by Hugh Howey
Shirly felt her heart drop to hear Walker cuss, thinking they’d forgotten something crucial. “Wait here,” she told him, running back out and to the ear muff station. She picked one of the sets with a dangling cord, the kind used to talk between the control room and anyone working on the primary or secondary generators. She jogged past the curious and frightened-looking crowd to the control room. It occurred to her that she should be more afraid like they were, that a real war was grinding closer to them. But all she could think about were the voices that war had interrupted. Her curiosity was much stronger than her fear. It’s how she’d always been.
“How about these?”
She shut the door behind herself and showed him the headphones.
“Perfect,” he said, his eyes wide with surprise. Before she could complain, he snipped the jack off with his multi-tool and began stripping wires. “Good thing it’s quiet in here,” he said, laughing.
Shirly laughed as well, and it made her wonder what the hell was going on. What were they going to do, sit in there and fiddle with wires while the deputies and the security people from IT came and dragged them away?
Walker got the ear cones wired in, and a faint hiss of static leaked out of them. Shirly hurried over to join him; she sat down and held his wrist to steady his hand. The earphones trembled in them.
“You might have to—” He showed her the knob with the white marks he’d painted on.
Shirly nodded and realized they’d forgotten to grab the paint. She held the dial and studied the various ticks. “Which one?” she asked.
“No.” He stopped her as she began dialing back toward one of the voices they’d found. “The other way. I need to see how many—” He coughed into his fist. “We need to see how many there are.”
She nodded and turned the knob gradually toward the black unpainted portion. The two of them held their breath, the hum of the main generator barely audible through the thick door and double paned glass.
Shirly studied Walker while she spun the dial. She wondered what would become of him when they were rounded up. Would they all be put to cleaning? Or could he and a few of the others claim to be bystanders? It made her sad, thinking what had been wrought of their anger, their thirst for revenge. She thought how things could’ve gone so differently, how they’d had all these dreams, unrealistic perhaps, of a real change in power, an easy fix to impossible and intractable problems.
“A little faster,” Walker said, growing impatient with the silence. They’d heard a few hits of crackling static, but no one talking. Shirly very slightly increased the rate she spun the knob.
“You think the antenna—?” she started to ask.
Walker raised his hand. The little speakers in his lap had popped. He jerked his thumb to the side, telling her to go back. Shirly did. She tried to remember about how far she had gone since the sound, using a lot of the same skills she’d learned in that very room to adjust the previously noisy generator—
“—Solo? This is Juliette. Can you hear me? What’s going on up there?”
Shirly dropped the knob. She watched it swing on its soldered wire and crash to the floor.
Her hands felt numb. Her fingertips tingled. She turned, gaped at Walker’s lap where the ghostly voice had risen, and found him looking dumbly down at his own hands.
Neither of them moved. The voice, the name, they were unmistakable.
Tears of confused joy winked past Walker’s beard and fell into his lap.
14
• Silo 17 •
Juliette grabbed the limp air hose with both hands and squeezed. Her reward was a few weak bubbles rolling up her visor—the pressure inside the tube was gone.
She whispered a curse, tilted her chin against the radio, and called Solo’s name. Something had happened to the compressor. He was probably working on it, maybe topping up the fuel. She told him not to turn it off for that. He wouldn’t know what to do, wouldn’t be able to restart it. She hadn’t thought this through clearly at all; she was an impossible distance from breathable air, from any hope of survival.
She took a tentative breath. She had what was trapped in the suit and the air that remained in the hose. How much of the air in the hose could she suck with just the power of her lungs? She didn’t think it would be much, but she didn’t know.
She took one last look at the large sump pump, her hasty wiring job, the loose trail of wires streaming through the water that she’d hoped to have time to secure against vibration and accidental tugs. None of it likely mattered anymore, not for her. She kicked away from the pump and waved her arms through the water, wading through the viscous fluid that seemed to both impede her while giving her nothing to push or pull against.
The weights were holding her back. Juliette bent to release them, and found she couldn’t. The buoyancy of her arms, the stiffness of the suit . . . she groped for the velcro straps, but watched her fingers through the magnified view of helmet and water as they waved inches from the blasted things.
She took a deep breath, sweat dripping from her nose and splattering the inside of her dome. She tried again and came close, her fingertips nearly brushing the black straps, both hands outstretched, grunting and throwing her shoulders into the simple act of reaching her damned shins—
But she couldn’t. She gave up and shuffled a few more steps down the hallway, following the wire and hose, both visible in the faint cone of white light emanating from above her head. She tried not to bump the wire, thinking of what one accidental pull might do, how tenuous the connection was that she’d made to the pump’s ground. Even as she struggled for a deep breath, her mind was ever playing the mechanic. She cursed herself for not taking longer to prepare.
Her knife! She remembered her knife and stopped dragging her feet. It slid out of its homemade sheath sewn across her belly and gleamed in the glow from her flashlight.
Juliette bent down and used the extra reach of the blade; she slid the point of the knife between her suit and one of the straps. The water was dark and thick all around her. With the limited amount of light from her helmet, and being at the bottom of Mechanical under all that heap of flood, she felt more remote and alone, more afraid, than she had in all her life.
She gripped the knife, terrified of what dropping it could mean, and bobbed up and down, using her stomach muscles. It was like doing sit-ups while standing. She attacked the strap with a labored sawing motion, cursed in her helmet from the effort, the strain, the pain in her abdomen from lurching forward, from throwing her head down—when finally the exercise weight popped free. Her calf felt suddenly naked and light as the round hunk of iron clanged mutely to the plate steel flooring.
Juliette tilted to the side, held down by one leg, the other trying to rise up. She worked the knife carefully beneath the second strap, fearful of cutting her suit and seeing a stream of precious bubbles leak out. With desperate force, she shoved and pulled the blade against the black webbing just like before. Nylon threads popped in her magnified vision; sweat spattered her helmet; the knife burst through the fabric; the weight was free.
Juliette screamed as her boots flew up behind her, rising above her head. She twisted her torso and waved her arms as much as she could, but her helmet slammed into the runs of pipes at the top of the hallway.
There was a bang—and the water all around her went black. She fumbled for her flashlight, to turn it back on, but it wasn’t there. Something bumped her arm in the darkness. She fumbled for the object with one hand, knife in the other, felt it spill through her gloved fingers, and then it was gone. While she struggled to put the knife away, her only source of light tumbled invisible to the ground below.
Juliette heard nothing but her rapid breathing. She was going to die like this, pinned to the ceiling, another bloated body in these corridors. It was as if she were destined to perish in one of those suits, one way or another. She kicked against the pipes and tried to wiggle free. Which way had she been going? Where was she facing? The pitch black w
as absolute. She couldn’t even see her own arms in front of her. It was worse than being blind, it was some new ability to see the nothingness, to know her eyes were working but somehow taking nothing in. It heightened her panic, even as the air in her suit seemed to grow more and more stale.
The air.
She reached for her collar and found the hose, could just barely feel it through her gloves. Juliette began to gather it in, hand over hand, like pulling a mining bucket up a deep shaft.
It felt like miles of it went through her hands. The slack gathered around her like knotted noodles, bumping and sliding against her. Juliette’s breathing began to sound more and more desperate. She was panicking. How much of her shallow breaths were coming from the adrenaline, the fear? How much because she was using up all her precious air? She had a sudden terror that the hose she was pulling had been cut, that it had been sawn through on the stairwell, that the free end would at any moment slip through her fingers, that her next frantic reach for more of the lifeline would result in a fistful of inky water and nothing else—
But then she grabbed a length of hose with tension, with life. A stiff line that held no air, but led the way out.
Juliette cried out in her helmet and reached forward to grab another handhold. She pulled herself, her helmet bumping against a pipe and bouncing her away from the ceiling. She kept reaching, lunging one hand forward in the black to where the line should be, finding it, grasping, yanking, hauling herself through the midnight soup of the drowned and the dead, wondering how far she’d get before she joined them and breathed her very last.
15
• Silo 18 •
Lukas sat with his mother on the thick jamb of the open server room door. He looked down at her hands, both of them wrapped around one of his. She let go with one of them and picked a piece of lint off his shoulder, then cast the offending knot of string away from her precious son.
“And you say there’ll be a promotion in this?” she asked, smoothing the shoulder of his undershirt.
Lukas nodded. “A pretty big one, yeah.” He looked past her to where Bernard and Sheriff Billings were standing in the hallway, talking in low voices. Bernard had his hands tucked inside the stretched belly of his coveralls. Billings looked down and inspected his gun.
“Well, that’s great, sweetheart. It makes it easier to bear you being away.”
“It won’t be for much longer, I don’t think.”
“Will you be able to vote? I can’t believe my boy is doing such important things!”
Lukas turned to her. “Vote? I thought the election was put off.”
She shook her head. Her face seemed more wrinkled than it had a month ago, her hair whiter. Lukas wondered if that were possible in so brief a time.
“It’s back on,” she said. “This nasty business with those rebels is supposed to be just about over.”
Lukas glanced toward Bernard and the Sheriff. “I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to let me vote,” he told his mother.
“Well, that’s nice. I like to think I raised you proper.” She cleared her throat into her fist, then returned it to the back of his hand. “And they’re feeding you? With the rationing, I mean.”
“More than I can eat.”
Her eyes widened. “So I suppose there’ll be some sort of a raise—?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’d think so. And look, you’ll be taken care of—”
“Me?” She pressed her hand to her chest, her voice high. “Don’t you worry about me.”
“You know I do. Hey, look, Ma—I think our time’s up.” He nodded down the hallway. Bernard and Peter were heading toward them. “Looks like I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Oh. Well, of course.” She smoothed the front of her red coveralls and allowed Lukas to help her to her feet. She puckered her lips, and he presented his cheek.
“My little boy,” she said, kissing him noisily and squeezing his arm. She stepped back and gazed up at him with pride. “You take good care of yourself.”
“I will, Ma.”
“Make sure you get plenty of exercise.”
“Ma, I will.”
Bernard stopped by their side, smiling at the exchange. Lukas’s mother turned and looked the silo’s acting Mayor up and down. She reached out and patted Bernard on his chest. “Thank you,” she said, her voice cracking.
“It’s been great to meet you, Mrs. Kyle.” Bernard took her hand and gestured toward Peter. “The sheriff here will see you out.”
“Of course.” She turned one last time and waved at Lukas. He felt a little embarrassed but waved back.
“Sweet lady,” Bernard said, watching them go. “She reminds me of my mother.” He turned to Lukas. “You ready?”
Lukas felt like voicing his reluctance, his hesitation. He felt like saying, “I suppose,” but he straightened his back instead, rubbed his damp palms together and dipped his chin. “Absolutely,” he managed, feigning a confidence he didn’t feel.
“Great. Let’s go make this official.” He squeezed Lukas’s shoulder before heading into the server room. Lukas walked around the edge of the thick door and leaned into it, slowly sealing himself in as the fat hinges groaned shut. The electric locks engaged automatically, thumping into the jamb. The security panel beeped, its happy green light flicking over to the menacing red eye of a sentry.
Lukas took a deep breath and picked his way through the servers. He tried not to go the same way as Bernard, tried never to go the same way twice. He chose a longer route just to break the monotony, to have one less routine in that prison.
Bernard had the back of the server open by the time he arrived. He held the familiar headphones out to Lukas.
Lukas accepted them and put them on backwards, the microphone snaking around the rear of his neck.
“Like this?”
Bernard laughed at him and twirled his finger. “Other way around,” he said, lifting his voice so Lukas could hear through the muffs.
Lukas fumbled with the headphones, tangling his arm in the cord. Bernard waited patiently.
“Are you ready?” Bernard asked, once they were in place. He held the loose jack in one hand. Lukas nodded. He watched Bernard turn and aim the plug at the banks of receptacles. He pictured Bernard’s hand swinging down and to the right, slamming the plug home into number 17, then turning and confronting Lukas about his favorite pastime, his secret crush—
But his boss’s small hand never wavered; it clicked into place, Lukas knowing exactly how that felt, how the receptacle hugged the plug tightly, seemed to welcome it in, the pads of one’s fingers getting a jolt from the flicking of that spring-loaded plastic retainer—
The light above the jack started blinking. A familiar buzzing throbbed in Lukas’s ears. He waited for her voice, for Juliette to answer.
A click.
“Name.”
A trill of fear ran up Lukas’s back, bumps erupting across his arms. The voice, deep and hollow, impatient and aloof, came and went like the glimpse of a star. Lukas licked his lips.
“Lukas Kyle,” he said, trying not to stammer.
There was a pause. He imagined someone, somewhere, writing this down or flipping through files or doing something awful with the information. The temperature behind the server soared. Bernard was smiling at him, oblivious to the silence on his end.
“You shadowed in IT.”
It felt like a statement, but Lukas nodded and answered. “Yessir.”
He wiped his palm across his forehead and then the seat of his coveralls. He desperately wanted to sit down, to lean back against server number 40, to relax. But Bernard was smiling at him, his mustache lifting, his eyes wide behind his glasses.
“What is your primary duty to the silo?”
Bernard had prepped him on likely questions.
“To maintain the Order.”
Silence. No feedback, no sense if he was right or wrong.
“What do you protect above all?”
Th
e voice was flat and yet powerfully serious. Dire and somehow calm. Lukas felt his mouth go dry.
“Life and Legacy,” he recited. But it felt wrong, this rote façade of knowledge. He wanted to go into detail, to let this voice, like a strong and sober father, understand that he knew why this was important. He wasn’t dumb. He had more to say than memorized facts—
“What does it take to protect these things we hold so dear?”
He paused.
“It takes sacrifice,” Lukas whispered. He thought of Juliette—and the calm demeanor he was projecting for Bernard nearly crumbled. There were some things he wasn’t sure about, things he didn’t understand. This was one of them. It felt like a lie, his answer. He wasn’t sure the sacrifice was worth it, the danger so great that they had to let people, good people, go to their—