Dust (7 page)

“It was on the crook of your right arm,” Lukas said. “Three of them crossed and made a little star. I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”

Juliette doused the light and stood alone in the darkness. She could still feel Lukas gazing at her. She could feel people gawking at the scars even when she was fully clothed. She thought of George seeing her like that – and a lump rose in her throat.

Lukas appeared next to her in the pitch black, his arm around her, a kiss lighting on her shoulder. “Come back to bed,” he said. “I’m sorry. We can leave the light out.”

Juliette hesitated. “I don’t like you knowing them so well,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of your star charts.”

“I know,” he said. “I can’t help it. They’re a part of you, the only you I’ve ever known. Maybe we should have your father take a look—?”

She pulled away from him, only to click the light back on. She studied the crook of her arm in the mirror, first her right arm and then her left, thinking he must be wrong.

“Are you sure it was there?” she asked, studying the web of scars for some bare patch, some piece of open sky.

Lukas took her tenderly by the wrist and elbow, lifted her arm to his mouth, and kissed it.

“Right there,” he said. “I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”

Juliette wiped a tear from her eye and laughed in that mix of gasp and sigh that comes from a sad burst of emotion. Locating a particularly offensive knot of flesh, a welt that ran right around her forearm, she showed it to Lukas, forgiving him if not believing him.

“Do this one next,” she said.

Silo 1

11

The silicon-carbon batteries the drones ran on were the size of toaster ovens. Charlotte judged each one to weigh between thirty and forty pounds. They had been pulled from two of the drones and wrapped in webbing taken from one of the supply crates. Charlotte gripped one battery in each hand and took lunging squats in a slow lap around the warehouse, her thighs screaming and quivering, her arms numb.

A trail of sweat marked her progress, but she had a long way to go. How had she let herself get so out of shape? All the running and exercise during basic, just to sit at a console and fly a drone, to sit on her butt and play war games, to sit in a cafeteria and eat slop, to sit and read.

She’d gotten overweight, is what. And it hadn’t bothered her until she’d woken up in this nightmare. She’d never felt the urge to get up and move around until someone had frozen her stiff for a few hundred years. Now she wanted the body back that she remembered. Legs that worked. Arms that weren’t sore just from brushing her teeth. Maybe it was silly of her, thinking she could go back, be who she once was, return to a world she remembered. Or maybe she was being impatient with her recovery. These things took time.

She made it back around to the drones, a full lap. That she could complete a circuit of the room meant progress. It’d been a few weeks since her brother had woken her, and the routine of eating, exercising, and working on the drones was beginning to seem normal. The insane world she had been woken up to was starting to feel real. And that terrified her.

She lowered the batteries to the ground and took a series of deep breaths. Held them. The routine of military life had been similar. It had prepared her for this, was all that kept her from going crazy. Being cooped up was not new. Living in the middle of a desert wasteland where it wasn’t safe to go out was not new. Being surrounded by men she ought to fear was not new. Stationed in Iraq during the Second Iranian War, Charlotte had grown accustomed to these things, to not leaving base, to not wanting to leave her bunk or a bathroom stall. She was used to this struggle to keep sane. It was mental as much as physical exercise that was required.

She showered in one of the stalls down from drone control, toweled off, sniffed each of her three sets of coveralls, and decided it was time to prod Donny into doing laundry again. She pulled on the least offensive of the three, hung the towel to dry from the foot of an upper bunk, and then made up her bed Air Force crisp. Donald had once lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse, but Charlotte had almost grown comfortable in the barracks with its ghosts. It felt like home.

Down the hall from the barracks stood a room of pilot stations. Most were covered in plastic sheets. There was a flat desk along the same wall that bore a mosaic of large monitors. It was here that the radio set was being pieced together. Her brother had gathered a jumble of spare parts one at a time from the lower storerooms. It might be decades or even centuries before anyone noticed they were gone.

Charlotte flicked on the light bulb she’d rigged over the table and powered up the set. She could already get quite a few stations. She tuned the knob until she heard static and left it there, waiting on voices. Until then, she pretended it was the sea rolling up onto a beach. Sometimes it was rain on a canopy of fat leaves. Or a crowd of people quietly talking in a dark theater. She pawed through the bin of parts Donald had amassed and looked for a better set of speakers, still needed a microphone or some way to transmit. She wished she was more mechanically inclined. All she knew how to do was plug things together. It was like assembling a rifle or a computer – she just joined anything that would mate and flicked on the power. It had only resulted in smoke the one time. What it mostly took was patience, which she didn’t have a lot of. Or time, which she was drowning in.

Footsteps down the hall signaled breakfast. Charlotte turned down the volume and cleared room on the desk as Donny entered, a tray in his hands.

“Morning,” she said, getting up to take the tray from him. Her legs felt wobbly from the workout. As her brother stepped into the spill of light from the dangling bulb, she noted his frown. “Everything okay?” she asked.

He shook his head. “We might have a problem.”

Charlotte set the tray down. “What is it?”

“I ran into a guy I knew from my first shift. Was stuck on the lift with him. A handyman.”

“That’s not good.” She lifted the dented metal cover from one of the plates. There was an electrical board and a coil of wire beneath. Also, the small screwdriver she’d asked for.

“Your eggs are under the other one.”

She set the lid aside and grabbed her fork. “Did he recognize you?”

“I couldn’t tell. I kept my head down until he got off. But I knew him as well as I’ve known anyone in this place. It feels like yesterday that I borrowed tools from him, asked him to change a light for me. Who knows what it feels like for him. That might’ve been yesterday or a dozen years ago. Memory works weird in this place.”

Charlotte took a bite of eggs. Donny had put a touch too much salt on them. She imagined him up there with the shaker, his hand trembling. “Even if he did recognize you,” she said around a bite of food, “he might think you’re on another shift as yourself. How many people know you as Thurman?”

Donald shook his head. “Not many. But still, this could come crashing down on us at any moment. I’m going to bring some food up from the pantry, more dry goods. Also, I went in and changed the clearance for your badge so you can access the lifts. And I double-checked that no one else could get down here. I’d hate for you to get trapped if something happened to me.”

Charlotte moved her eggs around her plate. “I don’t like thinking about that,” she said.

“Another bit of a problem. The head of this silo is going off shift in a week, which will make things a little complicated. I’m relying on him to orient the next guy to my status. Things have been going a little too smoothly thus far—”

Charlotte laughed and took another bite of eggs. “Too smoothly,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d hate to see rough. What’s the latest on your favorite silo?”

“The IT head picked up today. Lukas.”

Charlotte thought her brother sounded disappointed. “And?” she asked. “Learn anything new?”

“He managed to crack another server. It’s more of the same data, everything about its residents, every job they’ve had, who they’re related to, from birth to death. I don’t understand how those machines go from that information to this ranked list. It seems like a bunch of noise, like there has to be something else.”

He produced a sheet of folded paper, a new printout of the rankings of the silos. Charlotte cleared a space on the workbench, and he smoothed the report.

“See? The order has changed again. But what determines that?”

She studied the report while she ate, and Donald grabbed one of his folders of notes. He spent a lot of time working in the conference room where he could spread things out and pace back and forth, but Charlotte preferred it when he sat at that drone station. He would sit there for hours sometimes, going through his notes while Charlotte worked on the radio, the two of them listening for chatter among the static.

“Silo six is back on top again,” she muttered. It was like reading the side of a cereal box while she ate, all those numbers that made little sense. One column was labeled
Facility
, which Donald said was what they used to call the silos. Beside each silo was a percentage like a massive dose of daily vitamins:
99.992%, 99.989%, 99.987%, 99.984%
. The last silo with a percentage read
99.974%
. Every silo below this was marked off or had
N/A
listed. Silos 40, 12, 17, and a handful of others were included in that latter category.

“You still think the one on top is the only one that gets to survive?” she asked.

“I do.”

“Have you told these people you’re talking to? Because they’re way down the list.”

He just looked at her and frowned.

“You haven’t. You’re just using them to help you figure all this out.”

“I’m not using them. Hell, I saved that silo. I save it every day that I don’t report what’s going on over there.”

“Okay,” Charlotte said. She returned to her eggs.

“Besides, they probably figure they’re using me. Hell, I think they get more out of our talks than I do. Lukas, the one who heads up their IT, he peppers me with all these questions about the way the world used to be—”

“And the mayor?” Charlotte turned and studied her brother closely. “What does she get out of it?”

“Juliette?” Donald thumbed through a folder. “She enjoys threatening me.”

Charlotte laughed. “I would love to hear that.”

“If you get that radio sorted, you might.”

“And then you’ll spend more time working down here? It would be good, you know. Lessen the risk of being recognized.” She scraped her plate with her fork, not willing to admit the real reason she wanted him down there more was how empty the place felt when he was gone.

“Absolutely.” Her brother rubbed his face, and Charlotte saw how tired he was. Her gaze fell back to the numbers while she ate.

“It makes it seem arbitrary, doesn’t it?” she wondered aloud. “If these numbers mean what you think they mean. They’re functionally equivalent.”

“I doubt the people who planned all this look at it that way. All they need is one of them. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s like a bunch of spares in a box. You pluck one out, and all you care about is if it’ll work. That’s it. They just want to see everything is one hundred percent all the way down.”

Charlotte couldn’t believe that’s what they had in mind. But Donny had shown her the Pact and enough of his notes to convince her. All the silos but one would be exterminated. Their own included.

“How long before the next drone is ready?” he asked.

Charlotte took a sip of juice. “Another day or two. Maybe three. I’m really going light with this one. Not even sure if it’ll fly.” The last two hadn’t made it as far as the first. She was getting desperate.

“Okay.” He rubbed his face again, his palms muffling his voice. “We’re gonna have to decide before too long what we’re gonna do. If we do nothing, this nightmare plays out for another two hundred years, and you and I won’t last that long.” He started to laugh, but it turned into a cough. Donald fished into his coveralls for his handkerchief, and Charlotte looked away. She studied the dark monitors while he had one of his fits.

She didn’t want to admit this to him, but her inclination was to let it play out. It seemed as if a bunch of precision machines were in control of humanity’s fate, and she tended to trust computers a lot more than her brother did. She had spent years flying drones that could fly themselves, that could make decisions on which targets to hit, could guide missiles to precise locations. She often felt less like a pilot and more like a jockey, a person on a beast that could race along on its own, that only needed someone there to occasionally take the reins or shout encouragement.

She glanced over the numbers on the report again. Hundredths of a percentage point would decide who lived and who died. And most would die. She and her brother would either be asleep or long dead by the time it happened. The numbers made this looming holocaust seem so damn … arbitrary.

Donald used the folder in his hand to point at the report. “Did you notice eighteen moved up two spots?”

She had noticed. “You don’t think you’ve become too … attached, do you?”

He looked away. “I have a history with this silo. That’s all.”

Charlotte hesitated. She didn’t want to press further, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t mean the silo,” she said. “You seem … different each time you talk to her.”

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was sent to clean,” he said. “She’s been outside.”

For a moment Charlotte thought that was all he was going to say on the matter. As if this were enough, as if it explained everything. He was quiet a pause, his eyes flicking back and forth.

“No one is supposed to come back from that,” he finally said. “I don’t think the computers take this into account. Not just what she survived, but that eighteen is hanging in there. By all accounts, they shouldn’t be. If they make it through this … you wonder if they don’t give us the best hope.”

“
You
wonder,” Charlotte said, correcting him. She waved the piece of paper. “There’s no way we’re smarter than these computers, brother.”