Solo waved his flashlight about but couldn’t see every corner at once. Cabinets and countertops. A spot of movement, he thought. He trained his light back a little, and something moved on one of the counters. It leapt straight up, the sound of claws scratching as it caught itself on an open cabinet above the counter, then the whisking of a bushy tail before a black shadow disappeared into the darkness.
•31•
A cat! A living thing. A living thing he need not fear, that could do him no harm. Jimmy trudged into the room, calling “kitty, kitty, kitty.” He recalled neighbors trying to corral that tailless animal that lived down the hall from his old apartment.
Something rummaged around in the cabinets. One of the closed doors rattled open and banged shut again. He could only see a spot at a time, wherever he aimed the flashlight. His shins brushed against something. He aimed the beam down to see trash and debris floating in the water. There was a squeak and a splash. Searching with the flashlight, he saw a V of ripples behind what he took for a swimming rat. Jimmy no longer wanted to be in that room. He shivered and rubbed his arm with his free hand. The cat made a racket inside the cabinet.
“Here, kitty, kitty,” he said with less gusto. Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out one of his ration bars and tore the packaging off with his teeth. Taking a stale bite for himself, he chewed and held the rest out in front of him. The silo had been dead for twelve years. He wondered how long cats lived, how this one had made it so long. And eating what? Or were old cats having new cats? Was this a new cat? They didn’t have a lottery, did they?
His bare feet brushed through something beneath the water. The reflection of the light made it difficult to see, and then a white bone broke the surface before sinking again. There was a loose jumble of someone’s remains around his ankles.
Jimmy pretended it was just trash. He reached the cabinet making all the noise, grabbed a handle, and pulled it open. There was a hiss from the shadows. Cans and rotting boxes shifted about as the cat retreated further. Jimmy broke off a piece of stale bar and set it on the shelf. He waited. There was another squeak from the corner of the room, the sound of water lapping at furniture, a stillness inside the cabinet. He kept the flashlight down so as not to spook the animal.
Two eyes approached like bobbing lights. They fixed themselves on Jimmy for a small eternity. He began to seriously wonder if his feet might fall off from the cold, if that’s what feet did when you subjected them to such abuse. The eyes drew closer and diverted downward. It was a black cat, the color of wet shadow, slick as oil. The piece of ration bar crunched as the cat chewed.
“Good kitty,” he whispered, ignoring the scattered bones beneath his feet. He broke off another small piece of the bar and held it out. The cat withdrew a pace. Jimmy set the food on the edge and watched as the animal came forward more quickly this time to snatch it up. The next piece, the cat took from his palm. He offered the last piece, and as the cat came to accept it, Jimmy tried to pick it up with both hands. And this thing, this company he hoped would do him no harm, latched onto one of his arms and sank its claws into his flesh.
Jimmy screamed and threw up his hands. The flashlight tumbled end over end in the air. There was a splash as the cat disappeared. A shriek and a hiss, a violent noise, Jimmy fumbling beneath the water for the dull glow of the light, which flickered once, twice, then left him in darkness.
He groped blindly, seized a solid cylinder, and felt the knobby ends where the leg sockets into the hip. He dropped the bone in disgust. Two more bones before he found the flashlight, which was toast. He retrieved it anyway as the sound of frantic splashing approached. His arms were on fire; he had seen blood on them in the last of the spinning light. And then something was against his leg, up his shin, claws stinging his thighs, the damn cat climbing him like the leg of a table.
Jimmy reached for the poor animal to get its claws out of his flesh. The cat was soaked and hardly felt bigger around than his flashlight. It trembled in his arms and rubbed itself against a dry patch of his coveralls, mewing in complaint. It began to sniff at his breast pocket.
Jimmy held the animal with one forearm across his chest, making a perch, and reached inside his pocket for the other ration bar. It was perfectly dark in the room, so dark it made his ears ache. He ripped the package free and held the bar steady. Tiny paws wrapped around his hand, and there was a crunching sound.
Jimmy smiled. He worked his way toward where he thought the door might be, bumping through furniture and old bones as he went, Solo no more.
Silo 1
•32•
Donald’s apartment had transformed into a cave, a cave where notes lay strewn like bleached bones, where the carcasses of folders decorated his walls, and where boxes of more notes were ordered up from archives like fresh kill. Weeks had passed. The stomping in the halls had dwindled. Donald lived alone with ghosts and slowly pieced together the purpose of what he’d helped to build. He was beginning to see it, the entire picture, zooming out of the schematic until the whole was laid bare.
He coughed into a pink rag and resumed examination of his latest find. It was a map he’d come across once before in the armory, a map of all the silos with a line coming out of each and converging at a single point. Here was one of many mysteries left. The document was labeled Seed, but he could find nothing else about it.
He shuffled through his piles—he had a system, the stacks had meaning—and found what he was looking for. A list similar to the one he’d uncovered on his last shift. A ranking of all the silos. Victor had spent a lot of time looking at this list before he killed himself. The ordering was different than Donald remembered. Different silos were near the top of this one. It was a version of the list that’d been updated weeks ago by Eren. Or generated by a computer and signed off by him. Donald had printed it from the Ops directory, which his Thurman account had access to. He scratched his beard. Silo 18 was near the bottom, down near the silos that no longer harbored life. Silos 12, 17, 40, and a dozen others were labeled N/A. He could tell the list was gravely important by who had access to it and who didn’t. Silo 6 was at the very top. The one hopeful egg in the basket.
Donald could hear Anna approaching while he worked; he could hear her whispers getting louder. She had been trying to tell him something. The note in Thurman’s account, she was trying to say, it had been left for him. So obvious, now. She could never be woken, not a woman. She needed him, needed his help. Donald imagined her piecing all of this together on some recent shift, alone and terrified, scared of her own father, no one left to turn to. So she had taken her father out of power, had entrusted Donald, had left him a note. And what did Donald do?
He heard her whispers and did not startle as she burst up through the film of white pages, a swimmer emerging from a frothy sea. Her arms flailed and splashed as she gasped for air, as she came back to life. Donald watched her struggle for a while. He imagined a hand on her head, pushing her back under. He willed the guilt to subside until the splashes and ripples settled and were pages once more.
Scratching his beard, he looked elsewhere. He nearly told himself that he wasn’t mad, but that would be a small consolation. Sane people never said that to themselves.
The reports. Anna had spent a year like this once, down in the armory, surrounded by notes. Living alone, meals delivered, lonely and wishing for company. He was only a few weeks into what she had suffered and already cracking. Anna had been so much stronger than he, but now she was dead. She’d been dead for over two weeks, and nobody knew. Maybe they never would.