They were greeted on the landing of one-ten by frowns. McLain, the elder woman and head of Supply, stood with her arms crossed over her yellow overalls, her stance screaming unwelcome.
“Hello, Jove.” Knox fixed her with a wide smile.
“Don’t Jove me,” McLain said. “What’s this nonsense you’re after?”
Knox glanced up and down the stairwell, shrugged his heavy load higher up his shoulder. “Mind if we step in and talk about it?”
“I don’t want any trouble here,” she said, her eyes blazing beneath her lowered brow.
“Let’s go inside,” Knox said. “We haven’t stopped once on the way up. Unless you want us collapsing out here.”
McLain seemed to consider this. Her arms loosened across her chest. She turned to three of her workers, who formed an imposing wall behind her, and nodded. While they pulled open the gleaming doors of Supply, she turned and grabbed Knox’s arm. “Don’t get comfortable,” she told him.
Inside the front room of Supply, Knox found a small army of men and women in their yellow overalls, waiting. Most of them stood behind the low, long counter where the people of the silo normally waited for whatever parts they needed, whether newly fabricated or recently repaired. The parallel and deep aisles of shelves beyond ran into the gloomy distance, boxes and bins bulging off of them. The room was noticeably quiet. Usually, the mechanical thrumming and clanking sounds of fabrication could be heard worming their way through the space, or one might hear workers chatting unseen back in the stacks while they sorted newly fashioned bolts and nuts into hungry bins.
Now it was just silence and distrustful glares. Knox stood with his people, their sacks and loads slumping exhaustedly to the floor, sweat on their brows, while the men and women of Supply watched, unmoving.
He had expected a more amicable welcome. Mechanical and Supply had a long history together. They jointly ran the small mine beneath the lowest levels of Mechanical that supplemented the silo’s stockpile of ores.
But now, as McLain followed her boys back inside, she graced Knox with a look of scorn he hadn’t seen since his mother passed away.
“What in the hell is the meaning of this?” she hissed at Knox.
He was taken aback by the language, especially in front of his people. He thought of himself and McLain as equals, but now he was being snapped at as if by one of Supply’s dogs. Made to feel small and worthless.
McLain’s gaze ranged down the exhausted line of mechanics and their shadows before turning back to him.
“Before we discuss how we’re cleaning up this problem, I want to hear how you’re handling your employees, whoever was responsible.” Her eyes bored through him. “I am correct in assuming you had nothing to do with this, right? That you’ve come to apologize and shower me with bribes?”
Shirly started to say something, but Knox waved her off. There were a lot of people in the room just waiting for this to go undiplomatically.
“Yes, I do apologize,” Knox said, grinding his teeth together and bowing his head. “And no, I just learned of this earlier today. After I found out about the cleaning, in fact.”
“So it was all your electrician,” McLain said, her thin arms crossed tightly over her chest. “One man.”
“That’s right. But—”
“I’ve meted out punishment to those involved here, let me tell you. And I suppose you’ll have to do more than banish that old fart to his room.”
There was laughter behind the counter. Knox put a hand on Shirly’s shoulder to keep her in place. He looked past McLain to the men and women arranged behind her.
“They came and took one of our workers,” he said. His chest may have been heavy, but his voice still boomed. “You know how it happens. When they want a body for cleaning, they take it.” He thumped his chest. “And I let them. I stood there because I trust this system. I fear it, just as any of you.”
“Well—” McLain began, but Knox cut her short, continuing in that voice that routinely gave calm commands over the racket of machines run amok.
“One of my people was taken, and it was the oldest of us, the wisest of us, who intervened on her behalf. It was the weakest and most scared who braved his neck. And whoever of you he turned to for help, and who gave it, I owe you my life.” Knox blinked away the blur and continued. “You gave her more than a chance to walk over that hill, to die in peace and out of sight. You gave me the courage to open my eyes. To see this veil of lies we live behind—”
“That’s quite enough,” McLain barked. “Someone could be sent to cleaning for even listening to such nonsense, to such drivel.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Marck cried down the line. “Juliette is dead because of—”
“She’s dead because she broke these very laws!” McLain snapped, her voice high and shrill. “And now you march up here to break even more? On my level?”
“We aim to break heads!” Shirly said.
“Leave it!” Knox told them both. He saw the anger in McLain’s eyes, but he also saw something else: the sporadic nods and raised brows among the rank and file behind her.
A porter entered the room with empty sacks in each hand and looked around at the tense silence. One of the large Supply workers by the door ushered him back onto the landing with apologies, telling him to return later. Knox composed his words carefully during the interruption.
“No person has ever been sent to cleaning for listening, however great the taboo.” He allowed that to sink in. He glared at McLain as she moved to interrupt, but she seemed to decide against it. “So let me be sent to cleaning by any of you for what I’m about to say. I will welcome it if these facts do not move you to instead push forward with me and my men. For this is what Walker and a few of you brave souls have shown us this morning. We have cause for more hope than they dare give us. There’s more at our disposal to broaden our horizons than they’ll allow. We have been raised on a pack of lies, made to fear by the sight of our kinsmen rotting on the hills, but now one of us has crossed over that! They have seen new horizons! We have been given seals and washers and told that they should suffice, but what are they?”
He stared down the men and women behind the counter. McLain’s arms seemed to loosen across her chest.
“Designed to fail, that’s what! Fake. And who knows what other lies there are. What if we’d taken any cleaner back and done our best by them? Cleaned and disinfected them? Tried whatever we could? Would they survive? We can no longer trust IT to tell us they wouldn’t!”
Knox saw chins rise and fall. He knew his own people were ready to storm the room if need be; they were as amped up and driven mad by all this as he was.
“We are not here to cause trouble,” he said, “we are here to bring order! The uprising has already happened.” He turned to McLain. “Don’t you see? We’ve been living the uprising. Our parents were the children of it, and now we feed our own children to the same machine. This will not be the start of something new, but the end of something old. And if Supply is with us, we stand a chance. If not, then may our bodies haunt your view of the outside, which I now see as far less rotten than this blasted silo!”
Knox bellowed this last in open defiance of all taboo. He threw it out and savored the taste of it, the admission that anything beyond those curved walls might be better than what was inside them. The whisper that had killed so many became a throaty roar shouted from his broad chest.