At Marina’s nod, she continued, “Well, the red ones didn’t come on last night. Something was wrong with the switch. Taylor and Piotr were on the stairs and he just…missed.” She waved her hands out, a perfect mimic of a person missing a grab for something.
“Why wouldn’t he just wait? Or call for a light or something? That’s not like Piotr at all,” Marina said, trying to picture the scene. She wouldn’t have moved at all if there wasn’t enough light. She would have called out and someone would have come with a light eventually. Or just turned them back on.
Greta shook her head. Marina could tell that she was equally baffled. No one in the silo would be careless like that. There were just some things everyone knew and what to do if the lights went out was one of them. It happened now and then. Things broke. You waited for them to be fixed and you definitely did not wander around near the stairs. When the lights went out anywhere in the silo, it could get so dark it made a person dizzy.
Even in primary school kids learned how to find the floor when it went dark. They had been put into the dark to learn how hard it was to tell up from down and how to safely get down to the floor. If you were with someone else, you were supposed to hold their hand on the floor because it helped. It sounded so simple that it was funny, until you had to do it and couldn’t tease out which way was up. But that was a closed room with no light. Some light, however weak, would have traveled through the stairwell from the other landings. Perhaps not much, but some.
Once Greta was calm again, Marina helped her to her room, a supporting arm around her waist, and put her to bed. She brought her a cup of herbal tea and a cool, damp towel for her eyes. She tried not to be impatient to leave and sat with her. As soon as Greta’s breathing took on the measured regularity of sleep, Marina quietly made a quick exit.
She didn’t need to go looking for the scene because the landing was still awash with people. Deputies tried to keep gawkers from the rails overlooking the ‘splash zone’, as it was called. Porters struggled up the stairs while the lifts were unavailable and were grumbling as they trudged upward.
But all the rest, and there were a good many, were gawkers. They might be there under the guise of being on their way to a shift or home from a shift or on an impromptu visit to the Memoriam, but they were really pausing too long because they were hoping for a tidbit of information. As Marina stood there by the entrance, she heard people betting on whether or not it was a fall or a jump. She was disgusted. People were usually so good, but when something like this happened they were positively gruesome.
Marina saw her husband before he saw her. She pushed her way through the gawkers until she got near him. His arm went across the chest of the man in front of her with a rough, “Stay back. Let them work.”
She stopped short as the man in front of her did. She gaped at him, never having seen this side of him before. He was intimidating.
He saw her over the shoulder of the man he had stopped and grimaced. “Sorry, honey!”
The man pushed Joseph’s arm off his chest and exclaimed, “Don’t call me honey!”
Joseph rolled his eyes and motioned for Marina to go back toward the Memoriam then called for Sela to take his spot. He waited until she got there and Marina could see the very serious expression on her daughter’s face. She wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the onlookers. Joseph stepped through the little crowd and gave Marina a one armed hug when he reached her.
She wasted no time and asked, “Why are people still here?”
He sighed and said, “You don’t want to know. It’s a bad one.”
Marina blanched at the matter of fact way her husband said it. He was Piotr yesterday. Today he was a bad one. It was too much to try to tie together. She took a handful of his coverall sleeve and tugged, “Tell me. He was my friend.”
Joseph’s face lost the hard edge and he patted her hand, “Yeah, I know. Are you sure you really want to know all this?”
She nodded and bit her lip.
“Well, it’s an Othered mess down there. He hit the landing on 73, the lifts and from there he basically fell apart and went everywhere,” he said, back in deputy mode and speaking with such a lack of feeling that Marina felt nausea rise in her belly. She put a hand over her mouth and choked back a cry. Joseph cleared his throat and went on, his voice less clinical, “He wouldn’t have felt it. For him it was over as soon as he hit that first landing.”
“You’re sure?” Marina asked, hoping that was true.
“Very sure,” he said.
It was said with such confidence that Marina realized she didn’t want to know the detail that gave him that level of surety. She lowered her hand from her mouth and gripped his arm again, “How could this have happened?”
Joseph seemed at a loss for that one. “I don’t know. Why would he have fallen like that? It was almost like he was aiming for it or something. You don’t fall that far sideways. But he didn’t jump, that we know. He was with someone else and their story matches the facts. He fell. He just tripped on the stairs and fell when the lights went out.”
“What about Taylor?”
“The other guy is fine. A little banged up from trying to grab him when he fell, but physically he’ll be fine. He’s a mess though,” Joseph said and pointed at his head. Of course Taylor wouldn’t be fine. It had been clear that Piotr viewed Taylor as a son and friend. Taylor just as clearly admired Piotr. No, he wouldn’t be fine at all after that.
“The lights?” Marina asked.
“That was weird. Some idiot jammed a piece of cloth between the contacts inside the switch. How does that happen, I ask you? Probably a prank, but I doubt very much whoever did it thinks it’s funny now. They certainly won’t if I find out who it was,” Joseph answered, his voice grim at the thought of the person who sabotaged the lights.
“It’s been all night. Why are people still here?”
“Uh, well,” Joseph started. At Marina’s hard look he made a face and said, “We were done, but people keep finding, uh, more stuff.”
Marina’s bile rose and she was pretty sure she was a hair’s breadth from vomiting up her breakfast. She took a step backward and leaned over, her breath pushing out like she might be able to breathe it out with her lungs instead of spew it from her stomach. Joseph rubbed her hunched back, trying to be supportive even while keeping half an eye on the landing.
She stood and pushed his arm away, not ungently but without hesitation either. “Get it taken care of. He has a family. It’s not entertainment,” she said, her breath still coming out in uneven puffs. She pointed toward the people remaining on the landing and hissed, “And get them out of here.”
Without waiting for an answer she turned and went back into the Memoriam and straight to her room. She fished the book from her hiding place and tucked it into her pocket. She almost left the Memoriam then, but knew that an immediate absence might cause alarm. She went to Taylor’s room and knocked on the door. No one answered and she was about to turn away when the door opened a crack.
A single eye, recognizable as Taylor’s though it was rimmed in red and swollen, showed through the crack. “Hey,” Marina said, quietly and without expectation. She thought he probably needed someone right then. If he was there when that happened then all that he had heard would still be sounding in his ears. It was almost good that he was spared the sight, that it had been dark.
His breath hitched and he opened the door wide. Marina stepped in and hugged him. He felt broken. He sounded like he had become hollow and the sounds he made were heartbreaking. He practically gurgled his words, he was so filled with tears and grief. “I’m sorry.”