ust (Silo, #3)(84)
Raph whistled. “That’s enough for a few hundred years of cleanings, eh? Assuming you were sending ’em out one a year.”
Juliette thought that was about right. And she supposed, now that she knew how the outside air got poisoned, that this was probably the plan: a steady flow of the exiled. Not cleaning, but doing the exact opposite. Making the world dirty.
“Hey, do you remember Gina from Supply?”
Juliette nodded, and the past tense was a busted knuckle. Quite a few from Supply had made it down, but Gina hadn’t.
“Did you know we were seeing each other?”
Juliette shook her head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry, Raph.”
“Yeah.”
They made a turn of the staircase.
“Gina did an analysis once of a bunch of spares. You know they had this computer just to tally everything, where it was located, how many were on order, all of that? Well, IT had burned through a few chips for their servers, bang, bang, bang, just one of those weeks where failures crop up all in a row—”
“I remember those weeks,” Juliette said.
“Well, Gina wondered how long before they were gonna run out of these chips. This was one of those parts they couldn’t make more of, you know? Intricate things. So she looked at the average failure rate, how many they had in the pens, and she came up with two hundred and forty-eight years.”
Juliette waited for him to continue. “That number mean something?” she asked.
“Not at first, no. But the number got her curious because she’d run a similar report a few months prior, again out of curiosity, and the number had been close to that. A few weeks later, a bulb goes out in her office. Just a bulb. It winks out while she’s working on something, and it got her thinkin’. You’ve seen the storehouse of bulbs they’ve got, right?”
“I haven’t, actually.”
“Well, they’re vast. She took me down there once. And …”
Raph fell quiet for a few treads.
“Well, the storehouse is about half empty. So Gina runs the figures for a simple bulb for the whole silo and comes up with two hundred and fifty-one years’ supply.”
“About the same number.”
“That’s right. And now she’s real curious – you’d have loved this about her – she started running reports like this in her spare time, big-ticket items like fuel cells and pregnancy implants and timer chips. And they all converge at right about two-fifty. And that’s when she figures we’ve got that much time left.”
“Two hundred and fifty years,” Juliette said. “She told you this?”
“Yeah. Me and a few others over drinks. She was pretty drunk, mind you. And I remember …” Raph laughed. “I remember Jonny saying that she was remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, and speaking of forgetting the missus, he needed to get back to his. And one of Gina’s friends from Supply says that people’ve been saying stuff like this since her grandmother was around, and they would always be saying that. But Gina says the only reason this wasn’t occurring to everyone at once is because it’s early. She said to wait two hundred years or so, and people would be going down into empty caverns to get the last of everything, and then it would be obvious.”
“I’m truly sorry she’s not here,” Juliette said.
“Me too.” They climbed a few steps. “But that’s not why I’m bringing this up. You said there were a couple hundred suits. Seems like the same count, don’t it?”
“It was just a guess,” Juliette told him. “I only went down there the couple of times.”
“But it seems about right. Don’t it seem like a clock ticking down? Either the gods knew how much to stock away, or they don’t have plans for us past a certain date. Makes you feel like pig’s milk, don’t it? Anyhow, that’s how it seems to me.”
Juliette turned and studied her albino friend, saw the way the green emergency lights gave him a sort of eerie glow. “Maybe,” Juliette said. “Gina may’ve been on to something.”
Raph sniffed. “Yeah, but f*ckit. We’ll be long dead before then.”
He laughed at this, his voice echoing up and down the stairs, but the sentiment made Juliette sad. Not just that everyone she knew would be dead before that date ever happened, but that this knowledge made it easier to stomach an awful and morbid truth: Their days were counted. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.
49
The farms were dark, the overhead lights sleeping on their distantly clicking timers. Down a long and leafy hall, voices spilled as grow plots were claimed and those claims were just as quickly disputed. Things that were not owned by anyone became owned. It reminded Hannah of troubling times. She clutched her child to her chest and stuck close to Rickson.
Young Miles led the way with his dying flashlight. He beat it in his palm whenever it dimmed, which somehow coaxed more life out of it. Hannah glanced back in the direction of the stairwell. “What’s taking Solo so long?” she asked.
Nobody answered. Solo had chased after Elise. It was common enough for her to run off after some distraction, but it was different with all these people everywhere. Hannah was worried.