‘To keep them in,’ Thurman said. He balanced the tray with one hand and pressed the call button on the express. ‘It’s not that we’re showing them what we did. We’re showing them what’s out there. Those screens and a few taboos are all that contain these people. Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains—’
The lift arrived. A man in reactor red excused himself and stepped between the two of them. They boarded and Thurman fumbled for his badge. ‘Fear,’ he said. ‘Even the fear of death is barely enough to counter this compulsion of ours. If we didn’t show them what was out there, they would go look for themselves. That’s what we’ve always done as a race.’
Donald considered this. He thought about his own compulsion to escape the confines of all that pressing concrete, even if it meant death out there. The slow strangulation inside was worse.
‘I’d rather see a reset than extinguish the entire silo,’ Donald said, watching the numbers race by. He didn’t mention that he’d been reading up on the people who lived there. A reset would mean a world of loss and heartache, but there would be a chance at life afterwards. The alternative was death for them all.
‘I’m less and less eager to gas the place, myself,’ Thurman admitted. ‘When Vic was around, all I did was argue against wasting our time with any one silo like this. Now that he’s gone, I find myself pulling for these people. It’s like I have to honour his last wishes. And that’s a dangerous trap to fall into.’
The lift stopped on twenty and picked up two workers, who ceased a conversation of their own and fell silent for the ride. Donald thought about this process of cleansing a silo only to watch the violence repeat itself. The great wars of old were like this. He remembered two wars in Iran, a new generation unremembering so that sons marched into the battles their fathers had already fought.
The two workers got off at the rec hall, resuming their conversation as the doors closed. Donald remembered how much he enjoyed punishing himself in the weight room. Now he was wasting away with little appetite, nothing to push against, no resistance.
‘It makes me wonder sometimes if that was why he did what he did,’ Thurman said. The lift slid towards fifty-four. ‘Vic calculated everything. Always with a purpose. Maybe his way of winning this argument of ours was to ensure that he had the last word.’ Thurman glanced at Donald. ‘Hell, it’s what finally motivated me to wake you.’
Donald didn’t say out loud how crazy that sounded. He thought Thurman just needed some way to make sense of the unthinkable. Of course, there was another way Victor’s death had ended the argument. Not for the first time, Donald imagined that it hadn’t been a suicide at all. But he didn’t see where such doubts could get him except in trouble.
They got off on fifty-four and carried the trays through the aisles of munitions. As they passed the drones, Donald thought of his sister, similarly sleeping. It was good to know where she was, that she was safe. A small comfort.
They ate at the table in the war room. Donald pushed his dinner around his plate while Thurman and Anna talked. The two reports sat before him – just scraps of paper, he thought. No mystery contained within. He had been looking at the wrong thing, assuming there was a clue in the words, but it was just Donald’s existence that Victor had remarked upon. He had sat across the hall from Donald and watched him react to whatever was in their water or their pills. And now when Donald looked at his notes, all he saw was a piece of paper with pain scrawled across it amid specks of blood.
Ignore the blood, he told himself. The blood wasn’t a clue. It had come after. There were several splatters in a wide space left in the notes. Donald had been studying the senseless. He had been looking for something that wasn’t there. He may as well have been staring off into space.
Space. Donald set his fork down and grabbed the other report. Once he ignored the large spots of blood, there was a gap in the notes where nothing had