“S-s-sorry,” the man muttered. He licked his mouth and swallowed. The knife was trembling uncontrollably.
“My name’s Jules,” she said, realizing this man was much more frightened of her than the other way around. “What’s yours?”
He glanced at the knife blade held sideways between them, almost as if checking a mirror. He shook his head.
“No name,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “No need.”
“Are you alone?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Solo,” he said. “Years.” He looked up at her. “Where did”—he licked his lips again, cleared his throat; his eyes watered and glinted in the light—“you come from? What level?”
“You’ve been by yourself for years?” Juliette said in wonder. She couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t come from any level,” she told him. “I came from another silo.” She enunciated this last softly and slowly, worried what this news might do to such a seemingly fragile man.
But Solo nodded as if this made sense. It was not the reaction Juliette had expected.
“The outside . . .” Solo looked again at the knife. He reached out of the hole and set it on the grating, slid it away from both of them. “Is it safe?”
Juliette shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had a suit. It wasn’t a far walk. But still, I shouldn’t be alive.”
Solo bobbed his head. He looked up at her, wet tracks running from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his beard. “None of us should,” he said. “Not a one.”
47
“What is this place?” Lukas asked Bernard. The two of them stood before a large chart hanging on the wall like a tapestry. The diagrams were precise, the lettering ornate. It showed a grid of circles evenly spaced with lines between them and intricacies inside each. Several of the circles were crossed out with thick red marks of ink. It was just the sort of majestic diagramming he hoped to achieve one day with his star charts.
“This is our Legacy,” Bernard said simply.
Lukas had often heard him speak similarly of the mainframes upstairs.
“Are these supposed to be the servers?” he asked, daring to rub his hands across a piece of paper the size of a small bedsheet. “They’re laid out like the servers.”
Bernard stepped beside him and rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Interesting. So they are. I never noticed that before.”
“What are they?” Lukas looked closer and saw each was numbered. There was also a jumble of squares and rectangles in one corner with parallel lines spaced between them, keeping the blocky shapes separate and apart. These figures contained no detail within them, but the word Atlanta was written in large letters beneath.
“We’ll get to that. Come, let me show you something.”
At the end of the room was a door. Bernard led him through this, turning on more lights as he went.
“Who else comes down here?” Lukas asked, following along.
Bernard glanced back over his shoulder. “No one.”
Lukas didn’t like that answer. He glanced back over his own shoulder, feeling like he was descending into something people didn’t return from.
“I know this must seem sudden,” Bernard said. He waited for Lukas to join him, threw his small arm around Lukas’s shoulder. “But things changed this morning. The world is changing. And she rarely does it pleasantly.”
“Is this about . . . the cleaning?” He’d nearly said Juliette. The picture of her felt hot against his breastbone.
Bernard’s face grew stern. “There was no cleaning,” he said abruptly. “And now all hell will break loose, and people will die. And the silos, you see, were designed from the ground down to prevent this.”
“Designed,” Lukas repeated. His heart beat once, twice. His brain whirred through its circuits and finally computed that Bernard had said something that had made no sense.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you say silos?”
“You’ll want to familiarize yourself with this.” Bernard gestured toward a small desk which had a fragile-looking wooden chair tucked up against it. There was a book on the desk unlike any Lukas had ever seen, or even heard of. It was nearly as thick as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are never to remove from your neck. Come down when you can and read. Our history is in here, as well as every action you are to take in any emergency.”
Lukas approached the book, a lifetime’s worth of paper, and hinged open the cover. The contents were machine printed, the ink pitch-black. He flipped through a dozen pages of listed contents until he found the first page of the main text. Oddly, he recognized the opening lines immediately.
“It’s the Pact,” he said, looking up at Bernard. “I already know quite a bit of—”
“This is the Pact,” Bernard told him, pinching the first half inch of the thick book. “The rest is the Order.”
He stepped back.
Lukas hesitated, digesting this, then reached forward and flopped the tome open near its middle.
In the Event of an Earthquake:
For casement cracking and outside leak, see airlock breach (p. 2,180)
For collapse of one or more levels, see support columns under sabotage (p. 751)
For fire outbreak, see . . .
“Sabotage?” Lukas flipped a few pages and read something about air handling and asphyxiation. “Who came up with all this stuff?”
“People who experienced many bad things.”
“Like . . . ?” He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say this, but it felt like taboos were allowed to be broken down there. “Like the people before the uprising?”
“The people before those people,” Bernard said. “The one people.”
Lukas closed the book. He shook his head, wondering if this was all a gag, some kind of initiation. The priests usually made more sense than this. The children’s books, too.
“I’m not really supposed to learn all this, am I?”
Bernard laughed. His countenance had fully transformed from earlier. “You just need to know what’s in there so you can access it when you need to.”
“What does it say about this morning?” He turned to Bernard, and it dawned on him suddenly that no one knew of his fascination, his enchantment, with Juliette. The tears had evaporated from his cheeks; the guilt of possessing her forbidden things had overpowered his shame for falling so hard for someone he hardly knew. And now this secret had wandered out of sight. It could be betrayed only by the flush he felt on his cheeks as Bernard studied him and pondered his question.
“Page seventy-two,” Bernard said, the humor draining from his face and replaced with the frustration from earlier.
Lukas turned back to the book. This was a test. A shadowing rite. It had been a long time since he’d performed under a caster’s glare. He began flipping through the pages and saw at once that the section he was looking for came right after the Pact, was at the very beginning of the Order.
He found the page. At the very top, in bold print, it said:
In the Event of a Failed Cleaning
And below this rested terrible words strung into awful meaning. Lukas read the instructions several times, just to make sure. He glanced over at Bernard, who nodded sadly, before Lukas turned back to the print.