While the patch of grey inched past, Mission thought of the night’s danger and marvelled at the fear in his heart. He possessed a sudden care for a life he had once laboured to end, a life that never should have been. He thought of his mother and wondered what she had been like, beyond the disobedience that had cost her life. That was all he knew of his mom. He knew the implant in her hip had failed, as one in ten thousand might. And instead of reporting the malfunction — and the pregnancy — she had hidden him in loose clothes until it was past the time the Pact allowed a child to be treated as a cyst.
‘Ready yourself,’ Morgan hissed.
The grey mass of the generator crept down and out of sight. Mission clutched his knife and thought of how he should’ve been cut out of her and discarded. But past a certain date, and one life was traded for another. Such was the Pact. Born behind bars, Mission had been allowed free while his mother had been sent outside to clean.
‘Now,’ Morgan commanded, and Mission started. Soft and well-worn boots squeaked on the stairs above, the sounds of men lurching into action. Mission concentrated on his part. He pressed himself against the curved rail and reached out into the space beyond. His palm found rope as stiff as steel. He pressed his blade to the taut line.
There was a pop like sinew snapping, the first of the braids parting with just a touch of his sharp blade.
Mission had but a moment to think of those on the landing below, the farmers’ accomplices waiting two levels down. Men were storming up the staircase. Mission longed to join them. With the barest of sawing motions, the rope parted the rest of the way, and Mission thought he heard the heavy generator whistle as it picked up speed. There was a ferocious crash a moment later, men screaming in alarm down below. Above, the fighting had broken out.
With one hand on the rail and another gripping his knife, Mission took the stairs three at a time. He rushed to join the melee above, this midnight lesson on breaking the Pact, on doing another’s job. Grunts and groans and slapping thuds spilled from the landing, and Mission threw himself into the scuffle, thinking not of consequences, but only of this one fight.
29
2212
• Silo 1 •
THE WHEELCHAIR SQUEAKED as its wheels circled around. With each revolution there was a sharp peal of complaint followed by a circuit of deathly silence. Donald lost himself in this rhythmic sound as he was pushed along. His breath puffed out into the air, the room harbouring the same deep chill as his bones.
There were rows and rows of pods stretched out to either side. Names glowed orange on tiny screens, made-up names designed to sever the past from the present. Donald watched them slide by as they pushed him to the exit. His head felt heavy, the weight of remembrance replacing the dreams that coiled away and vanished like wisps of smoke.
The men in the pale blue overalls guided him through the door and into the hallway. He was steered into a familiar room with a familiar table. The wheelchair shimmied as they removed his bare feet from the footrests. He asked how long it’d been, how long he’d been asleep.
‘A hundred years,’ someone said. Which would make a hundred and sixty since orientation. No wonder the wheelchair felt unsteady — it was older than he was. Its screws had worked loose over the long decades that Donald had been asleep.
They helped him stand. His feet were still numb from his hibernation, the cold fading to painful tingles. A curtain was drawn. They asked him to urinate in a cup, which came as glorious relief. The sample was the colour of charcoal, dead machines flushed from his system. The paper gown wasn’t enough to warm him, even though he knew the cold was in his flesh, not in the room. They gave him more of the bitter drink.
‘How long before his head is clear?’ someone asked.
‘A day,’ the doctor said. ‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’
They had him sit while they took his blood. An old man in white overalls with hair just as stark stood in the doorway, frowning. ‘Save your strength,’ the man in white said. He nodded to the doctor to continue his work and disappeared before Donald could place him in his faltering memory. He felt dizzy as he watched his blood, blue from the cold, being taken from him.
They rode a familiar lift. The men around him talked, but their voices seemed distant. Donald felt as though he had been drugged, but he remembered that he had stopped taking their pills. He reached for his bottom lip, finger and mouth both tingling, and felt for an ulcer, that little pocket where he kept his pills unswallowed.
But the ulcer wasn’t there. It would’ve healed in his sleep decades ago. The elevator doors parted, and Donald felt more of that dreamtime fade.
They pushed him down another hall, scuff marks on the walls the height of the wheels, black arcs where rubber had once met the paint. His eyes roamed the walls, the ceiling, the tiles, all bearing centuries of wear. It seemed like yesterday that they had been almost new. Now they were heaped with abuse, a sudden crumbling into ruin. Donald remembered designing halls just like these. He remembered thinking they were making something to last for ages. The truth was there all along. The truth was in the design, staring back at him, too insane to be taken seriously.
The wheelchair slowed.
‘The next one,’ a gruff voice behind him said, a familiar voice. Donald was pushed past one closed door to another. One of the orderlies bustled around the wheelchair, a ring of keys jangling from his hip. A key was selected and slotted into the lock with a series of neat clicks. Hinges cried out as the door was pushed inward. The lights inside were turned on.
It was a room like a cell, musky with the scent of disuse. The light overhead flickered before it came on. There was a narrow double bunk in the corner, a side table, a dresser, a bathroom.
‘Why am I here?’ Donald asked, his voice cracking.
‘This will be your room,’ the orderly said, putting away his keys. His young eyes darted up to the man steering the wheelchair as if seeking assurances for his answer. Another young man in pale blue hurried around and removed Donald’s feet from the stirrups and placed them on carpet worn flat by the years.
Donald’s last memory was of being chased by snarling dogs with leathery wings, chased up a mountain of bones. But that was a dream. What was his last real memory? He remembered a needle. He remembered dying. That felt real.
‘I mean—’ Donald swallowed painfully. ‘Why am I… awake?’
He almost said alive. The two orderlies exchanged glances as they helped him from the chair to the lower bunk. The wheelchair squeaked once as it was pushed back into the hallway. The man guiding it paused, his broad shoulders making the doorway appear small.
One of the orderlies held Donald’s wrist — two fingers pressing lightly on ice-blue veins, lips moving as he silently counted. The other orderly dropped two pills into a plastic cup and fumbled with the cap on a bottle of water.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ the silhouette in the doorway said.
The orderly with the pills glanced over his shoulder as the older man stepped inside the small room and some of the air was displaced. The room shrank. It became more difficult for Donald to breathe.
‘You’re the Thaw—’ Donald whispered.
The old man with the white hair waved a hand at the two orderlies. ‘Give us a moment,’ he said. The one with a grip on Donald’s wrist finished his counting and nodded to the other. Unswallowed pills rattled in a paper cup as they were put away. The old man’s face had awoken something in Donald, pierced through the muddle of visions and dreams.