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.”
16
“Give leave awhile,
we must talk in secret.”
“That 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 one day achieve 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 continuous piece of paper the size of a small bed sheet. “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 large 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 on 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 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 its old circuits and finally computed something Bernard had said 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 stood nearly as high as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are to never 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 body. 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 seepage, turn to AIRLOCK BREACH (p.2180)
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 have experienced many bad things.”
“Like…?” He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say this, but it felt like taboos weren’t allowed 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 only be betrayed 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 this new Order.
He found the page. At the very top, in bold print, it said:
In Case 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.
In Case of a Failed Cleaning:
Prepare for War.
17
“Poor living corpse, closed in a dead man’s tomb!”
Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.
“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress in one corner resting directly on the floor, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing off. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.
“You live here alone?” Juliette asked. “Is there no one else?” She couldn’t help but hear the thin hope in her voice.
Solo shook his head.
“What about further down?” Juliette inspected her wound. The bleeding had almost stopped.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I’ll find a tomato missing, but I figure it’s the rats.” He stared at the corner of the room. “Can’t catch them all,” he said. “More and more of them—”
“Sometimes you think there’s more of you, though? More survivors?” She wished he would focus.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his beard, looked around the room like there was something he should be doing for her, something you offered guests. “I find things moved sometimes. Find things left out. The grow lights left on. Then I remember I did them.”
He laughed to himself. It was the first natural thing she’d seen him do, and Jules figured he’d been doing a lot of it over the years. You either laughed to keep yourself sane or you laughed because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.
“Thought the knife in the door was something I did. Then I found the pipe. Wondered if it was left behind by a really, really big rat.”
Juliette smiled. “I’m no rat,” she said. She adjusted her tablecloth, patted her head and wondered what had happened to her other scrap of cloth.
Solo seemed to consider this.
“So how many years has it been?” she asked.
“Thirty-four,” he said, no pause.
“Thirty-four years? Since you’ve been alone?”
He nodded, and the floor seemed to fall away from her. Her head spun with the concept of that much time with no other person around.
“How old are you?” she asked. He didn’t seem all that much older than her.
“Fifty,” he said. “Next month, I’m pretty sure.” He smiled. “This is fun, talking.” He pointed around the room. “I talk to things sometimes, and whistle.” He looked straight at her. “I’m a good whistler.”
Juliette realized she probably wasn’t even born when whatever happened here took place. “How exactly have you survived all these years?” she asked.
“I dunno. Didn’t set out to survive for years. Tried to last hours. They stack up. I eat. I sleep. And I—” He looked away, went to one of the shelves and sorted through some cans, many of them empty. He found one with the lid hinged open, no label, and held it out toward her. “Bean?” he asked.
Her impulse was to decline, but the eager look on his poor face made it impossible. “Sure,” she said, and she realized how hungry she was. She could still taste the brackish water from earlier, the tang of stomach acid, the unripe tomato. He stepped closer, and she dug into the wet juice in the can and came out with a raw green bean. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.
“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”
“In apartments?” Juliette asked.
Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of other garbage and bachelor debris.
“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.
“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty four years ago?”
He lifted his arms. “What always happens. People go crazy. It only takes once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”
He suddenly sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, and twisted the fabric of his coveralls where they bunched up at his knees. “Our silo had one bad day. Was all it took.” He looked up at Juliette. “No credit for all the years before that. Nope. You wanna sit?”
He waved at the floor. Again, she couldn’t say no. She sat down, away from the reeking bed, and rested her back against the wall. There was so much to digest.
“How did you survive?” she asked. “That bad day, I mean. And since.”
She immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t important to know. But she felt some need, maybe to glimpse what awaited her, maybe because she feared that surviving in this place could be worse than dying on the outside.
“Staying scared,” he said. “My dad’s caster was the head of IT. Of this place.” He nodded. “My dad was a big shadow. Knew about these rooms, one of maybe two or three who did. In just the first few minutes of fighting, he showed me this place, gave me his keys. He made a diversion, and suddenly I became the only one who knew about this place.” He looked down at his lap a moment, then back up. Juliette realized why he seemed so much younger. It wasn’t just the fear, the shyness, that made him seem that way—it was in his eyes. He was locked in the perpetual terror of his teenage ordeal. His body was simply growing old around the frozen husk of a frightened little boy.
He licked his lips. “None of them made it, did they? The ones who got out?” Solo searched her face for answers. She could feel the dire hope leaking out of his pores.
“No,” she said sadly, remembering what it felt like to wade through them, to crawl over them. It felt like weeks ago rather than days.
“So you saw them out there? Dead?”
She nodded.
He dipped his chin. “The view didn’t stay on for long. I only snuck up once in the early days. There was still a lot of fighting going on. As time went by, I went out more often and further. I found a lot of the mess they made. But I haven’t found a body in—” He thought carefully. “—maybe twenty years?”
“So there were others in here for a while?”
He pointed toward the ceiling. “Sometimes they would come in here. With the servers. And fight. They fought everywhere. Got worse as it went along, you know? Fight over food, fight over women, fight over fighting.” He twisted at the waist and pointed back through another door. “These rooms are like a silo in a silo. Made to last ten years. But it lasts longer if you’re solo.” He smiled.