scouts or drones. Everyone says that’s too big a risk. And now it looks like eighteen is going to burn itself to the ground.’
‘And I’m supposed to help? What does your father think I know?’ He stepped around the planning table and waved for the bottle. Anna splashed her cup and handed the drink to him; she reached for another cup by her monitor while Donald collapsed onto her cot. It was a lot to take in.
‘It’s not Dad who thinks you know anything. He didn’t want you up at all. No one’s supposed to come out of deep freeze.’ She screwed the cap back on the bottle. ‘It was his boss.’
Donald nearly choked on his first sip of the Scotch. He sputtered and wiped his chin with his sleeve while Anna looked on with concern.
‘His boss?’ he asked, gasping for air.
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Dad told you why you’re here, right?’
He fumbled in his pocket for the report. ‘Something I wrote during my last . . . during my shift. Thurman has a boss? I thought he was in charge.’
Anna laughed humourlessly. ‘Nobody’s in charge,’ she told him. ‘The system’s in charge. It just runs. We built it to just go.’ She got up from her desk and walked over to join him on the cot. Donald slid over to give her more room.
‘Dad was in charge of digging the holes, that was his job. There were three of them who planned most of this. The other two had ideas for how to hide this place. Dad convinced them they should just build it in plain sight. The nuclear containment facility was his idea, and he was in a position to make it happen.’
‘You said three. Who were the others?’
‘Victor and Erskine.’ Anna adjusted a pillow and leaned back against the wall. ‘Not their real names, of course. But what does it matter? A name is a name. You can be anyone down here. Erskine was the one who discovered the original threat, who told Victor and Dad about the nanos. You’ll meet him. He’s been on a double shift with me, working on the loss of these silos, but it’s not his area of expertise. Do you need more?’ She nodded at his cup.
‘No. I’m already feeling dizzy.’ He didn’t add that it wasn’t from the alcohol. ‘I remember a Victor from my shift. He worked across the hall from me.’
‘The same.’ She looked away for a moment. ‘Dad refers to him as the boss, but I’ve been working with Victor for a while, and he never thought of himself that way. He thought of himself as a steward, joked once about feeling like Noah. He wanted to wake you months ago because of what’s happening in silo eighteen, but Dad vetoed the idea. I think Victor was fond of you. He talked about you a lot.’
‘Victor talked about me?’ Donald remembered the man across the hall from him, the shrink. Anna reached up and wiped underneath her eyes.
‘Yes. He was a brilliant man, could tell what you were thinking, what anyone was thinking. He planned most of this. Wrote the Order, the original Pact. It was all his design.’
‘What do you mean was?’
Her lip trembled. She tipped her cup, but there was little left in the bottom.
‘Victor’s dead,’ she said. ‘He shot himself at his desk two days ago.’
32
• Silo 1 •
‘VICTOR? SHOT HIMSELF?’ Donald tried to imagine the composed man who had worked across the hall from him doing such a thing. ‘Why?’
Anna sniffed and slid closer to Donald. She twisted the empty cup in her hands. ‘We don’t know. He was obsessed with that first silo we lost. Obsessed. It broke my heart to see how he blamed himself. He used to say that he could see certain things coming, that there were . . . probabilistic certainties.’ She said these two words in a mimic of his voice, which brought the old man’s face even more vividly to Donald’s mind.
‘But it killed him not to know the precise when and where.’ She dabbed her eyes. ‘He would’ve been better off if it’d happened on someone else’s shift. Not his. Not where he’d feel guilty.’
‘He blamed me,’ Donald said, staring at the floor. ‘It was on my shift. I was such a mess. I couldn’t think straight.’
‘What? No. Donny, no.’ She rested a hand on his knee. ‘There’s no one to blame.’
‘But my report—’ He still had it in his hand, folded up and dotted