With one last look inside, one final shudder of regret for not stopping to see her father the last few times she’d passed his nursery, Juliette shut the door on the darkness and the ghosts and considered her predicament. She could very well be perfectly alone in a dying silo. The thrill of being alive at all was quickly draining away, replaced with the reality of her solitude and the tenuousness of her survival. Her stomach grumbled its agreement. She could somehow still smell the fetid soup on her, could taste the stomach acid from her retching. She needed water. She needed clothes. These primal urges were pushed to the forefront, drowning out the severity of her situation, the daunting tasks before her, leaving the regrets of the past behind.
If the layout was the same, the first hydroponic farm would be four floors below and the larger of the two upper dirt farms would lie just below that. Juliette shivered from an updraft of cold air. The stairwell was creating its own thermal cycle, and it would only be colder the further down she went. But she went anyway—lower was better. At the next level, she tried the door. It was too dark to see past the first interior hallway, but it seemed like offices or workrooms. She tried to remember what would be on the fourteenth in her own silo but didn’t know. Was it incredible not to know? The up top of her own home had somehow been strange to her. That made this silo something completely alien.
She held the door to fourteen open and stuck the blade of her knife between the slits of metal that formed every landing’s grating. The handle was left sticking up to form a stop. She allowed the door to close on its sprung hinges until it rested on the handle, holding it open. This let in enough light for her to steal inside and grope around the first handful of rooms.
There were no overalls hanging on the backs of the doors, but one room was set up for conferences. The water in the pitchers had long evaporated, but the purple tablecloth looked warm enough. Warmer than being naked. Juliette moved the assortment of cups, plates, and pitchers and grabbed the cloth. She wrapped it around her shoulders, but it was going to slip off when she moved, so she tried knotting the corners in front of her. Giving up on this, she ran back to the landing, out into the welcomed light, and removed the fabric completely. Grabbing the knife—the door squealing eerily shut behind her—she pushed the blade through the center of the tablecloth and cut a long gash. Her head went through this, the cloth falling past her feet in front of and behind her. A few minutes with the blade and she’d cut away the excess, forming a belt out of one long strip and tying another shock of fabric over her head to keep it warm.
It felt good to be making something, to be engineering her way through one particular problem. She had a tool, a weapon if need be, and clothes. The impossible list of tasks had been whittled down a few shavings. She descended further, her feet cold on the stairs, dreaming of boots, thirsty for water, very much aware of all that remained for her to do.
On fifteen, she was reminded of another necessity as her weary legs nearly gave way. Her knees buckled, she grabbed the railing, and she realized, as the adrenaline left her veins, that she was deathly tired. She paused on the landing, hands on her knees, and took a few deep breaths. How long had she been going? How much further could she push herself? She checked her reflection in the blade of the knife, saw how horrible she looked, and decided she needed rest before she went any further. Rest now, while it was still warm enough not to shiver to pieces.
It was tempting to explore that level for a bed, but she decided against it—there would be little comfort in the pitch black behind those doors. So she curled up on the steel grating of landing fifteen, tucked her arms under her head, and adjusted the tablecloth so every patch of bare skin was covered. And before she could go over the long list forming in her head, exhaustion took over. She drifted off to sleep with only a moment’s panic that she shouldn’t be so tired, that this might be the sort of nap one never woke up from, that she was destined to join the residents of this strange place, curled up and unmoving, frozen and lifeless, rotting and wasting away . . .
43
“Do you understand what you’re proposing we do?”
Knox looked up at McLain, met her wrinkled and wizened eyes with as much confidence as he could muster. The tiny woman who controlled all the silo’s spares and fabrication cut an oddly imposing figure. She didn’t have Knox’s barrel chest or thick beard, had wrists barely bigger than two of his fingers, but she possessed a wizened gray gaze and the weight of hard years that made him feel but a shadow in her presence.
“It’s not an uprising,” he said, the forbidden words moving easily with the grease of habit and time. “We’re setting things to right.”
McLain sniffed. “I’m sure that’s what my great-grandparents said.” She pushed back loose strands of silver hair and peered down at the blueprint spread out between them. It was as if she knew this was wrong but had resigned herself to helping rather than hindering it. Maybe it was her age, Knox thought, peering at her pink scalp through hair so thin and white as to be like filaments of glass. Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.
He looked down at the blueprint and smoothed the sharp creases in the fine paper. He was suddenly aware of his hands, how thick and grease limned his fingers appeared. He wondered if McLain saw him as a brute, storming up here with delusions of justice. She was old enough to consider him young, he realized. Young and hot tempered, while he thought of himself as being old and wise.
One of the dozens of dogs that lived among Supply’s stacks grunted discontentedly under the table as if all this war planning were spoiling its nap.
“I think it’s safe to assume IT knows something is coming,” McLain said, running her small hands across the many floors between them and thirty-four.
“Why? You don’t think we were discreet coming up?”
She smiled up at him. “I’m sure you were, but it’s safe to assume this because it would be dangerous to assume otherwise.”
He nodded and chewed on the part of his beard below his lower lip.
“How long will the rest of your mechanics take to get here?” McLain asked.
“They’ll leave around ten, when the stairwell is dimmed, and be here by two, three at the latest. They’ll be loaded down.”
“And you think a dozen of your men is sufficient to keep things running down below?”
“As long as nothing major breaks, yeah.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Where d’ya think the porters will fall? Or the people from the mids?”
She shrugged. “The mids see themselves as toppers mostly. I know, I spent my childhood up there. They go for the view and eat at the café as much as they can, justifying the climb. The toppers are another question. I think we have more hope among them.”
Knox wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. “Say again?”
She looked up at him, and Knox felt the dog nuzzling against his boots, looking for company or warmth.