This world is the same as my world, she thought to herself, stumbling down the first flight of stairs in the wan glow of emergency light strips. The Gods built more than one.
Her heavy boots, still dripping with soup, felt unsteady on the metal treads. At the landing on two, she paused and took in a few gulps of air, less painful gulps, and considered how best to remove the infernal and bulky outfit that made every movement awkward, that reeked of the fetid smell of rot and outside air. She looked down at her arms. The thing had required help to don. There were double zippers in the back, layers of velcro, miles of heat tape. She looked at the knife in her hand, suddenly grateful that she had never dropped it after using it to remove her helmet.
Gripping the knife with one clumsy glove, she carefully inserted the tip through the other sleeve, right above the top of her wrist. She forced the point through, pushing the blade over the top of her arm so it wouldn’t jab her even if it pierced all the way. The fabric was difficult to cut, but a tear finally formed as she augured the handle in small circles. She slid the knife into this tiny rip, the dull side of the blade facing her skin, and slid it down her arm and toward her knuckles. When the tip of the blade ripped through the fabric between her fingers, she was able to free her hand from the long gash she’d made, the sleeve flopping from her elbow.
Juliette sat down on the grating, moved the knife to her newly freed hand, and worked on the other side. She freed it as well while soup dripped from her shoulders and down her arms. She next started a tear at her chest, better control of the knife now without the thick gloves on. She ripped the metal foil exterior away, peeling herself like an orange. The solid collar for her helmet had to stay—it was attached to her charcoal fabric undersuit as well as the reinforced zippers up her back—but piece by piece she removed the shiny outer coat which was slathered with a nastiness she attributed partly to the soup and partly to her trek over the hills.
Next came her boots, which were cut free around the ankles until she was able to work them off, sawing a slit down the outside edge and popping one foot free, then the other.
Before she cleaned up the hanging tatters of fabric any further, or worried about the material still attached to the zipper at her back, she got up from the landing and hurried down the steps, putting more distance between herself and the air above that seemed to scratch at her throat. She was another two flights down, swimming through the green glow of the stairwell, before she appreciated the fact that she was alive.
She was alive.
For however much longer, this was a brutal, beautiful, and brand new fact for Juliette. She had spent three days climbing long stairs similar to these as she came to grips with her fate. Another day and night had been spent in a cell made for the future corpses who dotted the landscape. And then—this. An impossible trek through the wilderness of the forbidden, breaking in to the impenetrable and the unknown. Surviving.
Whatever happened next, for this moment, Juliette flew down foreign steps in bare feet, the steel cool against her tingling skin, the air burning her throat less and less with each gulp of new air, the raw stench and memory of death receding further and further above her. Soon, it was just the patter of her joyous descent ringing out and drifting down a lonely and empty darkness like a muffled bell that rang not for the dead, but for the living.
••••
She stopped on six and rested while she worked on what remained of her protective suit. With care, she sliced her black undersuit by her shoulders and collarbone, working the tear all the way around and clawing at her back as it ripped free, strips of heat tape still attached. Once the helmet collar was detached from the fabric—just the zipper hanging like a second spine along her back—she could finally remove it from her neck. She pulled it off and dropped it to the ground, then stripped off the rest of the black carbon fabric, peeling away the arms and legs and leaving all the material in a rough pile outside the double doors to level six.
Six should be an apartment level, she thought. She considered going inside and yelling out for help or looking for clothes and supplies in the many rooms, but her greater impulse was to descend. The up-top felt poisoned and too close. It didn’t matter if it was all in her imagination—or if it was from her miserable experiences living in the up-top of her own silo—her body felt a revulsion for the place. Safe was the down deep. It had always felt this way.
One hopeful image did linger from the upper kitchen: The rows and rows of canned and jarred food for the lean harvests. Juliette figured there would be more in the lower mess halls as well. And the air in the silo seemed decent as she regained her breath; the sting in her lungs and on her tongue had faded. Either the vast silo held a lot of air that was now being consumed by no one, or there was still a source. All these thoughts gave her hope, these tallies of resources. So she left her spoiled and tattered clothing behind and armed with only a large chef’s knife, she stole down the curved stairs naked, her body becoming more and more alive with every step taken, her mind becoming more determined to keep the rest of her that way.
••••
On thirteen, she stopped and checked inside the doors. There was always the chance that this silo was laid out completely differently, floor to floor, so it made little sense to plan ahead if she didn’t know what to expect. There were only a handful of areas in the up-top that she was intimately familiar with, and every bit of overlap so far had seemed a perfect copy. Thirteen, she would definitely know. There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots. In her mind, as she pushed the door open a crack, she wasn’t in a different silo, an abandoned husk of a silo, but in her past, pushing open a door on her youth.
It was dark inside, none of the security or emergency lights on. There was a different smell. The air was stagnant and had a tinge of decay.
Juliette shouted down the hallway.
“Hello?”
She listened to her voice echo back from the empty walls. The voice that returned sounded distant, weaker, higher than her own. She imagined herself at age nine, running through these very halls, crying out to her older self across the years. She tried to picture her mother chasing behind that girl, attempting to scoop her up and force her to be still, but the ghosts evaporated in the darkness. The last of the echoes faded, leaving her alone and naked in the doorway.
As her eyes adjusted, she could just barely make out a reception desk at the end of the hall. Light reflected off glass windows just where they should be. It was the exact same layout as her father’s nursery in the mids, the place where she had been not just born, but raised. It was hard to believe that this was some place different. That other people had lived here, other children had been born, had played and had been raised just over a hill and down a dip, had given chase or challenged each other to Hop or whatever games they had invented, all of them unaware of the other. Maybe it was from standing in the doorway of a nursery, but she couldn’t help but think of all the lives this place had contained. People growing up, falling in love, burying their dead.
All those people outside. People she had desecrated with her boots, scattering their bones and ashes as she kicked her way into the very place they had fled. Juliette wondered how long ago it had happened, how long since the silo had been abandoned. What had happened here? The stairwell was still lit, which meant the battery room still held juice. She needed paper to do the math, to figure how recently or how long ago all this life had turned to death. There were practical reasons for wanting to know, beyond the mere itch of curiosity.
With one last look inside, one final shudder of regret for not stopping to see her father the last few times she’d passed his nursery, Juliette shut the door on the darkness and the ghosts and considered her predicament. She could very well be perfectly alone in a dying silo. The thrill of being
alive at all was quickly draining away, replaced with the reality of her solitude and the tenuousness of her survival. Her stomach grumbled its agreement. She could somehow still smell the fetid soup on her, could taste the stomach acid from her retching. She needed water. She needed clothes. These primal urges were pushed to the forefront, drowning out the severity of her situation, the daunting tasks before her, leaving the regrets of the past behind.
If the layout was the same, the first hydroponic farm would be four floors below. The larger of the two upper dirt farms would lie just below that. Juliette shivered from an updraft of cold air. The stairwell was creating its own thermal cycle, and it would only be colder the further down she went. But she went anyway—lower was better. At the next level, she tried the door. It was too dark to see past the first interior hallway, but it seemed like offices or workrooms. She tried to remember what would be on the fourteenth in her own silo, but didn’t know. Was it incredible to not know? The up-top of her own home had somehow been strange to her. That made this silo something completely alien.
She held the door to fourteen open and stuck the blade of her knife between the slits of metal that formed every landing’s grating. The handle was left sticking up to form a stop. She allowed the door to close on its sprung hinges until it rested on the handle, holding it open. This let in enough light for her to steal inside and grope around the first handful of rooms.
There were no coveralls hanging on the backs of the doors, but one room was set up for conferences. The water in the pitchers had long evaporated out, but the purple tablecloth looked warm enough. Warmer than being naked. Juliette moved the assortment of cups, plates, and pitchers and grabbed the cloth. She wrapped it around her shoulders, but it was going to slip off when she moved, so she tried knotting the corners in front of her. Giving up on this, she ran back to the landing, out into the welcomed light, and removed the fabric completely. Grabbing the knife—the door squealing eerily shut behind her—she pushed the blade through the center of the tablecloth and cut a long gash. Her head went through this, the cloth falling past her feet in front and behind her. A few minutes with the blade and she’d cut away the excess, forming a belt out of a long strip and from another shock of fabric, enough to tie over her head and keep it warm.
It felt good to be making something, to be engineering her way through one particular problem. She had a tool, a weapon if need be, and clothes. The impossible list of tasks had been whittled down a few shavings. She descended further, her feet cold on the stairs, dreaming of boots, thirsty for water, very much aware of all that remained for her to do.
On fifteen, she was reminded of another necessity as her weary legs nearly gave way. Her knees buckled, she grabbed the railing, and she realized, as the adrenaline evaporated from her veins, that she was deathly tired. She paused on the landing, hands on her knees, and took a few deep breaths. How long had she been going? How much further could she push herself? She checked her reflection in the blade of the knife, saw how horrible she looked, and decided she needed rest before she went any further. Rest now, while it was still warm enough to not shiver to pieces.
It was tempting to explore that level for a bed, but she decided against it—there would be little comfort in the pitch black behind those doors. So she curled up on the steel grating of landing fifteen, tucked her arms under her head, and adjusted the tablecloth so every patch of bare skin was covered. And before she could go over the long list forming in her head, exhaustion took over. She drifted off to sleep with only a moment’s panic that she shouldn’t be so tired, that this might be the sort of nap one never woke up from, that she was destined to join the residents of this strange place, curled up and unmoving, frozen and lifeless, rotting and wasting away—
12
“But old folks — many feign as they were dead;
Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead.”
“Do you understand what you’re proposing we do?”
Knox looked up at McLain, met her wrinkled and wizened eyes with as much confidence as he could muster. The tiny woman who controlled all the silo’s spares and fabrication cast an oddly imposing figure. She didn’t have Knox’s barrel chest or thick beard, had wrists barely bigger than two of his fingers, but she possessed a wizened gray gaze and the weight of hard years that made him feel but a shadow in her presence.
“It’s not an uprising,” he said, the forbidden words moving easily with the grease of habit and time. “We’re setting things to right.”
McLain sniffed. “I’m sure that’s what my great grandparents said.” She pushed back loose strands of silver hair and peered down at the blueprint spread out between them. It was as if she knew this was wrong, but had resigned herself to helping rather than hinder it. Maybe it was her age, Knox thought, peering at her pink scalp through hair so thin and white as to be like filaments of glass. Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.
He looked down at the blueprint and smoothed the sharp creases in the fine paper. He was suddenly aware of his hands, how thick and grease-limned his fingers appeared. He wondered if McLain saw him as a brute, storming up here with delusions of justice. She was old enough to see him as young, he realized. Young and hot tempered, while he thought of himself as being old and wise.
One of the dozens of dogs that lived among Supply’s stacks grunted discontentedly under the table as if all this war planning were spoiling its nap.
“I think it’s safe to assume IT knows something is coming,” McLain said, running her small hands across the many floors between them and thirty four.
“Why? You don’t think we were discrete coming up?”
She smiled up at him. “I’m sure you were, but it’s safe to assume this because it would be dangerous to assume otherwise.”
He nodded and chewed on the part of his beard below his lower lip.
“How long will the rest of your mechanics take to get here?” McLain asked.
“They’ll leave around ten, when the stairwell is dimmed, and be here by two, three at the latest. They’ll be loaded down.”
“And you think a dozen of your men is sufficient to keep things running down below?”
“As long as nothing major breaks, yeah.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Where d’ya think the porters will fall? Or the people from the mids?”
She shrugged. “The mids see themselves as toppers mostly. I know, I spent my childhood up there. They go for the view and eat at the cafe as much as they can, justifying the climb. The toppers are another question. I think we have more hope among them.”
Knox wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. “Say again?”
She looked up at him, and Knox felt the dog nuzzling against his boots, looking for company or warmth.
“Think about it,” McLain said. “Why are you so riled up? Because you lost a good friend? That happens all the time. No, it’s because you were lied to. And the toppers will feel this ever more keenly, trust me. They live in sight of those who’ve been lied to. It’s the mids, the people who aspire upward without knowing and who look down on us without compassion that will be the most reluctant.”
“So you think we have allies up top?”
“That we can’t get to, yeah. And they would take some convincing. A fine speech like you poisoned my people with.”
She gifted him with a rare grin, and Knox felt himself beaming in return. And right then he knew, instantly, why her people were devoted to her. It was similar to the pull he had on others, but for different reasons. People feared him and wanted to feel safe. But they respected McLain and wanted to feel loved.
“The problem we’re gonna have is that the mids are what separate us from IT.” She drew her hand across the blueprint. “So we need to get through there quick but without starting a fight.”
“I thought we’d just storm up befor
e dawn,” Knox grumbled. He leaned back and peered under the table at the dog, who was half sitting on one of his boots and looking up at him with its foolish tongue hanging out, tail wagging. All Knox saw in the animal was a machine that ate food and left shit behind. A furry ball of meat he wasn’t allowed to eat. He nudged the filthy thing off his boot. “Scram,” he said.
“Jackson, get over here.” McLain snapped her fingers.
“I don’t know why you keep those things around, much less breed more of ‘em.”
“You wouldn’t,” McLain snapped back. “They’re good for the soul, for those of us who have them.”
He checked to see if she was serious and found her smiling a little more easily now.
“Well, after we set this place right, I’m gonna push for a lottery for them, too. Get their numbers under control.” He returned her sarcastic smile. Jackson whined until McLain reached down to pet him.
“If we were all as loyal as this to each other, there’d never need be an uprising,” she said, peering up at him.
He dipped his head, unable to agree. There had been a few dogs in Mechanical over the years, enough for him to know that some people felt this way, even if he didn’t. He always shook his head at those who spent hard-earned chits on food that would fatten a thing that would never fatten him in return. When Jackson crossed under the table and rubbed against his knee, whining to be petted, he left his hands spread out on the blueprint, defiant.
“What we need for the trip up is a diversion,” McLain said. “Something to thin the numbers in the mids. It’d be nice if we could get more of them to go up-top, because we’re going to make a racket moving this many people up the stairs—”
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