Dust (17 page)

He knew her well enough. Juliette grabbed the control sample, cursing herself under her breath, and wondered what Lukas was thinking out there in the hall, listening in on his radio. “Last one,” she said, rattling the container.

Nelson waited, chalk poised above the slate. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t …” She aimed the light inside. She rattled the container. Sweat trickled down her jaw and dripped from her chin. “I thought this was the control,” she said. She set the sample down and grabbed the next container, but it was full of soil. Her heart was pounding, her head spinning. None of this made sense. Unless she’d pulled the samples out in the wrong order. Had she screwed it all up?

“Yeah, that’s the control sample,” Nelson said. He tapped the canister she’d just checked with his length of pipe. “It’s marked right there.”

“Gimme a sec,” she said. Juliette took a few deep breaths. She peered inside the control sample once again, which had been collected inside the airlock. It should have captured nothing but argon. She handed the container to Nelson.

“Yeah, that’s not right,” he said. He shook the container. “Something’s not right.”

Juliette could barely hear. Her mind raced. Nelson peered inside the control sample.

“I think …” He hesitated. “I think maybe a seal fell out when you opened the lid. Which is no big deal. These things happen. Or maybe …”

“Impossible,” she said. She had been careful. She remembered seeing the seals in there. Nelson cleared his throat and placed the control sample on the workbench. He adjusted the worklight to point directly down into it. Both of them leaned over. Nothing had fallen out, she was sure of it. But then, she had made mistakes. Everyone was capable of them—

“There’s only one seal in there,” Nelson said. “I really think maybe it fell—”

“The heat tape,” Juliette said. She adjusted the light. There was a flash from the bottom of the container where a piece of tape was stuck. The other piece was gone. “Are you telling me that an adhered piece of tape fell out as well?”

“Well then, containers are out of order,” he said. “We have them backwards. This makes perfect sense if we got them all backwards. Because the one from the hill isn’t quite as worn as the ramp sample. That’s what it is.”

Juliette had thought of that, but it was an attempt to match what she thought she knew to what she was seeing. The whole point of going out was to confirm suspicions. What did it mean that she was seeing something completely different?

And then it hit her like a wrench to the skull. It hit her like a great betrayal. A betrayal by a machine that was always good to her, like a trusted pump that suddenly ran backwards for no apparent reason. It hit her like a loved one turning his back while she was falling, like some great bond that wasn’t simply taken away but never truly existed.

“Luke,” she said, hoping he was listening, that he had his radio on. She waited. Nelson coughed.

“I’m here,” he answered, his voice thin and distant. “I’ve been following.”

“The argon,” Juliette said, watching Nelson through both of their domes. “What do we know about it?”

Nelson blinked the sweat from his eyes.

“Know what?” Lukas said. “There’s a periodic table in there somewhere. Inside one of the cabinets, I think.”

“No,” Juliette said, raising her voice so she could be sure he heard. “I mean, where does it come from? Are we even sure what it is?”

Silo 1

25

There was a rattle in Donald’s chest, a flapping of some loosely connected thing, an internal alarm that his condition was deteriorating – that he was getting worse. He forced himself to cough, as much as he hated to, as much as his diaphragm was sore from the effort, as much as his throat burned and muscles ached. He leaned forward in his chair and hacked until something deep inside him tore loose and skittered across his tongue, was spat into his square of fetid cloth.

He folded the cloth rather than look and collapsed back into his chair, sweaty and exhausted. He took a deep, less-rattly breath. Another. A handful of cool gasps that didn’t quite torture him. Had anything ever felt so great as a painless breath?

Glancing around the room in a daze, he absorbed all that he had once taken for granted: remnants of meals, a deck of cards, a butterflied paperback with browned pages and striated spine – signs of shifts endured but not suffered. He was suffering. He suffered the wait before Silo 18 answered. He studied the schematic of all the other silos that he fretted over. Dead worlds is what he saw. All of them would die except for one. There was a tickle in his throat, and he knew for certain that he would be dead before he decided anything, before he found some way to help or choose or steer the project off its suicidal course. He was the only one who knew or cared – and his knowledge and compassion would be buried with him.

What was he thinking, anyway? That he could fix things? That he could put right a world he had helped destroy? The world was long past fixing. The world was long past setting to right. One glimpse of green fields and blue skies from a drone, and his mind had tumbled out of sorts. Now it’d been so long since that one glimpse that he’d begun to doubt it. He knew how the cleanings worked. He knew better than to trust the vision of some machine.

But foolish hope had him there, in that comm room, reaching out once more. Foolish hope had him dreaming of a stop to it all, some way to let these silos full of people live their own lives, free of all this meddling. It was curiosity as well, wanting to know what was going on in those servers, the last great mystery, one he could explore only with the help of this IT Head he had inducted himself. Donald just wanted answers. He longed for truth and for a painless death for himself and for Charlotte. An end to shifts and dreams. A final resting place, perhaps, up on that hill with a view of Helen’s grave. It wasn’t too much to hope for, he didn’t think.

He checked the clock on the wall. They were late to answer. Fifteen minutes already. Something was happening. He watched the second hand jitter around and realized the entire operation, all of the silos, was like a giant clock. The whole thing ran on automatic. It was winding down.

Invisible machines rode the winds around the planet, destroying anything human, returning the world to wilderness. The people buried underground were dormant seeds that would have to wait another two hundred years before they sprouted. Two hundred years. Donald felt his throat begin to tickle once more and wondered if he had two
days
in him.

At that moment, he only had fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes before the operators would come back on shift. These sessions of his had grown regular. It was not unusual to clear everyone out for classified discussions, but it was beginning to seem suspicious that he did it every day at the same exact time. He could see the way they looked at one another as they took their mugs and filed out. Probably thought it was some romance. Donald often felt as if it were a romance of sorts. A romance of olden times and truth.

Now he was being stood up. Half of this session had been wasted on listening to the line buzz and go unanswered. Something was happening over there. Something bad. Or maybe he was on edge from the reports of a dead body found in his own silo, some murder the folks in Security were looking into. It was strange that this barely stirred him. He cared more about other silos, had lost all empathy for his own.

There was a click in his ringing headset. “Hello?” he asked, his voice tired and weak. He trusted the machines to make him sound stronger.

There was no reply, just the sound of someone breathing. But that was good enough for an introduction. Lukas never failed to say hello.

“Mayor,” he said.

“You know I don’t like being called that,” she said. She sounded winded, as though she’d been running.

“You prefer Juliette?”

Silence. Donald wondered why he preferred to hear from her. Lukas, he was fond of. He had been there when the young man took his Rite, and Donald admired his curiosity, his study of the Legacy. It filled him with nostalgia to talk about the old world with Lukas. It was a therapy of sorts. And Lukas was the one helping him pry the lid off those servers to study their contents.

With Juliette, the allure was something different. It was the accusations and abuse, which he knew he fully deserved. It was the harsh silences and the threats. There was some part of Donald that wanted her to come end him before his cough could. Humiliation and execution – that was his path to exoneration.

“I know how you’re doing it,” Juliette finally said, fire in her voice. Venom. “I finally understand. I figured it out.”

Donald peeled his headset from one ear and wiped a trickle of sweat. “What do you understand?” he asked. He wondered if Lukas had uncovered something in one of the servers, something to set Juliette off.

“The cleanings,” she spat.

Donald checked the clock. Fifteen minutes were going to slip by in a hurry. The person reading that novel would be back soon, as well as the techs in the middle of that game of cards. “I’m happy to talk about the cleanings—”

“I’ve just been outside,” she told him.

Donald covered his microphone and coughed. “Outside where?” he asked. He thought of the tunnel she claimed to be digging, the racket they had been making over there that had recently gone silent. He thought she meant she’d been beyond the boundaries of her silo.

“
Outside
outside. The hills. The world the ancients left behind. I took samples.”

Donald leaned forward in his seat. She meant to threaten him, but all he heard was a promise. She meant to torture him, but all he felt was excitement.
Outside.
And to take samples. He dreamed of such a venture. Dreamed of discovering what he had breathed out there, what they had done to the world, if it was getting better or worse. Juliette must think
he
held the answers, but he had nothing but questions.

“What did you find?” he whispered. And he damned the machines that would make him sound disinterested, that would make him sound as if he knew. Why couldn’t he just say that he had no idea what was wrong with the world or with himself and please, please help him? Help each other.

“You aren’t sending us out there to clean. You’re sending something else. I’ll tell you what I found—”

To Donald, her voice was the entire universe. The weight of the soil overhead vanished, as did the solidness beneath his feet. It was just him in a bubble, and that voice.

“—we took two samples and another from the airlock that should’ve been inert gas. We took a sample from the ramp and one from the hills.”

Suddenly, he was the silent one. His coveralls clung to him. He waited and waited, but she outlasted him. She wanted him to beg for it. Maybe she knew how lost he was.

“What did you find?” he asked again.

“That you’re a lying sack of ratshit. That everything we’ve been told, any time we’ve trusted you, we’ve been fools. We take for granted everything you show us, everything you tell us, and none of it’s true. Maybe there were no ancients. You know these goddamn books over here? Burn them all. And you let Lukas believe this crap—”

“The books are real,” Donald said.

“Ratshit. Like the argon? Is the argon real? What the hell are you pumping into the airlocks when we go out to clean?”

Donald repeated her question in his head. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Stop with the games. I know what’s going on now. When you send us outside, you pump our airlocks full of something that eats away at us. It takes the seals and gaskets first, and then our bodies. You’ve got it down to a science, haven’t you? Well, I found the camera feeds you hid. I cut them weeks ago. Yeah, that was me. And I saw the power lines coming in. I saw the pipes. The gas is in the pipes, isn’t it?”

“Juliette, listen to me—”

“Don’t you say my name like you know me. You don’t know me. All these talks, telling me how my silo was built like you built it yourself, telling Lukas about a disappeared world like you’d seen it with your own eyes. Were you trying to get us to like you? To think you were our friend? Saying you want to help us?”

Donald watched the clock tick down. The techs would be back soon. He’d have to yell at them to get out. He couldn’t leave the conversation like this.

“Stop calling us,” Juliette said. “The buzzing and the flashing lights, it’s giving us headaches. If you keep doing this every day, I’m going to start tearing shit down, and I’ve got enough to worry about.”

“Listen … Please—”

“No, you listen. You are cut off from us. We don’t want your cameras, your power, your gas. I’m cutting it all. And no one will ever clean from here again. No more of this bullshit argon. The next time I go out, it’ll be with clean air. Now fuck off and leave us to it.”

“Juliette—”

But the line was dead.

Donald pulled his headset off and threw it against the desk. Playing cards scattered, and the book fell from its perch, losing someone’s place.

Argon? What the hell had come over her? The last time she’d been so angry was when she said she had found some machine, threatened to come after him. But this was something else. Argon. Pumped out with a cleaning. He had no idea what she was talking about. Pumped out with a cleaning—

A bout of dizziness struck him, and Donald sank back into his chair. His coveralls were damp with sweat. He clutched a bloody rag and remembered a fog-filled airlock. He remembered stumbling down a ramp with a jostling crowd, crying for Helen, the vision of bomb blasts seared in his retinas, Anna and Charlotte tugging him along, while a white cloud billowed out around him.

The gas. He knew how the cleanings went. There was gas to pressurize the airlock. Gas to push against the outside air. Gas to push
out.

“The dust is in the air,” Donald said. He leaned against the counter, his knees weak. The nanos eating away at mankind, they were loosed on the world with every cleaning, little puffs like clockwork, tick-tock with each exile.

The headphones sat there quietly. “I am an ancient,” Donald said, using her words. He grabbed the headphones from the desk and repeated into the microphone, loudly, “I am an ancient! I did this!”