by Hugh Howey
She pointed to the red can of extra gas and gave him another thumbs up. He returned the gesture. Juliette shuffled toward the steps, her gloved hand on the railing for balance. Solo squeezed past and went to the railing and the knotted rope. He held out a hand to steady her while she lumbered down the slippery treads in the suit’s clunky boots.
Her hope was that it would be easier to move once she was in the water, but she had no way of knowing, just an intuitive feel for the physics of it all, the way she could gauge a machine’s intent simply by poring over it. She took the last dry steps, and then her boots broke the oily surface of the water and found the step below. She waded down two more, anticipating the frigid cold to seep through, but it never came. The suit and her undergarments kept her toasty. Almost too warm, in fact—she could see a humid mist forming on the inside of her helmet. She dipped her chin into the radio switch and told Solo to open her valve to let the air in.
He fumbled at her collar and twisted the lever to allow the flow of air. It hissed by her ear, quite noisily, and she could feel the suit puff out around her. The overflow valve she’d screwed into the other side of the collar squealed as it opened and let out the excess pressure, preventing her suit—and her head, she suspected—from bursting.
“Weights,” she said, clicking the radio.
He ran back to the landing and returned with the round exercise weights. Kneeling on the last dry step, he strapped these below her knees with heavy velcro, then looked up to see what was next.
Juliette struggled to lift one foot, then the other, making sure that the weights were secure.
“Wire,” she said, getting the hang of working the radio.
This was the most important part: the power from IT would run the lifeless pumps below. Twenty four volts of juice. She had installed a switch on the landing so Solo could test it while she was down there. She didn’t want to travel with the wires live.
Solo unspooled a dozen feet of the two-connector wire and tied a loop around her wrist. His knots were good, both with the rope and the wire. Her confidence in the endeavor was growing by the minute, her discomfort in the suit lessening.
Solo smiled down through her clear plastic dome from two steps above, yellow teeth flashing in his scraggly beard. Juliette returned the smile. She stood still while he fumbled with the flashlight strapped to her helmet, clicking it on. The battery was freshly charged and would last a full day, much longer than she possibly needed.
“Okay,” she said. “Help me over.”
Releasing the radio contact with her chin, she turned and leaned against the railing, worked her belly up onto it, then eased her head over. It was an incredible sensation, throwing herself over that rail. It felt suicidal. This was the great stairwell; this was her silo; she was four levels up from Mechanical; all that space below her, that long plummet only madmen dove into, and she was going just as willingly.
Solo helped with her weighted feet. He splashed down onto the first wet step to assist her. Juliette threw her leg over the railing as he lifted. Suddenly, she was straddling that narrow bar of slippery steel, wondering if the water would truly hold her, if it would catch and slow her fall. And there was a moment of raw panic, the taste of metal in her mouth, the sinking of her stomach and the dire need to urinate, all while Solo heaved her other foot over the railing, her gloved hands clawing madly for the rope he’d tied, her boots splashing noisily and violently into the silvery skin of the flooded waters.
“Shit!”
She blew her breath out into the helmet, gasping from the shock of splashing in so quickly, her hands and knees wrapping around the twisting rope, her body moving inside the puffy suit like a layer of too-large skin had become detached.
“You okay?” Solo shouted, his hands cupped around his beard.
She nodded, her helmet unmoving. She could feel the tug of the weights on her shins, trying to drag her down. There were a dozen things she wanted to say to Solo, reminders and tips, words of luck, but her mind was racing too fast to think of using the radio. Instead, she loosened her grip with her gloves and knees, felt the rope slide against her body with a distant squeak, and she began her long plummet down.
11
• Silo 18 •
Lukas sat at the little desk constructed from an embarrassment of wood and stared down at a book stuffed with a fortune in crisp paper. The chair beneath him was probably worth more than he’d make in a lifetime, and he was sitting on it. If he moved, the joints of the dainty thing twisted and squeaked, like it could come apart at any moment.
He kept his boots firmly planted on either side, his weight on his toes, just in case.
Lukas flipped a page, pretending to read. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reading, he just didn’t want to be reading this. Entire shelves of more interesting works seemed to mock him from within their tin boxes. They sang out to be perused, for him to put away the Order with its rigid writing, bulleted lists, and internal labyrinth of page references that lead in more circles than the great stairwell itself.
Each entry in the Order pointed to another page, every page another entry. Lukas flipped through a few and wondered if Bernard was keeping tabs on him. The head of IT sat on the other side of the small study, just one room of many in the well-stocked hideaway beneath the servers. While Lukas pretended to shadow for his new job, Bernard alternated between fiddling with the small computer on the other desk and going over to the radio mounted on the wall to give instructions to the security forces in the down deep.
Lukas pinched a thick chunk of the Order and flopped it to the side. He skipped past all the recipes for averting silo disasters and checked out some of the more academic reference material toward the back. This stuff was even more frightening: chapters on group persuasion, on mind-control, on the effects of fear on upbringing, graphs and tables dealing with population growth—
He couldn’t take it. He adjusted his chair and watched Bernard for a while as the head of IT and acting Mayor scrolled through screen after screen of text, his head notching back and forth as he scanned the words there.
After a moment, Lukas dared to break the silence:
“Hey, Bernard?”
“Hm?”
“Hey, why isn’t there anything in here about how all this came to be?”
Bernard’s office chair squealed as he swiveled it around to face Lukas. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The people who made all this, the people who wrote these books. Why isn’t there anything in the Order about them? Like how they built all this stuff in the first place.”
“Why would there be?” Bernard half turned back to his computer.
“So we would know. I dunno, like all the stuff in the other books—”
“I don’t want you reading those other books. Not yet.” Bernard pointed to the wooden desk. “Learn the Order first. If you can’t keep the silo together, the Legacy books are pulp. They’re as good as processed wood if no one’s around to read them.”
“Nobody can read them but the two of us if they stay locked up down here—”
“No one alive. Not today. But one day, there’ll be plenty of people who’ll read them. But only if you study.” Bernard nodded toward the thick and dreadful book before turning back to his keyboard and reaching for his mouse.
Lukas sat there a while, staring at Bernard’s back, the knotted cord of his master keys sticking out of the top of his undershirt.
“I figure they must’ve known it was coming,” Lukas said, unable to stop himself from perseverating about it. He had always wondered about these things, had suppressed them, had found his thrills in piecing together the distant stars that were so far away as to be immune to the hillside taboos. And now he lived in this vacuum, this hollow of the silo no one knew about where forbidden topics didn’t dare tread and he had access to a man who seemed to know the precious truth.
“You aren’t studying,” Bernard said. His head remained bent over his keyboard, but he seemed to know Luk
as was watching him.
“But they had to’ve seen it coming, right?” Lukas lifted his chair and turned it around a little more. “I mean, to have built all these silos before it got so bad out there—”
Bernard turned his head to the side, his jaw clenching and unclenching. His hand fell away from the mouse and came up to smooth his mustache. “These are the things you want to know? How it happened?”
“Yes.” Lukas nodded. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I want to know.”
“Do you think it matters? What happened out there?” Bernard turned and looked up at the schematics on the wall, then at Lukas. “Why would it matter?”
“Because it happened. And it only happened one way, and it kills me not to know. I mean, they saw it coming, right? It would take years to build all—”
“Decades,” Bernard said.
“And then move all this stuff in, all the people—”
“That took much less time.”
“So you know?”
Bernard nodded. “The information is stored here, but not in any of the books. And you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. That’s the past, and the past is not the same thing as our legacy. You’ll need to learn the difference.”
“The difference between our past and our legacy.”
“Hm.” Bernard nodded. He seemed to be waiting on something.
Lukas thought about the difference. For some reason, a conversation with Juliette sprang to mind, something she was forever telling him—
“I think I know,” he said.
“Oh?” Bernard pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at him. “Tell me what you think you know.”
“All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world can be like, that’s our Legacy.”
Bernard’s lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand to continue.
“And the bad things that can’t be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that’s the past.”
“And what does this difference mean? What do you think it means?”
“It means we can’t change what’s already happened, but we can have an impact on what happens next.”
Bernard clapped his small hands together. “Very good.”
“And this—” Lukas turned and rested one hand on the thick book. He continued, unbidden, “—the Order. This is a roadmap for how to get through all the bad that’s piled up between our past and the future’s hope. This is the stuff we can prevent, that we can fix.”
Bernard raised his eyebrows at this last, as if it were a new way of looking at an old truth. Finally, he smiled, his mustache curling up, his glasses rising on the wrinkled bridge of his nose.
“I think you’re almost ready,” he said. “Soon.” Bernard turned back to his computer, his hand falling to his mouse. “Very soon.”
12
• Silo 17 •
The descent to Mechanical was oddly tranquil, almost mesmerizing. Juliette slid through the green flood, fending herself off the curved railing each time the staircase spiraled around beneath her feet. The only sounds anywhere were the hiss of air entering her helmet and the excess gurgling out the other side. A never-ending stream of bubbles rolled up her visor like beads of solder, drifting up in defiance of gravity.
Juliette watched these silver spheres chase one another and play like children through the metal stairs. They broke up where they touched the railing, leaving just minuscule dots of gas stuck to the surface, rolling and colliding. Others marched in wavy lines inside the stairway. They gathered in crowds beneath the hollow steps, bubbles becoming pockets of air that wobbled and caught the light radiating from the top of her helmet.
It was easy to forget where she was, what she was doing. The familiar had become distorted and strange. Everything seemed magnified by the plastic dome of her visor, and it was easy to imagine that she wasn’t sinking at all, but that the great stairway was rising, pushing up through the deep earth and heading toward the clouds. Even the sensation of the rope sliding through her gloved hands and across her padded belly felt more like something tugged inexorably from above rather than a line she was descending.
It wasn’t until she arched her back and looked straight up that Juliette remembered how much water was stacking up above her. The green glow of the emergency lights faded to an eerie black in the space of a landing or two. The light from her flashlight barely dented it. Juliette inhaled sharply and reminded herself that she had all the air in the silo. She tried to ignore the sensation of so much liquid piled up on her shoulders, of being buried alive. If she had to, if she panicked, she could just cut the weights free. One flick with the chef’s knife and she would bob right back to the surface. She told herself this as she continued to sink. Letting go of the rope with one hand, she patted for the knife, making sure it was still there.
“SLOWER!” her radio barked.
Juliette grabbed the rope with both hands and squeezed until she came to a stop. She reminded herself that Solo was up there, watching the air hose and electrical wires as they spooled off their neat coils. She imagined him tangled up in the lines, hopping around on one foot. Bubbles raced out of her overflow valve and jiggled through the lime water back toward the surface. She leaned her head back and watched them swirl around the taut rope, wondering what was taking him so long. In the undersides of the helical steps, the air pockets danced mercury silver, wavering in the turbulence of her passing—
“OKAY.” The radio speaker behind her neck crackled. “GOOD HERE.”
Juliette cringed from the volume of Solo’s voice and wished she’d checked that before closing up her helmet. There was no fixing it now.
With ears ringing and the silence and majesty of the tranquil descent broken, she slid down another level, keeping her pace steady and slow as she studied the slack in the wire and the air hose for any sign of their pulling taut. As she passed close to the landing of one-thirty-nine, she saw that one of the doors was missing; the other door had been wrenched violently on its hinges. The entire level must be flooded, which meant more water for the pumps to move. Just before the landing rose out of sight, she saw dark forms down the corridor, shadows floating in the water. The flashlight on her helmet barely illuminated a pale and bloated face before she drifted past, leaving the long dead to rise out of sight.
It hadn’t occurred to Juliette that she might come across more bodies. Not the drowned of course—the flood would’ve risen too slowly to take anyone by surprise—but any violence that occurred in the down deep would now be preserved in its icy depths. The chill of the water around her seemed to finally penetrate the layers of her suit. Or perhaps it was just her imagination.
Her boots thumped to the lowermost floor of the stairwell while she was still looking up, keeping an eye on the slack in the lines. Her knees were jarred by the startling end to her descent. It had taken her far less time than a dry hike would have.
With a grip on the rope for balance, Juliette let go with her other hand and waved it through the thick atmosphere of green groundwater. She dipped her chin against the radio switch. “I’m down,” she transmitted to Solo.
She took a few lumbering and tentative steps, waving her arms and half-swimming toward the entrance to Mechanical. The light from the stairwell barely penetrated past the security gates. Beyond, the oily depths of a home both foreign and familiar awaited her.
“I HEAR YOU,” Solo answered after some delay.
Juliette felt her muscles tense up as his voice rattled around inside her helmet. Not being able to adjust the volume was going to drive her mad.
After a dozen halting steps, she eventually got the hang of the awkward wading motion and learned to drag her weighted boots across the steel decking. With the suit inflated and her arms and legs brushing around on the inside, it was like guiding a bubble by throwing oneself against its skin. She paused once to look back at her air hose, making sure it wasn’t getting caught on the stairs, and she gave the rope she had descended one last glance. Even fro
m this distance it appeared as an impossibly slender thread, a thread hanging in that submerged straw of a stairwell. It wavered slightly in the wake she was causing, almost as if saying goodbye.
Juliette tried not to read anything into it; she turned back to the entrance to Mechanical. You don’t have to do this, she reminded herself. She could hook up two, maybe three more small pumps plus a few additional runs of hydroponic piping. The work might take a few months, the water level would recede for years, but eventually these levels would be dry and she could investigate those buried diggers Solo had told her about. It could be done with minimal risk—other than to her sanity.
And if her only reason for getting back home was vengeance, if that was her only motivation, she might have chosen to wait, to take that safe route. She could feel the temptation even then to yank the weights off her boots and float up through the stairwell, to fly past the levels like she used to dream she could, arms out, buoyant and free—
