Donald shook his head. That wasn’t right. None of that felt right. What was it about this that nagged him?
It was the blackout. Donald felt a chill run up his spine. It was the number forty. It was the silo, not the level. The report trembled in his hands. He wanted to jump up and pace the cafeteria, but all he had was the germ of a connection, the hint of an outline. He fought to connect the dots before the ideas melted away, disturbed by a rush of adrenalin.
It was silo forty he had spoken with. The boy had found himself at the back of seventeen’s comm station. He didn’t know it was a silo calling at all. That would be why he’d called it a level and had wondered what was happening down there. This blackout, this lack of contact, it was just like the silos Anna had been working on.
Anna—
Donald thought about the note she had left, asking Thurman to wake her. She was asleep below. She would know what to do. She should’ve been woken and put in charge, not him. He gathered the reports and papers and put them back into the proper folders. Workers were beginning to arrive from the lifts. The smell of reconstituted eggs floated out from the kitchen, the swinging doors pumping the aroma with the traffic of the bustling food staff, but Donald had forgotten his hunger.
He glanced up at the wall screen. Would anyone on shift right now know of silo forty? Maybe not. They wouldn’t have made the same connection. Thurman and the others had kept the outbreak a secret, didn’t want to cause a panic. But what if silo forty was still out there? What if they’d contacted seventeen? Anna said the master system had been hacked, that silo forty had hacked them. They had cut several facilities off from silo one before Anna and Thurman had been woken to terminate them all. But what if they hadn’t? What if this silo seventeen wasn’t destroyed? What if it was still there, and this cleaner had stumbled into the bowl to find—
Donald had a sudden urge to go see for himself, to stroll outside and dash up to the top of the hill, suit be damned. He left the wall screen and headed towards the airlock.
Perhaps he would need to wake Anna, just as Thurman had. He could set her up in the armoury. There was a blueprint for doing this from his last shift, only he didn’t have anyone he could trust to help. He didn’t know the first thing about waking people up. But he was in charge, right? He could demand to know.
He left the cafeteria and approached the silo’s airlock, that great yellow door to the open world beyond. The outside wasn’t as bad as he had been led to believe. Unless he was simply immune. There were machines in his blood that kept him stitched up when he was frozen. Perhaps they had kept him alive out there. He approached the inner airlock door and peered through the small porthole. The memory of being in there struck him with sudden violence. He tucked the two folders under his elbow and rubbed his arm where the needle had bitten into his flesh long ago, putting him to sleep. What was out there? The light spilling through the holding cell bars flickered as a dust cloud passed, and Donald realised how strange it was that they had a wall screen in silo one. The people here knew what they’d done to the world. Why did they need to see the ruin they’d left behind?
Unless—
Unless the purpose was the same as for the other silos. Unless it was to keep them from going outside, a haunting reminder that the planet was not safe for them. But what did they really know beyond the silos? And how could a man hope to see for himself?
74
2345
• Silo 1 •
IT TOOK A few days of planning and building up the nerve for Donald to make the request, and a few days more for Dr Wilson to schedule an appointment. During that time he told Eren about his suspicions of silo forty’s involvement. The flurry of activity launched by this simple guess quickly consumed the silo. Donald signed off on a requisition for a bombing run, even though he didn’t quite understand what he was signing. Little-used levels of the silo – levels familiar to Donald from before – were