“Tell me,” he whispered.
“We’re not sure how, but one of them made it out of sight—”
“A cleaner, sir—”
A cleaner. Donald sank into the chair; his bones were as cold and heavy as stone. It wasn’t Helen at all.
“—over the hill—” one said.
“—we got a call from eighteen—”
Donald raised his hand a little, his arm trembling and still half numb from the sleep. “Wait,” he croaked. “One at a time. Why did you wake me?” It hurt to talk.
One of the men cleared his throat. The blanket was tucked up under Donald’s chin to stop him from shivering. He hadn’t known he was shivering. They were being so reverent with him, so gentle. What was this? He tried to clear his head.
“You told us to wake you—”
“It’s protocol—”
Donald’s eyes fell to the pod, still steaming as the chill escaped. There was a screen at the base, empty readouts without him in there, just a rising temp. A rising temp and a name. Not his name.
And Donald remembered how names meant nothing unless that was all one had to go by. If nobody remembered each other, if they didn’t cross paths, then a name was everything.
“Sir?”
“Who am I?” he asked, reading the little screen, not understanding. This wasn’t him. “Why did you wake me?”
“You told us to, Mr. Thurman.”
The blanket was wrapped snugly around his shoulders. The chair was turned. They were treating him with respect, as if he had authority. The wheels on this chair did not squeak at all.
“It’s okay, sir. Your head will clear soon.”
He didn’t know these people. They didn’t know him.
“The doctor will clear you for duty.”
Nobody knew anyone.
“Right this way.”
And then anyone could be anybody.
“Through here.”
Until it didn’t matter who was in charge. One who might do what was correct, another who might do what was right.
“Very good.”
One name as good as any other.
59
The Loud came before the quiet. That was a Rule of the World, for the bangs and shouts need somewhere to echo, just as bodies need space in which to fall.
Jimmy Parker was in class when the last of the great Louds began. It was the day before a cleaning. Tomorrow, they would be off from school. For the death of a man, Jimmy and his friends would be gifted a few extra hours of sleep. His father would work overtime down in IT. And tomorrow afternoon, his mother would insist that they go up with his aunt and cousins to watch the bright clouds drift over the clear view of the hills until the sky turned dark as sleep.
Cleaning days were for staying in bed and for seeing family. They were for silencing unrest and quietening the Louds. That’s what Mrs. Pearson told them as she wrote the rules from the Pact up on the blackboard. Her chalk clacked and squeaked and left dusty trails of all the whys for which a man could be put to death. Civics lessons on a day before a banishment. Warnings on the eve of graver warnings. Jimmy and his friends fidgeted in their seats and learned rules. Rules of the World that very soon would no longer apply.
Jimmy was sixteen. Many of his friends would move off and shadow soon, but he would need another year of study to follow in his father’s footsteps. Mrs. Pearson marked the blackboard and moved on to the seriousness of choosing a life partner, of registering relationships according to the Pact. Sarah Jenkins turned in her seat and smiled back at Jimmy. Civics lessons and biology lessons intermingled, hormones spoken of alongside the laws that governed their excesses. Sarah Jenkins was cute. Jimmy hadn’t thought so at the beginning of the year, but now he was seeing it. Sarah Jenkins was cute and would be dead in just a few hours.
Mrs. Pearson asked for a volunteer to read from the Pact, and that’s when Jimmy’s mother came for him. She burst in unannounced. An embarrassment. The end of Jimmy’s world began with hot cheeks and a burning collar and everyone watching. His mom didn’t say anything to Mrs. Pearson, didn’t excuse herself. She just stormed through the door and hurried among the desks the way she walked when she was angry. She pulled Jimmy from his desk and led him out with his arm in her fist, causing him to wonder what he’d done this time.
Mrs. Pearson didn’t speak. Jimmy looked back at his best friend Paul, caught him smiling behind his palm, and wondered why Paul wasn’t in trouble too. They rarely got in or out of a fix alone, he and Paul. The only person to utter a word was Sarah Jenkins. “Your backpack!” she cried out just before the classroom door slammed shut, her voice swallowed by the quiet.
There were no other mothers pulling their children down the hallway. If they came, it would be much later. Jimmy’s father worked among the computers and knew things. His father knew things before anyone else. This time, it was only moments before. There were others scrambling on the stairwell already. The noise was frightening. The landing outside the school level thrummed with the vibrations of distant and heavy traffic. A bolt in one of the railing’s stanchions rattled as it worked its way loose. It felt as though the silo would simply shake itself apart. Jimmy’s mom took him by the sleeve and pulled him toward the spiral staircase as if he was still twelve.
Jimmy pulled against her for a moment, confused. In the past year, he had grown bigger than his mom, as big as his father, and it was strange to be reminded that he had this power, that he was nearly a man. He had left his backpack and his friends behind. Where were they going? The banging from below seemed to be getting louder.
His mother turned as he gave resistance. Her eyes, he saw, were not full of anger. There was no glare, no furrowed brow. They were wide and wet, shiny like the times Grandma and Grandpa had passed. The noise below was frightful, but it was the look in his mother’s eyes that placed fear in Jimmy’s bones.
“What is it?” he whispered. He hated to see his mother upset. Something dark and empty—like that stray and tailless cat that nobody could catch in the upper apartments—clawed at his insides.
His mother didn’t say. She turned and pulled him down the stairs, toward the thundering approach of something awful, and Jimmy realized at once that he wasn’t in trouble at all.
They all were.
60
Jimmy had never felt the stairs tremble so. The entire spiral staircase seemed to sway. It turned to rubber the way a length of charcoal appears to bend between jiggled fingers, a parlor trick he’d learned in class. Though his feet rarely touched the steps—racing as he was to keep up with his mother—they tingled and felt numb from vibrations transmitted straight from steel to bone. Jimmy tasted fear in his mouth like a dry spoon on his tongue.
There were angry screams from below. Jimmy’s mother shouted her encouragement, told him to hurry, and down the staircase they spiraled. They raced toward whatever bad thing was marching upward. “Hurry,” she cried again, and Jimmy was more scared of the tremor in her voice than the shuddering of a hundred levels of steel.
He hurried.
They passed twenty-nine. Thirty. People ran by in the opposite direction. A lot of people in coveralls the color of his father’s. On the landing of thirty-one, Jimmy saw his first dead body since his grandpa’s funeral. It looked as if a tomato had been smashed on the back of the man’s head. Jimmy had to skip over the man’s arms, which stuck out into the stairwell. He hurried after his mother while some of the red dripped through the landing and splattered and slicked the steps below.