“Yeah, right. You want us talking. Learn what you can. And then you destroy us. It’s all games with you. You send us out to clean, but you’re just poisoning the air. That’s what you’re doing. You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t— Listen, I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I … this will be hard for you to believe, maybe, but I remember when the world out there was very different. When we could live and breathe out there. And I think part of it can be like that again. Is like that right now. That’s what my brother wanted to tell you, that there’s hope out there.”
A pause. A heavy breath. Charlotte’s arm was back to throbbing.
“Hope.”
Charlotte waited. The radio hissed at her like an angry breath forced through clenched teeth.
“My home, my people, are dead and you would have me hope. I’ve seen the hope you dish out, the bright blue skies we pull down over our heads, the lie that makes the exiled do your bidding, clean for you. I’ve seen it, and thank God I knew to doubt it. It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?”
She was right. This Juliette was right. How could such a conversation as this take place? How did her brother manage it? It was alien races who somehow spoke the same tongue. It was gods and mortals. Charlotte was attempting to commune with ants, ants who worried about the twists of their warrens beneath the soil, not the layout of the wider land. She wouldn’t be able to get them to see—
But then Charlotte realized this Juliette knew nothing of her own hell. And so she told her.
“My brother was beaten half to death,” Charlotte said. “He could very well be dead. It happened before my own eyes. And the man who did it was like a father to us both.” She fought to hold it together, to not let the tears creep into her voice. “I’m being hunted right now. They will put me back to sleep or they will kill me, and I don’t know that there’s a difference. They keep us frozen for years and years while the men work in shifts. There are computers out there that play games and will one day decide which of your silos is allowed to go free. The rest will die. All of the silos but one will die. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”
She fumbled through the folder for the notes, the list of the rankings, and couldn’t find it through her blurred vision. She grabbed the map instead. Juliette was saying nothing, was likely just as confused by Charlotte’s hell as Charlotte was of hers. But it needed to be said. These awful truths discovered needed to be told. It felt good.
“We … Donny and I were only ever trying to figure out how to help you, all of you, I swear. My brother … he had an affinity for your people.” Charlotte let go of the mic so this person couldn’t hear her cry.
“My people,” Juliette said, subdued.
Charlotte nodded. She took a deep breath. “Your silo.”
There was a long silence. Charlotte wiped her face with her sleeve.
“Why do you think I would trust you? Do you know what you all have done? How many lives you’ve taken? Thousands are dead—”
Charlotte reached to adjust the volume, to turn it back down.
“—and the rest of us will join them. But you say you want to help. Who the hell are you?”
Juliette waited for her to answer. Charlotte faced the hissing box. She squeezed the mic. “Billions,” she said. “Billions are dead.”
There was no response.
“We killed so many more than you could ever imagine. The numbers don’t even make sense. We killed nearly everyone. I don’t think … the loss of thousands … it doesn’t even register. That’s why they’re able to do it.”
“Who? Your brother? Who did this?”
Charlotte wiped fresh tears from her cheeks and shook her head. “No. Donny would never do this. It was … you probably don’t have the words, the vocabulary. A man who used to be in charge of the world the way it once was. He attacked my brother. He found us.” Charlotte glanced at the door, half expecting Thurman to kick it down and barge in, to do the same to her. She had poked the nest, she was sure of it. “He’s the one who killed the world and your people. His name is Thurman. He was a … something like a mayor.”
“Your mayor killed my world. Not your brother, but this other man. Did he kill this world that I’m standing in right now? It’s been dead for decades. Did he kill it as well?”
Charlotte realized this woman thought of silos as the entire world. She remembered an Iraqi girl she spoke with once while attempting to get directions to a different town. That was a conversation in a different language about a different world, and it had been simpler than this.
“The man who took my brother killed the wider world, yes.” Charlotte saw the memo in the folder, the note labeled The Pact. How to explain?
“You mean the world outside the silos? The world where crops grew aboveground and silos held seeds and not people?”
Charlotte let out a held breath. Her brother must’ve explained more than he let on.
“Yes. That world.”