ust (Silo, #3)(93)
“Collapse codes?”
Donald nodded and drowned a cough with a gulp of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was comforting to see all the notes out on the table. The pieces were fitting together.
“The silos were built to fail, and all but one of them will. There’s no gravity to take them down, so they had us build them – they had me design them – with great slabs of concrete between the levels.” He shook his head. “It never made sense at the time. It made the dig deeper, increased costs, it’s an insane amount of concrete. I was told it had something to do with bunker busters or radiation leaks. But it was worse than that. It was so they’d have something to take down. The walls aren’t going anywhere – they’re tied to the earth.” He took another sip of water. “That’s why the concrete. And it was because of the gas that they didn’t want lifts. Never understood why they had us take them out. Said they wanted the design more ‘open’. It’s harder to gas a place if you can block off the levels.”
He coughed into the crook of his arm, then drew a finger around a portion of the conference table. “These silos were like a cancer. Forty must’ve communicated with its neighbors, or they just took them offline as well, hacked them remotely. The heads on shift here in our silo started waking people up to deal with it. The collapse codes weren’t working, nothing was. Anna figured they’d discovered the blast charges in forty and had blocked the frequency – something like that.”
He paused and remembered the sound of static from her radio, the jargon she’d used that gave him headaches but made her seem so smart and confident. His gaze fell to the corner of the room where a cot once lay, where she used to sneak over in the middle of the night and slip into his arms. Donald finished his water and wished he had something stronger.
“She finally managed to hack the detonators and bring the silos down,” he said. “It was this or they were going to risk sending drones up or boots over, which is last-page Order stuff. Back of the book.”
“Which is what we’ve been doing,” Charlotte said.
Donald nodded. “I did even more of it before I woke you, back when this level was crawling with pilots.”
“So that’s what happened to these silos? They were collapsed?”
“That’s what Anna said. Everything looked good. The people in charge over here were relying on her, taking her word. We were all put back to sleep. I figured it was my last snooze, that I’d never wake up again. Deep Freeze. But then I was brought out for another shift, and people were calling me by a different name. I woke up as someone else.”
“Thurman,” Darcy said. “The Shepherd.”
“Yeah, except I was the sheep in that story.”
“You were the one who nearly got over the hill?”
Donald saw the way Charlotte stiffened. He returned his attention to the folders and didn’t answer.
“This woman you’re talking about,” Darcy said. “Was she the same one who messed up the database?”
“Yeah. They gave her full access to fix this problem they were having; it was that severe. And her curiosity got her looking in other places. She found this note about what her father and others had planned, realized these collapse codes and gas systems weren’t just for emergencies. We were all one big ticking time bomb, every single silo. She realized that she was going to be put in cryo and never wake up again. And even though she could change anything she wanted, she couldn’t change her gender. Couldn’t make it so that anyone would wake her up, and so she tried to get me to help. She put me in her father’s place.”
Donald paused and fought back the tears. Charlotte rested her hand on his back. The room was quiet for a long moment.
“But I didn’t understand what she wanted me to do. I started digging on my own. And meanwhile, Silo 40 isn’t gone at all. The place is still standing. I realize this when another silo goes dark.” Donald paused. “I was acting head at the time, wasn’t thinking straight, and I signed off on a bombing. Whatever it took to make it all go away. I didn’t care about the tremors, being spotted, just ordered it done. We cratered anything over there that was still standing. Drones and bombs started thinning them out.”
“I remember,” Darcy said. “That was about when I got on shift. There were pilots up in the cafeteria all the time. They worked a lot in the middle of the night.”
“And they worked down here. When they were done and went back under, I woke up my sister. I was just waiting for them to leave. I didn’t want to drop bombs. I wanted to see what was out there.”
Darcy checked the clock on the wall. “And now we’ve all seen it.”
“There’s another two hundred years or so before all the silos go down,” Donald said. “You ever think about why this silo only has lifts, doesn’t have any stairs? You want to know why they call it the express but the damn thing still takes forever to get anywhere?”
“We’re rigged to blow,” Darcy said. “There’s that same mass of concrete between every level.”
Donald nodded. This kid was fast. “If they let us walk up a flight of stairs, we’d see. We’d know. And enough people here would know what that was for, what this meant. They might as well put the countdown clock on every desk. People would go insane.”