Aurora(54)

Marques had shown up to the airport with a family.

Aubrey had failed to follow all his good advice.

His dentist had proven to be a bad hire.

Jimmy had asked to bring an unvetted stranger into the complex.

Ann-Sophie had returned home yesterday at dinnertime with her cheeks flushed, her speech slurred, and had lied about where she’d been, and,

Brady had checked in via SMS from the satellite phone in Illinois, but in a spare and incomplete manner. “Arrived in Aurora, contact made. Leaving in morning.”



When Thom had messaged him back, asking if the money handover had been completed, Brady had failed to respond. So there was more to the story there. What on earth could it possibly be? Was Brady going to prove unreliable as well? Brady? The idea was unthinkable, but there were a lot of unimaginable events playing out right now, one after the other, and there were more that could be added to the list.

It was only day five of the crisis, but Thom had noted that the residents of the silo were failing to follow the posted schedules that had been meticulously created for them. Successful communal living thrives on a balanced and rigorously observed schedule that includes exercise, contributive labor, and frequent periods of quiet isolation. That was all pretty much out the window already, as he’d noticed most of the residents preferred to spend their days outside the silo doing fuck-all or, worse, driving around the desert aimlessly, burning gas and “exploring the area.”

Chloe had taken to desert meditation and was habitually late for her own yoga classes. Dr. Rahman, their reclusive GP, insisted on Zoom appointments even though he was a hundred feet away. And the Friedmans, the husband-and-wife chef duo, had stopped posting menus and taken to just reheating freeze-dried stuff from the acre-size storage floor, or sometimes just leaving the commissary unlocked, for people to feed themselves.

Ann-Sophie, his own wife and the de facto First Lady of Sanctuary, was the worst offender of all. Just this morning, she’d packed up herself and the kids and told Thom they were spending the day with Marques and Beth and Kearie. She declined to answer further questions, and Thom was pointedly not invited to join.

Disruption. This was how it happened. An oscillation was introduced, which would then become a shimmy, which would quickly accelerate into a wobble before spinning out of control and tearing apart an entire structure. This is how industries were collapsed and rebuilt, this was how fortunes were made, and this was how societies, whether big or small, fell apart.

No, Thom thought. Not here. Disorder, entropy, and vulnerability will not be tolerated. These chaos monkeys will not be released.

He sat up abruptly, the pillows falling away from his face. The nap had, as always, revealed not only the problem but also the answer, and he pawed for the yellow legal pad now, clicking the pen, and writing two words in all capital letters at the top of the page: CREATE ORDER.

And he already knew exactly how to do it.

The simplest way to bind a system is to threaten it.





21.





Aurora

The black BMW was still in Aubrey’s driveway when Rusty approached the house on foot, just after 2 a.m. If the car was there, that meant the big ex-cop-looking guy was still there too. He was in the house, and that made everything more complicated. Part of Rusty had expected the guy to be gone, but another, smarter part of him knew better.

OK. So the guy was still there. Was that a reason to bail on the whole plan, though? No, because it wasn’t a plan, he reminded himself. It was a tiny, little unformed scheme that he was noodling around with to see if it would lead to anything.

He didn’t have to go through with it. He would explore the situation, one step at a time, like a hand of Texas hold ’em, and see how the cards fell. If he got dealt a pair of shit hole cards—if he couldn’t get into the house or the money wasn’t somewhere he could find it easily—he’d just walk away. There would be numerous chances to get out, he thought, and he was a good-enough poker player to know when the cards demanded that you toss them in and wait for the next opportunity.

In fact, Rusty was the worst kind of poker player, the kind who gives himself credit for skills and wisdom that he does not possess. He was the kind of card player who routinely relied on divine intervention to save his ass; he was a guy who would stay in a hand not just hoping for a queen but hoping for a red queen, figuring he was due some good luck. Once an opponent realized that essential truth about him, Rusty was dead. Over the years he’d lost several hundred thousand dollars at poker, a number that was held down only because he didn’t have access to more.

Drugs and gambling, Rusty’s twin vices, worked in destructive harmony. Either one taken on its own was pricey enough, but putting the two of them together—the clouded judgment of a habitual drug user and the irrational optimism of a compulsive gambler—was like holding a thumb over the end of a money hose.

Rusty needed cash. More than that, his life depended on getting it. Zielinski and Espinoza had made that clear. And there was money here, he could tell. Money that he was probably owed, if he took a minute to try to figure out exactly why and by whom. So he was just going to, you know, check it out.

He turned into the driveway and walked softly around to the side of the house, grateful for the light from the dimming green aurorae still visible in the sky. He walked along the narrow strip that bordered the south side of the house, just past the cement apron beneath the kitchen window where he’d hooked up the generator a few days earlier.