“What direction were they heading?” he asked, his voice a whisper. The others held perfectly still so that the rustle of their coveralls wouldn’t compete with his words.
A man from the back of the room answered. “In the direction of seventeen, sir.”
Donald composed himself. He remembered the Order, the danger of letting anyone out of sight. These people in their silos with a limited view of the world thought that they were the only ones alive. They lived in bubbles that must not be allowed to burst. “Any word from seventeen?” he asked.
“Seventeen is gone,” the operator beside him said, dispensing more bad news with the same flat voice.
Donald cleared his throat. “Gone?” He searched the faces of the gathered. Foreheads creased with worry. Eren studied Donald, and the operator beside him adjusted his bulk in his seat. On the screen, the cleaner disappeared over the top of the hill and out of view. “What did this cleaner do?” he asked.
“It wasn’t her,” Eren said.
“Seventeen was shut down shifts ago,” the operator said.
“Right, right.” Donald ran his fingers through his hair. His hand was trembling.
“You feeling all right?” the operator asked. He glanced at the Ops Head, then back to Donald. He knew. Donald sensed that this man in orange with the headphones around his neck knew something was wrong.
“Still a bit woozy,” Donald explained.
“He’s only been up for half an hour,” Eren told the operator.
There were murmurs from the back of the room.
“Yeah, okay.” The operator settled back into his seat. “It’s just … he’s the Shepherd, you know? I pictured him waking up chewing nails and farting tacks.”
Someone just behind Donald’s chair chuckled.
“So what’re we supposed to do about the cleaner?” a voice asked. “We need permission before we can send anyone out after her.”
“She can’t have gotten far,” someone said.
The comm engineer on the other side of Donald spoke up. He had one side of his headphones still on, the other side pulled off so he could follow the conversation. A sheen of sweat stood out on his forehead. “Eighteen is reporting that her suit was modified,” he said. “There’s no telling how long it’ll last. She could still be out there, Sirs.”
This caused a chorus of whispers. It sounded like wind striking a visor, peppering it with sand. Donald stared at the screen, at a lifeless hill as seen from Silo 18. The dust came in dark waves. He remembered what it had felt like out there on that landscape, the difficulty moving in one of those suits, the hard slog up that gentle rise. Who was this cleaner, and where did she think she was going?
“Get me the file on this cleaner as soon as you can,” he said. The others fell still and stopped their whispering arguments. Donald’s voice was commanding because of its quietude, because of who they thought he was. “And I want whatever we have on seventeen.” He glanced at the operator, whose brow was furrowed in either worry or suspicion. “To refresh my memory,” he added.
Eren rested a hand on the back of Donald’s chair. “What about the protocols?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we scramble a drone or send someone after her? Or shut down eighteen? There’s going to be violence over there. We’ve never had a cleaning not go through before.”
Donald shook his head, which was beginning to clear. He looked down at his hand and remembered tearing off a glove once, there on the outside. He shouldn’t be alive. How was he alive? He wondered what Thurman would do, what the old man would order. But he wasn’t Thurman. Someone had told him once that people like Donald should be in charge. And now he was.
“We don’t do anything just yet,” he said, coughing and clearing his throat. “She won’t get far.”
The others stared at him with a mixture of shock and acceptance. There finally came a handful of nods. They assumed he knew best. He had been woken up, after all. It was all according to protocol. The system could be trusted—it was designed to just go. All anyone needed to do was their own job and let others handle the rest.
•5•
It was a short walk from his apartment to the central offices, which Donald assumed was the point. It reminded him of a CEO’s office he’d once seen with an adjoining bedroom. What had seemed impressive at first became sad after realizing why it was there.
He rapped his knuckles on the open door marked Office of Psychological Services. He used to think of these people as shrinks, that they were here to keep others sane. Now he knew that they were in charge of the insanity. All he saw on the door anymore was “OPS.” Operations. The Head of the Head of the Heads. The office across the hall was where the busywork landed. Donald was reminded how each silo had a mayor for shaking hands and keeping up appearances, just as the world of yore had Presidents who came and went. Meanwhile, it was the men in shadows whose term limits were bounded by gravestones who wielded true power. That this silo operated by the same deceit should not be surprising; it was the only way such men knew to run anything.
He kept his back to his former office and knocked a little louder. Eren looked up from his computer and a hard mask of concentration melted into a wan smile. “Come in,” he said as he rose from his seat. “You need the desk?”
“Yes, but stay.” Donald crossed the room gingerly, his legs still half asleep, and noticed that while his own whites were crisp, Eren’s were crumpled with the wear of a man well into his six-month shift. Even so, the Ops Head appeared vigorous and alert. His beard was neatly trimmed by his neck and only peppered with gray. He helped Donald into the plush chair behind the desk.
“We’re still waiting for the full report on this cleaner,” Eren said. “The Head of eighteen warned that it’s a thick one.”
“Priors?” Donald imagined anyone sent to clean would have priors.
“Oh, yeah. The word is that she was a sheriff, but I only heard that from Gable across the hall. Not sure if I’m buying it. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first lawman to want out.”
“But it would be the first time anyone’s gotten out of sight,” Donald said.
“From what I understand, yeah.” Eren crossed his arms and leaned against the desk. “Nearest anyone got before now was that gentleman you stopped. I reckon that’s why protocol says to wake you. I’ve heard some of the boys refer to you as the Shepherd.” Eren laughed.
Donald cleared his throat into his fist. He was loath to admit that he had been more the loose sheep than the shepherd. “Tell me about seventeen,” he said, changing the subject. “Who was on shift when that silo went down?”
“We can look it up.” Eren waved a hand at the keyboard.
“My, uh, fingers are still a little tingly,” Donald said. He slid the keyboard toward Eren, who hesitated before getting off the desk. The Ops Head bent over the keys and pulled up the shift list with a shortcut. Donald tried to follow along with what he was doing on the screen. These were files he didn’t have access to, menus he was unfamiliar with.
“Looks like it was Cooper. I think I came off a shift once as he was coming on. Name sounds familiar. I sent someone down to get those files as well.”
“Good, good.”
Eren raised his eyebrows. “You went over the seventeen reports on your last shift, right?”