ust (Silo, #3)(23)
The lights overhead weren’t yet blinking. He was early or the man named Donald was late. Lukas made his way toward the far wall, passing by several servers with their sides off and wires streaming out. With Donald’s help, he was figuring out how to fully access the machines, see what was on them. Nothing exciting yet, but he was making progress.
He stopped at the comm server, which had been his home within a home some lifetime ago. Now it was a different sort of conversation he fell into behind that server. It was a different sort of person on the other end of the line.
One of the rickety wooden chairs from below had been brought up. Lukas remembered climbing the ladder and pushing it ahead of him, Juliette yelling at him that they should lower a rope, the two of them arguing like young porters. Beside the chair, a stack of book tins made a side table of sorts. One of the Legacy books was splayed out on top. Lukas made himself comfortable and picked up the book. He had marked pages by creasing the corners. There were small dots in the margins where he had questions. He flipped through the book and scanned the material while he waited on the call.
What once had been boring about the books was now all he cared about. During his imprisonment – his Rite – he had been forced to read the parts of the Order on human behavior. Now he pored over these sections. And Donald, the voice on the other end of the line, had him fairly convinced that these were more than mere stories, these Robbers Cave boys and Milgrams and Skinners. Some of these things had truly happened.
He had graduated from these stories to find even more lessons in the Legacy books. It was the history of the old world that now commanded his attention. Episodic uprisings had occurred over thousands of years. He and Jules argued over whether or not there could be an end to such cyclic violence. The books suggested such hope was folly. And then Lukas had discovered an entire chapter on the dangers of an uprising’s aftermath, the very situation in which they now found themselves. He read about men with strange names – Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Lenin – who fought to liberate a people and then enslaved them into something even worse.
They were legends, Juliette insisted. Myths. Like the ghouls parents use to make their children behave. She saw those chapters to mean that tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. Always with the tearing down, she said, as if the scraps and ashes could be pieced back together.
Lukas disagreed. He thought, and Donald said, that these stories were real. Yes, the revolutions were painful. There would always be a period when things were worse. But eventually, they get better. People learn from their mistakes. This is what he had tried to convince her of one night after a call from Donald had kept them up through the dim time. Jules, of course, had to get in the last word. She had taken him up to the cafeteria and had pointed to the glow over the horizon, to the lifeless hills, to the rare glint of sunlight on decrepit towers. “Here is your world made better,” she had told him. “Here is man well learned from his mistakes.”
Always with the last word, though Lukas had more to say. “Maybe this is the bad time that comes before,” he had whispered into his coffee. And Juliette, for her part, had pretended not to hear.
The pages beneath Lukas’s fingers pulsed red. He glanced up at the lights overhead, now flashing with the incoming call. There was a buzzing from the comm server, a blinking indicator over the very first slot. He gathered the headset and untangled the cord, slotted it into the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Lukas.” The machine removed all intonation from the voice, all emotion. Except for disappointment. That it was not Juliette who answered elicited a letdown that could be felt if not quite heard. Or perhaps it was all in Lukas’s head.
“Just me,” he said.
“Very well. Just so you know, I have pressing matters here. Our time is short.”
“Okay.” Lukas found his place in the book. He skipped down to where they’d previously left off. These talks reminded him of his studies with Bernard, except now he had graduated from the Order to the Legacy. And Donald was swifter than Bernard, more open with his answers. “So … I wanted to ask you something about this Rousseau guy—”
“Before we do,” Donald said, “I need to implore you again to stop with the digging.”
Lukas closed the book on his finger, marking his place. He was glad Juliette had agreed to attend the Town Hall. She got animated whenever this topic came up. Because of an old threat she’d made, Donald seemed to think they were digging toward him, and she made Lukas vow to leave the lie alone. She didn’t want them finding out about her friends in 17 or her plans to rescue them. Lukas found the ruse uncomfortable. Where Juliette distrusted this man – who had warned them both that their home could be shut down at any time through mysterious means – Lukas saw someone trying to help them at some cost to himself. Jules thought Donald was scared for his own life. Lukas thought Donald was frightened for them.
“I’m afraid that the digging will have to continue,” Lukas said. He nearly blurted out: She won’t stop, but best for there to be some sense of solidarity.
“Well, my people can pick up the vibrations. They know something is happening.”
“Can you tell them we’re having trouble with our generator? That it’s misaligned again?”