“What do you mean? A silo in a silo?”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry. I’m used to talking with someone who knows everything I know.” He winked at her, and Juliette realized he meant himself. “You don’t know what a silo is.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I was born and raised in a place just like this. Only, I guess you could say that we’re still having good days and not giving ourselves credit for them.”
Solo smiled. “Then what’s a silo?” he asked, that teenage defiance bubbling to the surface.
“It’s . . .” Juliette searched for the words. “It’s our home. A building like those over the hill, but underground. The silo is the part of the world you can live in. The inside,” she said, realizing it was harder to define than she thought.
Solo laughed.
“That’s what the word means to you. But we use words all the time without really understanding them.” He pointed toward the shelf with all the metal canisters. “All the real knowing is in those. Everything that ever happened.” He shot her a look. “You’ve heard the term “raging bull’? Or someone being “bullheaded’?”
She nodded. “Of course.”
“But what’s a bull?” he asked.
“Someone who’s careless. Or mean, like a bully.”
Solo laughed. “So much we don’t know,” he said. He studied his fingernails. “A silo isn’t the world. It’s nothing. The term, this word, comes from a long time ago, back when crops grew in the outside further than you could see”—he waved his hand over the floor like it was some vast terrain”—back when there were more people than you could count, back when everyone had lots of kids.” He glanced up at her. His hands came together and kneaded one another, almost as if embarrassed to bring up the making of kids around a woman.
“They grew so much food,” he continued, “that even for all these people they couldn’t eat it all, not at once. So they stored it away in case times got bad. They took more seeds of grain than you could count and they would pour them into these great silos that stood aboveground—”
“Aboveground,” Juliette said. “Silos.” She felt as though he must be making this up, some delusion he’d concocted over the lonely decades.
“I can show you pictures,” he said petulantly, as if upset by her doubt. He got up and hurried to the shelf with the metal canisters. He read the small white labels on the bottom, running his fingers across them.
“Ah!” He grabbed one—it looked heavy—and brought it to her. The clasp on the side released the lid, revealing a thick object inside.
“Let me,” he said, even though she hadn’t moved a muscle to help. He tilted the box and let the heavy object fall onto his palm, where it balanced expertly. It was the size of a children’s book, but ten or twenty times as thick. Still, it was a book. She could see the edges of miraculously fine-cut paper.
“I’ll find it,” he said. He flipped pages in large chunks, each flap a fortune in pressed paper clapping solidly against more fortunes. Then he whittled his search down more finely, a pinch at a time, before moving to a single page at a time.
“Here.” He pointed.
Juliette moved closer and looked. It was like a drawing, but so exact as to almost seem real. It was like looking at the view of the outside from the cafeteria, or the picture of someone’s face on an ID, but in color. She wondered if this book had batteries in it.
“It’s so real,” she whispered, rubbing it with her fingers.
“It is real,” he said. “It’s a picture. A photograph.”
Juliette marveled at the colors, the green field and blue sky reminding her of the lies she had seen in her visor’s false images. She wondered if this was false as well. It looked nothing like the rough and smeared photos she’d ever seen.
“These buildings”—he pointed to what looked like large white cans sitting on the ground—“these are silos. They hold seed for the bad times. For until the times get good again.”
He looked up at her. They were just a few feet apart, Juliette and him. She could see the wrinkles around his eyes, could see how much the beard concealed his age.
“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” she told him.
He pointed at her. Pointed at his own chest. “We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times.”
“Who? Who put us here? And what bad times?”
He shrugged. “But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope.”
He glanced up from the book and bit his lip, water welling up in his eyes. “Seeds don’t go crazy,” he told her. “They don’t. They have bad days and lots of good ones, but it doesn’t matter. You leave them and leave them, however many you bury, and they do what seeds do when they’re left alone too long . . .”
He stopped. Closed the book and held it to his chest. Juliette watched as he rocked back and forth, ever so slightly.
“What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him.
He frowned.
“We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.”
49
The waiting beyond the stacks of Supply was the worst. Those who could napped. Most engaged in nervous banter. Knox kept checking the time on the wall, picturing all the pieces moving throughout the silo. Now that his people were armed, all he could hope for was a smooth and bloodless transfer of power. He hoped they could get their answers, find out what had been going on in IT—those secretive bastards—and maybe vindicate Jules. But he knew bad things could happen.
He saw it on Marck’s face, the way he kept looking at Shirly. The worry there was evident in the man’s frown, the tilt of his eyebrows, the wrinkles above the bridge of his nose. Knox’s shift leader wasn’t hiding the concern for his wife as well as he probably thought he was.
Knox pulled out his multi-tool and checked the blade. He flashed his teeth in the reflection to see if anything from his last meal was stuck there. As he was putting it away, one of Supply’s shadows emerged from behind the stacks to let them know they had visitors.
“What color visitors?” Shirly asked as the group gathered their guns and lurched to their feet.
The young girl pointed at Knox. “Blue. Same as you.”
Knox rubbed the girl’s head as he slipped between the shelving units. This was a good sign. The rest of his people from Mechanical were running ahead of schedule. He made his way to the counter while Marck gathered the others, waking a few, the extra rifles clattering as they were gathered up.
As Knox rounded the counter, he saw Pieter enter through the front door, the two Supply workers guarding the landing having allowed him past.
Pieter smiled as he and Knox clasped hands. Members of Pieter’s refinery crew filed in behind, their customary black overalls replaced with the more discreet blue.
“How goes it?” Knox asked.
“The stairs sing with traffic,” Pieter said. His chest swelled as he took in and held a deep breath, then blew it out. Knox imagined the pace they’d maintained to shave off so much time.
“Everyone’s under way?” He and Pieter slid to the side while their two groups merged, members of Supply introducing themselves or embracing those they already knew.