“You asked me if Victor had regrets—” Erskine coughed into his fist and nodded. “I do think he felt something close to that once. It was something he said to me as he was coming off his eighth or ninth shift, I don’t remember which. I think I was heading into my sixth. This was just after the two of you worked together, after that nasty business with Silo 12—”
“My first shift,” Donald said, since Erskine seemed to be counting. He wanted to add that it was his only shift. It was his final shift.
“Yes, of course.” Erskine adjusted his glasses. “I’m sure you knew him well enough to know that he didn’t show his emotions often.”
“He was difficult to read,” Donald agreed. He knew almost nothing of the man he had just helped to bury.
“So you’ll appreciate this, I think. We were riding the lift together, and Vic turns to me and says how hard it is to sit there at that desk of his and see what we were doing to the men across the hall. He meant you, of course. People in your position.”
Donald tried to imagine the man he knew saying such a thing. He wanted to believe it.
“But that’s not what really struck me. I’ve never seen him sadder than when he said the following. He said—” Erskine rested a hand on the pod. “He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you—he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge.”
“People like me?” Donald shook his head. “What does that even mean?”
Erskine smiled. “I asked him precisely that. His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.” Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. “And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.”
•16•
It was that night that Anna came to him. After a day of numbness and dwelling on death, of eating the meals brought down by Thurman and not tasting a bite, of watching her set up a computer for him and spread out folders of notes, she came to him in the darkness.
Donald complained. He tried to push her away. She sat on the edge of the cot and held his wrists while he sobbed and grew feeble. He thought of Erskine’s story, on what it meant to do the right thing rather than the correct thing, what the difference was. He thought this as an old lover draped herself across him, her hand on the back of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder, lying there against him while he wept.
A century of sleep had weakened him, he thought. A century of sleep and the knowledge that Mick and Helen had lived a life together. He felt suddenly angry at her. Not at Anna, whose breath he could feel on his neck, but at Helen. Angry at her for not holding out, for not living alone, for not getting his messages and meeting him over the hill where he could store her beauty away forever.
Anna kissed his cheek and whispered that everything would be okay. Fresh tears flowed down Donald’s face as he realized that he was everything Victor had assumed he wasn’t. He was a miserable human being for wishing his wife to be lonely so that he could sleep at night a hundred years later. He was a miserable human being for denying her that solace when Anna’s touch made him feel so much better.
“I can’t,” he whispered for the dozenth time.
“Shhh,” Anna said. She brushed his hair back in the darkness. And the two of them were alone in that room where wars were waged. They were trapped together with those crates of arms, with guns and ammo, and far more dangerous things.
Silo 18
•17•
Mission wound his way toward Central Dispatch and agonized over what to do for his friend. He felt afraid for Rodny but powerless to help. The door they had him behind was unlike any he’d ever seen: thick and solid, gleaming and daunting. If the trouble his friend had caused could be read by where they were keeping him—
He shuddered to continue that line of thought. It’d only been a few months since the last cleaning. Mission had been there, had carried up part of the suit, a more haunting experience than porting a body for burial. Dead bodies at least were placed in those black bags the coroners used. There was something good and somber about them. The cleaning suit was a different sort of bag, tailored to a living soul that would crawl inside and be forced to die there.
Mission remembered where they had picked up the gear. It’d been a room right down the hall from where Rodny was being kept. Weren’t cleanings run by the same department? He shivered. One slip of a tongue could land a body out there, rotting on the hills, and his friend Rodny was known to wag his dangerously.
First his mother, and now his best friend. Mission wondered what the Pact said about volunteering to clean in one’s stead. If it said anything at all. Amazing that he could live under the rules of a document that he’d never read. He just assumed others had, all the people in charge, and that they were operating by its contents fairly.
On fifty-eight, a porter’s ’chief tied to the downbound railing caught his attention. It was the same blue pattern as the ‘chief worn around his neck, but with a bright red merchant’s hem. Duty beckoned, dispelling thoughts that were spiraling nowhere. Mission unknotted the ‘chief and searched the fabric for the merchant’s stamp. It was Drexel’s, the apothecary down the hall. Light loads and lighter pay, normally. But at least it was downbound, unless Drexel had been careless again with which rail he tied it to.
Mission was dying to get to Central where a shower and a change of clothes awaited, but if anyone spotted him with a flat pack marching past a signal ‘chief, he’d hear it from Morgan and the others. He hurried inside to Drexel’s, praying it wasn’t a round of meds going to several dozen individual apartments. His legs turned to rubber just thinking about it.
Drexel was at the counter as Mission pushed open the apothecary’s squeaky door. A large man with a full beard and a balding head, Drexel was something of a fixture in the mids. Many came to him rather than to the doctors, though Mission wasn’t sure how sound a choice that was. Often, though, it was the man with the most promises who got the chits, not the one who made people better. And besides, the very worst cases rarely complained. If they did, only the roots heard.
The usual handful of sick people sat on Drexel’s benches in the waiting room, sniffling and coughing. Mission felt the urge to cover his mouth with his ‘chief. Instead, he innocuously held his breath and waited while Drexel filled a small square of paper with ground powder, folding it neatly like one might roll a cigarette, before handing it to the woman waiting. The woman slid a few chits across the counter. When she walked away, Mission tossed the signal ‘chief on top of the money.
“Ah, Mish. Good to see you, boy. Looking fit as a fiddle.” Drexel smoothed his beard and smiled, yellow teeth peering out from cornrows of drooping whiskers.