羊毛战记 Part 5 The Stranded 73

　　73

　　• Silo 18 •

　　Lukas couldn’t force himself to study, not what he was supposed to be studying. The Order satflopped open on the wooden desk, the little lamp on its thousand-jointed neck bent¹ over and warmingit in a pool of light. He stood before the wall schematics instead, staring at the arrangement of silos,which were spaced out like the servers in the room above him, and listened to the radio crackle withthe sounds of distant warring.

　　The final push was being made. Sims’s team had lost a few men in an awful explosion, somethingabout a stairwell—but not the great stairwell—and now they were in a fight they hoped would be thelast. The little speakers by the radio crackled with static as the men coordinated² themselves, asBernard shouted orders from his office one level up, always with the crackle of gunfire eruptingbehind the voices.

　　Lukas knew he shouldn’t listen, and yet he couldn’t stop. Juliette would call him any time nowand ask him for an update. She would want to know what had happened, how the end had come, andthe only thing worse than telling her would be admitting he didn’t know, that he couldn’t bear tolisten.

　　He reached out and touched the round roof of silo seventeen. It was as though he were a godsurveying the structures from up high. He pictured his hand piercing the dark clouds above Julietteand spanning a roof built for thousands. He rubbed his fingers over the red X drawn³ across the silo,those two slashes⁴ that admitted to such a great loss. The marks felt waxy⁵ beneath his fingers, likethey’d been drawn with crayon or something similar. He tried to imagine getting the news one daythat an entire people were gone, wiped out. He would have to dig in Bernard’s desk—his desk—andfind the red stick, cross out another chance at their Legacy⁶, another pod of buried hope.

　　Lukas looked up at the overhead lights, steady and constant, unblinking. Why hadn’t she called?

　　His fingernail caught on one of the red marks and flaked⁷ a piece of it away. The wax stuck underhis fingernail, the paper beneath still stained blood red. There was no taking it back, no cleaning itoff, no making it whole again—

　　Gunfire erupted from the radio. Lukas went to the shelf where the little unit was mounted andlistened to orders being barked, men being killed. His forehead went clammy with sweat. He knewhow that felt, to pull that trigger, to end a life. He was conscious of an emptiness in his chest and aweakness in his knees. Lukas steadied himself with the shelf, palms slick, and looked at thetransmitter hanging there inside its locked cage. How he longed to call those men and tell them not todo it, to stop all the insanity⁸, the violence, the pointless killing⁹. There could be a red X on them all.

　　This was what they should fear, not each other.

　　He touched the metal cage that kept the radio controls locked away from him, feeling the truth ofthis and the silliness of broadcasting it to everyone else. It was na?ve. It wouldn’t change anything.

　　The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinctionrequired something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.

　　His hand drifted across the metal grating. He peered inside at one of the dials, the arrow pointingto the number “18.” There were fifty numbers in a dizzying circle, one for each silo. Lukas gave thecage a futile¹⁰ tug¹¹, wishing he could listen to something else. What was going on in all those otherdistant lands? Harmless things, probably. Jokes and chatter¹². Gossip. He could imagine the thrill ofbreaking in on one of those conversations and introducing himself to people who weren’t in theknow. “I am Lukas from silo eighteen,” he might say. And they would want to know why silos hadnumbers. And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of themleft, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, noone to peer through the parting clouds for them.

　　He left the radio alone, left it to its war, and walked past the desk and its eager pool of lightspilling across that dreary¹³ book. He checked the tins for something that might hold his attention. Hefelt restless, pacing like a pig in its pen. He knew he should go for another jog among the servers, butthat would mean showering, and somehow showering had begun to feel like an insufferable chore.

　　Crouching¹⁴ down at the far end of the shelves, he sorted through the loose, untinned stacks ofpaper there. Here was where the handwritten notes and the additions to the Legacy had amassed¹⁵ overthe years. Notes to future silo leaders, instructions, manuals, mementos¹⁶. He pulled out the generatorcontrol-room manual, the one Juliette had written. He had watched Bernard shelve the papers weeksago, saying it might come in handy if the problems in the down deep went from bad to worse.

　　And the radio was blasting the worse.

　　Lukas went to his desk and bent the neck of the lamp so he could read the handwriting inside.

　　There were days that he dreaded¹⁷ her calling, dreaded getting caught or Bernard answering or herasking him to do things he couldn’t, things he would never do again. And now, with the lights steadyoverhead and nothing buzzing, all he wanted was a call. His chest ached for it. Some part of himknew that what she was doing was dangerous, that something bad could’ve happened. She was livingbeneath a red X, after all, a mark that meant death for anyone below it.

　　The pages of the manual were full of notes she’d made with sharp lead. He rubbed one of them,feeling the grooves¹⁸ with his fingers. The actual content was inscrutable. Settings for dials in everyconceivable order, valve positions, electrical diagrams. Riffling through the pages, he saw the manualas a project not unlike his star charts, created by a mind not unlike his own. This awareness¹⁹ made thedistance between them worse. Why couldn’t they go back? Back to before the cleaning, before thestring of burials. She would get off work every night and come sit with him while he gazed into thedarkness, thinking and watching, chatting and waiting.

　　He turned the manual around and read some of the printed words from the play, which werenearly as indecipherable. In the margins²⁰ sat notes from a different hand. Lukas assumed Juliette’smother, or maybe one of the actors. There were diagrams on some pages, little arrows showingmovement. An actor’s notes, he decided²¹. Directions on a stage. The play must’ve been a souvenir toJuliette, this woman he had feelings for whose name was in the title.

　　He scanned the lines, looking for something poetic²² to capture his dark mood. As the text flowedby, his eyes caught a brief flash of familiar scrawl²³, not the actor’s. He flipped²⁴ back, looking for it apage at a time until he found it.

　　It was Juliette’s hand, no mistaking. He moved the play into the light so he could read the fadedmarks:

　　George:

　　There you lay, so serene²⁵. The wrinkles in your brow and by your eyes, nowhere seen. A touchwhen others look away, look for a clue, but only I know what happened to you. Wait for me. Wait forme. Wait there, my dear. Let these gentle pleas find your ear, and bury them there, so this stolen kisscan grow on the quiet love that no other shall know.

　　Lukas felt a cold rod pierce his chest. He felt his longing²⁶ replaced by a flash of temper. Who wasthis George? A childhood fling? Juliette was never in a sanctioned relationship; he had checked theofficial records the day after they’d met. Access to the servers afforded certain guilty powers. Acrush, perhaps? Some man in Mechanical who was already in love with another girl? To Lukas, thiswould have been even worse. A man she longed for in a way she never would feel for him. Was thatwhy she’d taken a job so far from home? To get away from the sight of this George she couldn’thave, these feelings she’d hidden in the margins of a play about forbidden love?

　　He turned and plopped down in front of Bernard’s computer. Shaking the mouse, he logged in tothe upstairs servers remotely, his cheeks feeling flush with this sick feeling, this new feeling,knowing it was called jealousy²⁷ but unfamiliar²⁸ with the heady rush that came with it. He navigated²⁹ tothe personnel files and searched the down deep for “George.” There were four hits. He copied the IDnumber of each and put them in a text file, then fed them to the ID department. While the pictures ofeach popped up, he skimmed their records, feeling a little guilty for the abuse of power, a littleworried about this discovery, and a lot less agonizingly bored having found something to do.

　　Only one of the Georges worked in Mechanical. Older guy. As the radio crackled behind him,Lukas wondered what would become of this man if he was still down there. There was a chance thathe was no longer alive, that the records were a few weeks out of date, the blockade a barrier to thetruth.

　　A couple of the hits were too young. One wasn’t even a year old yet. The other was shadowing aporter. It left one man, thirty-two years old. He worked in the bazaar³⁰, occupation listed as “other,”

　　married with two kids. Lukas studied the blurry³¹ image of him from the ID office. Mustache. Recedinghair. A sideways smirk³². His eyes were too far apart, Lukas decided, his brows too dark and much toobushy.

　　Lukas held up the manual and read the poem again.

　　The man was dead, he decided. Bury these pleas.

　　He did another search, this time a global one that included the closed records. Hundreds of hitsthroughout the silo popped up, names from all the way back to the uprising. This did not dissuadeLukas. He knew Juliette was thirty-four, and so he gave her an eighteen-year window, figured if shewere younger than sixteen when she’d had this crush, he wouldn’t stress, he would let go of theenvious and shameful³³ burn inside him.

　　From the list of Georges, there were only three deaths in the down deep for the eighteen-yearperiod. One was in his fifties, the other in his sixties. Both died of natural causes. Lukas thought tocross-reference them with Juliette, see if there had been any work relations, if they shared a familytree perhaps.

　　And then he saw the third file. This was his George. Her George. Lukas knew it. Doing the math,Lukas saw he would be thirty-eight if he were still alive. He had died just over three years earlier, hadworked in Mechanical, had never married.

　　He ran the ID search, and the picture confirmed his fears. He was a handsome man, a square jaw,a wide nose, dark eyes. He was smiling at the camera, calm, relaxed. It was hard to hate the man.

　　Difficult, especially, since he was dead.

　　Lukas checked the cause and saw that it was investigated and then listed as an industrial accident.

　　Investigated. He remembered hearing something about Jules when the up top got its new sheriff. Herqualifications had been a source of debate and tension, a wind of whispers. Especially around IT. Butthere had been chatter that she’d helped out on a case a long time ago, that this was why she’d beenchosen.

　　This was the case. Was she in love with him before he died? Or did she fall for the memory of theman after? He decided it had to be the former. Lukas searched the desk for a charcoal³⁴, found one, andjotted down the man’s ID and case number. Here was something to occupy his time, some way ofgetting to know her better. It would distract him, at least, until she finally got around to calling himback. He relaxed, pulled the keyboard into his lap, and started digging.

 

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