‘They’ve got you doing the heavy lifting, I see,’ his father said, breaking the quiet. He assumed the load Mission had carried had been assigned by Dispatch. Mission didn’t correct him.
‘They let us carry what we can handle,’ he said. ‘The older porters get mail delivery. We each haul what we can.’
‘I remember when I first stepped out of the shadows,’ his dad said. He squinted and wiped his brow, nodded down the line. ‘Got stuck with potatoes while my caster went back to plucking blueberries. Two for the basket and one for him.’
Not this again. Mission watched as Riley tested the tip of the knife with the pad of his finger. He reached to take back the blade, but his brother twisted away from him.
‘The older porters get mail duty because they can get mail duty,’ his father explained.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mission said, the sadness gone, the anger back. ‘The old ports have bad knees is why we get the heavy loads. Besides, my bonus pay is judged by the pound and the time I make, so I don’t mind.’
‘Oh, yes.’ His father waved at Mission’s feet. ‘They pay you in bonuses and you pay them with your knees.’
Mission could feel his cheeks tighten, could sense the burn of the whelp around his neck.
‘All I’m saying, son, is that the older you get and the more seniority you have, you’ll earn your own choice of rows to hoe. That’s all. I want you to watch out for yourself.’
‘I’m watching out for myself, Dad.’
Riley climbed up, sat on the top rail and flashed his teeth at his reflection in the knife. The kid already had a freckled band of spots across his nose, the start of a farmer’s tan. Damaged flesh from damaged flesh, father like son. And Mission could easily picture Riley years hence, on the other side of that rail, all grown up with a kid of his own. It made him thankful that he’d wormed his way out of the farms and into a job he didn’t take home every night beneath his fingernails.
‘Are you joining us for lunch?’ his father asked, sensing perhaps that he was pushing Mission away.
‘If you don’t mind,’ Mission said. He felt a twinge of guilt that his father expected to feed him, but he appreciated not having to ask. And it would hurt his stepmom’s feelings if he didn’t pay her a visit. ‘I’ll have to run afterward, though. I’ve got a… delivery tonight.’
His father frowned. ‘You’ll have time to see Allie though, right? She’s forever asking about you. The boys here are lined up to marry that girl if you keep her waiting.’
Mission wiped his face to hide his expression. Allie was a great friend — his first and briefest romance — but to marry her would be to marry the farms, to return home, to live among the buried dead. ‘Probably not this time,’ he said. He felt bad for admitting it.
‘Okay. Well, go drop that off. Don’t squander your bonus sitting here jawing with us.’ The disappointment in the old man’s voice was hotter than the lights and not so easy to shade. ‘We’ll see you in the feeding hall in half an hour?’ He reached out, took his son’s hand one more time and gave it a squeeze. ‘It’s good to see you, son.’
‘Same.’ Mission shook his father’s hand, then clapped his palms together over the grow pit to knock loose any dirt. Riley reluctantly gave the knife back and Mission slipped it into its sheath. He fastened the clasp around the handle, thinking on how he might need to use it that night. He pondered for a moment if he should warn his father, thought of telling him and Riley both to stay inside until morning, not to dare go out.
But he held his tongue, patted his brother on the shoulder and made his way to the pump room down the hall. As he walked through rows of planters and pickers, he thought about farmers selling their own vegetables in makeshift stalls and grinding their own flour. He thought about the cafeteria growing its own sprouts and corn. And he thought of the recently discovered plans to move something heavy from one landing to another without involving the porters.
Everyone was trying to look after themselves in case the violence returned. Mission could feel it brewing, the suspicion and the distrust, the walls being built. Everyone was trying to get a little less reliant on the others, preparing for the inevitable, hunkering down.
He loosened the straps on his pack as he approached the pump room, and a dangerous thought occurred to him, a revelation: if everyone was trying to get to where they didn’t need one another, how exactly was that supposed to help them all get along?
28
• Silo 18 •
THE LIGHTS OF the great spiral staircase were dimmed at night so man and silo might sleep. It was in 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. Somewhere above him, there came the sound of rope wound tight and sliding across metal, the squeaking of fibres as they gripped steel and strained under some great weight.
A gang of porters huddled with him on the stairway. Mission pressed his cheek against the inner post, the steel cooling his skin. He controlled his breathing and listened for the rope. He well knew 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 grey of the dim-time there came a recognisable squeak as the load from above was steadily lowered.
He waited for the signal. He thought on rope, on his own life — and other forbidden things. There was a book in Dispatch down on seventy-four that kept accounts. In the main way station for all the porters, a massive ledger fashioned out of a fortune in paper was kept under lock and key. It contained a careful tally of certain types of deliveries, handwritten so the information couldn’t slip off into wires.
Mission had heard the senior porters kept track of certain kinds of pipe in this ledger, but he didn’t know why. Brass too, and various types of fluids and powders coming out of Chemical. Order these — or too much rope — and you were put on the watching list. Porters were the lords of rumour. 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. It seemed strange to him that if you ordered enough to hang yourself, nobody cared. Enough to span a few levels, and eyebrows were raised.
He adjusted his ’chief and thought on this in the dim-time. A man may take his own life, he supposed, as long as he didn’t take another’s job.
‘Ready yourself,’ came the whisper from above.
Mission tightened the grip on his knife and concentrated on the task at hand. His eyes strained to see in the wan light. He could hear the steady breathing of his fellow porters around him. No doubt they would be squeezing their own knives in anticipation.
The knives came with the job. A porter’s knife for slicing open delivered goods, for cutting fruit to eat on the climb, and for keeping peace as its owner strayed across all the silo’s heights and depths, taking its dangers two at a time. Now, Mission tensed his in his hand, waiting for the order.
Up the stairwell two full turns, on a dim landing, a group of farmers argued in soft voices as they handled the other end of that rope, performing a porter’s job in the dark of night to save a hundred chits or two. Beyond the rail, the rope was invisible in the darkness. He would have to lean out and grope blindly for it. He felt a ring of heat by his collar, and the hilt of his blade was unsure in his sweaty palm.
‘Not yet,’ Morgan whispered, and Mission felt his old caster’s hand on his shoulder, holding him back. Mission cleared his mind. Another soft squeak, the sound of line taking the strain of a heavy generator, and a dense patch of grey drifted through the black. The men above shouted in whispers as they handled the load, as they did in green the work of men in blue.