“I’m picking you up nice and clear,” someone answered, a man’s voice. “You’re looking for someone on eighteen? I don’t think anyone’s up there. Who did you say this was?”
Charlotte squeezed the mic. “My name is Charlotte Keene. Who is this?”
“This is Tom Higgins, head of the Planning Committee. We’re up here at the deputy station on seventy-five. We’re hearing there’s been some kind of collapse, that we shouldn’t head back down. What’s going on below?”
“I’m not below you,” Charlotte said. “I’m in another silo.”
“Say again. Who is this? Keene, you say? I don’t recognize your name from the census.”
“Yes, Charlotte Keene. Is your mayor there? Juliette?”
“You say you’re in our silo? Is this someone from the Mids?”
Charlotte started to say something, realized how difficult this was going to be, but another voice cut in. A familiar voice.
“This is Juliette.”
Charlotte leaned forward and adjusted the volume. She squeezed the mic. “Juliette, my name is Charlotte Keene. You’ve been speaking with my brother, Donny. Donald, I mean.” She was nervous. She paused to wipe her palms on the leg of her coveralls. When she let go of the mic, the man from earlier could be heard talking on the same frequency:
“—heard our silo is gone. Can you confirm? Where are you?”
“I’m in Mechanical, Tom. I’ll come see you when I can. Yes, our silo is gone. Yes, you should stay where you are. Now let me see what this person wants.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’? I don’t understand.”
“Dead, Tom. Everyone is dead. You can tear up your fucking census. Now please stay off the air. In fact, can we change channels?”
Charlotte waited to hear what the man would say. And then she realized the mayor was speaking to her. She hurriedly squeezed the mic before the other voice could step on her transmission.
“I … uh, yes. I can transmit on all frequencies.”
Again, the head of the planning committee, or whatever he’d called himself, stepped in: “Did you say dead? Was this your doing?”
“Channel eighteen,” Juliette said.
“Eighteen,” Charlotte repeated. She reached for the knob as a burst of questions spilled from the radio. The man’s voice was silenced by a twist of Charlotte’s fingers.
“This is Charlotte Keene on channel eighteen, over.”
She waited. It felt as though a door had just been pulled tight, a confidant pulled inside.
“This is Juliette. What’s this about me knowing your brother? What level are you on?”
Charlotte couldn’t believe how difficult this was to get across. She took a deep breath. “Not level. Silo. I’m in Silo 1. You’ve spoken with my brother a few times.”
“You’re in Silo 1. Donald is your brother.”
“That’s right.” And finally, it sounded as if this was established. It was a relief.
“Have you called to gloat?” Juliette asked. There was a sudden spark of life in her voice, a flash of violence. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? How many people you’ve killed? Your brother told me he was capable of this, but I didn’t believe him. I never believed him. Is he there?”
“No.”
“Well, tell him this. And I hope he believes me when I say it: My every thought right now is how best to kill him, to make sure this never happens again. You tell him that.”
A chill spread through Charlotte. This woman thought her brother had brought doom on them. Her palms felt clammy as she cradled the mic. She pressed the button, found it sticking, knocked it against the table until it clicked properly.
“Donny didn’t … He may already be dead,” Charlotte said, fighting back the tears.
“That’s a shame. I guess I’ll be coming for whoever’s next in line.”
“No, listen to me. Donny … it wasn’t him who did this. I swear to you. Some people took him. He wasn’t supposed to be talking to you at all. He wanted to tell you something and didn’t know how.” Charlotte released the mic and prayed that this was getting through, that this stranger would believe her.
“Your brother warned me he could press a button and end us all. Well, that button has been pressed, and my home has been destroyed. People I care about are now dead. If I wasn’t coming after you bastards before, I sure as hell am now.”
“Wait,” Charlotte said. “Listen. My brother is in trouble. He’s in trouble because he was talking to you. The two of us … we aren’t involved in this.”
“Yeah, right. You want us talking. Learn what you can. And then you destroy us. It’s all games with you. You send us out to clean, but you’re just poisoning the air. That’s what you’re doing. You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t— Listen, I swear to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I … this will be hard for you to believe, maybe, but I remember when the world out there was very different. When we could live and breathe out there. And I think part of it can be like that again. Is like that right now. That’s what my brother wanted to tell you, that there’s hope out there.”
A pause. A heavy breath. Charlotte’s arm was back to throbbing.
“Hope.”
Charlotte waited. The radio hissed at her like an angry breath forced through clenched teeth.
“My home, my people, are dead and you would have me hope. I’ve seen the hope you dish out, the bright blue skies we pull down over our heads, the lie that makes the exiled do your bidding, clean for you. I’ve seen it, and thank God I knew to doubt it. It’s the intoxication of nirvana. That’s how you get us to endure this life. You promise us heaven, don’t you? But what do you know of our hell?”
She was right. This Juliette was right. How could such a conversation as this take place? How did her brother manage it? It was alien races who somehow spoke the same tongue. It was gods and mortals. Charlotte was attempting to commune with ants, ants who worried about the twists of their warrens beneath the soil, not the layout of the wider land. She wouldn’t be able to get them to see—
But then Charlotte realized this Juliette knew nothing of her own hell. And so she told her.
“My brother was beaten half to death,” Charlotte said. “He could very well be dead. It happened before my own eyes. And the man who did it was like a father to us both.” She fought to hold it together, to not let the tears creep into her voice. “I’m being hunted right now. They will put me back to sleep or they will kill me, and I don’t know that there’s a difference. They keep us frozen for years and years while the men work in shifts. There are computers out there that play games and will one day decide which of your silos is allowed to go free. The rest will die. All of the silos but one will die. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”
She fumbled through the folder for the notes, the list of the rankings, and couldn’t find it through her blurred vision. She grabbed the map instead. Juliette was saying nothing, was likely just as confused by Charlotte’s hell as Charlotte was of hers. But it needed to be said. These awful truths discovered needed to be told. It felt good.
“We … Donny and I were only ever trying to figure out how to help you, all of you, I swear. My brother … he had an affinity for your people.” Charlotte let go of the mic so this person couldn’t hear her cry.
“My people,” Juliette said, subdued.
Charlotte nodded. She took a deep breath. “Your silo.”
There was a long silence. Charlotte wiped her face with her sleeve.
“Why do you think I would trust you? Do you know what you all have done? How many lives you’ve taken? Thousands are dead—”
Charlotte reached to adjust the volume, to turn it back down.
“—and the rest of us will join them. But you say you want to help. Who the hell are you?”
Juliette waited for her to answer. Charlotte faced the hissing box. She squeezed the mic. “Billions,” she said. “Billions are dead.”
There was no response.
“We killed so many more than you could ever imagine. The numbers don’t even make sense. We killed nearly everyone. I don’t think … the loss of thousands … it doesn’t even register. That’s why they’re able to do it.”
“Who? Your brother? Who did this?”
Charlotte wiped fresh tears from her cheeks and shook her head. “No. Donny would never do this. It was … you probably don’t have the words, the vocabulary. A man who used to be in charge of the world the way it once was. He attacked my brother. He found us.” Charlotte glanced at the door, half expecting Thurman to kick it down and barge in, to do the same to her. She had poked the nest, she was sure of it. “He’s the one who killed the world and your people. His name is Thurman. He was a … something like a mayor.”
“Your mayor killed my world. Not your brother, but this other man. Did he kill this world that I’m standing in right now? It’s been dead for decades. Did he kill it as well?”
Charlotte realized this woman thought of silos as the entire world. She remembered an Iraqi girl she spoke with once while attempting to get directions to a different town. That was a conversation in a different language about a different world, and it had been simpler than this.
“The man who took my brother killed the wider world, yes.” Charlotte saw the memo in the folder, the note labeled The Pact. How to explain?
“You mean the world outside the silos? The world where crops grew aboveground and silos held seeds and not people?”
Charlotte let out a held breath. Her brother must’ve explained more than he let on.
“Yes. That world.”
“That world has been dead for thousands of years.”
“Hundreds of years,” Charlotte said. “And we … we’ve been around a long time. I … I used to live in that world. I saw it before it was ruined. The people here in this silo are the ones who did it. I’m telling you.”
There was silence. It was the sucking vacuum after a bomb. An admission, clearly stated. Charlotte had done it, what she thought her brother had always wanted to do. Admit to these people what they’d done. Paint a target. Invite retribution. All that they deserved.
“If this were true, I would want all of you dead. Do you understand me? Do you know how we live? Do you know what the world is like outside? Have you seen it?”
“Yes.”
“With your own eyes? Because I have.”
Charlotte sucked in a deep breath. “No,” she admitted. “Not with my own eyes. With a camera. But I’ve seen further out than any, and I can tell you that it’s better out there. I think you’re right about us poisoning the world, but I think it’s contained. I think there’s a great cloud around us. Beyond this cloud is blue skies and a chance at a life. You have to believe me, if I could help you get free, make this right, I would in a heartbeat.”
There was a long pause. A very long pause.
“How?”
“I’m not … I don’t think I’m in a position to help. I’m only saying if I could, I would. I know you’re in trouble over there, but I’m not in great shape over here. When they find me, they’ll probably kill me. Or something like it. I’ve done …” She touched the screwdriver on the bench. “… very bad things.”
“My people will want me dead for the part I played in this,” Juliette said. “They’ll send me to clean, and I won’t come back this time. So I guess we have something in common.”
Charlotte laughed and wiped her cheeks. “I’m truly sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for the things you’re going through. I’m sorry we did this to you all.”
There was silence.
“Thank you. I want to believe you, believe that you and your brother weren’t the ones who did this. Mostly because someone close to me wanted me to believe your brother was trying to help. So I hope you aren’t in the way when I get over there. Now, these bad things you say you’ve done, have you done them to bad people?”
Charlotte sat up straight. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Good. That’s a start. And now let me tell you about the world out there. I’ve loved two men in all my life, and both of them tried to convince me of this, that the world was a good place, that we could make it better. When I found out about the diggers, when I dreamed about tunneling here, I thought this was the way. But it only made things worse. And those two men with all that hope bursting from their breasts? Both of them are dead. That’s the world I live in.”
“Diggers?” Charlotte asked. She tried to make sense of this. “You got to that other silo through the airlocks. Over the hills.”
Juliette didn’t answer at first. “I’ve said too much,” she said. “I should go.”
“No, wait. Help me understand. You tunneled from one silo to another?” Charlotte leaned forward and spread the notes out again, grabbed the map. Here was one of those puzzles that made no sense until a new rule or piece of information was made available. She traced one of the red lines out beyond the silos to a point labeled SEED.
“I think this is important,” Charlotte said. She felt a surge of excitement. She saw how the game was supposed to play out, what was to become of this in two hundred years. “You have to believe me when I say this, but I am from the old world. I promise. I’ve seen it covered with crops that … like you say, that grow aboveground. And the world outside that looks ruined, I don’t think it stretches like that forever. I’ve seen a glimpse. And these diggers, you called them. I think I know what they’re for. Listen to me. I have a map here that my brother thought was important. It shows a bunch of lines leading to this place marked S-E-E-D.”