ust (Silo, #3)(104)
She nodded, followed Darcy, sat back down on the bin and began to work herself into her suit.
“This isn’t happening,” Darcy said. He eyed the pistol Charlotte had set aside while she squirmed into her suit.
“Don’t even think about it,” Donald said. “In fact, you should get busy getting dressed.”
The guard and his sister both turned to peer at him quizzically. Charlotte was just getting her legs into her suit. “What’re you talking about?” she asked.
Donald picked up the hammer sitting among the tools and showed it to her. “I’m not risking that it doesn’t go off,” he said.
She tried to stand up, but her feet weren’t all the way through the suit legs. “You said you had a way of setting it off remotely!”
“I do. Remotely from you.” He aimed the gun at Darcy. “Get dressed. You’ve got five minutes to get inside that lift—”
Darcy lunged for the gun sitting beside Charlotte. Charlotte was faster and snatched it off the bin. Donald took a step back, and then realized his sister was aiming the gun at him. “You get dressed,” she told her brother. Her voice was shaky, her eyes shining. “This isn’t what we discussed. You promised.”
“I’m a liar,” Donald said. He coughed into the crook of his arm and smiled. “You’re a hypocrite and I’m a liar.” He began to back toward the lift, his gun trained on Darcy. “You’re not going to shoot me,” he told his sister.
“Give me the gun,” Darcy told Charlotte. “He’ll listen if I’m holding it.”
Donald laughed. “You aren’t going to shoot me either. That gun’s not loaded. Now get dressed. You two get out of here. I’m giving you half an hour. The drone lift takes twenty minutes to get to the top. The best thing to use for jamming the door is an empty bin. I left one over there.”
Charlotte was crying and tugging at the legs of her suit, trying to get her feet all the way through. Donald had known she’d never go without him unless he made her, that she’d do something stupid. She would run and embrace him and beg him to come, insist that she would stay there and die with him. The only chance of getting her out had been to leave Darcy with her. He was a hero. He would save himself and her both. Donald jabbed the call button on the non-express.
“Half an hour,” he repeated. He saw that Darcy was already unzipping his suit to get in. His sister was yelling at him and trying to stand up, nearly tripped and fell. She started to kick the suit off rather than put it on the rest of the way. The elevator dinged and opened. Donald leaned the cart back and pulled it inside. Tears welled up in his eyes to see the pain he was causing Charlotte. She was halfway down the aisle toward him as the doors began to close.
“I love you,” he said. He wasn’t sure if she heard him. The doors squeezed shut on the sight of her. He scanned his ID, pressed a button, and the lift began to move.
Silo 17
58
The comm hub cooled, even as the fire raged below. Wisps of smoke curled out from underneath it. Juliette studied the interior of the great black machine and saw a ruin of broken circuit boards. The long row of headset jacks had shattered, and several of the wires at the base of the machine had stretched and snapped when it tipped over.
“Will it burn out?” Raph asked, eyeing the wisps of smoke.
Juliette coughed. She could still feel the smoke in her throat, could taste those burning pages. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She watched the lights overhead for any sign of faltering. “What power this silo has runs beneath the grates down there.”
“So this silo could go dark as the mines at any time?” Raph scrambled to his feet. “I’m gonna get our bags, have our flashlights handy. And you need to drink some more water.”
Juliette watched him trot off. She could feel those books burning beneath her. She could feel the wires inside the radio melting. She didn’t think the power would go – hoped it wouldn’t go – but so much else was being lost. The large schematics that had helped her find the digger might be ash already. The schematics to help her choose which silo to reach out to, which silo to dig for, gone.
Tall black machines hummed and whirred all around her, those square-shouldered and unmoved giants. Unmoved save for one. Juliette rose to her feet and studied the fallen server, and the link between those machines and the silos became even more obvious. Here was one collapsed like her home. Like Solo’s home. She studied the arrangement of the servers and remembered that their layout was identical to the layout of the silos. Raph returned with both of their bags. He handed Juliette her canteen of water. She took a sip, lost in thought.
“I’ve got your flashli—”
“Wait,” Juliette said. She twisted the cap back onto her canteen and walked between the servers. She went to the back of one and studied the silver plate above the nest of wires. There was a silo symbol there with its three downward-pointing triangles. The number “29” was etched in the center.
“What’re you looking for?” Raph asked.
Juliette tapped the plate. “Lukas used to say he needed to work on server six or server thirty or whatever. I remember him showing me how these things were laid out like the silos. We have a schematic right here.”