Knox was taken aback by the sudden attack, this quiet hiss that landed with all the force of a shout.
“You know where I’ll—” he started to answer.
“Damn straight,” McLain said, releasing his arm. “And you’d better well know that I’ll see you there.”
15
“I dreamt my lady came and found me dead.”
Juliette stood perfectly still and listened to the sound of footsteps retreating down the stairwell. She could feel the vibrations in the railing. Goose bumps rushed up her legs and down her arms. She wanted to call out, to yell for the person to stop, but the sudden rush of adrenaline made her chest feel cold and empty. It was like a chill wind had forced itself deep into her lungs, crowding out her voice. People were alive and in the silo with her. And they were running away.
She pushed away from the railing and dashed across the landing, hit the curved steps at a dead run and took them as fast as her legs could take her. A flight down, as the adrenaline subsided, she found the lungs to yell, “Stop!,” but the racket of her bare feet on the metal stairs likely drowned out her voice. She could no longer hear the person running, dared not stop and listen for fear they would get too far ahead, but as she passed the doorway on thirty-one, she felt the panic that they might slip inside some level and get away. And if there were only a handful of them hiding in the vast silo, she may never find them. Not if they didn’t want to be found.
Somehow, this was more terrifying than anything else: that she might live the rest of her days foraging and surviving in a dilapidated silo, talking to inanimate objects, while a group of people did the same and stayed out of sight. It so stressed her that it took a while to consider the opposite: that this might instead be a group who would seek her out, and not have the best intentions.
They wouldn’t have the best intentions, but they would have her knife.
She stopped on thirty-two to listen. Holding her breath to keep quiet was almost impossible—her lungs were crying out for deep gulps of air. But she remained still, the pulse in her palms beating against the cool railing, the distinct sound of footsteps still below her and louder now. She was catching up! She took off again, emboldened, taking the steps three at a time, her body sideways as she danced down the stairs as she had in youth, one hand on the curving railing, the other held out in front of her for balance, the balls of her feet just barely touching a tread before she was flying down to the next, concentrating lest she slip. A spill could be deadly at such speeds. Images of casts on arms and legs and stories of the unfortunate elderly with broken hips came to mind. Still, she pushed her limits, positively flying. Thirty three went by in a blaze. Half a spiral later, over her footfalls, she heard a door slam. She stopped and looked up. She leaned over the railing and peered down. The footfalls were gone, leaving just the sound of her panting for air.
Juliette hurried down another rotation of the steps and checked the door on thirty-four. It wouldn’t open. It wasn’t locked, though. The handle clicked down and the door moved, but caught on something. Juliette tugged as hard as she could—but to no avail. She yanked again and heard something crack. With a foot braced on the other door, she tried a third time, yanking sharply, snapping her head back, pulling her arms toward her chest and kicking with her foot—
Something snapped. The door flew open, and she lost her grip on the handle. There was an explosion of light from inside, a bright burst of illumination spilling out the door before it slammed shut again.
Juliette scrambled across the landing and grabbed the handle. She pulled the door open and struggled to her feet. One broken half of a broom stick lay inside the hallway—the other half hung from the handle of the neighboring door. Both stood out in the blinding light all around her. The overhead lamps inside the room were fully lit, the bright rectangles in the ceiling marching down the hall and out of sight. Juliette listened for footsteps, but heard little more than the buzzing of the bulbs. The turnstile ahead of her winked its red eye over and over, like it knew secrets but wouldn’t tell.
She got up and approached the machine, looked to the right where a glass wall peeked into a conference room, the lights full-on in there as well. She hopped over the stile, the motion a habit already, and called out another hello. Her voice echoed back, but it sounded different in the lit air, if that were possible. There was life in here, electricity, other ears to hear her voice, which made the echoes somehow fainter.
She passed offices, peeking in each one to look for signs of life. The place was a mess. Drawers dumped on the floor, metal filing cabinets tipped over, precious paper everywhere. One of the desks faced her, and Juliette could see that the computer was on, the screen full of green text. It felt as though she’d entered a dreamworld. In two days—assuming she’d slept that long—her brain had gradually acclimated to the pale green glow of the emergency lights, had grown used to a life in the wilderness, a life without power. She still had the taste of brackish water on her tongue, and now she strolled through a disheveled but otherwise normal workplace. She imagined the next shift—did offices like these have shifts?—returning, laughing, from the stairwell, shuffling papers and righting furniture and getting back to work.
The thought of work had her wondering what they did here. She had never seen such a layout. She almost forgot about her flight down the stairs as she poked about, as curious about the rooms and power as the footsteps that had brought her there. Around a bend she came to a wide metal door that, unlike the others, wouldn’t open. Juliette heaved on it and felt it barely budge. She pressed her shoulder against the metal door and pushed it, a few inches at a time, until she could squeeze through. She had to step over a tall metal filing cabinet that had been yanked down in front of the heavy door in an attempt to hold it closed.
The room was massive, at least as big as the generator room and far larger than the cafeteria. It was full of tall pieces of furniture bigger than filing cabinets but with no drawers. Instead, their fronts were covered with blinking lights, red, green, and amber.
Juliette shuffled through paper that had spilled from the filing cabinet. And she realized, as she did so, that she couldn’t be alone in the room. Someone had pulled the cabinet across the door, and they had to have done this from inside.
“Hello?”
She passed through the rows of tall machines, for that’s what she figured they were. They hummed with electricity, and now and then seemed to whir or clack like their innards were busy. She wondered if this were some sort of exotic power plant—providing the lighting perhaps? Or did these have stacks of batteries inside? Seeing all the cords and cables at the backs of the units had her leaning toward batteries. No wonder the lights were blaring. This was like twenty of Mechanical’s battery rooms combined.
“Is anyone here?” she called out. “I mean you no harm.”
She worked her way through the room, listening for any movement, until she came across one of the machines with its door hinged open. Peering inside, she saw not batteries but boards like the kind Walker was forever soldering on. In fact, the guts of this machine looked eerily similar to the inside of the dispatch room’s computer—
Juliette stepped back, realizing what these were. “The servers,” she whispered. She was in this silo’s IT. Level thirty-four. Of course.
There was a scraping sound near the far wall, the sound of metal sliding on metal. Juliette ran in that direction, darting between the tall units, wondering who the hell this was running from her, and where they planned to hide.
She rounded the last row of servers to see a portion of the floor moving, a section of metal grate sliding to cover a hole. Juliette dove for the floor, her tablecloth garb wrapping up her legs, her hands seizing the edge of the cover before it could close. Right in front of her, she saw the knuckles and fingers of a man’s hands gripping the edge of the grate. There was a startled scream, a grunt of effort. Juliette tried to yank back on the grate, but had no leverage. One of the hands disappeared. A knife took i
ts place, snicking against the grate, hunting for her fingers.
Juliette swung her feet beneath her and sat up for leverage. She yanked on the grate and felt the knife bite into her finger as she did so.
She screamed. The man below her screamed. He emerged and held the knife between them, his hand shaking, the blade catching and reflecting the overhead lights. Juliette tossed the metal hatch away and clutched her hand, which was dripping blood.
“Easy!” she said, scooting out of reach.
The man ducked his head down, then poked it back up. He looked past Juliette as if others were coming up behind her. She fought the urge to check—but decided to trust the silence just in case he was trying to fool her.
“Who are you?” she asked. She wrapped part of her garment around her hand to bandage it. She noticed the man, his beard thick and unkempt, was wearing gray coveralls. They could’ve been made in her silo, with just slight differences. He stared at her, his dark hair wild and hanging shaggy over his face. He grunted, coughed into his hand, seemed prepared to duck down under the floor and disappear.
“Stay,” Juliette said. “I mean you no harm.”
The man looked at her wounded hand and at the knife. Juliette glanced down to see a thin trace of blood snaking toward her elbow. The wound ached, but she’d had worse in her time as a Mechanic.
“S-s-sorry,” the man muttered. He licked his mouth and swallowed. The knife was trembling uncontrollably.
“My name’s Jules,” she said, realizing this man was much more frightened of her than the other way around. “What’s yours?”
He glanced at the knife blade held sideways between them, almost as if checking a mirror. He shook his head.
“No name,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “No need.”
“Are you alone?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Solo,” he said. “Years.” He looked up at her. “Where did—” He licked his lips again, cleared his throat. His eyes watered and glinted in the light. “—you come from? What level?”
“You’ve been by yourself for years?” Juliette said in wonder. She couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t come from any level,” she told him. “I came from another silo.” She enunciated this last softly and slowly, worried what this news might do to such a seemingly fragile man.
But Solo nodded as if this made sense. It was not the reaction Juliette had expected.
“The outside—” Solo looked again at the knife. He reached out of the hole and set it on the grating, slid it away from both of them. “—is it safe?”
Juliette shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had a suit. It wasn’t a far walk. But still, I shouldn’t be alive.”
Solo bobbed his head. He looked up at her, wet tracks running from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his beard. “None of us should,” he said. “Not a one.”
16
“Give leave awhile,
we must talk in secret.”
“What is this place?” Lukas asked Bernard. The two of them stood before a large chart hanging on the wall like a tapestry. The diagrams were precise, the lettering ornate. It showed a grid of circles evenly spaced with lines between them and intricacies inside each. Several of the circles were crossed out with thick red marks of ink. It was just the sort of majestic diagramming he hoped to one day achieve with his star charts.
“This is our legacy,” Bernard said simply.
Lukas had often heard him speak similarly of the mainframes upstairs.
“Are these supposed to be the servers?” he asked, daring to rub his hands across a continuous piece of paper the size of a small bed sheet. “They’re laid out like the servers.”
Bernard stepped beside him and rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Interesting. So they are. I never noticed that before.”
“What are they?” Lukas looked closer and saw each was numbered. There was also a jumble of squares and rectangles in one corner with parallel lines spaced between them, keeping the blocky shapes separate and apart. These figures contained no detail within them, but the word “Atlanta” was written large beneath.
“We’ll get to that. Come, let me show you something.”
At the end of the room was a door. Bernard led him through this, turning on more lights as he went.
“Who else comes down here?” Lukas asked, following along.
Bernard glanced back over his shoulder. “No one.”
Lukas didn’t like that answer. He glanced back over his own shoulder, feeling like he was descending into something people didn’t return from.
“I know this must seem sudden,” Bernard said. He waited on Lukas to join him, threw his small arm around Lukas’s shoulder. “But things changed this morning. The world is changing. And she rarely does it pleasantly.”
“Is this about… the cleaning?” He nearly said “Juliette.” The picture of her felt hot against his breastbone.
Bernard’s face grew stern. “There was no cleaning,” he said abruptly. “And now all hell will break loose, and people will die. And the silos, you see, were designed from the ground down to prevent this.”
“Designed—” Lukas repeated. His heart beat once, twice. His brain whirred its old circuits and finally computed something Bernard had said that had made no sense.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you say silos?”
“You’ll want to familiarize yourself with this.” Bernard gestured toward a small desk which had a fragile-looking wooden chair tucked up against it. There was a book on the desk unlike any Lukas had ever seen, or even heard of. It stood nearly as high as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are to never remove from your neck. Come down when you can and read. Our history is in here, as well as every action you are to take in any emergency.”
Lukas approached the book, a lifetime’s worth of paper, and hinged open the cover. The contents were machine printed, the ink pitch-black. He flipped through a dozen pages of listed contents until he found the first page of the body. Oddly, he recognized the opening lines immediately.
“It’s the Pact,” he said, looking up at Bernard. “I already know quite a bit of—”
“This is the pact,” Bernard told him, pinching the first half inch of the thick book. “The rest is the Order.”
He stepped back.
Lukas hesitated, digesting this, then reached forward and flopped the tome open near its middle.
• In the event of an earthquake:
• For casement cracking and outside seepage, turn to AIRLOCK BREACH (p.2180)
• For collapse of one or more levels, see SUPORT COLUMNS under SABOTAGE (p.751)
• For fire outbreak, see—
“Sabotage?” Lukas flipped a few pages and read something about air handling and asphyxiation. “Who came up with all this stuff?”
“People who have experienced many bad things.”
“Like… ?” He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say this, but it felt like taboos weren’t allowed down there. “Like the people before the uprising?”
“The people before those people,” Bernard said. “The one people.”
Lukas closed the book. He shook his head, wondering if this was all a gag, some kind of initiation. The priests usually made more sense than this. The children’s books, too.
“I’m not really supposed to learn all this, am I?”
Bernard laughed. His countenance had fully transformed from earlier. “You just need to know what’s in there so you can access it when you need to.”
“What does it say about this morning?” He turned to Bernard, and it dawned on him suddenly that no one knew of his fascination, his enchantment, with Juliette. The tears had evaporated from his cheeks, the guilt of possessing her forbidden things had overpowered his shame for falling so hard for someone he hardly knew. And now this secret had wandered out of sight. It could only be betrayed by the flush he felt on his cheeks as Bernard studied him and pondered his questi
on.
“Page seventy-two,” Bernard said, the humor draining from his face and replaced with the frustration from earlier.
Lukas turned back to the book. This was a test. A shadowing rite. It had been a long time since he’d performed under a caster’s glare. He began flipping through the pages and saw at once that the section he was looking for came right after the Pact, was at the very beginning of this new Order.
He found the page. At the very top, in bold print, it said:
• In Case of a Failed Cleaning:
And below this rested terrible words strung into awful meaning. Lukas read the instructions several times, just to make sure. He glanced over at Bernard, who nodded sadly, before Lukas turned back to the print.
• In Case of a Failed Cleaning:
• Prepare for War.
17
“Poor living corpse, closed in a dead man’s tomb!”
Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.
“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress in one corner resting directly on the floor, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing off. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.
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