Solo held up his parachute, a paper tent with little strings fastened to a tiny washer. He had dozens and dozens of bits of string lying in tangles across the open book. A handful of washers remained. He gave one of the strings on his parachute a tug and thought of the bodies up in the cafeteria. Behind that door, there were dead people who wouldn’t break down like the others. When he and Shadow had first discovered them, he’d assumed they’d recently passed. Dozens of them, dying together and piled on one another as though they’d been tossed in there or had been crawling atop the others. The door to the forbidden outside was just beyond them, Solo knew. But he hadn’t gone that far. He had closed the door and left in a hurry, spooked by the lifeless eyeballs and the strange feeling of seeing a face other than his own peering back at him like that. He had left the bodies and not come back for a long time. He had waited for them to become bones. They never had.
He went to the rail and peered over, made sure the piece of paper was tented, ready to grab the air. There was a cool updraft from the flooded deep. Solo leaned out beyond the third-level railing, the fine paper pinched in one hand, the washer resting in his other palm. He wondered why some people rotted and others kept going. What made them break down?
“Break down,” he said aloud. He liked the way his voice sounded sometimes. He was an expert in how things broke down. Shadow should’ve been there, rubbing against his ankles, but he wasn’t.
“I’m an expert,” Solo told himself. “Breaking down, breaking down.” He stretched out his arms and released the parachute, watched it plummet for a moment before the strings went taut. And then it bobbed and twisted in the air as it sank into the dwindling depths. “Down down down,” he called after the parachute. All the way to the bottom. Sinking until it splashed invisible or got caught up along the way.
Solo knew well how bodies rot. He scratched his beard and squinted after the disappearing chute, then sat back down and crossed his legs, the knee torn completely out of his old overalls. He mumbled to himself, delaying what needed to be done, his Project for the day, and instead tore another page from the shrinking book, trying not to think about yet another carcass that would soon dwindle with time.
99
There had been items Solo spent days and weeks searching for. There had been some things he’d needed that had consumed his hunts for years. Often, he found useful things much later, when he needed them no longer. Like the time he had come across a stash of razors. A great big bin of them in a doctor’s office. All the important stuff—the bandages, medicine, the tape—had long ago been snagged by those fighting over the scraps. But a bin of new razors, many of the blades still shiny, taunted him. He had long before resigned himself to his beard, but there had been times before that when he would’ve killed for a razor.
Other times, he found a thing before he even knew he needed it. The machete was like that. A great blade found beneath the body of a man not long dead. Solo had taken it simply so nobody else would have the murderous thing. He had locked himself below the server room for three days, terrified of the sight of another still-warm body. That had been many years ago. It took a while longer for the farms to thicken up where the machete became necessary. By then, he had taken to leaving his gun behind—no longer any use for it—and the machete became a constant companion, something found before he knew he needed it.
Solo set the last of the parachutes free and watched as it narrowly missed the landing on level nine. The folded paper vanished out of sight. He thought of the things Shadow had helped him find over the years, mostly food. But there was one time when Shadow had run off with a mind of his own. It was on a trip down to Supply when Shadow had raced ahead and had disappeared across a landing. Solo had followed with his flashlight.
The cat had mewed and mewed by a door—Solo wary of another pile of bodies—but the apartment had been empty. Up on the kitchen counter, twirling, pawing at a cabinet full of little cans. Ancient and spotted with rust, but with pictures of cats on them. A madness in Shadow, and there, with a short cord plugged into the wall, a battered contraption, a mechanized can opener.
Solo smiled and gazed over the rail, thinking on the things found and lost over the years. He remembered pressing the button on the top of that gadget the first time, how Shadow had whipped into a frenzy, how neatly the tops had come off. He remembered not being impressed at all with the food in the cans, but Shadow had a mind of his own.
Solo turned and studied the book with the torn pages, feeling sad. He was out of washers, so he left the book behind and reluctantly headed down to the farms. He was off to do what needed to be done.
Hacking at the greenery with his machete, Solo marveled that the farms hadn’t long ago rotted to ruin without people around to tend them. But the lights were rigged to come on and off, and more than half of them still could. Water continued to dribble from pipes. Pumps kicked on and off with angry buzzes and loud grumbles. Electricity stolen from his realm below was brought up on wires that snaked the stairwell walls. Nothing worked perfectly, but Solo saw that man’s relationship to the crops mostly consisted of eating them. Now it was only him eating. Him and the rats and the worms.
He carried his burden through the thickest plots, needing to reach the far corners of the farm where the lights no longer burned, where the soil was cool and damp, where nothing grew anymore. A special place. Away from his weekly trips to gather food. A place he would come to as a destination rather than simply pass because it was along the way.
Leaving the heat of the lights, he entered a dark place. He liked it back here. It reminded him of the room beneath the servers, a private and safe place where one could hide and not be disturbed. And there, scattered among other abandoned and forgotten tools, a shovel. A thing he needed right when he needed it. This was the other way of finding things. It was when the silo was in a gifting mood. It wasn’t a mood the silo got into often.
Solo knelt and placed his burden by the edge of the three-railing fence. The body in the bag had gone into that stiff phase. Soon it would soften. After that—
Solo didn’t want to think after that. He was an expert in some things he’d rather not know.
He collected the shovel and scampered over the top rail—it was too dark to hunt for the gate. The shovel growled and crunched through the dirt. He lifted each scoop into the air. Soft sighs and little piles slid out. Some things you found just when you needed them, and Solo thought of the years that had passed so swiftly with his friend. He already missed the way Shadow rubbed on his shin while he worked, always in the way but clever enough not to be stepped on, coming in a flash whenever Solo broke out in a whistle, there at just the right time. A thing found, before he even knew he needed it.
100
Donald’s boots echoed in the lower-level shift storage, where thousands of pods lay packed together like gleaming stones. He stooped to check another nameplate. He had lost count of his position down the aisle and was worried he’d have to start over again. Bringing a rag to his mouth, he coughed. He wiped his lip and carried on. Something heavy and cold weighed down one pocket and pressed against his thigh. Something heavy and cold lay within his chest.
He finally found the pod marked Troy. Donald rubbed the glass and peered inside. There was a man in there, older than he seemed. Older than Donald remembered. A blue cast overwhelmed pale flesh. White hair and white brows possessed an azure tint.