19
• Silo 18 •
The door to the generator room slammed shut behind her, dulling the patter of gunfire to a distant hammering. Shirly ran toward the control room on sore legs, ignoring her friends and coworkers asking her what was going on outside. They cowered along the walls and behind the railing from the loud blast and the sporadic gunfire. Just before she reached the control room, she noticed some workers from second shift on top of the main generator toying with the rumbling machine’s massive exhaust system.
“I got it,” Shirly wheezed, slamming the control room door shut behind her. Courtnee and Walker looked up from the floor. The wide eyes and slack jaw on Courtnee’s face told Shirly she’d missed something.
“What?” she asked. She handed the two transmitters to Walker. “Did you hear? Walk, does she know?”
“How is this possible?” Courtnee asked. “How did she survive? And what happened to your face?”
Shirly touched her lip, her sore chin. Her fingers came away wet with blood. She used the sleeve of her undershirt to dab at her mouth.
“If this works,” Walker grumbled, fiddling with one of the transmitters, “we can ask Jules herself.”
Shirly turned and peered through the control room’s observation window. She lowered her sleeve away from her face. “What’s Karl and them doing with the exhaust feed?” she asked.
“They’ve got some plan to reroute it,” Courtnee said. She got up from the floor while Walker started soldering something, the smell reminding her of his workshop. He grumbled about his eyesight while Courtnee joined her by the glass.
“Reroute it where?”
“IT. That’s what Heline said, anyway. The cooling feed for their server room runs through the ceiling here before shooting up the mechanical shaft. Someone spotted the proximity on a schematic, thought of a way to fight back from here.”
“So, we choke them out with our fumes?” Shirly felt uneasy with the plan. She wondered what Knox would say if he were still alive, still in charge. Surely all the men and women riding desks up there weren’t the problem. “Walk, how long before we can talk? Before we can try and contact her?”
“Almost there. Blasted magnifiers—”
Courtnee rested her hand on Shirly’s arm. “Are you okay? How’re you holding up?”
“Me?” Shirly laughed and shook her head. She checked the bloodstains on her sleeve, felt the sweat trickling down her chest. “I’m walking around in shock. I have no idea what the hell’s going on anymore. My ears are still ringing from whatever they did to the stairwell. I think I screwed up my ankle. And I’m starving. Oh, and did I mention my friend isn’t as dead as I thought she was?”
She took a deep breath.
Courtnee continued to stare at her worryingly. Shirly knew none of this was what her friend was asking her about.
“And yeah, I miss Marck,” she said quietly.
Courtnee put her arm around her friend and pulled her close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
Shirly waved her off. The two of them stood quietly and watched through the window as a small crew from second shift worked on the generator, trying to reroute the outpouring of noxious fumes from the apartment-sized machine to the floors of the thirties high above.
“You know what, though? There are times when I’m glad he’s not here. Times when I know I won’t be around much longer either, not once they get to us, and I’m glad he’s not here to stress about it, to worry about what they’ll do to us. To me. And I’m glad I haven’t had to watch him do all this fighting, living on rations, this sort of craziness.” She dipped her chin at the crew outside. She knew Marck would either be up there leading that terrible work or outside with a gun pressed to his cheek.
“Hello. Testing. Hello, hello.”
The two women turned around to see Walker clicking the red detonate switch, the microphone from the headset held beneath his chin, furrows of concentration across his brow.
“Juliette?” he asked. “Can you hear me? Hello?”
Shirly moved to Walker’s side, squatted down, rested a hand on his shoulder. The three of them stared at the headphones, waiting for a reply.
“Hello?”
A quiet voice leaked out of the tiny speakers. Shirly clapped a hand to her chest, her breath stolen from the miracle of a reply. It was a fraction of a second later, after this surge of desperate hope, that she realized this wasn’t Juliette. The voice was different.
“That’s not her,” Courtnee whispered, dejected. Walker waved his hand to silence her. The red switch clicked noisily as he prepared to transmit.
“Hello. My name is Walker. We received a transmission from a friend. Is there anyone else there?”
“Ask them where they are,” Courtnee hissed.
“Where exactly are you?” Walker added, before releasing the switch.
The tiny speakers popped.
“We are nowhere. You’ll never find us. Stay away.”
There was a pause, a hiss of static.
“And your friend is dead. We killed him.”