by Hugh Howey
“Of course I do,” she said. “I was born and raised in a place just like this. Only, I guess you could say that we’re still having good days and not giving ourselves credit for them.”
Solo smiled. “Then what’s a silo?” he asked, that teenage defiance bubbling to the surface.
“It’s—” Juliette searched for the words. “It’s our home. A building like those over the hill, but underground. The silo is the part of the world you can live in. The inside,” she said, realizing it was harder to define than she thought.
Solo laughed.
“That’s what the word means to you. But we use words all the time without really knowing them.” He pointed toward the shelf with all the metal canisters. “All the real knowing is in those. Everything that ever happened.” He shot her a look. “You’ve heard the term ‘raging bull?’ Or someone being ‘bull-headed?’”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“But what’s a bull?” he asked.
“Someone who’s careless. Or mean, like a bully.”
Solo laughed. “So much we don’t know,” he said. He studied his fingernails. “A silo isn’t the world. It’s nothing. The term, this word, comes from a long time ago, back when crops grew in the outside farther than you could see—” He waved his hand over the floor like it was some vast terrain. “—back when there were more people than you could count, back when everyone had lots of kids—” He glanced up at her. His hands came together and kneaded one another, almost as if embarrassed to bring up the making of kids around a woman.
“They grew so much food,” he continued, “that even for all these people they couldn’t eat it all, not at once. So they stored it away in case times got bad. They took more seeds of grain than you could count and they would pour them into these great silos that stood aboveground—”
“Aboveground,” Juliette said. “Silos.” She felt as though he must be making this up, some delusion he’d concocted over the lonely decades.
“I can show you pictures,” he said petulantly, as if upset by her doubt. He got up and hurried to the shelf with the metal canisters. He read the small white labels on the bottom, running his fingers across them.
“Ah!” He grabbed one—it looked heavy—and brought it to her. The clasp on the side released the lid, revealing a thick object inside.
“Let me,” he said, even though she hadn’t moved a muscle to help. He tilted the box and let the heavy object fall onto his palm, where it balanced expertly. It was the size of a children’s book, but ten or twenty times as thick. Still, it was a book. She could see the edges of miraculously fine-cut paper.
“I’ll find it,” he said. He flipped pages in large chunks, each flap a fortune in pressed paper clapping solidly against more fortunes. Then he whittled his search down more finely, a pinch at a time, before moving to a single page at a time.
“Here.” He pointed.
Juliette moved closer and looked. It was like a drawing, but so exact as to almost seem real. It was like looking at the view of the outside from the cafeteria, or the picture of someone’s face on an ID, but in color. She wondered if this book had batteries in it.
“It’s so real,” she whispered, rubbing it with her fingers.
“It is real,” he said. “It’s a picture. A photograph.”
Juliette marveled at the colors, the green field and blue sky reminding her of the lie she had seen in her visor’s false video. She wondered if this was false as well. It looked nothing like the rough and smeared photos she’d ever seen.
“These buildings,” he pointed to what looked like large white cans sitting on the ground. “These are silos. They hold seed for during the bad times. For when the times get good again.”
He looked up at her. They were just a few feet apart, Juliette and him. She could see the wrinkles around his eyes, could see how much the beard concealed his age.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” she told him.
He pointed at her. Pointed at his own chest. “We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times.”
“Who? Who put us here? And what bad times?”
He shrugged. “But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope.”
He glanced up from the book and bit his lip, water welling up in his eyes. “Seeds don’t go crazy,” he told her. “They don’t. They have bad days and lots of good ones, but it doesn’t matter. You leave them and leave them, however many you bury, and they do what seeds do when they’re left alone too long—”
He stopped. Closed the book and held it to his chest. Juliette watched as he rocked back and forth, ever so slightly.
“What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him.
He frowned.
“We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.”
18
“If you had the strength of twenty men,
it would dispatch you straight.”
The waiting beyond the stacks of Supply was the worst. Those who could, napped. Most engaged in nervous banter. Knox kept checking the time on the wall, picturing all the pieces moving throughout the silo. Now that his people were armed, all he could hope for was a smooth and bloodless transfer of power. He hoped they could get their answers, find out what’s been going on in IT—those secretive bastards—and maybe vindicate Jules. But he knew bad things could happen.
He saw it on Marck’s face, the way he kept looking at Shirly. The worry there was evident in the man’s frown, the tilt of his eyebrows, the wrinkles above the bridge of his nose. Knox’s shift leader wasn’t hiding the concern for his wife as well as he probably thought he was.
Knox pulled out his multi-tool and checked the blade. He flashed his teeth in the reflection to see if anything from his last meal was stuck there. As he was putting it away, one of Supply’s shadows emerged from behind the stacks to let them know they had visitors.
“What color visitors?” Shirly asked, as the group gathered their guns and lurched to their feet.
The young girl pointed at Knox. “Blue. Same as you.”
Knox rubbed the girl’s head as he slipped between the shelving units. This was a good sign. The rest of his people from Mechanical were running ahead of schedule. He made his way to the counter while Marck gathered the others, waking a few, the extra rifles clattering as they were gathered up.
As Knox rounded the counter, he saw Pieter enter through the front door, the two Supply workers guarding the landing having allowed him past.
Pieter smiled as he and Knox clasped hands. Members of Pieter’s refinery crew filed in behind, their customary black coveralls replaced with the more discrete blue.
“How goes it?” Knox asked.
“The stairs sing with traffic,” Pieter said. His chest swelled as he took in and held a deep breath, then blew it out. Knox imagined the pace they’d maintained to shave off so much time.
“Everyone’s underway?” He and Pieter slid to the side while their two groups merged, members of Supply introducing themselves or embracing those they already knew.
“They are.” He nodded. “I’d give the last of them another half hour. Though I fear the whispers on porters’ lips travel even faster than we do.” He looked toward the ceiling. “I’d wager they echo above our heads even now.”
“Suspicions?” Knox asked.
“Oh, aye. We had a run-in by the lower market. People wanted to know the fuss. Georgie gave them lip, and I thought it’d come to blows.”
“God, and not in the mids yet.”
“Aye. Can’t help but think a smaller incursion would’ve had a greater chance of success.”
Knox frowned, but he understood Pieter thinking so. The man was used to doing a great deal with
only a handful of strong backs. But it was too late for them to argue over plans already in action. “Well, the blackouts have likely begun,” Knox said. “There’s nothing to it but for us to chase them up.”
Pieter nodded gravely. He looked around the room at the men and women arming themselves and re-packing their gear for another quick climb. “And I suppose we mean to bludgeon our way up.”
“Our plan is to be heard,” Knox said. “Which means making some noise.”
Pieter patted his boss on the arm. “Well then, we are already winning.”
He left to pick out a gun and top up his canteen. Knox joined Marck and Shirly by the door. Those without guns had armed themselves with fearsome shanks of flattened iron, the edges bright silver from the shrill work of the grinder. It was amazing to Knox that they all knew, instinctively, how to build implements of pain. It was something even shadows knew how to do at young ages, knowledge somehow dredged up from the brutal depths of their imagination, this ability to deal harm to one another.
“Are the others running behind?” Marck asked Knox.
“Not too bad,” Knox said. “More that these guys made good time. The rest’ll catch up. You guys ready?”
Shirly nodded. “Let’s get moving,” she said.
“Alright, then. Onward and upward, as they say.” Knox scanned the room and watched his mechanics meld with members of Supply. More than a few faces were turned his way, waiting for some sign, maybe another speech. But Knox didn’t have another one in him. All he had was the fear that he was leading good people to their slaughter, that the taboos were falling in some runaway cascade, and it was all happening much too quickly. Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.
“On me,” he growled, and the chatter began to die down. Packs rustled into place, pockets jangling with danger. “On me,” he said again to the quieting room, and his soldiers began to form up in columns. Knox turned to the door, thinking this was certainly all on him. He made sure his rifle was covered, tucked it under his arm, and squeezed Shirly’s shoulder as she pulled the door open for him.
Outside, two workers from Supply stood by the railing. They had been turning the sparse traffic away with a made-up power outage. With the doors open, bright light and the noise of Supply’s machinery leaked out into the stairwell, and Knox saw what Pieter meant by whispers traveling swifter than feet. He adjusted his pack of supplies—the tools, candles, and flashlights that made it seem as if he were marching to aid rather than war. Beneath this beguiling layer hid more bullets and an extra bomb, bandages and pain salve for just in case. His rifle was wrapped in a strip of cloth and remained tucked under his arm. Knowing what it was, he found the concealment ridiculous. Looking at the others marching with him, some in welding smocks, some holding construction helmets, he saw their intentions were all too obvious.
They left the landing and the light spilling from Supply behind and began their climb. Several of his people from Mechanical had changed into yellow coveralls, the better to blend in the mids. They moved noisily up the dimmed nighttime glow of the stairwell, the shiver of traffic from below giving Knox hope that the rest of his people would be catching up soon. He felt sorry for their weary legs but reminded himself that they were traveling light.
He tried his damnedest to picture the coming morning as positively as he could. Perhaps the clash would conclude before any more of his people arrived. Maybe they would end up being nothing more than a wave of supporters coming to join in the celebrations. Knox and McLain would have already entered the forbidden levels of IT, would have yanked the cover off the inscrutable machinery inside, exposing those evil whirring cogs once and for all.
They made good progress while Knox dreamed of a smooth overthrow. They passed one landing where a group of women were hanging laundry over the metal railing to dry. The women spotted Knox and his people in their blue coveralls and complained of the power outages. Several of his workers stopped to hand out supplies and to spread lies. It wasn’t until after they had left and had wound their way up to the next level that Knox saw the cloth had come unwrapped from Marck’s barrel. He pointed this out and it was fixed before the next landing.
The climb turned into a silent, grueling ordeal. Knox let others take the lead while he slid back and checked on the status of his people. Even those in yellow, he considered his responsibility. Their lives were hanging in the balance of decisions he’d made. It was just as Walker had said, that crazy fool. This was it. An uprising, just like the fables of their youth. And Knox suddenly felt a dire kinship with those old ghosts, those ancestors of myth and lore. Men and women had done this before. Maybe for different reasons, with a less noble anger caught in their throats, but somewhen, on some level, there had been a march like this. Similar boots on the same treads. Maybe some of the same boots, just with new soles. All with the jangle of mean machines in hands not afraid to use them.
It startled Knox, this sudden link to a mysterious past. And it wasn’t that terribly long ago, was it? Less than two hundred years? He imagined, if someone lived as long as Jahns had, or McLain for that matter, that three long lives could span that distance. Three handshakes to go from that uprising to this one. And what of the years between? That long peace sandwiched between two wars?
Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking on these things. Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of something awful. And yet it felt so right. So necessary. What if that former clash had felt the same? Had felt the same in the breasts of the men and women who’d waged it?
19
"Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,
As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.”
“It would take ten lifetimes to read all these.”
Juliette looked up from the pile of scattered tins and stacks of thick books. There was more to marvel at in their text-heavy pages than in any of the children’s books of her youth.
Solo turned from the stove where he was heating soup and boiling water. He waved a dripping metal spoon at the scattered mess she’d made. “I don’t think they were meant to be read,” he told her. “At least, not like I’ve been reading them, front to back.” He touched his tongue to the spoon, then stuck it back in the pot and stirred. “Everything’s out of order. It’s more like a backup to the backup.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Juliette admitted. She looked down at her lap where pictures of animals called “butterflies” filled the pages. Their wings were comically bright. She wondered if they were the size of her hands or the size of people. She had yet to find any sense of scale for the beasts.
“The servers,” Solo said. “What did you think I meant? The backup.”
He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages?
She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.
“The backup of what exactly?” she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answers to come.
Solo found two bowls. He began wiping one out with the fabric in the belly of his coveralls. “The backup of everything,” he said. “All that we know. All that ever was.” He set the bowls down and adjusted a knob on the stove. “Follow me,” he said, waving his arm. “I’ll show you.”
Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin. She rose and followed Solo out of the room and into the next one.
“Don’t mind the mess,” he said, gesturing at
a small hill of trash and debris piled up against one wall. It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and smelled like ten thousand. Juliette wrinkled her nose and fought the reflex to gag. Solo seemed unaffected. He stood beside a small wooden desk and flipped through diagrams hanging from the wall on enormous sheets of paper.
“Where’s the one I want?” he wondered aloud.
“What are these?” Juliette asked, entranced. She saw one that looked like a schematic of the silo, but unlike any they’d had in Mechanical.
Solo turned. He had several sheets flopped over one shoulder, his body practically disappearing between the layers of them. “Maps,” he said. “I want to show you how much is out there. You’ll shit yourself.”
