“I can’t, sir.”
Donald nodded. He appreciated the honest answer. He remembered what it felt like to watch those people spill out of 12 and perish on the landscape. He blinked his vision clear. “It feels like a parent losing thousands of children all at once,” he said.
The world stood still for a heartbeat or two. The operator and the comm head were both fixated on their monitors, looking for a crack. Eren watched Donald.
“You will have to be cruel to your children so as not to lose them,” Donald said.
“Yessir.”
Waveforms began to pulse like gentle surf. The comm head gave Donald the thumbs-up. He had seen enough. The boy had passed, and now the Rite was truly over.
“Welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order, Lukas Kyle,” Eren said, reading from the script and taking over for Donald. “Now, if you have a question or two, I have the time to answer, but briefly.”
Donald remembered this part. He had a hand in this. He settled back into his chair, suddenly exhausted.
“Just one, sir. And I’ve been told it isn’t important, and I understand why that’s true, but I believe it will make my job here easier if I know.” The young man paused. “Is there … ?” A new red spike on his graph. “How did this all begin?”
Donald held his breath. He glanced around the room, but everyone else was watching their monitors as if any question was as good as another.
Donald responded before Eren could. “How badly do you wish to know?” he asked.
The shadow took in a breath. “It isn’t crucial,” he said, “but I would appreciate a sense of what we’re accomplishing, what we survived. It feels like it gives me—gives us a purpose, you know?”
“The reason is the purpose,” Donald told him. This was what he was beginning to learn from his studies. “Before I tell you, I’d like to hear what you think.”
He thought he could hear the shadow gulp. “What I think?” Lukas asked.
“Everyone has ideas,” Donald said. “Are you suggesting you don’t?”
“I think it was something we saw coming.”
Donald was impressed. He had a feeling this young man knew the answer and simply wanted confirmation. “That’s one possibility,” he agreed. “Consider this—” He thought how best to phrase it. “What if I told you that there were only fifty silos in all the world, and that we are in this infinitely small corner of that world?”
On the monitor, Donald could practically watch the young man think, his readings oscillating up and down like the brain’s version of a heartbeat.
“I would say that we were the only ones …” A wild spike on the monitor. “I’d say we were the only ones who knew.”
“Very good. And why might that be?”
Donald wished he had the jostling lines on the screen recorded. It was serene, watching another human being clutch after his vanishing sanity, his disappearing doubts.
“It’s because … It’s not because we knew.” There was a soft gasp on the other end of the line. “It’s because we did it.”
“Yes,” Donald said. “And now you know.”
Eren turned to Donald and placed his hand over his mic. “We’ve got more than enough. The kid checks out.”
Donald nodded. “Our time is up, Lukas Kyle. Congratulations on your assignment.”
“Thank you.” There was a final flutter on the monitors.
“Oh, and Lukas?” Donald said, remembering the young man’s predilection for staring at the stars, for dreaming, for filling himself with dangerous hope.
“Yessir?”
“Going forward, I suggest you concentrate on what’s beneath your feet. No more of this business with the stars, okay, son? We know where most of them are.”
Silo 17
Year Sixteen
•35•
Jimmy wasn’t sure how the math worked, but feeding two mouths was more than just twice the work. And yet—it felt like less than half the chore. The addition didn’t add up, but he suspected it had to do with how nice it felt to provide for something besides himself. It was the satisfaction of seeing the cat eat and of it growing used to his presence that made him relish meals more and travel outside more often.
It had been a rough start, though. The cat had been skittish after its rescue. Jimmy had dried himself off with a towel scavenged two levels up, and the cat had acted insane as he dried it off after. It seemed to both love and hate the process, rolling around one minute and batting at Jimmy’s hands the next. Once dry, the animal had blossomed to twice its wet size. And yet, he was still pathetic and hungry.
Jimmy found a can of beans beneath a mattress (always the first place he looked, though it was often useless chits he found there). The can wasn’t too rusty. He opened it with his screwdriver and fed the slick pods to the cat one at a time while his own feet went from blue to normal, tingling like electricity the entire time.
After the beans, the cat had taken to following him wherever he went to see what he might find next. It made the hunt for food fun, rather than a never ending war against his own growling stomach. Fun, but lots of work. Up the staircase they went, him back in his boots, the cat silently pawing behind and sometimes ahead.
Jimmy had learned early on to trust the thing’s balance. The first few times it rubbed itself against the outer stanchions, even twisting itself beyond them and back through as it ascended the steps, Jimmy nearly had a heart attack. The cat seemed to have a death wish, or just an ignorance of what it meant to fall. But he soon learned to trust the cat even as the cat began to trust him.
And that first night, as he lay huddled under his tarp in the lower farms, listening to pumps and lights click on and off and noises he mistook for hiding others, the cat tucked itself under his arm and curled against the crook his belly made when his legs were bent and began to rattle like a pump on loose mounts.
“You were lonely, huh?” Jimmy had whispered. He had grown uncomfortable but was unwilling to move. A cramp had formed in his neck while a different tightness disappeared from deep in his gut, a tightness he didn’t know was there until it was gone.
“I was lonely, too,” he had told the cat softly, fascinated by how much more he talked with the animal around. It was better than talking to his shadow and pretending it was a person.
“That’s a good name,” Jimmy had whispered. He didn’t know what people named cats, but Shadow would work. Like the shadows in which he’d found the thing, another spot of blackness to follow Jimmy around. And that night, years back, the two of them had fallen asleep amid the clicking pumps, the dripping water, the buzzing insects, and all the stranger sounds deep within the farms that Jimmy preferred not to name.
That was years ago. Now, cat hair and beard hair gathered together in the spines of the Legacy books. Jimmy trimmed his beard while he read about snakes. The scissors made crunching noises as he pinched a load of hair, held it away from his chin, and hacked it off with the dull shears. He sprinkled most of the hair in an empty can. The rest drifted down among the words, large swoops of meddling punctuation to mingle with the cat’s hair, who kept walking back and forth under his arms, arching his back, and stepping across his sentences.
“I’m trying to read,” Jimmy complained. But he put down the scissors and dutifully stroked the animal from neck to tail, Shadow pressing his spine up into Jimmy’s palm as he got to the end of each pet. The animal lost its mind when Jimmy did this. He meowed and made that grumbling sound like his heart was going to burst and begged for more.