Dust (8 page)

Donald appeared sad. “We can be more compassionate than them,” he said.

Charlotte fought the urge to argue. She wanted to point out that he cared about this silo because of the personal contact. If he knew the people behind any of the other silos – if he knew their stories – would he root for them? It would be cruel to suggest this, however true.

Donald coughed into his rag. He caught Charlotte staring at him, glanced at the bloodstained cloth, put it away.

“I’m scared,” she told him.

Donald shook his head. “I’m not. I’m not afraid of this. I’m not afraid of dying.”

“I know you’re not. That’s obvious, or you would see someone. But you have to be afraid of something.”

“I am. Plenty. I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.”

“Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded.

Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said.

12

That night, Charlotte awoke from a nightmare of flying. She sat up in her cot, springs crying out like a nest of birds, and could still feel herself swooping down through the clouds, the wind on her face.

Always dreams of flying. Dreams of falling. Wingless dreams where she couldn’t steer, couldn’t pull up. A plummeting bomb zeroing in on a man with his family, a man turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun, a glimpse of Charlotte’s father and mother and brother and herself before impact and loss of signal—

The nest of birds beneath her fell quiet. Charlotte untangled her fists from the sheets, which were damp with all that dreams wrung from terrified flesh. The room hung heavy and somber around her. She could feel the empty bunks all around, that sense that her fellow pilots had been summoned away in the night, leaving her alone. She rose and padded across the hall to the bathroom, feeling her way and sliding the switches up just a fraction to keep the lights dim. She understood sometimes why her brother had lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse. Shadows of un-people stalked those halls. She could feel herself pass through the ghosts of the sleeping.

She flushed and washed her hands. There was no going back to her bunk, no chance of returning to sleep, not after that dream. Charlotte tugged on a pair of the red coveralls Donny had brought her, one of three colors, a little variety for her locked-up life. She couldn’t remember what the blue or gold ones were for, but she remembered reactor red. The red coveralls had pouches and slots for tools. She wore them while working, and so they were rarely the cleanest. Loaded up, the coveralls weighed near on twenty pounds, and they rattled as she walked. She zipped up the front and made her way down the hallway.

Curiously, the lights in the warehouse were already on. It had to be in the middle of the night. She was good about turning them off, and nobody else had access to that level. Her mouth suddenly dry, she crept towards the nearby drones under their tarps, the sound of whispers leaking from the shadows.

Beyond the drones – near the tall shelves with boxes of spares and tools and emergency rations – a man knelt over the still form of another. The figure turned at the sound of her jangling tools.

“Donny?”

“Yeah?”

A flush of relief. The sprawling body beneath her brother wasn’t a body at all. It was a puffy suit laid out with its arms and legs spread, an empty and lifeless form.

“What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

“Late,” he said. He dabbed his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Or early, depending. Did I wake you?”

Charlotte watched as he shifted his body to block her view of the suit. Flopping one leg up, he began to fold the outfit in on itself. A pair of shears and a roll of silvery tape sat by his knees, a helmet, gloves, and a bottle like a dive tank nearby. A pair of boots as well. The fabric whispered as it moved; it was this that she had mistaken for voices.

“Hm? No, you didn’t wake me. I got up to go to the bathroom. Thought I heard something.”

It was a lie. She had come out to work on a drone in the middle of the night, anything to stay awake, to stay grounded. Donald nodded and pulled a rag from his breast pocket. He coughed into this before stuffing it away.

“What’re you doing up?” she asked.

“I was just going through some supplies.” Donny made a pile out of the suit parts. “Some things they needed above. Didn’t want to risk sending someone else down for them.” He glanced at his sister. “You want me to fetch you something hot for breakfast?”

Charlotte hugged herself and shook her head. She hated the reminder of being trapped on that level, needing him to get her things. “I’m getting used to the rations in the crates,” she told him. “The coconut bars in the MREs are growing on me.” She laughed. “I remember hating them during basic.”

“I really don’t mind getting you something,” Donny said, obviously looking for an excuse to get out of there, some way to change topics. “And I should have the last of what we need for the radio soon. I put in a requisition for a microphone, which I can’t find anywhere else. There’s one in the comm room that’s acting up, which I might steal if nothing else works.”

Charlotte nodded. She watched her brother stuff the suit back into one of the large plastic containers. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She recognized when he was holding something back. It was what big brothers did.

Crossing to the nearest drone, she pulled the tarp off and laid out a spanner set on the forward wing. She had always been clumsy with tools, but weeks of work on the drones, of persistence if not patience, and she was getting the hang of how they were put together. “So what do they need the suit for?” she asked, forcing herself to sound nonchalant.

“I think it’s something to do with the reactor.” He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Charlotte allowed the lie to echo a bit. She wanted her brother to hear it.

Opening the skin of the drone’s wing, Charlotte remembered coming home from basic training with new muscles and weeks of competitive fierceness forged among a squad of men. This was before she’d let herself go while on deployment. Back then, she’d been a wiry and fit teenager, her brother off at graduate school, and his first teasing remark about her new physique had landed him on the sofa, his arm pinned behind his back, laughing and teasing her further.

Laughing, that is, until a sofa cushion had been pressed to the side of his face, and Donny had squealed like a stuck pig. Fun and games had turned into something serious and scary, her brother’s fear of being buried alive awakening something primal in him, something she never teased him for and never wanted to see again.

Now she watched as he sealed the bin with the suit inside and slid it back under a shelf. It wasn’t needed elsewhere in the silo, she knew. Donald fumbled for his rag, and his coughing resumed. She pretended to be fixated on the drone while he had his fit. Donny didn’t want to talk about the suit or the problem with his lungs, and she didn’t blame him. Her brother was dying. Charlotte knew her brother was dying, could see him like she saw him in her dreams, turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun. She saw him the way she saw every man in that last instant of their lives. There was Donny’s beautiful face on her screen, watching the inevitable fall from the sky.

He was dying, which is why he wanted to stockpile food for her and make sure she could leave. It was why he wanted to make sure she had a radio, so she would have someone to talk to. Her brother was dying, and he didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to die down there in that pit in the ground where he couldn’t breathe.

Charlotte knew damn well what the suit was for.

Silo 18

13

An empty cleaning suit lay spread across the workbench, one of its arms draped over the edge, elbow bent at an unnatural angle. The unblinking visor of the detached helmet gazed silently up at the ceiling. The small screen inside the helmet had been removed to leave a clear plastic window out on the real world. Juliette leaned over the suit, occasional drops of sweat smacking its surface, as she tightened the hex screws that held the lower collar onto the fabric. She remembered the last time she’d built a suit like this.

Nelson, the young IT tech in charge of the cleaning lab, labored at an identical bench on the other side of the workshop. Juliette had selected him as her assistant for this project. He was familiar with the suits, young, and didn’t appear to be against her. Not that the first two criteria mattered.

“The next item we need to discuss is the population report,” Marsha said. The young assistant – an assistant Juliette had never asked for – juggled a dozen folders until she found the right one. Recycled paper lay strewn across the neighboring workbench, turning an area for building things into a lowly desk. Juliette glanced up and watched as Marsha shuffled through a folder. Her assistant was a slight girl just out of her teens, graced with rosy cheeks and dark hair in tight coils. Marsha had been the assistant to the last two mayors, a short but tumultuous span of time. Like the gold ID card and the apartment on level six, she had come with the job.

“Here it is,” Marsha said. She bit her lip and scanned the report, and Juliette saw that it was printed on one side only. The amount of paper her office went through and repulped could afford to feed an apartment level for a year. Lukas had once joked that it was to keep the recyclers in business. The chance he was right had kept her from laughing.

“Can you hand me those gaskets?” Juliette asked, pointing to Marsha’s side of the workbench.

The young girl pointed to a bin of lock washers. And then an assortment of cotter pins. Finally, her hand drifted over the gaskets. Juliette nodded. “Thanks.”

“So, we’re under five thousand residents for the first time in thirty years,” Marsha said, returning to her report. “We’ve had a lot of … passings.” Juliette could feel Marsha glance up at her, even as she concentrated on seating the gasket into the collar. “The lottery committee is calling for an official count, just so we can get a sense of—”

“The lottery committee would perform a census every week if they could.” Juliette rubbed oil onto the gasket with her finger before seating the other side of the collar.

Marsha laughed politely. “Yes, well, they want to hold another lottery soon. They asked for another two hundred numbers.”

“Numbers,” Juliette grumbled. Sometimes she thought that was all Lukas’s computers were good for, a bunch of tall machines to pull numbers from their whirring butts. “Did you tell them my idea about an amnesty? They do know we’re about to double our space, right?”

Marsha shifted uncomfortably. “I told them,” she said. “And I told them about the extra space. I don’t think they took it so well.”

Across the workshop, Nelson looked up from the suit he was working on. It was just the three of them in the old lab where people had once been outfitted to die. Now they were working on something else, a different reason to send people outside.

“Well, what did the committee say?” Juliette asked. “They do know that when we reach this other silo, I’m going to need people to come with me and get it up and running again. The population here is going to dip.”

Nelson bent back to his work. Marsha closed the folder on the population report and looked at her feet.

“What did they say to my idea of suspending the lottery?”

“They didn’t say anything,” Marsha said. She glanced up, and the overhead lights caught the wet film across her eyes. “I don’t think many of them believe in your other silo.”

Juliette laughed and shook her head. Her hand was trembling as she set the last lock screw into the collar. “It doesn’t really matter what the committee believes, does it?” Though she knew this was true of her as well. It was true of anyone. The world out there was the way it was no matter how much doubt or hope or hate a person breathed into it. “The dig is underway. They’re clearing three hundred feet a day. I suppose the lottery committee will just have to make the trip down to see for themselves. You should tell them that. Tell them to go see.”

Marsha frowned and made a note. “The next thing on the agenda …” She grabbed her ledger. “There’s been a rash of complaints about—”

There was a knock at the door. Juliette turned, and Lukas entered the Suit Lab, smiling. He waved at Nelson, who saluted back with a 3/8 spanner. Lukas seemed unsurprised to see Marsha there. He clasped her on the shoulder. “You should just move that big wooden desk of hers down here,” he joked. “You’ve got the porting budget for it.”

Marsha smiled and tugged at one of her dark springs. She looked around the lab. “I really should,” she said.

Juliette watched her young assistant blush in Lukas’s presence and laughed to herself. The helmet locked into the collar with a neat click. Juliette tested the release mechanism.

“Do you mind if I borrow the mayor?” Lukas asked.

“No, I don’t mind,” Marsha said.

“I do.” Juliette studied one of the suit’s sleeves. “We’re way behind schedule.”

Lukas frowned. “There is no schedule. You set the schedule. And besides, have you even gotten permission for this?” He stood beside Marsha and crossed his arms. “Have you even told your assistant what you’re planning?”

Juliette glanced up guiltily. “Not yet.”

“Why? What’re you doing?” Marsha lowered her ledger and studied the suits for what seemed the first time.

Juliette ignored her. She glared at Lukas. “I’m behind schedule because I want to get this done before they complete the dig. They’ve been on a tear. Hit some soft soil. I’d really like to be down there when they punch through.”

“And I’d like for you to be at that meeting today, which you’re going to miss if you don’t get a move on.”

“I’m not going,” Juliette said.