His shins hurt from protecting himself from Thurman’s blows. There was a knot on his forearm like a second elbow. And every time a coughing fit seized him, he wanted to die. He tried to sleep. Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. Donald was all three.
He turned out the light beside his cot and lay in the darkness. The cryopods and shifts were exaggerated forms of sleep, he thought. What seemed unnatural was more a matter of degree than of kind. Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.
He coughed, which brought bolts of agony to his ribs and flashes of light to his vision. Donald prayed to black out, to pass away, but the gods in charge of his fate were expert torturers. Just enough – but not too much. Don’t kill the man, he could hear his wounds whispering to one another. We need him alive so that he can suffer for what he’s done.
The coughing passed with the taste of copper on his lips, blood misting his coveralls – but he didn’t care. He laid his head back, soaked in sweat from pain and exertion, and listened to the feeble groans escaping his lips.
Hours or minutes passed. Days. There was a rap at the door, the slide and click of a tumbler, someone flicking on the lights. It would be a guard with dinner or breakfast or some other meaningless designation of time of day. It would be Thurman to lecture him, to grill him, to take him and put him to sleep.
“Donny?”
It was Charlotte. The hall behind her was third-shift dim. As she came to him, a man filled the doorway, one of the security officers. They had discovered her and were locking her up as well. But they were giving him this moment at least. He sat up too quickly, nearly lost his balance, but their arms found one another, both of them wincing in the embrace.
“My ribs,” Donald hissed.
“Watch my arm,” his sister said.
She untangled herself and stepped back, and Donald was about to ask her what was wrong with her arm, but she pressed a finger to her lips. “Hurry,” she said. “This way.”
Donald peered past her to the man in the doorway. The guard gazed up and down the hallway, was more concerned about someone coming than about him or his sister escaping. The ache in Donald’s ribs lessened as he realized what was going on.
“We’re leaving?” he asked.
His sister nodded and helped him stand. Donald followed her into the hall.
So many questions, but silence was paramount. Now wasn’t the time. The security officer closed the door and locked it. Charlotte was already heading toward the lifts. Donald limped after her, barefoot, his left leg singing with every step. They were on the admin level. He passed the accounting offices where spares and supplies were managed; Records, where the major happenings of every silo were tallied and entered into the servers; Population Control, where so many of his reports had once originated. All the offices quiet at what must’ve been an early-morning hour.
The security station was unmanned. Beyond it, a lift was waiting for them, persistently buzzing in a hold state. Donald noted a strong odor of cleaning agent in the lift. Charlotte slammed the hold button back in, scanned her ID, and pressed the armory level. The guard slid through the closing doors sideways, and Donald noticed the gun in his hand. It wasn’t for fear of being discovered by others that he was carrying that gun, Donald realized. They weren’t quite free. The young man stood on the other side of the lift and watched him and his sister warily.
“I know you,” Donald said. “You work the late shift.”
“Darcy,” the guard said. He didn’t offer his hand. Donald thought of the empty security station and realized this man should’ve been there.
“Darcy, right. What’s going on?” He turned to his sister. A gauze wrapping could be seen peeking out from her short-sleeved undershirt. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” She watched the floors light up and slide by with obvious trepidation. “We flew another drone.” She turned to Donald, her eyes on fire. “It made it through.”
“You saw it?” His wounds were forgotten; the man standing in the lift with the gun was forgotten. It had been so long since that first flight gave him a brief glimpse of blue skies that he had grown to doubt it, had come to think it had never happened at all. The other flights had failed, had never reached as far. The elevator slowed as it approached the storehouse.
“The world isn’t gone,” Charlotte confirmed. “Just our piece of it.”
“Let’s get off the lift,” Darcy said. He waved the gun. “And then I want to understand what the hell is going on. And look, I’m not above having you both locked up before the morning shift comes on. I’ll deny we ever talked like this.”