by Hugh Howey
“I haven’t seen Rod in a while. I was going to ask you. Whatever they have him doing in IT, they don’t seem to let him out much.”
Mission shrugged and feigned indifference. In fact, he had grown concerned. The last two times he’d been through the thirties and stopped to see his friend, he’d been told Rodny was “unavailable.” Even when Mission insisted he didn’t mind waiting, they’d told him it wouldn’t happen. Mission worried his old friend was becoming a recluse or a workaholic, one more piece of his childhood wrested away. He used to laugh when Rodny boasted he’d be Mayor or a department head one day. It didn’t seem so funny anymore.
“I have to get back,” Jenine said. “I only get a ten.” She grabbed a small towel from a hanger over the sink and rubbed the cup inside and out. She set it back on the pile and held her hand out for Mission’s. “You got another delivery today, or are you done?”
“I’m done.” He finished his water and let her have the cup. “I’m crashing in the waystation on nineteen. I might do a run up-top before heading down to see the Crow tomorrow.”
“So what’re you doing tonight?” She waved her consent as Mission held up his thermos questioningly. “You wanna hang out? Me and some friends are going up to twenty-three to drop paint bombs.”
“I can’t tonight.” His metal thermos sang as it was filled, and he felt doubly bad for not bringing her anything. “I’ve got this thing later.”
“What thing? I thought you were gonna sack out.”
“I meant that I have to get up early. And haven’t you gotten a little old for paint bombs?”
Jenine smiled. “There’s this place on twenty-three where if you release at just the right spot, the bomb goes almost a hundred levels down before splatting at one-twenty-two.”
Mission shifted his weight to his other foot. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” He wanted to tell her that he walked through that spot on one-twenty-two all the time, that people he knew down there complained, that Sharen, another porter, had nearly been hit by a paint bomb dropped from the Mids a few weeks ago. Instead, he told Jenine about the time something had whistled by his head in the dead of night as he worked his way through the eighties. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” he told her.
Jenine’s smile melted. She didn’t say anything, didn’t have to—the silence was enough. It was as if she were beginning to understand something even better than Mission did: he was no longer just of the Up Top. He was a child of the entire silo, now. It meant more than being a target everywhere he went. It meant having no one to conspire with anymore, no one to pick out targets with in whispers.
“Well, you’ve gotta get up early tomorrow, anyway.”
“Yeah.” He brushed his hair off his forehead. All the barbers he passed in a typical week, never enough time to stop. He would look like Frankie soon enough. “Hey, it was good seeing you.”
“Same. For sure. Take care of yourself, Mish. Watch your steps.”
Mission smiled. And this time, when she leaned in to touch his neck and kiss his cheek, he was ready to reciprocate. “You know I will,” he said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. “You watch your steps as well.”
•5•
Later that night, Mission could still feel the soft touch of her hand on his neck and the press of her lips to his cheek. In the quiet and deathly darkness of the silo’s nighttime, he could hear Jenine whispering for him to be safe.
The lights had been dimmed so man and silo might sleep. It was those wee hours when children were long hushed with sing-song lullabies and only those with trouble in mind crept about. Mission held very still in that darkness and waited. He thought on love and other forbidden things. And somewhere in the dark, there came the chirp of rope wound tight and sliding against metal, the bird-like sound fibers made as they gripped steel and strained under some great burden.
A gang of porters huddled with him on the stairway. Mission pressed his cheek against the silo’s untrembling inner post, the cool steel touching him where Jenine’s lips had. He lost himself in his thoughts, controlling his breathing like he’d been shadowed how. And he listened for the rope. He knew well the sounds they made, could feel the burn on his neck, that raised weal healed over by the years, a mark glanced at by others but rarely mentioned aloud. And again in that thick gray of the dim-time there came a chirp like some caged bird flexing its beak.
He waited for the signal. He thought on rope, his own life, and secret love—all these forbidden things. There was a book in Dispatch down on seventy-four that kept accounts. In the main waystation for all the porters, a massive ledger fashioned out of a fortune in paper was kept under lock and key. On this year’s wage of pulp was a careful tally of certain types of deliveries, handwritten so the information couldn’t slip off into wires. Only a handful of porters knew for certain it existed—to the rest the book was legend.
Mission had heard that they kept track of certain kinds of pipe in this ledger, but he didn’t know why. Brass, too, and various types of fluids coming out of Chemical. Any of these or too much rope, and you were put on the watching list. Porters were the lords of rumor. They knew where everything went. And their whisperings gathered like condensation in Dispatch Main where they were written down.
Mission listened to the rope creak and sing in the darkness. He knew what it felt like to have a length of it cinched tightly around his neck. And it seemed strange to him—it seemed wrong—that if you ordered enough to hang yourself, nobody cared. Enough to span a few levels, and eyebrows were raised.
He adjusted his handkerchief and thought on this in the dim-time. A man may take his own life, he supposed, as long as he didn’t take another’s job.
“Ready yourself,” came the whisper from above.
Mission tightened the grip on his knife and concentrated on the task at hand. His eyes strained to see in the wan light. The steady breathing of his neighbors was occasionally heard. They would be squeezing their own knives or their empty and angry fists.
The knives came with the job—they were as much a part of porting as the inverted hearts that grew on practiced calves. A porter’s knife for slicing open delivered goods, for cutting fruit to eat on the climb, and for keeping peace as its owner strayed from all the heights and depths, taking the silo’s dangers two at a time. It was said that a porter’s knife shadowed for a thousand jobs, that its caster was its owner, its home a good sheath. Here waited but another job for Mission’s gleaming shadow. With the flick of a wrist, it would quiet the neck of that singing bird. It would part a rope that groaned under a darkened and illicit strain.
Up the stairwell two full turns, on a dim landing, a group of farmers argued in soft voices as they handled the other end of that rope, as they performed a porter’s job in the dark of night that they might save a hundred chits or two. Beyond the rail across from Mission, a black shape slid past. The rope was invisible in the inky void. He would have to lean out and grope for the chirping bird’s neck. He felt a ring of heat by his collar, and the hilt of his blade felt unsure in his sweating palm.
“Not yet,” Morgan whispered, and Mission felt his old caster’s hand on his shoulder, holding him back, still treating him like a shadow even now. Mission cleared his mind. Another soft chirp, the sound of line taking the strain of a heavy generator, and a dense patch of gray drifted through the black. The men above shouted in whispers as they handled the load, as they did in green the work of men in blue.
While the patch of gray inched past, Mission thought of the night’s danger and marveled at the fear in his heart. He possessed a sudden care for a life he had once labored to end, a life that never should’ve been. He thought of his mother and wondered what she was like, beyond her disobedience. That was all he knew of her. He knew the implant in her hip had failed, as one in ten thousand might. And instead of reporting the malfunction—and the pregnancy—she had hid him in loose clothes until it was past the time the Pact allowed a child to be treated as a cyst.
“Ready yourself,
” Morgan hissed.
The gray mass of the generator crept down and out of sight. Mission clutched his knife and thought of how he should’ve been cut out of her and discarded. But past a certain date, and one life was traded for another. Such was the Pact. Born behind bars, Mission had been allowed free while his mother had been sent outside. In the middle of the night, she must’ve watched as they cleaned the blood from his wailing flesh. By the morning, she was cleaning for them all.
“Now,” Morgan commanded, and Mission startled. Soft and well-worn boots squeaked on the stairs above, the sounds of men lurching into action. Mission concentrated on his part. He pressed himself against the curved rail and reached out into the space beyond. His palm found rope as stiff as steel, and he thought of the great depths below him, how long the fall. He remembered less dangerous games with paint bombs and paper parachutes as he pressed his blade to the taut line.
There was a pop like sinew snapping, the first of the braids parting with just a touch of his sharp blade.
Mission had but a moment to think of those on the landing below, the accomplices waiting two levels down. Another pop, and the wounded bird sang at a different pitch. Men were storming up the staircase. Mission longed to join them. With the barest of sawing motions, the rope parted the rest of the way and let out a twangy cry. Mission thought he heard the heavy generator whistle as it picked up speed. There was a ferocious crash a moment later, men screaming in alarm down below, but those screams could’ve been coming from anywhere. The fighting had broken out above.
With one hand on the rail and another strangling his knife, Mission took the stairs three at a time. He rushed to join the melee above, this midnight lesson on breaking the Pact, on doing another’s job.
Grunts and groans and slapping thuds spilled from the landing, and Mission threw himself into the scuffle, thinking not where wars come from but only on this one battle. His feet tangled briefly in forbidden rope, all those shorter strands twisted and woven into something bigger, a line long enough to tangle a thousand souls.
Silo 1
A second shift.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
- John Milton
•6•
The wheelchair squeaked as its wheels went ‘round and ‘round. With each revolution there was a sharp peal of complaint followed by a circuit of deathly silence. Donald lost himself in this rhythmic sound. He began to anticipate each chirp, like a lonely bird crying for its mate. Chirp and silence. Chirp and silence. As he was pushed along, his breath puffed out into the air, the room harboring the same deep chill as his bones.
There were rows and rows of pods stretched out to either side. Names glowed orange on tiny screens. Made-up names. Phony names designed to sever the past from the now. Donald watched them slide by as they pushed him toward the exit. His head felt heavy, his neck inadequate for propping up his skull, the weight of remembrance replacing the wisps of dreams that coiled away and vanished like vaporous smoke.
The men in the pale blue coveralls guided him through the door and into the hallway, and Donald seemed to float along like a ghost, like a man disturbed from his grave. He was steered into a familiar room with a familiar table. Boots kicked here—he remembered from a dream. In one dream, he was the one holding the boots still, bones like a bird’s struggling beneath his grip, and he was the enemy. In another dream it was his boots doing the kicking. He could see them at the ends of his own legs while ice burned in his veins.
The wheelchair shimmied as they removed his bare feet from the footrests. He asked how long it’d been, how long he’d been asleep.
“Seventy years,” someone said. He did the math. A hundred and twenty since orientation. No wonder the wheelchair felt unsteady—it was older than he was. Its screws had worked loose over the long decades that Donald had been asleep.
They helped him stand. His feet were still numb from his hibernation, the cold fading to painful tingles. A noisy curtain was drawn. They asked him to urinate in a cup, which came as glorious relief. The sample was the color of charcoal, dead machines flushed from his system. The paper gown wasn’t enough to warm him, even though he knew the cold was in his flesh, not in the room. They gave him more of the bitter drink.
“How long before his head is clear?” someone asked.
“A day,” the doctor said. “Tomorrow at the earliest.”
They had him sit while they took his blood. A man in white coveralls with hair just as stark stood in the doorway, frowning. “Save your strength,” the man said. He nodded to the doctor to continue his work and disappeared before Donald could place him in his faltering memory. He felt dizzy and watched as his blood, blue from the cold, was taken from him.
****
They rode a familiar elevator. The men around him talked, but their voices were drones behind a slowly parting fog. Donald felt as though he had been drugged, but he remembered that he had stopped taking their pills. He reached for his bottom lip, finger and mouth both tingling, and felt for an ulcer, that little pocket where he kept his pills unswallowed.
But the ulcer wasn’t there. It would’ve healed in his sleep decades ago. The lift dinged, the doors parted, and Donald felt more of that dreamtime fade.
They pushed him down another hall, scuff marks on the walls the height of the wheels, black arcs where rubber had once met the paint. His eyes roamed the walls, the ceiling, the tiles, all bearing centuries of wear. Like the wheelchair, these halls never slept. Yesterday, they were almost new. Now they were heaped with abuse, a jarring eyeblink of decrepitude, a sudden crumbling into ruin. Donald remembered designing halls just like these. He remembered thinking they were making something to last for ages. The truth was there all along. The truth was in the design, staring back at him, too insane to be taken seriously.
The wheelchair slowed.
“The next one,” a voice behind him said, a gruff voice, an exhausted and familiar voice. Donald was pushed past one closed door to another. One of the orderlies bustled around the wheelchair, a ring of keys jangling from his hip. A key was selected and slotted into the knob with a series of neat clicks. Hinges cried out as the door was pushed inward. The lights inside were turned on.
It was a room like a cell, musky with the scent of disuse. There was a narrow double bunk in the corner, a side table, a dresser, a bathroom. The light overhead flickered before it came on, like a tingling hand that needed a moment before forming a fist.
“Why am I here?” Donald asked, his voice cracking.
“This will be your room,” the orderly said, putting away his keys. His young eyes darted up to the man steering the wheelchair as if unsure of the rightness of his answer. Another young man in pale blue hurried around and removed Donald’s feet from the stirrups and placed them on carpet worn flat by the years.
Donald’s last memory was of being chased by snarling dogs with leathery wings, chased up a mountain of bones. But that was a dream. What was his last real memory? It was the one of being put to sleep for good. He remembered a needle. He remembered dying. That felt real.
“I mean—” Donald swallowed painfully. “Why am I . . . awake?”
He almost said alive. The two orderlies exchanged glances as they helped him from the chair to the lower bunk. The wheelchair squeaked once as it was pushed back into the hallway. The man guiding it paused, his broad shoulders making the doorway appear small.
One of the orderlies held Donald’s wrist—two fingers pressing lightly on ice-blue veins, lips silently counting. The other orderly dropped two pills into a plastic cup and fumbled with the cap on a bottle of water.
“That won’t be necessary,” the silhouette in the doorway said.
The orderly with the pills glanced over his shoulder, and Donald remembered that these weren’t orderlies at all. They were the other kind of doctors. Doctors of the body, not of the mind.
“I remember,” Donald muttered. He pictured himself inside a str
aw plunged deep into the dirt. There were other straws around him, concrete tombs lined with pipe and wire, things that he could draw, that he had designed.
The man in the doorway stepped inside the small room, and some of the air was displaced. “Good,” he said, in that familiar voice, that old voice. The room shrank further. It became more difficult to breathe.
“You’re the Thaw—” Donald whispered.
The old man with the white hair waved a hand at the two doctors. “Give us a moment,” he said. The one with a grip on Donald’s wrist finished his counting and nodded to the other. Unswallowed pills rattled in a paper cup as they were put away.
“I remember everything,” Donald said, though he suspected this wasn’t quite true. “You’re the Thaw Man.”
A smile was flashed, as white as his hair, wrinkles forming around his lips and eyes. The chair in the hallway squeaked as it was pushed away, off to retrieve someone else, never sleeping. The door clicked shut. Donald thought he heard a lock engage, but his teeth still chattered occasionally, and his ears were full of lead.
“Thurman,” the man said, correcting him. “But I don’t go by that anymore. Just as you don’t go by Donald.”
“But I remember,” Donald said. More came back to him. He remembered his office, the one upstairs and some other office far away, some place where it still rained and the grass grew. This man had been a Senator. But of what? Donald remembered drawing this place.
“And that’s a mystery we need to solve.” The senator of nothing tilted his head. “For now, it’s good that you do. We need you to remember.”