Tracy sank into one of the chairs. She looked up at Dmitry. “Are you sure about this? You were wrong about the clock the last time. You were a few seconds off. Maybe—”
“It was tape delay,” Dmitry said, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. “All broadcasters use a time delay. I wasn’t wrong. I’m not wrong now. I can show you the code.”
One of the founders groaned.
“What were you saying about the pod?”
“I think this is a manual for a single shift,” Dmitry said. “And the pod is for—”
“You mean the icebox?” Patrice asked.
“Yes. The cryo-unit is to allow them to stagger the shifts. To last the full five hundred years. I looked over one of the requisitions reports we intercepted, and it all makes sense—”
“Does our pod work?” Anatoly asked.
Dmitry shrugged. “Nobody wanted me to test it, remember? Listen, we have a decision to make—”
“What decision? You’re telling us we’re all dead.”
“Not all of us,” Tracy said. She rested her head in her palms, could see that witch from her dreams, shoveling soil on thousands of writhing bodies, hands clawing to get out.
“What do you mean?” Patrice asked.
“I mean we’re the same as them.” She looked up and pointed to the dead monitors, which had once looked out on the world, on the people with their anthems who had doomed them all. “We have the same decision to make. Our little world, our little mountain, isn’t big enough for all of us. So we have a decision to make. The same decision they made. We’re no better than them.”
“Yes,” Dmitry said. “I figure we have eighteen months’ worth of food for five thousand mouths. That gives us enough for fifteen people for five hundred years.”
“Fifteen people? To do what?”
“To survive,” Dmitry said. But the tone of his voice said something more somber and sinister. Tracy tried to imagine all that he was implying. Someone else said it for her.
“And kill everyone else? Our families?”
“No way,” someone said. Tracy watched her partners, these founders, fidget. It was the orientation all over again. A fight would break out.
“We can’t live that long anyway,” Tracy said, attempting to defuse the argument by showing how pointless it all was.
“Generations,” Anatoly blurted out. He scratched his beard, seemed to be pondering a way to make some insane plan work. “Have to make sure there’s only one birth for every death.”
Tracy’s eyes returned to the book on the center of the conference table. Others were looking at it as well. She remembered a passage like that inside the book. Several passages now suddenly made more sense. The answer had been there, but none of them had been willing to see it. It’s how that book seemed to work.
“I won’t be a part of this,” Natasha said. “I won’t. I’d rather have one year here, with my family, than even consider what you’re suggesting.”
“Will you still think that a year from now, when the last ration is consumed and we’re left watching one another waste away? Either it happens now, or it happens then. Which way is cleaner?”
“We sound just like them,” Tracy whispered, mostly to herself. She eyed those monitors again, saw her reflection in one of them.
“The Donner Party,” Sherman said. When one of the Russians turned to stare at him, Sherman started to explain. “Settlers heading west two centuries ago. They got trapped in the mountains and had to resort to—”
“I’m familiar with the story. It’s not an option.”
“I didn’t mean it was an option.” Sherman turned to Natasha. “I mean, that’s what we’re going to start thinking a year from now. Or eighteen months. Whenever.”
Natasha spun a lock of her hair. She dipped the end between her lips and remained silent.
“It would be quick,” Dmitry said. “We still have canisters of the test nanos, the ones I built. Those, I can program. We would have to inoculate ourselves first—”
“This is going too fast,” Tracy said. “We need to think about this.”
“After thirty-six days, we’ll be down to fourteen people,” Dmitry said. “At the rate we’ll be feeding these people, each month we delay means one spot lost. How long do you want to think about it?” He took off his glasses and wiped the condensation from them. It had grown hot in the room. “We’re in a lifeboat,” he said. “We are drifting to shore, but not as fast as we had hoped. There are too many of us in the boat.” He returned the glasses to the bridge of his nose, looked coolly at the others.
“Every one of us should have died yesterday,” Anatoly said. “Our families. Us. Every one. None of us should be here. Even this day is a bonus. A year would be a blessing.”
“Is it so important that any of us make it to the other side?” Patrice asked. The others turned to her. “I mean, it won’t even be us. If we were to do this. It would be our descendants. And what kind of hell are they going to endure in here, living for dozens of generations in this hole, keeping their numbers at fifteen, brothers and sisters coupling? Is that even surviving? What’s the point? What’s the point if we’re just trying to get someone to the other side? No matter what, the assholes in Atlanta will be our legacy now.”
“That’s why we have to do this,” Tracy said.
Dmitry nodded. “Tracy’s right. That’s precisely why we have to do this. So they don’t get away with it. Isn’t that what we planned from the beginning? Isn’t that why we only have enough food for a year but enough guns to slaughter an army?”
“Fifteen people is no army.”
“But they’ll know,” Dmitry said. “They’ll carry legends with them. We’ll write it all down. We’ll make up most of the first fifteen. We’ll make sure no one ever forgets—”
“You mean make a religion out of this.”
“I mean make a cause.”
“Or a cult.”
“Do we want them to have the world to themselves, the fuckers who did this?”
“We can’t decide anything now,” Tracy said. She rubbed her temples. “I need to sleep. I need to see my family—”
“No one can know,” Anatoly told her.
Tracy shot him a look. “I’m not telling anyone. But we need a day or two before we do anything.” She caught the look on Dmitry’s face. “Surely we have that much time.”
He nodded.
“And you won’t program anything without consulting with us first.”
Again, a nod.
Sherman laughed, but it was without humor. “Yes,” he said. “I need sleep as well.” He pointed to Dmitry. “And I want assurances that I’ll wake up in the morning.”
The following day, Tracy grabbed breakfast from the mess hall and found three founders at a table in the corner. She joined them. No one spoke. Between bites of bread and canned ham, she watched the bustle of strangers weaving through the tables and chairs, introducing themselves to one another, glancing around at their surroundings, and trying to cope with their imprisonment. Their salvation.
The buzz of voices and spoons clicking against porcelain was shattered for a brief moment by an awful release of laughter. Tracy searched for the offender, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. She watched Igor chew his bread, his eyes lifeless, focused beyond the mountain’s walls, and knew he was thinking the same thing: They were in a room crowded with ghosts. There was no stopping what they would have to do. And for the first time, Tracy understood all that John had endured those past years. She remembered the way he would glance around in a restaurant, his eyes haunted, the color draining suddenly from his face. Looking for an exit, she used to think. Looking for some way out if it all goes to shit.