He loosened the straps on his pack as he approached the pump room, and a dangerous thought occurred to him, a revelation: Everyone was trying to get to where they didn’t need one another. And how exactly was that supposed to help them all get along?
•4•
After the best meal he’d had in ages—as fresh as it was free—Mission hurried down four flights toward Sanitation to see Jenine. He felt light as a feather downbound and with the load off. With just his empty porter’s pack on his back, his canteen jouncing on one hip, his knife on the other, he skipped down the steps side-style with one hand on the rail. At times like these, descending after a long slog up, it felt as though he could leap over the rail and float unharmed to Mechanical like a mote of dust. He apologized to those he overtook, saying “porter, ma’am” and “porter, sir” by the book, even though he wasn’t carrying anything official.
Weightless as a bird, with his heart thrumming like one was trapped in his ribcage, it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t the descent that had him feeling giddy. Everyone expected him to grow up a farmer, to settle down with the girl who loved him, but Mission wanted the opposite of what was easily attainable. He wondered if this was a punishment of sorts, a slow strangulation, his thirst for distant things. Did he love the chase? Or was it that staying on the move made it more difficult for the past to catch up to him?
He arrived at Sanitation, a rumble of footfalls on steel treads, and pushed through doors in need of oil. Sanitation was one of the levels laid out in a spiral; a single hallway coiled its way from the landing and did three circuits before dead ending into the waste plant. Fresh water emerged near the landing and was piped out to the rest of the Up Top, while gray water and black water—euphemisms both—were pumped into the waste room. The gray came from showers, sinks, and drains, the black from toilets.
Such were the romantic and decidedly un-sexy conversations Mission had with the girl of his dreams that he could name the plant’s every phase of operation as he wound his way toward the waste room. If needed, he could also bore a porter to tears with rumors of who had said what about whom throughout the plant. This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.
The noise along the curving hallway grew louder the deeper he went. It started out as a background hum near the control rooms and offices, and just when he’d gotten used to this residual noise, another layer piled on top, more machines macerating, filtering, straining, and pumping. Mission never appreciated how loud the combined buzzing was until he left the plant with his hearing rattled and his throat sore from yelling over it all.
Inside the waste room, he spotted familiar faces all around the processing vats. Knowing who he was looking for, one of the workers pointed down the long row of low steel cylinders that held the gray and black water. Jenine was on top of one of the cylinders, which was almost as big around as his dad’s apartment and crisscrossed with pipes and valves. Crouched down, she worked a series of large valves while an older woman filled a glass vial with murky fluid and held it up to the light. Mission waited patiently. This was where the water eventually came from that his father was always cursing. He remembered his old man sitting around the dinner table, shaking his fist at the floor, grumbling about the supply of water, how it was more than he needed for his crops one day, never enough the next.
Jenine eventually felt his presence. She turned, smiled, and lifted a finger, asking him to wait a moment, then finished opening and closing the valves. The woman testing the waste water glanced up at the two of them, frowned at Mission, and carefully dispensed a dark dye into the tube before shaking it, a thumb unhygienically used to cork the end. These were dark arts, Mission thought, whatever they did to make shower water and urine safe to drink. Dark and noisy arts. But at least he had grown used to the smell, which wasn’t the foulness one would expect but rather something chemical, something caustic.
Jenine yelled to her supervisor that she was taking her break, wiped her palms on the seat of her pants, and hopped down. She led Mission away from the rows and rows of containers before digging the foam inserts out of her ears.
“Hey, Mish!” she yelled, as she pulled him into the hallway. She clasped his neck and kissed him on the cheek. By the time he thought to hug her back or return the gesture, it was already over, leaving him scrambling awkwardly at the air and feeling a fool.
She led him down two doors to the break room, which stank of microwaved soup and sweaty coveralls. It smelled almost exactly like the break room in Dispatch, fifty levels down, in fact. Mission wondered if every break room smelled just like this.
Jenine grabbed a dented metal cup from a pile of them by the sink and filled it with water. “Whadja bring me?” she asked, glancing at his shoulder.
Mission shook his head and turned to show her his empty pack. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like an ass.
She waved her hand and took a long pull on the tin cup. “It’s fine.” She refilled the cup from the sink, and Mission noticed that she waited for the faucet to stop dripping into the vessel, even tapped it twice with her fist to get the last drop, before pulling it away. Every profession had its quirks and habits, he supposed. Like how a porter never passed a landing without checking for a signal ’chief, nor missed a rumor whispered on the stairs.
“Sorry if I made it sound like it’s your duty to shower me with gifts.” She winked at him, and Mission laughed.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I like bringing you stuff. I was just weighed down with a tandem haul this time.” He swung his arms and twisted at the waist to stretch his spine. “They’ve been pouring it on us. But this is what I’ve been told to expect our first year.”
“Tell me about it.” Jenine leaned back against the counter and waved Mission toward the jumbled pile of cups. “I thought shadowing was bad, but first year is even worse.”
He accepted her offer and filled a cup with water. He reminded himself to top up his thermos before he left as well.
“It’s almost enough to make you miss school, isn’t it?” she asked.
Mission laughed. “Oh, hell yeah it is.”
“Here’s to better days.” She held her cup up.
Mission tinked his against hers, careful not to splash any water. “To better days.”
They watched each other over the lips of their cups while they drank. And in that breathless pause, in the time it took to swallow once, twice, three times, Mission felt an incredible rush of happiness that just as quickly plummeted away. It was like a memory of something that had not yet happened, a vivid image of him and Jenine sitting at a small table in a small apartment, and then a sense of the space between them brought on by their occupations. In this imaginary future, he would find himself leaving for another week of runs before he got his next day off. And so the same dread he felt right then in that break room, the desire to maximize their time together, to sip rather than gulp, would surely haunt him in a future he could only dream about. He swallowed and peered into his cup, searching for the courage to tell her how he felt.
“Speaking of better days,” Jenine said, “have you been by the Nest lately?”Mission shook his head. He finished his water with another long pull and filled it halfway back up. “I will tomorrow.” He turned and studied his friend and had a sudden sense of how grown up they had become, standing around like that, both with jobs, sipping water from dented cups, swapping memories of the long ago. “You?”
She nodded. “I was up last weekend. A few of us are trying to go more regularly, help with the kids, though there aren’t as many of them around as there used to be.”
“A few of you? Did Rodny go?”
He braced himself for her reply. An old rumor had spread that the two of them had been spending time together, back before Rodny was swallowed up by his work. Jenine was going to tell him that yes, she and Rodny were in love, had made it official, had registered with the Pact. She was going to tell him and break his heart—
“I haven’t seen Rod in a while. I was going to ask you. Whatever they have him doing in IT, they don’t seem to let him out much.”
Mission shrugged and feigned indifference. In fact, he had grown concerned. The last two times he’d been through the thirties and stopped to see his friend, he’d been told Rodny was “unavailable.” Even when Mission insisted he didn’t mind waiting, they’d told him it wouldn’t happen. Mission worried his old friend was becoming a recluse or a workaholic, one more piece of his childhood wrested away. He used to laugh when Rodny boasted he’d be Mayor or a department head one day. It didn’t seem so funny anymore.
“I have to get back,” Jenine said. “I only get a ten.” She grabbed a small towel from a hanger over the sink and rubbed the cup inside and out. She set it back on the pile and held her hand out for Mission’s. “You got another delivery today, or are you done?”
“I’m done.” He finished his water and let her have the cup. “I’m crashing in the waystation on nineteen. I might do a run up-top before heading down to see the Crow tomorrow.”
“So what’re you doing tonight?” She waved her consent as Mission held up his thermos questioningly. “You wanna hang out? Me and some friends are going up to twenty-three to drop paint bombs.”
“I can’t tonight.” His metal thermos sang as it was filled, and he felt doubly bad for not bringing her anything. “I’ve got this thing later.”
“What thing? I thought you were gonna sack out.”
“I meant that I have to get up early. And haven’t you gotten a little old for paint bombs?”
Jenine smiled. “There’s this place on twenty-three where if you release at just the right spot, the bomb goes almost a hundred levels down before splatting at one-twenty-two.”
Mission shifted his weight to his other foot. “Yeah, I’ve seen it.” He wanted to tell her that he walked through that spot on one-twenty-two all the time, that people he knew down there complained, that Sharen, another porter, had nearly been hit by a paint bomb dropped from the Mids a few weeks ago. Instead, he told Jenine about the time something had whistled by his head in the dead of night as he worked his way through the eighties. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” he told her.
Jenine’s smile melted. She didn’t say anything, didn’t have to—the silence was enough. It was as if she were beginning to understand something even better than Mission did: he was no longer just of the Up Top. He was a child of the entire silo, now. It meant more than being a target everywhere he went. It meant having no one to conspire with anymore, no one to pick out targets with in whispers.
“Well, you’ve gotta get up early tomorrow, anyway.”
“Yeah.” He brushed his hair off his forehead. All the barbers he passed in a typical week, never enough time to stop. He would look like Frankie soon enough. “Hey, it was good seeing you.”
“Same. For sure. Take care of yourself, Mish. Watch your steps.”
Mission smiled. And this time, when she leaned in to touch his neck and kiss his cheek, he was ready to reciprocate. “You know I will,” he said, kissing her lightly on the cheek. “You watch your steps as well.”
•5•
Later that night, Mission could still feel the soft touch of her hand on his neck and the press of her lips to his cheek. In the quiet and deathly darkness of the silo’s nighttime, he could hear Jenine whispering for him to be safe.
The lights had been dimmed so man and silo might sleep. It was those wee hours when children were long hushed with sing-song lullabies and only those with trouble in mind crept about. Mission held very still in that darkness and waited. He thought on love and other forbidden things. And somewhere in the dark, there came the chirp of rope wound tight and sliding against metal, the bird-like sound fibers made as they gripped steel and strained under some great burden.
A gang of porters huddled with him on the stairway. Mission pressed his cheek against the silo’s untrembling inner post, the cool steel touching him where Jenine’s lips had. He lost himself in his thoughts, controlling his breathing like he’d been shadowed how. And he listened for the rope. He knew well the sounds they made, could feel the burn on his neck, that raised weal healed over by the years, a mark glanced at by others but rarely mentioned aloud. And again in that thick gray of the dim-time there came a chirp like some caged bird flexing its beak.
He waited for the signal. He thought on rope, his own life, and secret love—all these forbidden things. There was a book in Dispatch down on seventy-four that kept accounts. In the main waystation for all the porters, a massive ledger fashioned out of a fortune in paper was kept under lock and key. On this year’s wage of pulp was a careful tally of certain types of deliveries, handwritten so the information couldn’t slip off into wires. Only a handful of porters knew for certain it existed—to the rest the book was legend.
Mission had heard that they kept track of certain kinds of pipe in this ledger, but he didn’t know why. Brass, too, and various types of fluids coming out of Chemical. Any of these or too much rope, and you were put on the watching list. Porters were the lords of rumor. They knew where everything went. And their whisperings gathered like condensation in Dispatch Main where they were written down.
Mission listened to the rope creak and sing in the darkness. He knew what it felt like to have a length of it cinched tightly around his neck. And it seemed strange to him—it seemed wrong—that if you ordered enough to hang yourself, nobody cared. Enough to span a few levels, and eyebrows were raised.