Second Shift: Order (Shift, #2)(8)

Jenine’s smile melted. She didn’t say anything, didn’t have to—the silence was enough. It was as if she were beginning to understand something even better than Mission did: he was no longer just of the Up Top. He was a child of the entire silo, now. It meant more than being a target everywhere he went. It meant having no one to conspire with anymore, no one to pick out targets with in whispers.

“Well, you’ve gotta get up early tomorrow, anyway.”

“Yeah.” He brushed his hair off his forehead. All the barbers he passed in a typical week, never enough time to stop. He would look like Frankie soon enough. “Hey, it was good seeing you.”

“Same. For sure. Take care of yourself, Mish. Watch your steps.”

Mission smiled. And this time, when she leaned in to touch his neck and kiss his cheek, he was ready to reciprocate. “You know I will,” he said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. “You watch your steps as well.”





5




Later that night, Mission could still feel the soft touch of her hand on his neck and the press of her lips to his cheek. In the quiet and deathly darkness of the silo’s nighttime, he could hear Jenine whispering for him to be safe.

The lights had been dimmed so man and silo might sleep. It was those wee hours when children were long hushed with sing-song lullabies and only those with trouble in mind crept about. Mission held very still in that darkness and waited. He thought on love and other forbidden things. And somewhere in the dark, there came the chirp of rope wound tight and sliding against metal, the bird-like sound fibers made as they gripped steel and strained under some great burden.

A gang of porters huddled with him on the stairway. Mission pressed his cheek against the silo’s untrembling inner post, the cool steel touching him where Jenine’s lips had. He lost himself in his thoughts, controlling his breathing like he’d been shadowed how. And he listened for the rope. He knew well the sounds they made, could feel the burn on his neck, that raised weal healed over by the years, a mark glanced at by others but rarely mentioned aloud. And again in that thick gray of the dim-time there came a chirp like some caged bird flexing its beak.

He waited for the signal. He thought on rope, his own life, and secret love—all these forbidden things. There was a book in Dispatch down on seventy-four that kept accounts. In the main waystation for all the porters, a massive ledger fashioned out of a fortune in paper was kept under lock and key. On this year’s wage of pulp was a careful tally of certain types of deliveries, handwritten so the information couldn’t slip off into wires. Only a handful of porters knew for certain it existed—to the rest the book was legend.

Mission had heard that they kept track of certain kinds of pipe in this ledger, but he didn’t know why. Brass, too, and various types of fluids coming out of Chemical. Any of these or too much rope, and you were put on the watching list. Porters were the lords of rumor. They knew where everything went. And their whisperings gathered like condensation in Dispatch Main where they were written down.

Mission listened to the rope creak and sing in the darkness. He knew what it felt like to have a length of it cinched tightly around his neck. And it seemed strange to him—it seemed wrong—that if you ordered enough to hang yourself, nobody cared. Enough to span a few levels, and eyebrows were raised.

He adjusted his handkerchief and thought on this in the dim-time. A man may take his own life, he supposed, as long as he didn’t take another’s job.

“Ready yourself,” came the whisper from above.

Mission tightened the grip on his knife and concentrated on the task at hand. His eyes strained to see in the wan light. The steady breathing of his neighbors was occasionally heard. They would be squeezing their own knives or their empty and angry fists.

The knives came with the job—they were as much a part of porting as the inverted hearts that grew on practiced calves. A porter’s knife for slicing open delivered goods, for cutting fruit to eat on the climb, and for keeping peace as its owner strayed from all the heights and depths, taking the silo’s dangers two at a time. It was said that a porter’s knife shadowed for a thousand jobs, that its caster was its owner, its home a good sheath. Here waited but another job for Mission’s gleaming shadow. With the flick of a wrist, it would quiet the neck of that singing bird. It would part a rope that groaned under a darkened and illicit strain.

Up the stairwell two full turns, on a dim landing, a group of farmers argued in soft voices as they handled the other end of that rope, as they performed a porter’s job in the dark of night that they might save a hundred chits or two. Beyond the rail across from Mission, a black shape slid past. The rope was invisible in the inky void. He would have to lean out and grope for the chirping bird’s neck. He felt a ring of heat by his collar, and the hilt of his blade felt unsure in his sweating palm.

“Not yet,” Morgan whispered, and Mission felt his old caster’s hand on his shoulder, holding him back, still treating him like a shadow even now. Mission cleared his mind. Another soft chirp, the sound of line taking the strain of a heavy generator, and a dense patch of gray drifted through the black. The men above shouted in whispers as they handled the load, as they did in green the work of men in blue.

While the patch of gray inched past, Mission thought of the night’s danger and marveled at the fear in his heart. He possessed a sudden care for a life he had once labored to end, a life that never should’ve been. He thought of his mother and wondered what she was like, beyond her disobedience. That was all he knew of her. He knew the implant in her hip had failed, as one in ten thousand might. And instead of reporting the malfunction—and the pregnancy—she had hid him in loose clothes until it was past the time the Pact allowed a child to be treated as a cyst.