ust (Silo, #3)(101)

“How did you raise them the last time?” Donald asked.

“Just like this.” She stared at the radio for a moment before turning in her seat to face him, her brow furrowed with worry. Donald expected a thousand questions: How long before they were taken? What were they going to do next? How could they get someplace safe? A thousand questions, but not the one she asked, her voice a sad whisper: “When did you go outside?”

Donald took a step back. He wasn’t sure how to answer. “What do you mean?” he asked, but he knew what she meant.

“I heard what Darcy said about you nearly getting over a hill. When was this? Are you still going out? Is that where you go when you leave me? Is that why you’re sick?”

Donald slumped against one of the drone control stations. “No,” he said. He watched the radio, hoping for some voice to break through the static and save him. But his sister waited. “I only went once. I went … thinking I’d never come back.”

“You went out there to die.”

He nodded. And she didn’t get angry with him. She didn’t yell or scream like he feared she might, which was why he had never told her before. She simply stood and rushed to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. And Donald cried.

“Why are they doing this to us?” Charlotte asked.

“I don’t know. I want to make it stop.”

“But not like that.” His sister stepped back and wiped her eyes. “Donny, you have to promise me. Not like that.”

He didn’t reply. His ribs ached from where she’d embraced him. “I wanted to see Helen,” he finally said. “I wanted to see where she’d lived and died. It was … a bad time. With Anna. Trapped down here.” He remembered how he had felt about Anna then, how he felt about her now. So many mistakes. He had made mistakes at every turn. It made it difficult to make anymore decisions, to act.

“There has to be something we can do,” Charlotte said. Her eyes lit up. “We could lighten a drone enough to carry us from here. The bunker busters must weigh sixty kilos. If we lighten another drone up, it could carry you.”

“And fly it how?”

“I’ll stay here and fly it.” She saw the look on his face and frowned. “Better that one of us gets out,” she said. “You know I’m right. We could launch before daylight, just send you as far as you can go. At least live a day away from this place.”

Donald tried to imagine a flight on the back of one of those birds, the wind pelting his helmet, tumbling off in a rough landing, lying in the grass and staring up at the stars. He pulled his rag out and filled it with blood, shook his head as he put it away. “I’m dying,” he told her. “Thurman said I have another day or two. He told me that a day or two ago.”

Charlotte was silent.

“Maybe we could wake another pilot,” he suggested. “I could hold a gun to his head. We could get you and Darcy both out of here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” his sister said.

“But you would have me go out there alone?”

She shrugged. “I’m a hypocrite.”

Donald laughed. “Must be why they recruited you.”

They listened to the radio.

“What do you think is going on in all those other silos right now?” Charlotte asked. “You dealt with them. Is it as bad there as it is here?”

Donald considered this. “I don’t know. Some of them are happy enough, I suppose. They get married and have kids. They have jobs. They don’t know anything beyond their walls, so I guess they don’t have some of the stress about what’s out there that you and I feel. But I think they have something else that we don’t have, this deep feeling that something is wrong with how they’re living. Buried, you know. And we understand that, and it chokes us, but they just have this chronic anxiety, I think. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen men happy enough here to get through their shifts. I’ve watched others go mad. I used to … I used to play solitaire for hours on my computer upstairs, and that’s when my brain was truly off and I wasn’t miserable. But then, I wasn’t really alive, either.”

Charlotte reached out and squeezed his hand.

“I think some of the silos that went dark have it best—”

“Don’t say that,” Charlotte whispered.

Donald looked up at her. “No, not that. I don’t think they’re dead, not all of them. I think some of them withdrew and are living how they want quietly enough that no one will come after them. They just want to be left alone, not controlled, free to choose how they live and die. I think it’s what Anna wanted them to have. Living down here on this level for a year, trying to find some life without being able to go outside, I think it changed how she viewed all this.”

“Or maybe it was being out of that box for a little while,” Charlotte said. “Maybe she didn’t like what it felt like to be put away.”

“Or that,” Donald agreed. Again, he thought how things would’ve been different had he woken her with some trust, had heard her out. If Anna was there to help, everything would be better. It pained him, but he missed her as much as he missed Helen. Anna had saved him, had tried to save others, and Donald had misunderstood and had hated her for both actions.