by Hugh Howey
She dropped her recent scavenges on her cot, thinking of Walker as she did so. Is this how he ended up living amongst his work? Was it the obsession, the drive, the need to keep hammering away at a series of never-ending problems until he couldn’t sleep more than a few paces from them?
The more she understood the old man, the farther away from him she felt, the lonelier. She sat down and rubbed her legs, her thighs and calves tight from the most recent hike up. She may’ve been gaining her porter legs these last weeks, but they were still sore all the time, the ache in them a constant new sensation. Squeezing the muscles transformed that ache into pain, which she somehow preferred. The sharp and definable sensations were better than the dull and nameless kind. She liked feelings she could understand.
Juliette kicked her boots off—strange to think of these scavenged things as hers—and stood up. That was enough rest. It was as much rest as she could allow herself to have. She carried her canvas sacks to one of the fancy workbenches, everything in the Suit Lab nicer than what she’d had in Mechanical. Even the parts engineered to fail were constructed with a level of chemical and engineering sophistication she could only begin to appreciate now that she understood their evil intent. She had amassed piles of washers and seals, the good from Supply and the leftover bad from the Lab, to see how the system worked. They sat along the back of her main workbench, a reminder of the diabolical murderousness with which she’d been sent away.
She dumped out the parts from Supply and thought about how strange it was to have access to, to live in this forbidden heart of some other silo. It was stranger still to appreciate these workbenches, these immaculate tools, all arranged for the purpose of sending people like her to their death.
Looking around at the walls, at the dozen or so cleaning suits hanging from racks in various states of repair, it was like living and working in a room full of ghostly apparitions. If one of those suits jumped down and started moving about on its own, it wouldn’t surprise her. The arms and legs on each one was puffy as if full, the mirrored visors easily concealing curious faces. It was like having company, these hanging forms. They watched her impassively while she sorted her finds into two piles: one of items she needed for her next big project, the other of useful tidbits she had snagged with no specific idea of what she might use them for.
A valuable rechargeable battery went in this second group, some blood still on it that she hadn’t been able to wipe off. Images flashed through her mind of some of the scenes she’d found while scrounging for materials: like the two men who had committed suicide in the head office of Supply, their hands interlocked, opposite wrists slit, a rust-colored stain all around them. This was one of the worst scenes, a memory she couldn’t shake. There were other evidences of violence scattered about the silo. The entire place was haunted and marred. She completely understood why Solo limited his rounds to the gardens. She also empathized with his habit of blocking off the server room every night with the filing cabinet, even though he had been alone for years. If someone hadn’t long ago fried the electronic keypad that activated the locks on that door, he would probably be employing it to come and go. Juliette didn’t blame him. She slid the deadbolts on the Suit Lab every night before she went to sleep. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but that conviction was being sorely tested by the constant feeling of being watched by—if not actual people—the silo itself.
She began her work on the air compressor, and as always, it felt good to be doing something with her hands. Fixing something. Staying distracted. The first few nights, after surviving the horrible ordeal of being sent to clean, of fighting her way inside this carcass of a silo, she had searched long and hard for some place that she could actually sleep. It was never going to be below the server room, not with the stench of Solo’s debris piles pervading the place. She tried the apartment for IT’s head, but thoughts of Bernard made it impossible to even sit still. The couches in the various offices weren’t long enough. The pad she’d tried to put together on the warm server room floor was nice, but the clicking and whirring of all those tall cabinets nearly drove her insane.
The Suit Lab, strangely enough, with the specters and ghouls hanging about, was the only spot where she’d won a decent night of sleep. It was probably the tools everywhere, the welders and wrenches, the walls of drawers full of every socket and driver imaginable. If she was going to fix anything, even herself, it was there in that room. The only other place she’d felt at home in silo 17 was in the two jail cells she sometimes slept in on trips up and down. There, and sitting behind that empty server, talking to Lukas.
She thought about him as she crossed the room to grab the right size tap from one of the expansive metal tool chests. She pocketed this and pulled down one of the complete cleaning suits, admiring the heft of the outfit, remembering how bulky it had felt when she’d worn one just like it. She lifted it onto a clear workbench and pulled off the helmet’s locking collar, took this to the drill press and carefully bored a starter hole. With the collar in a vise, she began working the tap into the hole, creating new threads for the air hose. She was wrestling with this and thinking about her last conversation with Lukas when the smell of fresh bread preceded Solo into the lab.
“Hello!” he called from the doorway. Juliette looked up and jerked her chin for him to enter. Turning the tap required effort, the metal handle digging into her palms, sweat forming on her brow.
“I baked more bread.”
“Smells great,” she grunted.
Ever since she’d taught Solo how to bake flatbread, she couldn’t get him to stop. The large tins of flour that had been holding up his canned goods shelves were being removed one at a time while he experimented with recipes. She reminded herself to teach him more things to cook, to put this industriousness of his to good use by having him mix it up a little.
“And I sliced cucumbers,” he said, proud as if it were a feast beyond compare. In so many ways, Solo was stuck with the mind of a teenager. Culinary habits included.
“I’ll have some in a bit,” she told him. With effort, she finally got the tap all the way through the pilot hole, creating a threaded connection as neat as if it had come from Supply. The tap backed out easily, just like a fitted bolt would.
Solo placed the plate of bread and vegetables on the workbench and grabbed a stool. “Whatcha working on? Another pump?” He peered at the large wheeled air compressor with the hoses trailing off it.
“No. That was going to take too long. I’m working on a way to breathe underwater.”
Solo laughed. He started munching on a piece of bread until he realized she was serious.
“You’re serious.”
“I am. The pumps we really need are in the sump basins at the very bottom of the silo. I just need to get some of this electricity from IT down to them. We’ll have the place dry in weeks or months instead of years.”
“Breathe underwater,” he said. He looked at her like she was the one losing her mind.
“It’s no different than how I got here from my silo.” She wrapped the male end of the air hose coupler with silicone tape, then began threading it into the collar. “These suits are airtight, which makes them watertight. All I need is a constant supply of air to breathe, and I can work down there as long as I like. Long enough to get the pumps going, anyway.”
“You think they’ll still work?”
“They should.” She grabbed a wrench and tightened the coupler as hard as she dared. “They’re designed to be submerged, and they’re simple. They just need power, which we’ve got plenty of up here.”
“What will I do?” Solo wiped his hands, sprinkling breadcrumbs on her workbench. He reached for another piece.
“You’ll be watching the compressor. I’ll show you how to crank it, how to top it up with fuel. I’m going to install one of the portable deputy radios in the helmet here so we can talk back and forth. There’ll be a whole mess of hose and electrical wire to play out.” She smiled up at him. “Don�
��t worry, I’ll keep you busy.”
“I’m not worried,” Solo said. He puffed out his chest and crunched on a cucumber, his eyes drifting to the compressor.
And Juliette saw—just like a teenager with little practice but great need—that Solo had not yet mastered the art of lying convincingly.
8
• Silo 18 •
“—boys from the other side of the camp. These results were closely observed by the experimenters, who were posing as camp counselors. When the violence got out of hand, the experiment was halted before it could run its full course. What began at Robber Cave as two sets of boys, all with nearly identical backgrounds and values, had turned into what became known in the field of psychology as an in-grouping and out-grouping scenario. Small perceived differences, the way one wore a hat, the inflections in speech, turned into unforgivable transgressions. When stones started flying, and the raids on each other’s camps turned bloody, there was no recourse for the experimenters but to put an end to—”
Lukas couldn’t read any more. He closed the book and leaned back against the tall shelves. He smelled something foul, brought the spine of the old book to his nose and sniffed. It was him, he finally decided. When was the last time he’d showered? His routine was all out of whack. There were no screaming kids to wake him in the morning, no evenings hunting for stars, no dimmed stairwell to guide him back to his bed so he could repeat it all the following day. Instead, it was fitful periods of tossing and turning in the hidden bunkroom of level thirty-five. A dozen bunks, but him all alone. It was flashing red lights to signal that he had company, conversations with Bernard and Peter Billings when they brought him food, long talks with Juliette whenever she called and he was free to answer. Between it all, the books. Books of history out of order, of billions of people, of even more stars. Stories of violence, of the madness of crowds, of the staggering timeline of life, of orbited suns that would one day burn out, of weapons that could end it all, of diseases that nearly had.
How long could he go on like this? Reading and sleeping and eating? The weeks already felt like months. There was no keeping track of the days, no way to remember how long he’d had on this pair of coveralls, if it was time to change out of them and into the pair in the dryer. Sometimes he felt like he changed and washed his clothes three times a day. It could easily have been twice a week. It smelled like longer.
He leaned his head back against the tins of books and closed his eyes. The things he was reading couldn’t all be true. It made no sense, a world so crowded and strange. When he considered the scale of it all, the idea of this life burrowed beneath the earth, sending people to clean, getting worked up over who stole what from whom—he sometimes felt a sort of mental vertigo, this frightening terror of standing over some abyss, seeing a dark truth far below, but unable to make it out before his senses returned and reality snatched him back from the edge.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat like that, dreaming of a different time and place, before he realized the throbbing red lights had returned.
Lukas returned the book to its tin and struggled to his feet. The computer screen showed Peter Billings at the server door, as deep as he was allowed into the room. A tray with Lukas’s dinner sat on top of the work log filing cabinet inside the door.
He turned away from the computer, hurried down the corridor, and scrambled up the ladder. After removing the grate, he carefully dropped it back into place and picked a circuitous path through the tall humming servers.
“Ah, here’s our little protégé.” Peter smiled, but his eyes narrowed at the sight of Lukas.
Lukas dipped his chin. “Sheriff,” he said. He always had this sense that Peter was silently mocking him, looking down on him, even though they were about the same age. Whenever he showed up with Bernard, especially the day Bernard had explained the need to keep Lukas safe, there had seemed some sort of competitive tension between them. A tension Lukas was aware of, even if he didn’t share. In private, Bernard had committed Lukas to secrecy and told him that he was grooming Peter for the eventual job of Mayor, that he and Lukas would one day work hand in hand. Lukas tried to remember this as he slid the tray off the cabinet. Peter watched him, his brow lowered in thought.
Lukas turned to go.
“Why don’t you sit and eat here?” Peter asked, not budging from where he leaned against the thick server room door.
Lukas froze.
“I see you sitting here with Bernard while you eat, but you’re always in a hurry to scurry off when I come by.” Peter leaned out and peered into the stacks of servers. “What is it you do in here all day, anyway?”
Lukas felt trapped. In truth, he wasn’t even all that hungry, had thought about saving it for later, but eating his food to completion was usually the fastest way out of these conversations. He shrugged and sat down on the floor, leaned against the work log cabinet, and stretched his legs out in front of him. Uncovering the tray revealed a bowl of unidentifiable soup, two slices of tomato, and a piece of cornbread.
“I work on the servers mostly, just like before.” He started with a bite of the bread, something bland. “Only difference is I don’t have to walk home at the end of the day.” He smiled at Peter while he chewed the dry bread.
“That’s right, you live down in the mids, don’t you?” Peter crossed his arms and seemed to get even more comfortable against the thick door. Lukas leaned to the side and gazed past him and down the hallway. Voices could be heard around the corner. He had a sudden impulse to get up and run, just for the sake of running.
“Barely,” he answered. “My apartment’s practically in the up-top.”
“All the mids are,” Peter laughed, “to those who live there.”
Lukas worked on the cornbread to keep his mouth occupied. He eyed the soup warily while he chewed.
“Did Bernard tell you about the big assault we’ve got planned? I was thinking of going down to take part.”
Lukas shook his head. He dipped his spoon into the soup.
“You know that wall Mechanical built, how those idiots boxed themselves in? Well, Sims and his boys are gonna blast it to smithereens. They’ve had all the time in the world to work on it from our side, so this little rebellion nonsense should be over in a few days, max.”
Slurping the hot soup, all Lukas could think about was the men and women of Mechanical trapped behind that wall of steel, and how he knew precisely what they were going through.
“Does that mean I’ll be out of here soon?” He pressed the edge of his spoon into an underripe tomato rather than use the knife and fork. “There can’t be any threat out there for me, can there? Nobody even knows who I am.”
“That’s up to Bernard. He’s been acting strange lately. A lot of stress, I suppose.” Peter slid down the door and rested on his heels. It was nice for Lukas to not have to crane his neck to look up at him.
“He did say something about bringing your mother up for a visit. I took that to mean you might be in here at least a week longer.”
“Great.” Lukas pushed his food around some more. When the distant server started buzzing, his body practically jerked as if tugged by some string. The overhead lights winked faintly, meaningful to those in the know.
“What’s that?” Peter peered into the server room, rising on his toes a little.
“That means I need to get back to work.” Lukas handed him the tray. “Thanks for bringing this.” He turned to go.
“Hey, the Mayor said to make sure you ate everything—”
Lukas waved over his shoulder. He disappeared around the first tall server and began to jog toward the back of the room, wiping his mouth with his hand, knowing Peter couldn’t follow.
“Lukas—!”
But he was gone. He hurried toward the far wall, digging his keys out of his collar as he went.
While he worked on the locks, he saw the overhead lights stop their flashing. Peter had closed the door. He removed the back panel and dug the headphones out of their p
ouch, plugged them in.
“Hello?” He adjusted his microphone, made sure it wasn’t too close.
“Hey.” Her voice filled him up in a way mere food couldn’t. “Did I make you run?”
Lukas took a deep breath. He was getting out of shape living in such confinement, not walking to and from work every day. “No,” he lied. “But maybe you should go easy with the calling. At least during the day. You-know-who is in here all the time. Yesterday, when you let it ring so long, we were sitting right beside the server while it buzzed and buzzed. It really pissed him off—”
“You think I care if he gets angry?” Juliette laughed. “And I want him to answer. I’d love to talk to him some more. Besides, what would you suggest? I want to talk to you, I need to talk to someone. And you’re always right there. It’s not like you can call me and expect me to be here waiting. Hell, I’m all over the damn place over here. You know how many times I’ve been from the thirties to Supply in the last week? Guess.”
