Elise nodded.
“You can join our flock. A flock is a congregation of people. The members of a church. Do you go to church?”
Elise shook her head. She rested her hand on her memory book, which had a page on sheep, how to raise them and how to care for them. Her memory book and this man disagreed. She felt a hollow in her stomach as she tried to sort out which of them to trust. She leaned toward her book, which was right about so much else.
“Do you want to come inside?” The man waved an arm at the door. Elise peered past him and into the darkness. “Are you hungry?”
Elise nodded.
“We’re gathering food. We found a church. The others will be down from the farms soon. Do you want to come in, get something to eat or drink? I picked what I could carry. I’ll share it with you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and Elise found herself studying his forearm, which was thick with dark hair like Solo’s but not like Rickson’s. Her tummy grumbled, and the farms seemed so far away.
“I need to get Puppy,” she said, her voice small in that vast stairwell, a tiny puff of fog in the cool air.
“We’ll get your puppy,” the man said. “Let’s go inside. I want to hear all about your world. It’s a miracle, you know. Did you know that you are a miracle? You are.”
Elise didn’t know this at all. It weren’t in any of the books she’d made memories from. But she’d missed a lot of pages. Her stomach grumbled. Her stomach talked to her, and so she followed this man with the dark beard into the dark hall. There were voices ahead, a soothing and quiet mix of hums and whispers, and Elise wondered if this was what a flock sounded like.
Silo 1
43
Charlotte was back to living in a box. A box, but without the cold, without the frosted window, and without the line of bright blue plunged deep into her vein. This box was missing those things and the chance of sweet dreams and the nightmare of waking. It was a plain metal box that dented and sang as she adjusted her weight.
She had made a tidy home of the drone lift, a metal container too low to sit up in, too dark for her to see her hand in front of her face, and too quiet to hear herself think. Twice she had lain there listening to boots on the other side of the door as men hunted for her. She stayed in the lift that night. She waited for them to come back, but they must have many levels to prowl.
She moved every few minutes in a fruitless attempt to make herself comfortable. She went once to use the bathroom when she couldn’t hold it anymore, when she feared she would go in her coveralls. To flush or not to flush? Risk the noise or the evidence in the bowl? She flushed, and imagined pipes rattling in some far-off place, someone able to pinpoint where it was coming from.
At the end of the hall, she made sure they hadn’t discovered the radio. She expected to find it missing, Donald’s notes as well, but all was still there beneath the plastic sheet. Hesitating a moment, Charlotte gathered the folders. They were too valuable to lose. She hurried back to her hole and pushed her things into a corner. Curling up, she pictured boots landing on her brother.
She thought of Iraq. There were dark nights there, lying in her bunk, men coming and going on and off their shifts with whispers and the squeak of springs. Dark nights when she had felt more vulnerable than her drone ever did in the sky. The barracks had felt like an empty parking garage in the dead of night, footsteps in the distance, and her unable to find her car keys. Hiding in that small drone lift felt the same. Like sleeping at night in a darkened garage, in a barracks full of men, wondering what she might wake up to.
She slept little. With a flashlight cradled between her cheek and her shoulder, she went through Donald’s folders, hoping the dry reading might help her nod off. In the silence, words and snippets of conversation from the radio returned to her. Another silo had been destroyed. She had listened to their panicked voices, to reports of outer doors being opened, reports of the gas her brother had said he could unleash on these people. She had heard Juliette’s voice, heard her say that everyone was dead.
She found a small chart in one of the folders, a map of numbered circles with many of them crossed out. People lived in those circles, Charlotte thought. And now another of them was empty. One more X to scratch. Except Charlotte, like her brother, now felt some connection with these people. She had listened to their voices with him on the radio, had listened to Donald as he recounted his efforts to reach out to them, this one silo that was open to what he had to say, that was helping him hack into their computers to understand what was happening. She had asked him once why he didn’t reach out to other silos, and he had said something about those in charge not being safe. They would have turned him in. Somehow, her brother and these people were all rebelling, and now they were gone. This was what happened to those who rebelled. Now it was just Charlotte in darkness and silence.
She flipped through her brother’s notes, and her neck began to cramp from holding the flashlight like that. The temperature in the box rose until she was sweating in her coveralls. She couldn’t sleep. This was nothing like that other box they put her in. And the more she read, the more she understood her brother’s endless pacing, his desire to do something, to put an end to the system in which they were trapped.
Careful with the water and food, taking tiny sips and small bites, she stayed inside for what felt like days but may have been hours. When she needed to go to the bathroom again, she decided to sneak to the end of the hall and try the radio once more. The urge to pee was matched only by the need to know what was going on. There had been survivors. The people of 18 had managed to scamper over the hills and reach another silo. A handful had survived — but how long would they last?
She flushed and listened to the surge of reclaimed water gurgle through overhead pipes. Taking a chance, she went to the drone control room. She left the hall light off and uncovered the radio. There was nothing but static on 18. The same on 17. She turned through a dozen of the other channels until she heard voices and was sure the thing was working. Back to 17, she waited. She could wait forever, she knew. She could wait until they came and found her. The clock on the wall showed that it was just past three, the middle of the night, which she thought was a good thing. They might not be looking for her right then. But then nobody might be listening, either. She squeezed the mic anyway.
“Hello,” she said. “Can anyone hear me?”
She nearly identified herself, where she was calling from, but then wondered if the people in her silo were listening in as well, monitoring all the stations. And what if they were? They wouldn’t know where she was transmitting from. Unless they could trace her through the repeaters. Maybe they could. But wasn’t this one of the silos crossed off their list? They shouldn’t be listening at all. Charlotte moved her tools out of the way and looked for the piece of paper Donny had brought her, the ranking of the silos. It listed at the bottom all of the silos that’d been destroyed—
“Who is this?”
A man’s voice spilled from the radio. Charlotte grabbed the mic, wondering if this was someone in her silo transmitting on that frequency.
“I’m… Who is this?” she asked, unsure how to answer.
“You down in Mechanical? You know what time it is? It’s the middle of the night.”
Down in Mechanical. That was the layout of their silos, not hers. Charlotte assumed this was one of the survivors. She also assumed others might be listening in and decided to play it safe.