She leaned far out over the railing and placed her hand on the hodgepodge of pipes and tubing fastened to the concrete wall of the stairwell. She tried to discern, with hands chilled by the cool air of the deep, any vibration from water gurgling through the pipe.
“Anything?” she called down to Solo. There seemed to be the slightest tremor in the plastic tubing, but it could’ve been her pulse rather than its.
“I think so!”
Solo’s thin voice echoed from far below.
Juliette frowned and peered down the dimly lit shaft, down that gap between steel step and thick concrete. She would have to go see for herself.
Leaving her small tool bag on the steps—no danger of anyone coming along to trip over it—she took the treads two at a time and spiraled her way deeper into the silo. The electrical wiring and the long snake of pipes spun into view with each rotation, drips of purple adhesive marking every laborious joint she’d cut and fastened by hand.
Other wiring ran alongside hers, electrical cables snaking from IT far above to power the grow lights of the lower farms. Juliette wondered who had rigged this stuff up. It hadn’t been Solo; this wiring had been strung during the early days of silo 17’s downfall. Solo had simply become the lucky beneficiary of someone else’s hard and desperate work. Grow lights now obeyed their timers, the greenery obeyed the urge to blossom, and beyond the stale stench of oil and gas, of floods and unmoving air, the ripe tinge of plants growing out of control could be nosed from several landings away.
Juliette stopped at the landing of one-thirty-six, the last dry landing before the flood. Solo had tried to warn her, had tried to tell her even as she lusted over the image of the massive diggers on the wall-sized schematic. Hell, she should’ve known about the flood without being told. Groundwater was forever seeping into her own silo, a hazard of living below the water table. Without power to the pumps, the water would naturally make its way in and rise.
Out on the landing, she leaned on the steel railing and caught her breath. A dozen steps below, Solo stood on the single dry tread their efforts had exposed. Nearly three weeks of wiring and plumbing, of scrapping a good section of the lower hydroponics farm, of finding a pump and routing the overflow to the water treatment facility tanks, and they had uncovered a single step.
Solo turned and smiled up at her. “It’s working, right?” He scratched his head, his wild hair jutting at all angles, his beard flecked with gray that his youthful jubilance denied. The hopeful question hung in the air, a cloud visible from the cold of the down deep.
“It’s not working enough,” Juliette told him, annoyed with the progress. She peered over the railing, past the jutting toes of borrowed boots and to the colorful slick of water below. The mirrored surface of oil and gas stood perfectly still. Beneath this coat of slime, the emergency lights of the stairwell glowed eerily green, lending the depths a haunting look that matched the rest of the empty silo.
In that silence, Juliette heard a faint gurgle in the pipe beside her. She even thought she could hear the distant buzz of the submerged pump a dozen or so feet below the oil and gas. She tried to will the water up that tube, up twenty levels and hundreds of joints to the vast and empty treatment tanks above.
Solo coughed into his fist. “What if we install another—?”
Juliette raised her hand to quiet him. She was doing the math.
The volume of the eight levels of Mechanical was difficult to figure, so many corridors and rooms that may or may not be flooded, but she could guess the height of the cylindrical shaft from Solo’s feet to the security station. The lone pump had moved the level of the flood a little less than a foot in two weeks. Eighty or ninety feet to go. With another pump, say a year to get to the entrance of Mechanical. Depending on how watertight the intervening levels were, it could be much more. Mechanical itself could take three or four times as long to clear.
“What about another pump?” Solo insisted.
Juliette felt nauseous. Even with three more of the small pumps from the hydroponic farms, and with three more runs of pipe and wiring to go with them, she was looking at a year, possibly two, before the silo was perfectly dry. She wasn’t sure if she had a year. Just a few weeks of being in that abandoned place, alone with a half-sane man, and she was already starting to hear whispers, to forget where she was leaving things, finding lights on she swore she’d turned off. Either she was going crazy, or Solo found humor in making her feel that way. Two years of this life, of her home so close but so impossibly far away—
She leaned over the railing, feeling like she really might be sick. As she gazed down at the water and through her reflection cast in that film of oil, she suddenly considered risks even crazier than two years of near-solitude.
“Two years,” she told Solo. It felt like voicing a death sentence. “Two years. That’s how long this’ll take if we add three more pumps. Six months at least on the stairwell, but the rest will go slower.”
“Two years!” Solo sung. “Two years two years!” He tapped his boot twice against the water on the step below, sending her reflection into sickening waves of distortion. He spun in place, peering up at her. “That’s no time!”
Juliette fought to control her frustration. Two years would feel like forever. And what would they find down there, anyway? What condition would the main generator be in? Or the diggers? A machine submerged under fresh water might be preserved as long as air didn’t get to it, but as soon as any of it was exposed by the pumps, the corrosion would begin. It was the nastiness of oxygen working on wet metal that spelled doom for anything useful down there. Machines and tools would need to be dried immediately and then oiled. And with only two of them—
Juliette watched, horrified, as Solo bent down, waved away the film of grease at his feet, and scooped up two palms of the brackish filth below. He slurped noisily and happily.
—okay, with only one of them working diligently at salvaging the machines, it wouldn’t be enough.
Maybe she’d be able to salvage the backup generator. It would require less work and still provide plenty of power.
“What to do for two years?” Solo asked, wiping his beard with the back of his hand and looking up at her.
Juliette shook her head. “We’re not waiting two years,” she told him. The last three weeks in silo 17 had been too much. This, she didn’t say.
“Okay,” he said, shrugging. He clomped up the stairwell in his too-big boots. His gray coveralls were also baggy, like he was still trying to wear clothing tailored for his father. He joined Juliette on the landing, smiled at her through his glistening beard. “You look like you have more projects,” he said happily.
She nodded silently. Anything the two of them worked on, whether it was fixing the sloppy wiring of the long-ago dead, or improving the farms, or repairing a light fixture’s ballast, Solo referred to as a “project.” And he professed to love projects. She decided it was something from his youth, some sort of survival mechanism he’d concocted over the years that allowed him to tackle whatever needed doing with a smile instead of horror or loneliness.
“Oh, we’ve got quite a project ahead of us,” Juliette told him, already dreading the job. She started making a mental list of all the tools and spares they’d need to scrounge on their way back up.
Solo laughed and clapped his hands. “Good,” he said. “Back to the workshop!” He twirled his finger over his head, pointing up at the long climb ahead of them.
“Not yet,” she said. “First, some lunch at the farms. Then we need to stop by Supply for some more things. And then I need some time alone in the server room.” Juliette turned away from the railing and that deep shaft of silver-green water below. “Before we get started in the workshop,” she said, “I’d like to make a call—”
“A call!” Solo pouted. “Not a call. You spend all your time on that stupid thing—”
Juliette ignored him and hit the stairs. She began the long slog up, her fifth in three weeks. And she knew Solo was right: she was spending too much time making calls, too much time with those headphones pulled down over her ears, listening to them beep. She knew it was crazy, that she was going slowly mad in that place, but sitting at the back of that empty server with her microphone close to her lips and the world made quiet by the cups over her ears—just having that wire linking her from a dead world to one that harbored life—it was the closest she could get in silo 17 to making herself feel sane.
5
• Silo 18 •
“—was the year the Civil War consumed the thirty-three states. More American lives were lost in this conflict than in all the subsequent ones combined, for any death was a death among kin. For four years, the land was ravaged, smoke clearing over battlefields of ruin to reveal brother heaped upon brother. More than half a million lives were lost. Some estimates range to almost twice that. Disease, hunger, and heartbreak ruled the life of man—”
The pages of the book flashed crimson just as Lukas was getting to the descriptions of the battlefields. He stopped reading and glanced up at the overhead lights. Their steady white had been replaced with the throbbing red, which meant someone was in the server room above him. He retrieved the loose silver thread curled up on the knee of his coveralls and laid it carefully into the spine of the book. Closing the old tome, he returned it to its tin case with care, then slid it into the gap on the bookshelf, completing the vast wall of silvery spines. Padding silently across the room, he bent down in front of the computer and shook the mouse to wake the screen.
A window popped up with live views of the servers, only distorted from such wide angles. It was another secret in a room overflowing with them, this ability to see distant places. Lukas searched through the cameras, wondering if it was Sammi or another tech coming to make a repair. His grumbling stomach, meanwhile, hoped it was someone bringing him lunch.
In camera four, he finally spotted his visitor: A short figure in gray coveralls sporting a mustache and glasses. He was slightly stooped, a tray in his hands dancing with silverware, a sloshing glass of water, and a covered plate, all of it partly supported by his protruding belly. Bernard glanced up at the camera as he walked by, his eyes piercing Lukas from a level away, a tight smile curling below his mustache.
Lukas left the computer and hurried down the hallway to get the hatch for him, his bare feet slapping softly on the cool steel grating. He scrambled up the ladder with practiced ease and slid the worn red locking handle to the side. Just as he lifted the grate, Bernard’s shadow threw the ladderway into darkness. The tray came to a clattering rest as Lukas shifted the section of flooring out of the way.
“I’m spoiling you today,” Bernard said. He sniffed and uncovered the plate. A fog of trapped steam billowed out of the metal hood—two stacks of pork ribs revealing themselves underneath.
“Wow.” Lukas felt his stomach rumble at the sight of the meat. He lifted himself out of the hatch and sat on the floor, feet dangling down by the ladder. He pulled the tray into his lap and picked up the silverware. “I thought we had the silo on strict rations, at least until the resistance was over.”
He cut a piece of tender meat free and popped it in his mouth. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.” He chewed and savored the rush of proteins, reminded himself to be thankful for the animal’s sacrifice.
“The rations haven’t been lifted,” Bernard said. He crouched down and waved at the plate. “We had a pocket of resistance flare up in the bazaar, and this poor guy found himself in the crossfire. I wasn’t about to let him go to waste. Most of the meat, of course, went to the wives and husbands of those we’ve lost—”
“Mmm?” Lukas swallowed. “How many?”
“Five, plus the three from that first attack.”
Lukas shook his head.
“It’s not bad, considering.” Bernard brushed his mustache with his hand and watched Lukas eat. Lukas gestured with his fork while he chewed, offering him some, but Bernard waved him away. The older man leaned back on the empty server that housed the uplink and the locking handle for the ladderway. Lukas tried not to react.
“So how long will I need to stay in here?” He tried to sound calm, like any answer would do. “It’s been three weeks, right?” He cut off another bite, ignoring the vegetables. “You think a few more days?”
Bernard rubbed his cheeks and ran his fingers up through his thinning hair. “I hope, but I don’t know. I’ve left it up to Sims, who’s convinced the threat isn’t over. Mechanical has themselves barricaded pretty good down there. They’ve threatened to cut the power, but I don’t think they will. I think they finally get that they don’t control the juice up here on our levels. They probably tried to cut it before they stormed in, and then were surprised to see us all lit up.”
“You don’t think they’ll cut the power to the farms, do you?” He was thinking of the rations, his fear of the silo being starved.
Bernard frowned. “Eventually. Maybe. If they get desperate enough. But that’ll just erode whatever support those greasers have up here. Don’t worry, they’ll get hungry enough and give in. It’s all going by the book.”
Lukas nodded and took a sip of water. The pork was the best he thought he’d ever had.
“Speaking of the book,” Bernard asked, “are you catching up with your studies?”
“Yeah,” Lukas lied. He nodded. In truth, he had hardly touched the book of Order. The more interesting details were found elsewhere.
“Good. When this annoyance is over, we’ll schedule you some extra shifts in the server room. You can spend that time shadowing. Once we reschedule the election, and I don’t think anyone else will run, especially not after all this, I’ll be up-top a lot more. IT will be yours to run.”