Refuse

10

Leah sat down, unsure of the trustworthiness of her legs for a moment. Tears ran down her face and onto the paper she clutched in her hands. After reading the second note from Ivan, she poured herself out, sobbing uncontrollably until she had no more tears to shed. After some time, she braced herself and read the note again.

Before she could even think about the ramifications of the letter, or ask herself if Ivan really meant the part about wanting to marry her, she’d already slung open her door and was sprinting towards Ivan’s place. He lived on the same floor, and his apartment was tucked away down a long, dark hallway that led away from the 57th floor landing. Arriving at his apartment, she found that the doorway was crisscrossed with duct tape, a rude pronouncement by the authorities that the peaceful man who lived here was really a criminal—an enemy to the silo. On the tape someone had written “Sheriff’s Investigation” several times. She reached through the tape and twisted the knob and the door swung open into the room. Apparently Sheriff Tatum’s office was sufficiently convinced that the mere mention of a Sheriff’s investigation was good enough of a threat to keep out interlopers. They were wrong about that. She’d have busted open the door if it came to that.

Leah looked back down the hallway towards the landing and saw that no one was watching, so she bent down and stepped through a gap in the tape. Slinking her way through the crisscrossed barrier, she made her way into the apartment and closed the door behind her.

She’d never been in Ivan’s apartment before. The tiny living area was Spartan. There was a small loveseat with a threadbare quilted blanket thrown over the back of it. There was a small dinette table with a single chair, and there was a metal bookshelf, identical to the one that the guild had used to press and hide paper. There was almost nothing in the room that betrayed the character of the apartment’s inhabitant. Almost nothing. On the bookshelves there were a few “approved” books, maybe ten or twelve of them. The books were held up by a set of bookends, probably made in a ceramics class. On each of the bookends was the imprint of a massive and towering tree, painted in brown and green to stand out against the black background of the ceramic base.

Leah worked quickly. She reached up beneath the overhanging lip of the top shelf and found the two wing nuts that she knew would be there. Her hands shook and she had to steady herself so that she could continue to twist the nuts to free the under-shelf from its mate. When the nuts were free from their bolts, the under-shelf was loose and she lowered it down and sat it on the love seat.

There on the shelf she saw a folded note written on homemade paper, a brass key, and four flattened sheets of paper that were covered—every millimeter of them—in tiny print.

She opened the folded note first:

If you’re reading this, then something has gone wrong. If you’re one of them, then it’s all over for us anyway, and I hope you feel good about destroying something that is beautiful. If you are one of us (hopefully you are one of us!), you’re reading this because I was able to get a note out to someone who hasn’t been arrested… yet. If there are documents here, PLEASE take them, and do all that you can do to get them into SAMIZDAT. If you truly are one us, the key will lead you to the information you need to know.Ivan.

Samizdat. There was that word again. She’d heard Sheriff Tatum say it when she was in her barely conscious state back in her jail cell.

She rubbed the key, turned it in her hands, and examined it closely.There were no marks or words or numbers that might indicate what it went to.