And it felt good.
McLain cringed. She took a step away, something like fear in her eyes. She turned her back on Knox and made to return to her people, and he knew he had failed. There had been a chance, however slim, in this silent and still crowd to inspire action, but the moment had slipped him by or he had scared it off.
And then McLain did something. Knox could see the tendons in her slender neck bulge. She lifted her chin to her people, her white hair in its tight knot high on her head, and she said, quietly, “What say you, Supply?”
It was a question, not a command. Knox would later wonder if it had been asked in sadness; he would wonder if she had taken poor stock of her people, who had listened patiently during his madness. He would also wonder if she was just curious, or if she was challenging them to cast him and his mechanics out.
But now he wondered, tears streaming down his face, thoughts of Juliette swelling inside his heart, if he could even hear his handful of compatriots shouting, so drowned out were they by the angry war cries of the good men and women of Supply.
41
Lukas followed Bernard through the halls of IT, nervous techs scattering before them like night bugs startled by the light. Bernard didn’t seem to notice the techs ducking into offices and peering through windows. Lukas hurried to keep up, his eyes darting side to side, feeling conspicuous with all these hidden others watching.
“Aren’t I a little old to be shadowing for another job?” he asked. He was pretty sure he hadn’t accepted the offer, not verbally anyway, but Bernard spoke as if the deal was done.
“Nonsense,” he said. “And this won’t be shadowing in the traditional sense.” He waved his hand in the air. “You’ll continue your duties as before. I just need someone who can step in, who knows what to do in case something happens to me. My will—”
He stopped at the heavy door to the server room and turned to face Lukas. “If it came to it, in an emergency, my will would explain everything to the next head, but—” He gazed over Lukas’s shoulder and down the hall. “Sims is my executor, which we’ll have to change. I just don’t see that ever going smoothly.”
Bernard rubbed his chin and lost himself in his thoughts. Lukas waited a moment, then stepped beside him and entered his code on the panel by the door, fished his ID out of his pocket—made sure it was his ID and not Juliette’s—and swiped it through the reader. The door clicked open, snapping Bernard out of his thoughts.
“Yes, well, this will be much better. Not that I expect to go anywhere, mind you.” He adjusted his glasses and stepped through the heavy steel doorway. Lukas followed, pushing the monstrous enclosure shut behind them and waiting for the locks to engage.
“But if something did happen to you, I would oversee the cleanings?” Lukas couldn’t imagine. He suspected there was more to learn about those suits than the servers. Sammi would be better at this, would actually want this job. Also—would he have to abandon his star charts?
“That’s a small part of the job, but yes.” Bernard guided Lukas through the servers, past number thirteen with its blank face and still fans, all the way to the back of the room.
“These are the keys to the true heart of the silo,” Bernard said, fishing a jangling set out of his overalls. They were strung on a cord of leather that hung around his neck. Lukas had never noticed them before.
“There are other features to this cabinet that you’ll learn about in time. For now, you simply need to know how to get downstairs.” He inserted the key into several locks on the back of the server, locks designed to look like recessed screws. What server was this? Twenty-eight? Lukas glanced around the room and tried to count its position, and realized he’d never been assigned to maintain this tower.
There was a gentle clang as the back came off. Bernard set it aside, and Lukas saw why he’d never worked on the machine. It was practically empty, just a shell, like it had been scrapped for parts over the long years.
“It’s crucial that you lock this after coming back up.”
Lukas watched Bernard grab a handle in the bottom of the empty chassis. Bernard pulled it toward him, and there was a soft grinding noise nearby. “When the grate’s back in place, you simply press this down to secure it.”
Lukas was about to ask What grate? when Bernard stepped aside and dug his fingers into the metal slats of the floor. With a grunt, he pulled the heavy surface of the flooring up and began sliding it over. Lukas jumped around to the other side and bent down to help.
“Wouldn’t the stairs . . . ?” he started to ask.
“They don’t access this part of thirty-five.” Bernard waved at a ladder leading down through the floor. “You go first.”
Lukas’s head spun from the day’s sudden turn. As he bent to grab the ladder he felt the contents of his breast pocket shift and shot a hand up to hold the watch, ring, and ID steady. What had he been thinking? What was he thinking now? He lowered himself down the long ladder, feeling like someone had initiated an automated routine in his brain, a rote program that had taken over his actions. From the bottom of the ladder, he watched as Bernard lowered himself down the first rungs before sliding the grate into place, sealing them both inside the dark dungeon beneath the already-fortressed server room.
“You are about to receive a great gift,” Bernard said in the darkness. “Just as I was once granted the same.”
He flicked on a light, and Lukas saw that his boss was grinning maniacally, the anger from before gone. Here was a new man before him, a confident and eager man.
“All the silo and everyone in it hinges on what I’m about to show you,” Bernard said. He beckoned Lukas down the brightly lit but narrow corridor toward a wider room beyond. The servers felt very far above. Lukas felt closed off from every other soul in the silo; he was curious, but also afraid. He wasn’t sure he wanted such responsibility and cursed himself for going along with this.
And yet, his feet moved. They carried him down that hidden passageway and into a room full of the strange and curious, a place that made the charting of stars seem insignificant, a den where the sense of the world’s scale, of size, took on wholly new proportions.
42
Juliette left her soup-slathered helmet on the floor and moved toward the pale-green glow of light. It seemed brighter than before. She wondered how much of the darkness had been because of her helmet. As her senses returned, she remembered that it wasn’t a piece of glass she’d been looking through, but some infernal screen that took the world as she saw it and overlaid it with half a lie. Maybe it had dimmed her view in the process.
She noticed the stench from her drenched suit followed her, the smell of rotten vegetables and mold—or possibly the toxic fumes from the outside world. Her throat burned a little as she crossed the cafeteria toward the stairwell. Her skin began to itch, and she couldn’t tell if it was from fear, her imagination, or truly something in the air. She didn’t dare risk finding out, so she held her breath and hurried as fast as her weary legs would take her, around the corner to where she knew the stairs would be.