“We’re putting a file together for you now, sir. Should have it soon. What we do know is that there was a cleaning scheduled in eighteen this morning. Except . . .”
Eren hesitated. Donald turned from the screen and caught the Ops head looking to the others for help. One of the operators—a large man in orange overalls with wiry hair and headphones around his neck—was the first to oblige. “The cleaning didn’t go through,” the operator said flatly.
Several of the men in boots stiffened. Donald glanced around the room at the crowd that had packed into the small comm center, and he saw how they were watching him. Waiting on him. The Ops head looked down at the floor in defeat. He appeared to be in his late thirties, the same age as Donald, and yet he was waiting to be chastised. These were the men in trouble, not him.
Donald tried to think. The people in charge were looking to him for guidance. Something was wrong with the shifts, something very wrong. He had worked with the man they thought he was, the man whose name graced his badge and his boots. Thurman. It felt like yesterday that Donald had stood in that very same comm room and had felt that man’s equal but for a moment. He had helped save a silo on his previous shift. And even though his head was groggy and his legs were weak, he knew it was important to uphold this charade. At least until he understood what was going on.
“What direction were they heading?” he asked, his voice a whisper. The others held perfectly still so that the rustle of their overalls wouldn’t compete with his words.
A man from the back of the room answered. “In the direction of seventeen, sir.”
Donald composed himself. He remembered the Order, the danger of letting anyone out of sight. These people in their silos with a limited view of the world thought that they were the only ones alive. They lived in bubbles that must not be allowed to burst. “Any word from seventeen?” he asked.
“Seventeen is gone,” the operator beside him said, dispensing more bad news with the same flat voice.
Donald cleared his throat. “Gone?” He searched the faces of the gathered. Foreheads creased with worry. Eren studied Donald, and the operator beside him adjusted his bulk in his seat. On the screen, the cleaner disappeared over the top of the hill and out of view. “What did this cleaner do?” he asked.
“It wasn’t her,” Eren said.
“Seventeen was shut down shifts ago,” the operator said.
“Right, right.” Donald ran his fingers through his hair. His hand was trembling.
“You feeling all right?” the operator asked. He glanced at the Ops head, then back to Donald. He knew. Donald sensed that this man in orange with the headphones around his neck knew something was wrong.
“Still a bit woozy,” Donald explained.
“He’s only been up for half an hour,” Eren told the operator.
There were murmurs from the back of the room.
“Yeah, okay.” The operator settled back into his seat. “It’s just . . . he’s the Shepherd, you know? I pictured him waking up chewing nails and farting tacks.”
Someone just behind Donald’s chair chuckled.
“So what’re we supposed to do about the cleaner?” a voice asked. “We need permission before we can send anyone out after her.”
“She can’t have gotten far,” someone said.
The comm engineer on the other side of Donald spoke up. He had one side of his headphones still on, the other side pulled off so he could follow the conversation. A sheen of sweat stood out on his forehead. “Eighteen is reporting that her suit was modified,” he said. “There’s no telling how long it’ll last. She could still be out there, sirs.”
This caused a chorus of whispers. It sounded like wind striking a visor, peppering it with sand. Donald stared at the screen, at a lifeless hill as seen from Silo Eighteen. The dust came in dark waves. He remembered what it had felt like out there on that landscape, the difficulty of moving in one of those suits, the hard slog up that gentle rise. Who was this cleaner, and where did she think she was going?
“Get me the file on this cleaner as soon as you can,” he said. The others fell still and stopped their whispering arguments. Donald’s voice was commanding because of its quietude, because of who they thought he was. “And I want whatever we have on seventeen.” He glanced at the operator, whose brow was furrowed by either worry or suspicion. “To refresh my memory,” he added.
Eren rested a hand on the back of Donald’s chair. “What about the protocols?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we scramble a drone or send someone after her? Or shut down eighteen? There’s going to be violence over there. We’ve never had a cleaning not go through before.”
Donald shook his head, which was beginning to clear. He looked down at his hand and remembered tearing off a glove once, there on the outside. He shouldn’t be alive. He wondered what Thurman would do, what the old man would order. But he wasn’t Thurman. Someone had told him once that people like Donald should be in charge. And now here he was.
“We don’t do anything just yet,” he said, coughing and clearing his throat. “She won’t get far.”
The others stared at him with a mixture of shock and acceptance. There finally came a handful of nods. They assumed he knew best. He had been woken up to control the situation. It was all according to protocol. The system could be trusted—it was designed to just go. All anyone needed to do was their own job and let others handle the rest.
63
It was a short walk from his apartment to the central offices, which Donald assumed was the point. It reminded him of a CEO’s office he’d once seen with an adjoining bedroom. What had seemed impressive at first became sad after realizing why it was there.
He rapped his knuckles on the open door marked Office of Psychological Services. He used to think of these people as shrinks, that they were here to keep others sane. Now he knew that they were in charge of the insanity. All he saw on the door anymore was “OPS.” Operations. The head of the head of the heads. The office across the hall was where the drudge work landed. Donald was reminded how each silo had a mayor for shaking hands and keeping up appearances, just as the world of before had presidents who came and went. Meanwhile, it was the men in the shadows who wielded the true power, those whose terms had no limits. That this silo operated by the same deceit should not be surprising; it was the only way such men knew how to run anything.
He kept his back to his former office and knocked a little louder. Eren looked up from his computer and a hard mask of concentration melted into a wan smile. “Come in,” he said as he rose from his seat. “You need the desk?”
“Yes, but stay.” Donald crossed the room gingerly, his legs still half asleep, and noticed that while his own whites were crisp, Eren’s were crumpled with the wear of a man well into his six-month shift. Even so, the Ops head appeared vigorous and alert. His beard was neatly trimmed by his neck and only peppered with gray. He helped Donald into the plush chair behind the desk.
“We’re still waiting for the full report on this cleaner,” Eren said. “The head of eighteen warned that it’s a thick one.”
“Priors?” Donald imagined anyone sent to clean would have priors.
“Oh, yeah. The word is that she was a sheriff. Not sure if I’m buying it. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first lawman to want out.”
“But it would be the first time anyone’s gotten out of sight,” Donald said.