ust (Silo, #3)(94)
“Two hundred years,” Darcy said.
“That might feel like a lot of time to others, but that’s a couple naps for us. But see, that’s the whole point. They need us dead so no one remembers. This whole thing—” Donald waved at the conference table with the depiction of the silos. “It’s as much a time machine as a ticking clock. It’s a way of wiping the earth clean and propelling some group of people, some tribe chosen practically at random, into a future where they inherit the world.”
“More like sending them back into the past,” Charlotte said. “Back into some primitive state.”
“Exactly. When I first learned about the nanos, it was something Iran was working on. The idea was to target an ethnic group. We already had machines that could work on a cellular level. This was just the next step. Going after a species is even easier than targeting a race. It was child’s play. Erskine, the man who came up with this, said it was inevitable, that someone would eventually do it, create a silent bomb that wipes out all of humanity. I think he was right.”
“So what’re you looking for in these folders?” Darcy asked.
“Thurman wanted to know if Anna ever left the armory. I’m pretty sure she did. Things would show up down here that I couldn’t find on the shelves. And he said something about gas lines—”
“We’ve got an hour and a half before I need to get you back,” Darcy said.
“Yeah, okay. So Thurman found something here in this silo, I think. Something his daughter did, something she snuck out and did. I think she left another surprise. When they gassed eighteen, Thurman mentioned that they did it right this time. That they undid someone’s mess. I thought he was talking about my mess, my fighting to save the place, but it was Anna who had changed things. I think she moved some valves around, or if it’s all computerized, just changed some code. There are two types of machines, both of which are in my blood right now. There are those that keep us together, like in the cryopods. And then there are the machines outside around the silos, those we pump inside them to break people down. It’s the ultimate haves versus the have-nots. I think Anna tried to flip this around, tried to rig it up so the next silo we shut down would get a dose of what we get. She was playing Robin Hood on a cellular level.”
He finally found the report. It was well-worn. It had been looked through hundreds of times.
“Silo seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t around when it was put down, but I looked into this. There was a guy there who answered a call after the place was gassed. But I don’t think it was gassed. Not correctly. I think Anna took what we get in our pods to stitch us up and sent that instead.”
“Why?” Charlotte asked.
Donald looked up. “To stop the world from ending. To not murder anyone. To show people some compassion.”
“So everyone at seventeen is okay?”
Donald flipped through the pages of the report. “No,” he said. “For whatever reason, she couldn’t stop the airlock from popping. That’s part of the procedure. And with the amount of gas outside, they didn’t stand a chance.”
“I spoke to someone at seventeen,” Charlotte said. “Your friend … that mayor is over there. There are people there. She said they tunneled their way over.”
Donald smiled. He nodded. “Of course. Of course. She wanted me to think she was coming after us.”
“Well, I think she’s coming after us now.”
“We need to get in touch with her.”
“What we need to do,” Darcy said, “is start thinking about the end of this shift. There’s going to be a helluva beating in about an hour.”
Donald and Charlotte turned to him. He was standing by the door, right near where Donald had been kicked over and over.
“I mean my boss,” Darcy said. “He’s gonna be pissed when he wakes up and discovers a prisoner escaped during my shift.”
Silo 17
53
Juliette and Raph stopped at the lower deputy station to look for another radio or a spare battery. They found neither. The charging rack was still on the wall, but it hadn’t been wired into the makeshift power lines trailing through the stairwell. Juliette weighed whether or not it was worth staying there and getting some juice in the portable or if she should just wait until they got to the Mids station or IT—
“Hey,” Raph whispered. “Do you hear something?”
Juliette shined her flashlight deep into the offices. She thought she heard someone crying. “C’mon,” she said.
She left the charger alone and headed back toward the holding cells. There was a dark form sitting in the very last cell, sobbing. Juliette thought it was Hank at first, that he had wandered up to the nearest thing like a home to him, only to realize what state this world was in. But the man wore robes. It was Father Wendel who peered up at them from behind the bars. The tears in his eyes caught in the glare of the flashlight. A small candle burned on the bench beside him, wax dripping to the ground.
The door to the holding cell wasn’t shut all the way. Juliette pulled it open and stepped inside. “Father?”
The old man looked awful. He had the tattered remains of an ancient book in his hands. Not a book, but a stack of loose pages. There were pages scattered all over the bench and on the floor. As Juliette cast her light down, she could see that she was standing on a carpet of fine print. There was a pattern of black bars across all the pages, sentences and words made unreadable. Juliette had seen pages like this once in a book kept inside a cage, a book where only one sentence in five could be read.