wouldn’t be on shift for several hours. But there was something else nagging him, something he felt he needed to see, a dream slipping away.
‘Must not have taken the first time,’ he explained, glancing at the button.
‘Mmm.’
The silence lasted one or two floors.
‘How much longer you got?’ the reactor mechanic asked.
‘Me? Just another couple of weeks. How about you?’
‘I just got on a week ago. But this is my second shift.’
‘Oh?’
The lights counted downward in floors but upward in number. Troy didn’t like this; he felt as if the lowest level should be level one. They should count up.
‘Is the second shift easier?’ he asked. The question came out unbidden. It was as though the part of him dying to know was more awake than the part of him praying for silence.
The mechanic considered this.
‘I wouldn’t say it’s easier. How about . . . less uncomfortable?’ He laughed quietly. Troy felt their arrival in his knees, gravity tugging on him. The doors beeped open.
‘Have a good one,’ the mechanic said. They hadn’t shared their names. ‘In case I don’t see you again.’
Troy raised his palm. ‘Next time,’ he said. The man stepped out, and the doors winked shut on the halls to the power plant. With a hum, the lift continued its descent.
The doors dinged on the medical level. Troy stepped out and heard voices down the corridor. He crept quietly across the tile, and the voices became louder. One was female. It wasn’t a conversation; it must have been an old movie. Troy peeked into the main office and saw a man lounging on a gurney, his back turned, a TV set up in the corner. Troy slunk past so as not to disturb him.
The hallway split in two directions. He imagined the layout, could picture the pie-shaped storerooms, the rows of deep-freeze coffins, the tubes and pipes that led from the walls to the bases, from the bases into the people inside.
He stopped at one of the heavy doors and tried his code. The light changed from red to green. He dropped his hand, didn’t need to enter this room, didn’t feel the urge, just wanted to see if it would work. The urge was elsewhere.
He meandered down the hall past a few more doors. Wasn’t he just here? Had he ever left? His arm throbbed. He rolled back his sleeve and saw a spot of blood, a circle of redness around a pinprick scab.
If something bad had happened, he couldn’t remember. That part of him had been choked off.
He tried his code on this other pad, this other door, and waited for the light to turn green. This time, he pushed the button that opened the door. He didn’t know what it was, but there was something inside that he needed to see.
21
2052
Fulton County, Georgia
LIGHT RAINS ON the morning of the convention left the man-made hills soggy, the new grass slick, but did little to erode the general festivities. Parking lots had been emptied of construction vehicles and mud-caked pickups. Now they held hundreds of idling buses and a handful of sleek black limos, the latter splattered with mud.
The lot where temporary trailers had served as offices and living quarters for construction crews had been handed over to the staffers, volunteers, delegates and dignitaries who had laboured for weeks to bring that day to fruition. The area was dotted with welcoming tents that served as the headquarters for the event coordinators. Throngs of new arrivals filed from the buses and made their way through the CAD-FAC’s security station. Massive fences bristled with coils of razor wire that seemed outsized and ridiculous for the convention but made sense for the storing of nuclear material. These barriers and gates held at bay an odd union of protestors: those on the Right who disagreed with the facility’s current purpose and those on the Left who feared its future one.
There had never been a National Convention with such energy, such crowds. Downtown Atlanta loomed beyond the treetops, but the city seemed far removed from the sudden bustle in lower Fulton County.
Donald shivered beneath his umbrella at the top of a knoll and gazed out over the sea of people gathering across the hills, heading towards whichever stage flew their state’s flag, umbrellas bobbing and jostling like water bugs.
Somewhere, a marching band blared a practice tune and stomped another hill into mud. There was a sense in the air that the world was about to change – a woman was about to