“Silo seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t around when it was put down, but I looked into this. There was a guy there who answered a call after the place was gassed. But I don’t think it was gassed. Not correctly. I think Anna took what we get in our pods to stitch us up and sent that instead.”
“Why?” Charlotte asked.
Donald looked up. “To stop the world from ending. To not murder anyone. To show people some compassion.”
“So everyone at seventeen is okay?”
Donald flipped through the pages of the report. “No,” he said. “For whatever reason, she couldn’t stop the airlock from popping. That’s part of the procedure. And with the amount of gas outside, they didn’t stand a chance.”
“I spoke to someone at seventeen,” Charlotte said. “Your friend… that mayor is over there. There are people there. She said they tunneled their way over.”
Donald smiled. He nodded. “Of course. Of course. She wanted me to think she was coming after us.”
“Well, I think she’s coming after us now.”
“We need to get in touch with her.”
“What we need to do,” Darcy said, “is start thinking about the end of this shift. There’s going to be a helluva beating in about an hour.”
Donald and Charlotte turned to him. He was standing by the door, right near where Donald had been kicked over and over.
“I mean my boss,” Darcy said. “He’s gonna be pissed when he wakes up and discovers a prisoner escaped during my shift.”
Silo 17
53
Juliette and Raph stopped at the lower deputy station to look for another radio or a spare battery. They found neither. The charging rack was still on the wall, but it hadn’t been wired into the makeshift power lines trailing through the stairwell. Juliette weighed whether or not it was worth staying there and getting some juice in the portable or if she should just wait until they got to the Mids station or IT—
“Hey,” Raph whispered. “Do you hear something?”
Juliette shined her flashlight deep into the offices. She thought she heard someone crying. “C’mon,” she said.
She left the charger alone and headed back toward the holding cells. There was a dark form sitting in the very last cell, sobbing. Juliette thought it was Hank at first, that he had wandered up to the nearest thing like a home to him, only to realize what state this world was in. But the man wore robes. It was Father Wendel who peered up at them from behind the bars. The tears in his eyes caught in the glare of the flashlight. A small candle burned on the bench beside him, wax dripping to the ground.
The door to the holding cell wasn’t shut all the way. Juliette pulled it open and stepped inside. “Father?”
The old man looked awful. He had the tattered remains of an ancient book in his hands. Not a book, but a stack of loose pages. There were pages scattered all over the bench and on the floor. As Juliette cast her light down, she could see that she was standing on a carpet of fine print. There was a pattern of black bars across all the pages, sentences and words made unreadable. Juliette had seen pages like this once in a book kept inside a cage, a book where only one sentence in five could be read.
“Leave me,” Father Wendel said.
She was tempted to, but she didn’t. “Father, it’s me, Juliette. What’re you doing here?”
Wendel sniffled and sorted through the pages as though he were looking for something. “Isaiah,” he said. “Isaiah, where are you? Everything’s out of order.”
“Where’s your congregation?” Juliette asked.
“Not mine anymore.” He wiped his nose, and Juliette felt Raph tug on her elbow to leave the man be.
“You can’t stay here,” she said. “Do you have any food or water?”
“I have nothing. Go.”
“C’mon,” Raph hissed.
Juliette adjusted the heavy load on her back, those sticks of dynamite. Father Wendel laid out more pages around his boots, checking the front and back of each as he did so.
“There’s a group down below planning another dig,” she told him. “I’m going to find them a better place, and they’re going to get our people out of here. Maybe you could come to one of the farms with us and see about getting some food, see if you can help. The people down below could use you.”
“Use me for what?” Wendel asked. He slapped a page down on the bench, and several other pages scattered. “Hellfire or hope,” he said. “Take your pick. One or the other. Damnation or salvation. Every page. Take your pick. Take your pick.” He looked up at them, beseeching them.
Juliette shook her canteen, cracked the lid, and held it out to Wendel. The candle on the bench sputtered and smoked, shadows growing and shrinking. Wendel accepted the canteen and took a sip. He handed it back.
“Had to see it with my own eyes,” he whispered. “I went into the dark to see the devil. I did. Walked and walked, and here it is. Another world. I led my flock to damnation.” He twisted up his face, studied one of the pages for a moment. “Or salvation. Take your pick.”
Plucking the candle from the bench, he held a page close to it in order to see it better. “Ah, Isaiah, there you are.” And with the baritone of a Sunday, he read: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances.” Wendel touched a corner of the page to the flame and roared again: “Its desolate inheritances!”
The page burned until he had to release it. It moved through the air like an orange, shrinking bird.
“Let’s go,” Raph hissed, more insistently this time.
Juliette held up a hand. She approached Father Wendel and crouched down in front of him, rested a hand on his knee. The anger she had felt toward him over Marcus was gone. The anger she had felt as he instilled outrage in his people toward her and her digging was gone. Replacing that anger was guilt — guilt from knowing that all of their fears and mistrust had been warranted.
“Father,” she said. “Our people will be damned if they stay in this place. I can’t help them. I won’t be here. They are going to need your guidance if they’re to make it to the other side.”
“They don’t need me,” he said.
“Yes, they do. Women in the depths of this silo weep for their babies. Men weep for their homes. They need you.” And she knew this was true. It was in the hard times that they needed him the most.
“You will see them through,” Father Wendel said. “You will see them through.”
“No, I won’t. You are their salvation. I am off to damn those who did this. I’m going to send them straight to hell.”
Wendel looked up from his lap. Hot wax flowed over his fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice. The smell of burnt paper filled the room, and he rested a hand on Juliette’s head.
“In that case, my child, I bless your journey.”
The trip up the stairwell was heavier with that blessing. Or maybe it was the weight of the explosives on her back, which Juliette knew would’ve been useful for the tunneling below. They could be used for salvation, but she was using them for damnation. They were like the pages of Wendel’s book in that they offered plenty of both. As she approached the farms, she reminded herself that Erik had insisted she take the dynamite. There were others eager to see her pull this off.
She and Raph arrived at the lower farms, and she knew something was wrong the moment they stepped inside. Cracking the door released a surge of heat, a blast of angry air. Her first thought was a fire, and she knew from living in that silo that there were no longer any water hoses that worked. But the bloom of bright lights down the hall and along the outer grow plots hinted at something else.