughter to Thurman, and Donald was the only one to blame for waking her up. Thurman would see that. He would put her back under where she might sleep until the end came for them all. It would be for the best.
Hours passed. Hours of bruised swelling and feeling his pulse throb in a dozen places. Donald tossed and turned, and day and night became even less distinguishable in that buried crypt. A feverish sweat overtook him, one born of regret and fear more than infection. He had nightmares of frozen pods set ablaze, of fire and ice and dust, of flesh melting and bone turning to powder.
Falling in and out of sleep, he had another dream. A dream of a cold night on a wide ocean, of a ship sinking beneath his feet, the deck trembling from the savagery of the sea. Donald’s hands were frozen to the wheel of the ship, his breath a fog of lies. Waves lapped over the rails as his command sank deeper and deeper. And all around him on the water were lifeboats ablaze. All the women and children burned out there, screaming, trapped in lifeboats shaped like cryopods that were never meant to reach the shore.
Donald saw that now. He saw it awake – panting, coughing, sweating – as well as in his dreams. He remembered thinking once that the women had been set aside so that there would be nothing to fight over. But the opposite was true. They were there to give the rest of them something to fight for. Someone to save. It was for them that men worked these dark shifts, slept through these dark nights, dreaming of what would never be.