“I was sent down here to retrieve … uh …” Her lowered voice sounded ridiculous. She shuffled through the opened folders and loose pages and tried again, this time with her normal voice just slightly flattened. “I was told to take this to recycling,” she explained to nobody. “Oh? And what level is recycling on?” she asked herself. “I have no fucking clue,” she admitted. “That’s why I’m looking for a map.”
She found a map. It wasn’t the right one, though. A grid of circles with red lines radiating out to a single point. She only knew it was a map because she recognized the layout with its grid of letters down the side and numbers across the top. The Air Force had once assigned daily targets on grids like these. She would grab a bagel and coffee in the mess hall, and then a man and his family from D-4 would die in a fiery maelstrom. Break for lunch. Ham and cheese on rye.
Charlotte recognized the circles laid out across the grid. It was the silos. She had flown three drones over depressions in hills just like this. The red lines were odd. She traced one with her finger. They reminded her of flight lines. They extended off every silo except for the one near the center, which she thought might be the one she was in. Donald had shown her this layout once on the big table, the one now buried under the loose pages. She folded the map and stuffed it into her breast pocket and kept looking.
The Silo 1 schematic she had seen before seemed lost, but she found the next best thing. A directory. It listed personnel by rank, shift assignment, occupation, living level, and work level. It was the size of a phone book for a small town, a reminder of how many people were taking turns running the silo. Not people – men. Scanning the names, Charlotte saw that it was all men. She thought of Sasha, the only other woman who’d gone through boot camp with her. Strange to think that Sasha was dead, that all the men in her regiment, everyone from flight school, all of them were dead.
She found the name of a reactor mechanic and his work level, looked for a pen amid the chaos, found one, and jotted the level number down. Administration, she discovered, was on level thirty-four. A comms officer worked on the same level, which sucked. She hated to think of the comm room right down the hall from the people who ran the joint. A security officer worked on twelve. If Donny was being held, maybe he’d be there. Unless they’d put him back to sleep. Unless he was in whatever passed for a hospital there. Cryo was down below, she thought. She remembered coming up the lift after he’d woken her. She found the level for the main cryo office by locating someone who worked there, but that probably wasn’t where the bodies were kept. Was it?
Her notes became a mess of scribbles, a rough outline of what was where above and below her. But where to start in her search? She couldn’t find mention of the supply and spares rooms her brother had been raiding, probably because no one actually worked on those levels. Starting over on a fresh piece of paper, she drew a cylinder and made the best schematic she could, filling in the floors she knew from Donny’s routine and the ones from the directory. Starting with the cafeteria at the very top, she worked her way down to the cryo office, which was as far down as her notes took her. The empty levels were her best bet. Some of those would be storerooms and warehouses. But the lift could just as easily open to a roomful of men playing cards – or whatever it was they did to kill the time while they killed the world. She couldn’t just roll the dice; she needed a plan.
She studied the map and considered her options. One place for sure would have a mic, and that was the comm room. She checked the clock on the wall. Six twenty-five. Dinnertime and end of shift, lots of people moving about. Charlotte touched her face where she had smudged grease to dull her cheekbones. She wasn’t thinking straight, probably shouldn’t go anywhere until after eleven. Or was it better to be lost in a jostling crowd? What was out there? She paced and debated. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, testing her new voice. It sounded like she had a cold. That was the best way to sound male: like she had a cold.
She returned to the storeroom and studied the elevator doors. Someone could burst out right then, and her decision would be made for her. She should wait until later. Returning to the drones, she pulled the tarp off the one she’d been working on and studied the loose panels and scattering of tools. Glancing back at the conference room, she saw Donny curled there on the floor, trying to fend off the kicks with his shins, two men holding him down, a man who could barely stand landing sickening blows.
Picking up a screwdriver, Charlotte slotted it into one of the tool pouches on her coveralls. Not sure what to do, she got to work on the drone, killing time. She would go out later that night when there were fewer people up and less chance of being spotted. First, she would get the next machine ready to fly. Donny wasn’t there – his work lay unfinished – but she could soldier on. She could piece things back together, one bolt and one nut at a time. And that night, she would go out and find the part she needed. She would win back her voice and reach out to those people in that stricken silo, if any of them were still alive.
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