16
• Silo 18 •
“Hello? Solo? Please say something.”
There was no mistaking that voice, even through the small speakers in the dismantled headset. It echoed bodiless in the control room, the same control room that had housed that very voice for so many years. The location was what nailed it for Shirly; she stared at the tiny speakers spliced into the magical radio, knowing it could be no one else.
Neither she nor Walker dared breathe. They waited what felt like forever before she finally broke the silence.
“That was Juliette,” she whispered. “How can we—? Is her voice trapped down here? In the air? How long ago would that have been?”
Shirly didn’t understand how any of the science worked; it was all beyond her pay grade. Walker continued to stare at the headset, unmoving, not saying a word, tears shining in his beard.
“Are these…these ripples we’re grabbing with the antenna, are they just bouncing around down here?”
She wondered if the same was true of all the voices they’d heard. Maybe they were simply picking up conversations from the past. Was that possible? Like some kind of electrical echo? Somehow, this seemed far less shocking than the alternative.
Walker turned to her, a strange expression on his face. His mouth hung partway open, but there was a curl at the edges of his lips, a curl that began to rise.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. The curl transformed into a smile. “This is now. This is happening.” He grabbed Shirly’s arm. “You heard it too, didn’t you? I’m not crazy. That really was her, wasn’t it? She’s alive. She made it.”
“No—” Shirly shook her head. “Walk, what’re you saying? That Juliette’s alive? Made it where?”
“You heard.” He pointed at the radio. “Before. The conversations. The cleaning. There’s more of them out there. More of us. She’s with them, Shirly. This is happeningrightnow.”
“Alive.”
Shirly stared at the radio, processing this. Her friend was still somewhere. Still breathing. It had been so solid in her head, this vision of Juliette’s body just over the hills, lying in silent repose, the wind flecking away at her. And now she was picturing her moving, breathing, talking into a radio somewhere.
“Can we talk to her?” she asked.
She knew it was a dumb question. But Walker seemed to startle, his old limbs jumping.
“Oh, God. God, yes.” He set the mish-mash of components down on the floor, his hands trembling, but with what Shirly now read as excitement. The fear in both of them was gone, drained from the room, the rest of the world beyond that small space fading to meaninglessness.
Walker dug into the parts bin. He dumped some tools out and pawed into the bottom of the container.
“No,” he said. He turned and scanned the parts on the ground. “No no no.”
“What is it?” Shirly slid away from the string of components so he could better see. “What’re we missing? There’s a microphone right there.” She pointed to the partially disassembled headphones.
“The transmitter. It’s a little board. I think it’s on my workbench.”
“I swiped everything into the bin.” Her voice was high and tense. She moved toward the plastic bucket.
“My other workbench. It wasn’t needed. All Jenks wanted was to listen in.” He waved at the radio. “I did what he wanted. How could I have known I’d need to transmit—?”
“You couldn’t,” Shirly said. She rested her hand on his arm. She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time. “Is there anything in here we can use? Think, Walk. Concentrate.”
He shook his head, wagged his finger at the headphones. “This mic is dumb. It just passes the sound through. Little membranes vibrating—”
He turned and looked at her. “Wait—there is something.”
“Down here? Where?”
“The mining storehouse would have them. A transmitter.” He pretended to hold a box and twist a switch. “For the blasting caps. I repaired one just a month ago. It would work.”
Shirly rose to her feet. “I’ll go get it,” she said. “You stay here.”
“But the stairwell—”
“I’ll be safe. I’m going down, not up.”
He bobbed his head.
“Don’t change anything with that.” She pointed to the radio. “No looking for more voices. Just hers. Leave it there.”
“Of course.”
Shirly bent down and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”
Outside, she found dozens of faces turning her way, frightened and questioning looks in their wide eyes, their slack mouths. She felt like shouting over the hum of the generator that Juliette was alive, that they weren’t alone, that other people lived and breathed in the forbidden outside. She wanted to, but she didn’t have the time. She hurried to the rail and found Courtnee.
“Hey—”
“Everything okay in there?” Courtnee asked.
“Yeah, fine. Do me a favor, will you? Keep an eye on Walker for me.”
Courtnee nodded. “Where are you—?”
But Shirly was already gone, running to the main door. She squeezed through a group huddled in the entranceway. Jenkins was outside with Harper. They stopped talking as she hurried past.
“Hey!” Jenkins seized her arm. “Where the hell’re you going?”
“Mine storeroom.” She twisted her arm out of his grasp. “I won’t be long—”
“You won’t be going. We’re about to blow that stairwell. These idiots are falling right into our hands.”
“You’re what?”
“The stairwell,” Harper repeated. “It’s rigged to blow. Once they get down there and start working their way through—” He put his hands together in a ball, then expanded the sphere in a mock explosion.
“You don’t understand—” She faced Jenkins. “It’s for the radio.”
He frowned. “Walk had his chance.”
“We’re picking up a lot of chatter,” she told him. “He needs this one piece. I’ll be right back, swear.”
Jenkins looked to Harper. “How long before we do this?”
“Five minutes, sir.” His chin moved back and forth, almost imperceptibly.
“You’ve got four,” he said to Shirly. “But make sure—”
She didn’t hear the rest. Her boots were already pounding the steel, carrying her toward the stairwell. She flew past the oil rig with its sad and lowered head, past the row of confused and twitching men, their guns all pointing the way.
She hit the top of the steps and slid around the corner. Someone half a flight up yelled in alarm. Shirly caught a glimpse of two miners with sticks of TNT before she skipped down the flight of stairs.
At the next level, she turned and headed for the mineshaft. The hallways were silent, just her panting and the clop, clop, clop of her boots.
Juliette. Alive.
A person sent to cleaning, alive.
She turned down the next hallway and ran past the apartments for the deep workers, the miners and the oil men, men who now bore guns instead of holes in the earth, who wielded weapons rather than tools.
And this new knowledge, this impossible bit of news, this secret, it made the fighting seem surreal. Petty. How could anyone fight if there were places to go beyond these walls? If her friend was still out there? Shouldn’t they be going as well?
She made it to the storeroom. Probably been two minutes. Her heart was racing. Surely Jenkins wouldn’t do anything to that stairway until she got back. She moved down the shelves, peering in the bins and drawers. She knew what the thing looked like. There should be several of them floating about. Where were they?
She checked the lockers, threw the dingy coveralls hanging inside them to the ground, tossed work helmets out of the way. She didn’t see anything. How much time did she have?
She tried the small foreman’s office next, throwing the door open and storming to the desk. Nothing in the drawers. Nothing on the shelves mounted to the wall. One of the big drawers on the bottom was stuck. Locked.
Shirly stepped back and kicked the front of the metal drawer with her boot. She slammed the steel toe into it once, twice. The lip curled down, away from the drawer above. She reached in, yanked the flimsy lock off its lip, and the warped drawer opened with a groan.
Explosives. Sticks of dynamite. There were a few small relays that she knew went into the sticks to ignite them. Beneath these, she found three of the transmitters Walker was looking for.
Shirly grabbed two of them, a few relays, and put them all in her pocket. She took two sticks of the dynamite—just because they were there and went with everything else—and ran out of the office, through the storeroom, back toward the stairs.
She had used up too much time. Her chest felt cool and empty, raspy, as she labored to breathe. She ran as fast as she could, concentrating on throwing her boots forward, lunging for more floor, gobbling it up.
Turning at the end of the hall, she again thought about how ridiculous this fighting was. It was hard to remember why it had begun. Knox was gone, so was McLain. Would their people be fighting if these great leaders were still around? Would they have done something different long ago? Something more sane?
She cursed the folly of it all as she reached the stairs. Surely it had been five minutes. She waited for a blast to ring out above her, to deafen her with the concussive ferocity trapped in that stairwell. Leaping up two treads at a time, she made the turn at the top and saw that the miners were gone. Anxious eyes peered at her over homemade barrels.
“Go!” someone yelled, waving their arms to the side, hurrying her along.
Shirly focused on Jenkins, who crouched down with his own rifle, Harper by his side. She nearly tripped over the wires leading away from the stairwell as she ran toward the two men.
“Now!” Jenkins yelled.
Someone threw a switch.
The ground lurched and buckled beneath Shirly’s feet, sending her sprawling. She landed hard on the steel floor, her chin grazing the diamond plating, the dynamite nearly flying from her hands.
Her ears were still ringing as she got to her knees. Men were moving behind the railing, guns popping into the bank of smoke leaking from a new maw of twisted and jagged steel. The screams of the distant wounded could be heard on the other side.
While men fought, Shirly patted her pockets, fished inside for the transmitters.
And again, the noise of war seemed to fade, to become insignificant. She hurried through the door to the generator room, back to Walker, her lip bleeding, her mind on more important things.