His heart raced with a mix of fear and excitement. It wasn’t simply being on this trail of clues, it was where that trail was taking him. Emergency Personnel had been set aside for the most extreme of cases, for those times when Security was deemed insufficient. Through a dense haze, he remembered a time when cops stepped aside while heavily armored men emerged from vans and took down a building with military precision. Had that been him? In a former, former life? He couldn’t remember. And anyway, these men in the emergency hall were different. Many of them had been up and about recently. Darcy remembered from when he got on shift. They were pilots. He recalled seeing ripples in his mug of coffee one day and finding out that bombs had been dropped from drones. Moving from one pod to the next, he searched for an empty one. Someone had not gone back to sleep when they should have, he suspected. Or someone had been stirred to do bad things.
It was this last possibility that filled him with fear. Who had access to such personnel? Who had the ability to awaken them without anyone knowing? He suspected that no matter whom he reported his findings to, as those findings went up and up the chain of command, they would possibly reach the person or people responsible. It also occurred to him that the man who had been killed was the on-shift head of the entire silo, the head of all the silos. This was big. This was huge. A feud between silo heads? This could get him off coffee-brewing and blood-mopping duty forever.
He was two thirds of the way through the grid of cryopods, making a circuit back and forth, when he started to suspect that he might’ve been wrong. It was all so tenuous. He was playing at someone else’s job. There wouldn’t be anyone missing, no grand conspiracy, nobody up killing people—
And then he peered inside a pod with no face there, with no frost on the glass. A palm on the skin of the pod confirmed that it was off. It was the same temperature as the room: cool but not freezing. He checked the display, fearing that it would be off and blank as well, but it showed power. Just no name. Only a number.
Darcy pulled out his report pad and clicked a pen. Only a number. He suspected any name that went with the pod would be classified. But he had his man. Oh, he had his man. And even if he couldn’t get a name, he knew where these pilots spent their time when they were on shift. He had a very good idea of where this missing man with his bullet wound might be hiding.
46
Charlotte waited until morning before trying the radio again. This time, she knew what she wanted to say. She also knew her time was short. She had heard people outside the drone lift again that morning, looking for her.
Waiting until she was sure they were gone, she nosed about and saw that they’d cleaned out the rest of Donald’s notes in the conference room. She went to the bathroom and took the time to change her bandage, found her arm a scabbed mess. At the end of the hall, she expected to find the radio missing, but the control room was undisturbed. They probably never looked under the plastic sheet, just assumed that everything in the room was part of the drone operations. She uncovered the radio, and the unit buzzed when she powered it on. She arranged Donny’s folders across her scattering of tools.
Something Donny had told her came back. He had said they wouldn’t live forever, the two of them. They wouldn’t live long enough outside the pods to see the results of their actions. And that made it hard to know how best to act. What to do for these people, these three dozen or so silos that were left? Doing nothing doomed so many of them. Charlotte felt her brother’s need to pace. She picked up the mic and considered what she was about to do, reaching out to strangers like this. But reaching out was better than just listening. The day before, she had felt like a 911 operator who could only listen while a crime was being committed, unable to respond, powerless to send help.
She made sure the knob was on seventeen, adjusted the volume and squelch until she was rewarded with a soft hiss of static. Somehow, a handful of people had survived the destruction of their silo. Charlotte suspected they had crossed overland. Their mayor – this Juliette her brother had spoken with – had proved it was possible. Charlotte suspected it was this that had drawn her brother’s attention. She knew from the suit Donny had been working on that he had dreamed of escaping somehow. These people may have found a way.
She opened his folders and spread out her brother’s discoveries. There was a ranking of the silos sorted by their chance of survival. There was a note from the Senator, this suicide pact. And the map of all the silos, not with X’s but with the red lines radiating out to a single point. Charlotte arranged the notes and composed herself before making the call. She didn’t care if she was discovered. She knew damn well what she wanted to say, what she thought Donny was dying to say but didn’t know how.
“Hello, people of silo eighteen. People of silo seventeen. My name is Charlotte Keene. Can you hear me? Over.”