Down the hall from the barracks stood a room of pilot stations. Most were covered in plastic sheets. There was a flat desk along the same wall that bore a mosaic of large monitors. It was here that the radio set was being pieced together. Her brother had gathered a jumble of spare parts one at a time from the lower storerooms. It might be decades or even centuries before anyone noticed they were gone.
Charlotte flicked on the light bulb she’d rigged over the table and powered up the set. She could already get quite a few stations. She tuned the knob until she heard static and left it there, waiting on voices. Until then, she pretended it was the sea rolling up onto a beach. Sometimes it was rain on a canopy of fat leaves. Or a crowd of people quietly talking in a dark theater. She pawed through the bin of parts Donald had amassed and looked for a better set of speakers, still needed a microphone or some way to transmit. She wished she was more mechanically inclined. All she knew how to do was plug things together. It was like assembling a rifle or a computer – she just joined anything that would mate and flicked on the power. It had only resulted in smoke the one time. What it mostly took was patience, which she didn’t have a lot of. Or time, which she was drowning in.
Footsteps down the hall signaled breakfast. Charlotte turned down the volume and cleared room on the desk as Donny entered, a tray in his hands.
“Morning,” she said, getting up to take the tray from him. Her legs felt wobbly from the workout. As her brother stepped into the spill of light from the dangling bulb, she noted his frown. “Everything okay?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We might have a problem.”
Charlotte set the tray down. “What is it?”
“I ran into a guy I knew from my first shift. Was stuck on the lift with him. A handyman.”
“That’s not good.” She lifted the dented metal cover from one of the plates. There was an electrical board and a coil of wire beneath. Also, the small screwdriver she’d asked for.
“Your eggs are under the other one.”
She set the lid aside and grabbed her fork. “Did he recognize you?”
“I couldn’t tell. I kept my head down until he got off. But I knew him as well as I’ve known anyone in this place. It feels like yesterday that I borrowed tools from him, asked him to change a light for me. Who knows what it feels like for him. That might’ve been yesterday or a dozen years ago. Memory works weird in this place.”
Charlotte took a bite of eggs. Donny had put a touch too much salt on them. She imagined him up there with the shaker, his hand trembling. “Even if he did recognize you,” she said around a bite of food, “he might think you’re on another shift as yourself. How many people know you as Thurman?”
Donald shook his head. “Not many. But still, this could come crashing down on us at any moment. I’m going to bring some food up from the pantry, more dry goods. Also, I went in and changed the clearance for your badge so you can access the lifts. And I double-checked that no one else could get down here. I’d hate for you to get trapped if something happened to me.”
Charlotte moved her eggs around her plate. “I don’t like thinking about that,” she said.
“Another bit of a problem. The head of this silo is going off shift in a week, which will make things a little complicated. I’m relying on him to orient the next guy to my status. Things have been going a little too smoothly thus far—”
Charlotte laughed and took another bite of eggs. “Too smoothly,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d hate to see rough. What’s the latest on your favorite silo?”
“The IT head picked up today. Lukas.”
Charlotte thought her brother sounded disappointed. “And?” she asked. “Learn anything new?”
“He managed to crack another server. It’s more of the same data, everything about its residents, every job they’ve had, who they’re related to, from birth to death. I don’t understand how those machines go from that information to this ranked list. It seems like a bunch of noise, like there has to be something else.”
He produced a sheet of folded paper, a new printout of the rankings of the silos. Charlotte cleared a space on the workbench, and he smoothed the report.
“See? The order has changed again. But what determines that?”
She studied the report while she ate, and Donald grabbed one of his folders of notes. He spent a lot of time working in the conference room where he could spread things out and pace back and forth, but Charlotte preferred it when he sat at that drone station. He would sit there for hours sometimes, going through his notes while Charlotte worked on the radio, the two of them listening for chatter among the static.
“Silo six is back on top again,” she muttered. It was like reading the side of a cereal box while she ate, all those numbers that made little sense. One column was labeled Facility, which Donald said was what they used to call the silos. Beside each silo was a percentage like a massive dose of daily vitamins: 99.992%, 99.989%, 99.987%, 99.984%. The last silo with a percentage read 99.974%. Every silo below this was marked off or had N/A listed. Silos 40, 12, 17, and a handful of others were included in that latter category.
“You still think the one on top is the only one that gets to survive?” she asked.