by Hugh Howey
Donald glanced over his shoulder. “Who, Raymond?”
“Yeah. He was in Ops until a few shifts back. Broke down. Tried to get himself into deep freeze. The duty doc at the time talked him into a demotion. We were losing too many people, and the shifts were starting to get some overlap.” Eren paused and took another bite. There was a familiar scent. Eren caught him watching and held out something. “Bagel?” he asked. “They’re fresh baked.”
Donald could smell it. Eren tore off a piece. The feeling of having become a stray animal or a homeless man was complete as he accepted the offering. It was still warm. “I didn’t know they could make these,” he said, popping the morsel into his mouth.
“New chef just came on shift. He’s been experimenting with all kinds of stuff. He—”
Donald didn’t hear the rest. He chewed on memories. A cool day in D.C., Helen up to visit, had the dog with her, drove all the way from Savannah. They walked around the Lincoln Memorial a week too early for the cherry blossoms, but still a spot of color here and there. Stopped for fresh bagels, still warm, the smell of coffee—
“Put an end to this,” Donald said, indicating the rest of Eren’s bagel.
“Sir?”
They were nearly to the bend in the hall that led to the comm room. “I don’t want this chef experimenting anymore. Have him stick to the usual.”
Eren seemed confused. After some hesitation, he nodded. “Yes sir.”
“Nothing good can come of this,” Donald explained. And while Eren agreed more strenuously this time, Donald realized he had begun to think like the people he loathed. A veil of disappointment fell over his face, this Ops Head, who in truth outranked him, who should by all rights be in charge, and Donald felt a sudden urge to take it back, to grab the man by the shoulders and ask him what the hell they thought they were doing, all this misery and heartache. They should eat memory foods, of course, and talk about the days they’d left behind.
Instead, he said nothing, and they continued down the hall in quiet and discomfort.
“Quite a few of our silo Heads came from Ops,” Eren said after a while, steering the conversation back to Raymond. “I was a comms officer for my first two shifts, you know. The guy I took over for, the Ops Head from the last shift, was from medical.”
“So you’re not a shrink?” Donald asked.
Eren laughed, and Donald thought of Victor, blowing his brains out. This wasn’t going to last, this place. There were cracked tiles in the center of the hall. Tiles that had no replacement. The ones at the edge were in much better shape, and Donald had an epiphany. He stopped outside the comm room and surveyed the wear on this centuries-old place. There were scuff marks low on the walls, hand-high, shoulder-high, fewer anywhere else. The traffic patterns on the floors throughout the facility showed where people walked. It wasn’t evenly distributed.
“Are you okay, sir?” Eren asked.
Donald held up his hand. He could sense those in the comm room were waiting on him. But he was thinking on how an architect designs a structure to last. A certain calculus was used, an averaging of forces and wear across an entire structure, letting every beam and rivet shoulder its share of the load. All together, the resulting building could take the force of a hurricane, an earthquake, with plenty of redundancies to boot. But real stress and strain weren’t as kind as the hurricanes computers simulated. Hidden in those calculus winds were hurtling rods of steel and two by fours. And where they slammed it was like bombs going off. Just as the center of a hall bore an unfortunate share of strain, some people would be on shift for the worst of it.
“I believe they’re waiting on us, sir.”
Donald looked away from the scuff marks to Eren, this young man with bright eyes and bagel on his breath. He was like a corner of the hall lightly touched, his hair full of color, an uptick at the corners of his mouth, a wan smile like a scar of hope.
“Right,” Donald said. He waved Eren inside the comm room before following behind, stepping dead center like everyone else.
•34•
Donald familiarized himself with the script while Eren plopped into the chair beside him and pulled a headset on. The software would mask their voices, make them featureless and the same. The silo Heads need not know when one man went off shift and another replaced him. It was always the same voice, the same person, as far as they were concerned.
The shift operator lifted a mug and took a sip. Donald could see something written on the mug with a marker. It said: We’re #1. Donald wondered if whoever wrote it meant the silo. The operator set the mug down and twirled his finger for Donald to begin.
Donald covered his mic and cleared his throat. He could hear someone talking on the other line as a distant headset was pulled on. There was a script to follow for the first half. Donald remembered most of it. Eren turned to the side and polished off the bagel guiltily. When the operator gave them the thumbs up, Eren gestured to Donald to do the honors, and all Donald could think about was getting this over with and getting down to that empty armory.
“Name,” he said into his mic.
“Lukas Kyle,” came the reply.
Donald watched the graphs jump with readings taken from the headset. He felt sorry for this person, signing on to head a silo rated near the bottom. It all seemed hopeless, and here Donald was going through the motions. “You shadowed in IT,” he said.
There was a pause. “Yessir.”
The boy’s temperature was up. Donald could read it on the display. The operator and Eren were comparing notes and pointing to something. Donald checked the script. It listed easy questions everyone knew the answers to.
“What is your primary duty to the silo?” he asked, reading the line.
“To maintain the Order.”
Eren raised a hand as the readouts spiked. When they settled, he gave Donald the sign to continue.
“What do you protect above all?” Even with the software helping, Donald tried to keep his voice flat. There was a jump on one of the graphs. Donald’s thoughts drifted to the news of the pilots gone from his space, a space that he felt belonged to him. He would get through this and set his alarm clock. Tonight. Tonight.
“Life and Legacy,” the shadow recited.
Donald lost his place. It took a moment to find the next line. “What does it take to protect these things we hold so dear?”
“It takes sacrifice,” the shadow said after a brief pause.
The comm head gave Donald and Eren an OK signal. The formal readings were over. Now to the baseline, to get off-script. Donald wasn’t sure what to say. He nodded to Eren, hoping he’d take over.
Eren covered his mic for a second as if he was about to argue, but shrugged. “How much time have you had in the Suit Labs?” he asked the shadow, studying the monitor in front of him.
“Not much, sir. Bernar— Uh, my boss, he’s wanting me to schedule time in the labs after, you know …”
“Yes. I do know.” Eren nodded. “How’s that problem in your lower levels going?”
“Um, well, I’m only kept apprised of the overall progress, and it sounds good.” Donald heard the shadow clear his throat. “That is, it sounds like progress is being made, that it won’t be much longer.”
A long pause. A deep breath. Waveforms relaxed. Eren glanced at Donald. The operator waved his finger for them to keep going.
Donald had a question, one that touched on his own regrets. “Would you have done anything differently, Lukas?” he asked. “From the beginning?”
There were red spikes on the monitors, and Donald felt his own temperature go up. Maybe he was asking something too close to home. He realized suddenly that these people they watched over were aliens, a different race, hundreds of years removed from his own kind. His pity for them grew. Such was how gods began doting on mortals, with pity.
“Nossir,” the young shadow said. “It was all by the Order, sir. Everything’s under control.”
The comm head reached to his controls and mu
ted all of their headsets. “We’re getting borderline readings,” he told them. “His nerves are spiking. Can you push him a little more?”
Eren nodded. The operator on the other side of him shrugged and took a sip from his #1 mug.
“Settle him down first, though,” the comm head said.
Eren turned to Donald. “Congratulate him and then see if you can get him emotional,” he suggested. “Level him out and tweak him.”
Donald hesitated. It was all so artificial and manipulative. He forced himself to swallow. The mics were unmuted.
“You are next in line for the control and operation of Silo eighteen,” he said stiffly, sad for what he was dooming this poor soul to.
“Thank you, sir.” The shadow sounded relieved. Waveforms collapsed as if they’d struck a pier.
Now Donald fought for some way to push the young man. The comm head waving at him didn’t help. Donald glanced up at the map of the silos on the wall. He stood, the headphone cord stretching, and studied the several silos marked out, the one there with the number ’12.’ Donald considered the seriousness of what this young man had just taken on, what his job entailed, how many had died elsewhere because their leaders had let them down.
“Do you know the worst part of my job?” Donald asked. He could feel those in the comm room watching him. Donald was back on his first shift, initiating that other young man. He was back on his first shift, shutting a silo down. There was silence, and he worried that the shadow on the other end had removed his headset.
“What’s that, sir?” the voice asked.
“Standing here, looking at a silo on this map, and drawing a red cross through it. Can you imagine what that feels like?”
“I can’t, sir.”
Donald nodded. He appreciated the honest answer. He remembered what it felt like to watch those people spill out of 12 and perish on the landscape. He blinked his vision clear. “It feels like a parent losing thousands of children all at once,” he said.
The world stood still for a heartbeat or two. The operator and the comm head were both fixated on their monitors, looking for a crack. Eren watched Donald.
“You will have to be cruel to your children so as not to lose them,” Donald said.
“Yessir.”
Waveforms began to pulse like gentle surf. The comm head gave Donald the thumbs-up. He had seen enough. The boy had passed, and now the Rite was truly over.
“Welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order, Lukas Kyle,” Eren said, reading from the script and taking over for Donald. “Now, if you have a question or two, I have the time to answer, but briefly.”
Donald remembered this part. He had a hand in this. He settled back into his chair, suddenly exhausted.
“Just one, sir. And I’ve been told it isn’t important, and I understand why that’s true, but I believe it will make my job here easier if I know.” The young man paused. “Is there … ?” A new red spike on his graph. “How did this all begin?”
Donald held his breath. He glanced around the room, but everyone else was watching their monitors as if any question was as good as another.
Donald responded before Eren could. “How badly do you wish to know?” he asked.
The shadow took in a breath. “It isn’t crucial,” he said, “but I would appreciate a sense of what we’re accomplishing, what we survived. It feels like it gives me—gives us a purpose, you know?”
“The reason is the purpose,” Donald told him. This was what he was beginning to learn from his studies. “Before I tell you, I’d like to hear what you think.”
He thought he could hear the shadow gulp. “What I think?” Lukas asked.
“Everyone has ideas,” Donald said. “Are you suggesting you don’t?”
“I think it was something we saw coming.”
Donald was impressed. He had a feeling this young man knew the answer and simply wanted confirmation. “That’s one possibility,” he agreed. “Consider this—” He thought how best to phrase it. “What if I told you that there were only fifty silos in all the world, and that we are in this infinitely small corner of that world?”
On the monitor, Donald could practically watch the young man think, his readings oscillating up and down like the brain’s version of a heartbeat.
“I would say that we were the only ones …” A wild spike on the monitor. “I’d say we were the only ones who knew.”
“Very good. And why might that be?”
Donald wished he had the jostling lines on the screen recorded. It was serene, watching another human being clutch after his vanishing sanity, his disappearing doubts.
“It’s because … It’s not because we knew.” There was a soft gasp on the other end of the line. “It’s because we did it.”
“Yes,” Donald said. “And now you know.”
Eren turned to Donald and placed his hand over his mic. “We’ve got more than enough. The kid checks out.”
Donald nodded. “Our time is up, Lukas Kyle. Congratulations on your assignment.”
“Thank you.” There was a final flutter on the monitors.
“Oh, and Lukas?” Donald said, remembering the young man’s predilection for staring at the stars, for dreaming, for filling himself with dangerous hope.
“Yessir?”
“Going forward, I suggest you concentrate on what’s beneath your feet. No more of this business with the stars, okay, son? We know where most of them are.”
Silo 17
Year Sixteen
•35•
Jimmy wasn’t sure how the math worked, but feeding two mouths was more than just twice the work. And yet—it felt like less than half the chore. The addition didn’t add up, but he suspected it had to do with how nice it felt to provide for something besides himself. It was the satisfaction of seeing the cat eat and of it growing used to his presence that made him relish meals more and travel outside more often.
It had been a rough start, though. The cat had been skittish after its rescue. Jimmy had dried himself off with a towel scavenged two levels up, and the cat had acted insane as he dried it off after. It seemed to both love and hate the process, rolling around one minute and batting at Jimmy’s hands the next. Once dry, the animal had blossomed to twice its wet size. And yet, he was still pathetic and hungry.
Jimmy found a can of beans beneath a mattress (always the first place he looked, though it was often useless chits he found there). The can wasn’t too rusty. He opened it with his screwdriver and fed the slick pods to the cat one at a time while his own feet went from blue to normal, tingling like electricity the entire time.
After the beans, the cat had taken to following him wherever he went to see what he might find next. It made the hunt for food fun, rather than a never ending war against his own growling stomach. Fun, but lots of work. Up the staircase they went, him back in his boots, the cat silently pawing behind and sometimes ahead.
Jimmy had learned early on to trust the thing’s balance. The first few times it rubbed itself against the outer stanchions, even twisting itself beyond them and back through as it ascended the steps, Jimmy nearly had a heart attack. The cat seemed to have a death wish, or just an ignorance of what it meant to fall. But he soon learned to trust the cat even as the cat began to trust him.
And that first night, as he lay huddled under his tarp in the lower farms, listening to pumps and lights click on and off and noises he mistook for hiding others, the cat tucked itself under his arm and curled against the crook his belly made when his legs were bent and began to rattle like a pump on loose mounts.
“You were lonely, huh?” Jimmy had whispered. He had grown uncomfortable but was unwilling to move. A cramp had formed in his neck while a different tightness disappeared from deep in his gut, a tightness he didn’t know was there until it was gone.
“I was lonely, too,” he had told the cat softly, fascinated by how much more he talked with the animal around. It was better than talking to his shadow and pretending it was a person
.
“That’s a good name,” Jimmy had whispered. He didn’t know what people named cats, but Shadow would work. Like the shadows in which he’d found the thing, another spot of blackness to follow Jimmy around. And that night, years back, the two of them had fallen asleep amid the clicking pumps, the dripping water, the buzzing insects, and all the stranger sounds deep within the farms that Jimmy preferred not to name.
* * *
That was years ago. Now, cat hair and beard hair gathered together in the spines of the Legacy books. Jimmy trimmed his beard while he read about snakes. The scissors made crunching noises as he pinched a load of hair, held it away from his chin, and hacked it off with the dull shears. He sprinkled most of the hair in an empty can. The rest drifted down among the words, large swoops of meddling punctuation to mingle with the cat’s hair, who kept walking back and forth under his arms, arching his back, and stepping across his sentences.
“I’m trying to read,” Jimmy complained. But he put down the scissors and dutifully stroked the animal from neck to tail, Shadow pressing his spine up into Jimmy’s palm as he got to the end of each pet. The animal lost its mind when Jimmy did this. He meowed and made that grumbling sound like his heart was going to burst and begged for more.
Tiny claws clenched into little fists and punctured a photo of a corn snake, and Jimmy guided the animal toward the floor. Shadow lay on his back with his feet in the air, watching Jimmy carefully. It was a trap. Jimmy could rub his belly for only a moment before the cat would suddenly decide it hated this and attack his wrist. Jimmy didn’t understand cats that well, but he’d read the entry on them a dozen times. One thing he hated to learn was that they didn’t live as long as humans. He tried not to think of that day. On that day he would go back to being Solo, and he much preferred being Jimmy. Jimmy talked more. Solo was the one with the wild thoughts, the one who gazed over the rails, who spat toward the Deep and watched as his spit trembled and tore itself apart from the wild speeds of its racing fall.