“Maybe she was helping them, I don’t know. She helped me. And somehow word spread to others. Or maybe by the time Anna was done saving your ass, she realized they were right and we were wrong. Maybe she left silo forty alone in the end to do whatever they pleased. I think she thought they might save us all.”
Donald coughed, and thought of all the hero sagas of old, of men and women struggling for righteousness, always with a happy ending, always against impossible odds, always bullshit. Heroes didn’t win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story – the dead didn’t say a word. All of it was bullshit.
“I bombed silo forty before I understood what was going on,” Donald said. He gazed at the ceiling, feeling the weight of all those levels, of the dirt and the heavy sky. “I bombed them because I needed a distraction, because I didn’t care. I killed Anna because she brought me here, because she saved my life. I did your job for you both times, didn’t I? I put down two rebellions you never saw coming—”
“No.” Thurman stood. He towered over Donald.
“Yes,” Donald said. He blinked away welling tears, could feel a hole in his heart where his anger toward Anna once lay. All that was there now was guilt and regret. He had killed the one who had loved him the most, had fought for the things that were right. He had never stopped to ask, to think, to talk.
“You started this uprising when you broke your own rules,” he told Thurman. “When you woke her up, you started this. You were weak. You threatened everything, and I fixed it. And goddamn you to hell for listening to her. For bringing me here. For turning me into this!”
Donald closed his eyes. He felt the tickle of escaping tears as they rolled down his temples, and the light through his lids quivered as Thurman’s shadow fell over him. He braced for a blow. He tilted his head back, lifted his chin, and waited. He thought of Helen. He thought of Anna. He thought of Charlotte. And remembering, he started to tell Thurman about his sister and where she was hiding before those blows landed, before he was struck as he deserved to be for helping these monsters, for being their unwitting tool at every turn. He started to tell Thurman about Charlotte, but there was a brightening of light through his lids, the slinking away of a shadow, and the slamming of an angry door.
Silo 18
32
Lukas sensed something was wrong before he slotted the headphones into the jack. The red lights above the servers throbbed red, but it was the wrong time of day. The calls from Silo 1 came like clockwork. This call had come in the middle of dinner. The buzzing and flashing lights had moved to his office and then to the hallway. Sims, the old Security chief, had tracked Lukas down in the break room to let him know someone was getting in touch, and Lukas’s first thought was that their mysterious benefactor had a warning for them. Or maybe he was calling to thank them for finally stopping with the digging.
There was a click in his headset as the connection was made. The lights overhead stopped their infernal blinking. “Hello?” he said, catching his breath.
“Who is this?”
Someone different. The voice was the same, but the words were wrong. Why wouldn’t this person know who he was?
“This is Lukas. Lukas Kyle. Who is this?”
“Let me speak to the head of your silo.”
Lukas stood up straight. “I am the head of this silo. Silo eighteen of World Order Operation Fifty. Who am I speaking to?”
“You’re speaking to the man who dreamed up that World Order. Now get me the head. I have here a … Bernard Holland.”
Lukas nearly blurted out that Bernard was dead. Everyone knew Bernard was dead. It was a fact of life. He had watched him burn rather than go out to clean, watched him burn rather than allow himself to be saved. But this man didn’t know that. And the complexities of life on the other end of that line, that infallible line, caused the room to wobble. The gods weren’t omnipotent. Or they didn’t sup around the same table. Or the one who called himself Donald was more rogue than even Lukas had believed he might be. Or – as Juliette would claim if she were there – these people were fucking with him.
“Bernard is … ah, he is indisposed at the moment.”
There was a pause. Lukas could feel the sweat bead up on his forehead and neck, the heat of the servers and the conversation getting to him.
“How long before he’s back?”
“I’m not sure. I can, uh, try to get him for you?” His voice lilted at the end of what shouldn’t have been a question.
“Fifteen minutes,” the voice said. “After that, things are going to go very badly for you and everyone over there. Very badly. Fifteen minutes.”