Shift

Prologue 2110 Beneath the hills of Fulton County, Georgia

TROY RETURNED TO the living and found himself inside a tomb. He awoke to a world of confinement, a thick sheet of frosted glass pressed near to his face.

Dark shapes stirred on the other side of the icy murk. He tried to lift his arms, to beat on the glass, but his muscles were too weak. He attempted to scream — but could only cough. The taste in his mouth was foul. His ears rang with the clank of heavy locks opening, the hiss of air, the squeak of hinges long dormant.

The lights overhead were bright, the hands on him warm. They helped him sit while he continued to cough, his breath clouding the chill air. Someone had water. Pills to take. The water was cool, the pills bitter. Troy fought down a few gulps. He was unable to hold the glass without help. His hands trembled as memories flooded back, scenes from long nightmares. The feeling of deep time and yesterdays mingled. He shivered.

A paper gown. The sting of tape removed. A tug on his arm, a tube pulled from his groin. Two men dressed in white helped him out of the coffin. Steam rose all around him, air condensing and dispersing.

Sitting up and blinking against the glare, exercising lids long shut, Troy looked down the rows of coffins full of the living that stretched towards the distant and curved walls. The ceiling felt low; the suffocating press of dirt stacked high above. And the years. So many had passed. Anyone he cared about would be gone.

Everything was gone.

The pills stung his throat. He tried to swallow. Memories faded like dreams upon waking, and he felt his grip loosen on everything he’d known.

He collapsed backwards — but the men in the white overalls saw this coming. They caught him and lowered him to the ground, a paper gown rustling on shivering skin.

Images returned; recollections rained down like bombs and then were gone.

The pills would only do so much. It would take time to destroy the past.

Troy began to sob into his palms, a sympathetic hand resting on his head. The two men in white allowed him this moment. They didn’t rush the process. Here was a courtesy passed from one waking soul to the next, something all the men sleeping in their coffins would one day rise to discover.

And eventually… forget.

1 2049 Washington, DC

THE TALL GLASS trophy cabinets had once served as bookshelves. There were hints. Hardware on the shelves dated back centuries, while the hinges and the tiny locks on the glass doors went back mere decades. The framing around the glass was cherry, but the cases had been built of oak. Someone had attempted to remedy this with a few coats of stain, but the grain didn’t match. The colour wasn’t perfect. To trained eyes, details such as these were glaring.

Congressman Donald Keene gathered these clues without meaning to. He simply saw that long ago there had been a great purge, a making of space. At some point in the past, the Senator’s waiting room had been stripped of its obligatory law books until only a handful remained. These tomes sat silently in the dim corners of the glass cabinets. They were shut in, their spines laced with cracks, old leather flaking off like sunburned skin.

A handful of Keene’s fellow freshmen filled the waiting room, pacing and stirring, their terms of service newly begun. Like Donald, they were young and still hopelessly optimistic. They were bringing change to Capitol Hill. They hoped to deliver where their similarly naive predecessors had not.

While they waited their turns to meet with the great Senator Thurman from their home state of Georgia, they chatted nervously among themselves. They were a gaggle of priests, Donald imagined, all lined up to meet the Pope, to kiss his ring. He let out a heavy breath and focused on the contents of the case, lost himself in the treasures behind the glass while a fellow representative from Georgia prattled on about his district’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

‘—and they have this detailed guide on their website, this response and readiness manual in case of, okay, get this — a zombie invasion. Can you believe that? Fucking zombies. Like even the CDC thinks something could go wrong and suddenly we’d all be eating each other—’

Donald stifled a smile, fearful its reflection would be caught in the glass. He turned and looked over a collection of photographs on the walls, one each of the Senator with the last four presidents. It was the same pose and handshake in each shot, the same background of windless flags and fancy oversized seals. The Senator hardly seemed to change as the presidents came and went. His hair started white and stayed white; he seemed perfectly unfazed by the passing of decades.

Seeing the photographs side by side devalued each of them somehow. They looked staged. Phoney. It was as if this collection of the world’s most powerful men had each begged for the opportunity to stand and pose with a cardboard cut-out, a roadside attraction.

Donald laughed, and the congressman from Atlanta joined him.

‘I know, right? Zombies. It’s hilarious. But think about it, okay? Why would the CDC even have this field manual unless—’

Donald wanted to correct his fellow congressman, to tell him what he’d really been laughing about. Look at the smiles, he wanted to say. They were on the faces of the presidents. The Senator looked as if he’d rather be anyplace else. It looked as if each in this succession of commanders-in-chief knew who the more powerful man was, who would be there long after they had come and gone.

‘—it’s advice like, everyone should have a baseball bat with their flashlights and candles, right? Just in case. You know, for bashing brains.’

Donald pulled out his phone and checked the time. He glanced at the door leading off the waiting room and wondered how much longer he’d have to wait. Putting the phone away, he turned back to the cabinet and studied a shelf where a military uniform had been carefully arranged like a delicate work of origami. The left breast of the jacket featured a wall of medals; the sleeves were folded over and pinned to highlight the gold braids sewn along the cuffs. In front of the uniform, a collection of decorative coins rested in a custom wooden rack, tokens of appreciation from men and women serving overseas.

The two arrangements spoke volumes: the uniform from the past and the coins from those currently deployed, bookends on a pair of wars. One that the Senator had fought in as a youth. The other, a war he had battled to prevent as an older and wiser man.

‘—yeah, it sounds crazy, I know, but do you know what rabies does to a dog? I mean, what it really does, the biological—’

Donald leaned in closer to study the decorative coins. The number and slogan on each one represented a deployed group. Or was it a battalion? He couldn’t remember. His sister Charlotte would know. She was over there somewhere, out in the field.

‘Hey, aren’t you even a little nervous about this?’

Donald realised the question had been aimed at him. He turned and faced the talkative congressman. He must’ve been in his mid-thirties, around Donald’s age. In him, Donald could see his own thinning hair, his own beginnings of a gut, that uncomfortable slide to middle age.

‘Am I nervous about zombies?’ Donald laughed. ‘No. Can’t say that I am.’

The congressman stepped up beside Donald, his eyes drifting towards the imposing uniform that stood propped up as if a warrior’s chest remained inside. ‘No,’ the man said. ‘About meeting him.’

The door to the reception area opened, bleeps from the phones on the other side leaking out.

‘Congressman Keene?’

An elderly receptionist stood in the doorway, her white blouse and black skirt highlighting a thin and athletic frame.

‘Senator Thurman will see you now,’ she said.

Donald patted the congressman from Atlanta on the shoulder as he stepped past.

‘Hey, good luck,’ the gentleman stammered after him.

Donald smiled. He fought the temptation to turn and tell the man that he knew the Senator well enough, that he had been bounced on his knee back when he was a child. Only — Donald was too busy hiding his own nerves to bother.

He stepped through the deeply panelled door of rich hardwoods and entered the Senator’s inner sanctum. This wasn’t like passing through a foyer to pick up a man’s daughter for a date. This was different. This was the pressure of meeting as colleagues when Donald still felt like that same young child.

‘Through here,’ the receptionist said. She guided Donald between pairs of wide and busy desks, a dozen phones chirping in short bursts. Young men and women in suits and crisp blouses double-fisted receivers. Their bored expressions suggested that this was a normal workload for a weekday morning.

Donald reached out a hand as he passed one of the desks, brushing the wood with his fingertips. Mahogany. The aides here had desks nicer than his own. And the decor: the plush carpet, the broad and ancient crown cornicing, the antique tile ceiling, the dangling light fixtures that may have been actual crystal.

At the end of the buzzing and bleeping room, a panelled door opened and disgorged Congressman Mick Webb, just finished with his meeting. Mick didn’t notice Donald, was too absorbed by the open folder he held in front of him.

Donald stopped and waited for his colleague and old college friend to approach. ‘So,’ he asked, ‘how did it go?’

Mick looked up and snapped the folder shut. He tucked it under his arm and nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah. It went great.’ He smiled. ‘Sorry if we ran long. The old man couldn’t get enough of me.’

Donald laughed. He believed that. Mick had swept into office with ease. He had the charisma and confidence that went along with being tall and handsome. Donald used to joke that if his friend wasn’t so shit with names, he’d be president someday. ‘No problem,’ Donald said. He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘I was making new friends.’

Mick grinned. ‘I bet.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ll see you back at the ranch.’

‘Sure thing.’ Mick slapped him on the arm with the folder and headed for the exit. Donald caught the glare from the Senator’s receptionist and hurried over. She waved him through to the dimly lit office and pulled the door shut behind him.

‘Congressman Keene.’

Senator Paul Thurman stood from behind his desk and stretched out a hand. He flashed a familiar smile, one Donald had come to recognise as much from photos and TV as from his childhood. Despite Thurman’s age — he had to be pushing seventy if he wasn’t already there — the Senator was trim and fit. His Oxford shirt hugged a military frame; a thick neck bulged out of his knotted tie; his white hair remained as crisp and orderly as an enlisted man’s.

Donald crossed the dark room and shook the Senator’s hand.

‘Good to see you, sir.’

‘Please, sit.’ Thurman released Donald’s hand and gestured to one of the chairs across from his desk. Donald lowered himself into the bright red leather, the gold grommets along the arm like sturdy rivets in a steel beam.

‘How’s Helen?’

‘Helen?’ Donald straightened his tie. ‘She’s great. She’s back in Savannah. She really enjoyed seeing you at the reception.’

‘She’s a beautiful woman, your wife.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Donald fought to relax, which didn’t help. The office had the pall of dusk, even with the overhead lights on. The clouds outside had turned nasty — low and dark. If it rained, he would have to take the underpass back to his office. He hated being down there. They could carpet it and hang those little chandeliers at intervals, but he could still tell he was below ground. The tunnels in Washington made him feel like a rat scurrying through a sewer. It always seemed as if the roof was about to cave in.

‘How’s the job treating you so far?’

‘The job’s good. Busy, but good.’

He started to ask the Senator how Anna was doing, but the door behind him opened before he could. The receptionist entered and delivered two bottles of water. Donald thanked her, twisted the cap on his and saw that it had been pre-opened.

‘I hope you’re not too busy to work on something for me.’ Senator Thurman raised an eyebrow. Donald took a sip of water and wondered if that was a skill one could master, that eyebrow lift. It made him want to jump to attention and salute.

‘I’m sure I can make the time,’ he said. ‘After all the stumping you did for me? I doubt I would’ve made it past the primaries.’ He fiddled with the water bottle in his lap.

‘You and Mick Webb go back, right? Both Bulldogs.’

It took Donald a moment to realise the Senator was referring to their college mascot. He hadn’t spent a lot of time at Georgia following sports. ‘Yessir. Go Dawgs.’

He hoped that was right.

The Senator smiled. He leaned forward so that his face caught the soft light raining down on his desk. Donald watched as shadows grew in wrinkles otherwise easy to miss. Thurman’s lean face and square chin made him look younger head-on than he did in profile. Here was a man who got places by approaching others directly rather than in ambush.

‘You studied architecture at Georgia.’

Donald nodded. It was easy to forget that he knew Thurman better than the Senator knew him. One of them grabbed far more newspaper headlines than the other.

‘That’s right. For my undergrad. I went into planning for my master’s. I figured I could do more good governing people than I could drawing boxes to put them in.’

He winced to hear himself deliver the line. It was a pat phrase from grad school, something he should have left behind with crushing beer cans on his forehead and ogling asses in skirts. He wondered for the dozenth time why he and the other congressional newcomers had been summoned. When he first got the invite, he thought it was a social visit. Then Mick had bragged about his own appointment, and Donald figured it was some kind of formality or tradition. But now he wondered if this was a power play, a chance to butter up the representatives from Georgia for those times when Thurman would need a particular vote in the lower and lesser house.

‘Tell me, Donny, how good are you at keeping secrets?’

Donald’s blood ran cold. He forced himself to laugh off the sudden flush of nerves.

‘I got elected, didn’t I?’

Senator Thurman smiled. ‘And so you probably learned the best lesson there is about secrets.’ He picked up and raised his water bottle in salute. ‘Denial.’

Donald nodded and took a sip of his own water. He wasn’t sure where this was going, but he already felt uneasy. He sensed some of the back-room dealings coming on that he’d promised his constituents he’d root out if elected.

The Senator leaned back in his chair.

‘Denial is the secret sauce in this town,’ he said. ‘It’s the flavour that holds all the other ingredients together. Here’s what I tell the newly elected: the truth is going to get out — it always does — but it’s going to blend in with all the lies.’ The Senator twirled a hand in the air. ‘You have to deny each lie and every truth with the same vinegar. Let those websites and blowhards who bitch about cover-ups confuse the public for you.’

‘Uh, yessir.’ Donald didn’t know what else to say so he drank another mouthful of water instead.

The Senator lifted an eyebrow again. He remained frozen for a pause, and then asked, out of nowhere: ‘Do you believe in aliens, Donny?’

Donald nearly lost the water out of his nose. He covered his mouth with his hand, coughed, had to wipe his chin. The Senator didn’t budge.

‘Aliens?’ Donald shook his head and wiped his wet palm on his thigh. ‘No, sir. I mean, not the abducting kind. Why?’

He wondered if this was some kind of debriefing. Why had the Senator asked him if he could keep a secret? Was this a security initiation? The Senator remained silent.

‘They’re not real,’ Donald finally said. He watched for any twitch or hint. ‘Are they?’

The old man cracked a smile. ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘If they are or they aren’t, the chatter out there would be the same. Would you be surprised if I told you they’re very much real?’

‘Hell, yeah, I’d be surprised.’

‘Good.’ The Senator slid a folder across the desk.

Donald eyed it and held up a hand. ‘Wait. Are they real or aren’t they? What’re you trying to tell me?’

Senator Thurman laughed. ‘Of course they’re not real.’ He took his hand off the folder and propped his elbows on the desk. ‘Have you seen how much NASA wants from us so they can fly to Mars and back? We’re not getting to another star. Ever. And nobody’s coming here. Hell, why would they?’

Donald didn’t know what to think, which was a far cry from how he’d felt less than a minute ago. He saw what the Senator meant, how truth and lies seemed black and white, but mixed together they made everything grey and confusing. He glanced down at the folder. It looked similar to the one Mick had been carrying. It reminded him of the government’s fondness for all things outdated.

‘This is denial, right?’ He studied the Senator. ‘That’s what you’re doing right now. You’re trying to throw me off.’

‘No. This is me telling you to stop watching so many science fiction flicks. In fact, why do you think those eggheads are always dreaming of colonising some other planet? You have any idea what would be involved? It’s ludicrous. Not cost-effective.’

Donald shrugged. He didn’t think it was ludicrous. He twisted the cap back onto his water. ‘It’s in our nature to dream of open space,’ he said. ‘To find room to spread out in. Isn’t that how we ended up here?’

‘Here? In America?’ The Senator laughed. ‘We didn’t come here and find open space. We got a bunch of people sick, killed them and made space.’ Thurman pointed at the folder. ‘Which brings me to this. I’ve got something I’d like you to work on.’

Donald placed his bottle on the leather inlay of the formidable desk and took the folder.

‘Is this something coming through committee?’

He tried to temper his hopes. It was alluring to think of co-authoring a bill in his first year in office. He opened the folder and tilted it towards the window. Outside, storms were gathering.

‘No, nothing like that. This is about CAD-FAC.’

Donald nodded. Of course. The preamble about secrets and conspiracies suddenly made perfect sense, as did the gathering of Georgia congressmen outside. This was about the Containment and Disposal Facility, nicknamed CAD-FAC, at the heart of the Senator’s new energy bill, the complex that would one day house most of the world’s spent nuclear fuel. Or, according to the websites Thurman had alluded to, it was going to be the next Area 51, or the site where a new-and-improved superbomb was being built, or a secure holding facility for libertarians who had purchased one too many guns. Take your pick. There was enough noise out there to hide any truth.

‘Yeah,’ Donald said, deflated. ‘I’ve been getting some entertaining calls from my district.’ He didn’t dare mention the one about the lizard people. ‘I want you to know, sir, that privately I’m behind the facility one hundred per cent.’ He looked up at the Senator. ‘I’m glad I didn’t have to vote on it publicly, of course, but it was about time someone offered up their backyard, right?’

‘Precisely. For the common good.’ Senator Thurman took a long pull from his water, leaned back in his chair and cleared his throat. ‘You’re a sharp young man, Donny. Not everyone sees what a boon to our state this’ll be. A real lifesaver.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sorry, you are still going by Donny, right? Or is it Donald now?’

‘Either’s fine,’ Donald lied. He no longer enjoyed being called Donny, but changing names in the middle of one’s life was practically impossible. He returned to the folder and flipped the cover letter over. There was a drawing underneath that struck him as being out of place. It was… too familiar. Familiar, and yet it didn’t belong there — it was from another life.

‘Have you seen the economic reports?’ Thurman asked. ‘Do you know how many jobs this bill created overnight?’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Forty thousand, just like that. And that’s only from Georgia. A lot will be from your district, a lot of shipping, a lot of stevedores. Of course, now that it’s passed, our less nimble colleagues are grumbling that they should’ve had a chance to bid—’

‘I drew this,’ Donald interrupted, pulling out the sheet of paper. He showed it to Thurman as if the Senator would be surprised to see that it had snuck into the folder. Donald wondered if this was the Senator’s daughter’s doing, some kind of a joke or a hello and a wink from Anna.

Thurman nodded. ‘Yes, well, it needs more detail, wouldn’t you say?’

Donald studied the architectural illustration and wondered what sort of test this was. He remembered the drawing. It was a last-minute project for his biotecture class in his senior year. There was nothing unusual or amazing about it, just a large cylindrical building a hundred or so storeys tall ringed with glass and concrete, balconies burgeoning with gardens, one side cut away to reveal interspersed levels for housing, working and shopping. The structure was spare where he remembered other classmates being bold, utilitarian where he could’ve taken risks. Green tufts jutted up from the flat roof — a horrible cliché, a nod to carbon neutrality.

In sum, it was drab and boring. Donald couldn’t imagine a design so bare rising from the deserts of Dubai alongside the great new breed of self-sustaining skyscrapers. He certainly couldn’t see what the Senator wanted with it.

‘More detail,’ he murmured, repeating the Senator’s words. He flipped through the rest of the folder, looking for hints, for context.

‘Wait.’ Donald studied a list of requirements written up as if by a prospective client. ‘This looks like a design proposal.’ Words he had forgotten he’d ever learned caught his eye: interior traffic flow, block plan, HVAC, hydroponics—

‘You’ll have to lose the sunlight.’ Senator Thurman’s chair squeaked as he leaned over his desk.

‘I’m sorry?’ Donald held the folder up. ‘What exactly are you wanting me to do?’

‘I would suggest those lights like my wife uses.’ He cupped his hand into a tiny circle and pointed at the centre. ‘She gets these tiny seeds to sprout in the winter, uses bulbs that cost me a goddamned fortune.’

‘You mean grow lights.’

Thurman snapped his fingers again. ‘And don’t worry about the cost. Whatever you need. I’m also going to get you some help with the mechanical stuff. An engineer. An entire team.’

Donald flipped through more of the folder. ‘What is this for? And why me?’

‘This is what we call a just-in-case building. Probably’ll never get used, but they won’t let us store the fuel rods out there unless we put this bugger nearby. It’s like this window in my basement I had to lower before our house could pass inspection. It was for… what do you call it… ?’

‘Egress,’ Donald said, the word flowing back unaided.

‘Yes. Egress.’ He pointed to the folder. ‘This building is like that window, something we’ve gotta build so the rest will pass inspection. This will be where — in the unlikely event of an attack or a leak — facility employees can go. A shelter. And it needs to be perfect or this project will be shut down faster than a tick’s wink. Just because our bill passed and got signed doesn’t mean we’re home free, Donny. There was that project out west that got okayed decades ago, scored funding. Eventually, it fell through.’

Donald knew the one he was talking about. A containment facility buried under a mountain. The buzz on the Hill was that the Georgia project had the same chances of success. The folder suddenly tripled in weight as he considered this. He was being asked to be a part of this future failure. He would be staking his newly won office on it.

‘I’ve got Mick Webb working on something related. Logistics and planning. You two will need to collaborate on a few things. And Anna is taking leave from her post at MIT to lend a hand.’

‘Anna?’ Donald fumbled for his water, his hand shaking.

‘Of course. She’ll be your lead engineer on this project. There are details in there on what she’ll need, space-wise.’

Donald took a gulp of water and forced himself to swallow.

‘There’s a lot of other people I could call in, sure, but this project can’t fail, you understand? It needs to be like family. That’s why I want to use people I know, people I can trust.’ Senator Thurman interlocked his fingers. ‘If this is the only thing you were elected to do, I want you to do it right. It’s why I stumped for you in the first place.’

‘Of course.’ Donald bobbed his head to hide his confusion. He had worried during the election that the Senator’s endorsement stemmed from old family ties. This was somehow worse. Donald hadn’t been using the Senator at all; it was the other way around. Studying the drawing in his lap, the newly elected congressman felt one job he was inadequately trained for melt away — only to be replaced by a different job that seemed equally daunting.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I still don’t get it.’ He studied the old drawing. ‘Why the grow lights?’

‘Because this building I want you to design for me — it’s going to go underground.’

2 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY HELD HIS breath and tried to remain calm while the doctor pumped the rubber bulb. The inflatable band swelled around his bicep until it pinched his skin. He wasn’t sure if slowing his breathing and steadying his pulse affected his blood pressure, but he had a strong urge to impress the man in the white overalls. He wanted his numbers to come back normal.

His arm throbbed a few beats while the needle bounced and the air hissed out.

‘Eighty over fifty.’ The band made a ripping sound as it was torn loose. Troy rubbed the spot where his skin had been pinched.

‘Is that okay?’

The doctor made a note on his clipboard. ‘It’s low, but not outside the norm.’ Behind him, his assistant labelled a cup of dark grey urine before placing it inside a small fridge. Troy caught sight of a half-eaten sandwich among the samples, not even wrapped.

He looked down at his bare knees sticking out of the blue paper gown. His legs were pale and seemed smaller than he remembered. Bony.

‘I still can’t make a fist,’ he told the doctor, working his hand open and shut.

‘That’s perfectly normal. Your strength will return. Look into the light, please.’

Troy followed the bright beam and tried not to blink.

‘How long have you been doing this?’ he asked the doctor.

‘You’re my third coming out. I’ve put two under.’ He lowered the light and smiled at Troy. ‘I’ve only been out myself for a few weeks. I can tell you that the strength will return.’

Troy nodded. The doctor’s assistant handed him another pill and a cup of water. Troy hesitated. He stared down at the little blue capsule nestled in his palm.

‘A double dose this morning,’ the doctor said, ‘and then you’ll be given one with breakfast and dinner. Please do not skip a treatment.’

Troy looked up. ‘What happens if I don’t take it?’

The doctor shook his head and frowned, but didn’t say anything.

Troy popped the pill in his mouth and chased it with the water. A bitterness slid down his throat.

‘One of my assistants will bring you some clothes and a fluid meal to kick-start your gut. If you have any dizziness or chills, you’re to call me at once. Otherwise, we’ll see you back here in six months.’ The doctor made a note, then chuckled. ‘Well, someone else will see you. My shift will be over.’

‘Okay.’ Troy shivered.

The doctor looked up from his clipboard. ‘You’re not cold, are you? I keep it a little extra warm in here.’

Troy hesitated before answering. ‘No, doctor. I’m not cold. Not any more.’

Troy entered the lift at the end of the hall, his legs still weak, and studied an array of numbered buttons. The orders they’d given him included directions to his office, but he vaguely remembered how to get there. Much of his orientation had survived the decades of sleep. He remembered studying that same book over and over, thousands of men assigned to various shifts, tours of the facility before being put under like the women. The orientation felt like yesterday; it was older memories that seemed to be slipping away.

The doors to the lift closed automatically. His apartment was on thirty-seven; he remembered that. His office was on thirty-four. He reached for a button, intending to head straight to his desk, and instead found his hand sliding up to the very top. He still had a few minutes before he needed to be anywhere, and he felt some strange urge, some tug, to get as high as possible, to rise through the soil pressing in from all sides.

The lift hummed into life and accelerated up the shaft. There was a whooshing sound as another car or maybe the counterweight zoomed by. The round buttons flashed as the floors passed. There was an enormous spread of them, seventy in all. The centres of many were dull from years of rubbing. This didn’t seem right. It seemed like just yesterday the buttons were shiny and new. Just yesterday, everything was.

The lift slowed. Troy palmed the wall for balance, his legs still uncertain.

The door dinged and slid open. Troy blinked at the bright lights in the hallway. He left the lift and followed a short walk towards a room that leaked chatter. His new boots were stiff on his feet, the generic grey overalls itchy. He tried to imagine waking up like this nine more times, feeling this weak and disoriented. Ten shifts of six months each. Ten shifts he hadn’t volunteered for. He wondered if it would get progressively easier or if it would only get worse.

The bustle in the cafeteria quietened as he entered. A few heads turned his way. He saw at once that his grey overalls weren’t so generic. There was a scattering of colours seated at the tables: a large cluster of reds, quite a few yellows, a man in orange; no other greys.

That first meal of sticky paste he’d been given rumbled once more in his stomach. He wasn’t allowed to eat anything else for six hours, which made the aroma from the canned foods overwhelming. He remembered the fare, had lived on it during orientation. Weeks and weeks of the same gruel. Now it would be months. It would be hundreds of years.

‘Sir.’

A young man nodded to Troy as he walked past, towards the lifts. Troy thought he recognised him but couldn’t be sure. The gentleman certainly seemed to have recognised him. Or was it the grey overalls that stood out?

‘First shift?’

An older gentleman approached, thin, with white and wispy hair that circled his head. He held a tray in his hands, smiled at Troy. Pulling open a recycling bin, he slid the entire tray inside and dropped it with a clatter.

‘Come up for the view?’ the man asked.

Troy nodded. It was all men throughout the cafeteria. All men. They had explained why this was safer. He tried to remember as the man with the splotches of age on his skin crossed his arms and stood beside him. There were no introductions. Troy wondered if names meant less amid these short six-month shifts. He gazed out over the bustling tables towards the massive screen that covered the far wall.

Whirls of dust and low clouds hung over a field of scattered and mangled debris. A few metal poles bristled from the ground and sagged lifelessly, the tents and flags long vanished. Troy thought of something but couldn’t name it. His stomach tightened like a fist around the paste and the bitter pill.

‘This’ll be my second shift,’ the man said.

Troy barely heard. His watering eyes drifted across the scorched hills, the grey slopes rising up towards the dark and menacing clouds. The debris scattered everywhere was rotting away. Next shift, or the one after, and it would all be gone.

‘You can see further from the lounge.’ The man turned and gestured along the wall. Troy knew well enough what room he was referring to. This part of the building was familiar to him in ways this man could hardly guess at.

‘No, but thanks,’ Troy stammered. He waved the man off. ‘I think I’ve seen enough.’

Curious faces returned to their trays, and the chatter resumed. It was sprinkled with the clinking of spoons and forks on metal bowls and plates. Troy turned and left without saying another word. He put that hideous view behind him — turned his back on the unspoken eeriness of it. He hurried, shivering, towards the lift, knees weak from more than the long rest. He needed to be alone, didn’t want anyone around him this time, didn’t want sympathetic hands comforting him while he cried.

3 2049 Washington, DC

DONALD KEPT THE thick folder tucked inside his jacket and hurried through the rain. He had chosen to get soaked crossing the square rather than face his claustrophobia in the tunnels.

Traffic hissed by on the wet asphalt. He waited for a gap, ignored the crossing signals and scooted across.

In front of him, the marble steps of Rayburn, the office building for the House of Representatives, gleamed treacher-ously. He climbed them warily and thanked the doorman on his way in.

Inside, a security officer stood by impassively while Donald’s badge was scanned, red unblinking eyes beeping at bar codes. He checked the folder Thurman had given him, made sure it was still dry, and wondered why such relics were still considered safer than an email or a digital copy.

His office was one floor up. He headed for the stairs, preferring them to Rayburn’s ancient and slow lift. His shoes squeaked on the tile as he left the plush runner by the door.

The hallway upstairs was its usual mess. Two high-schoolers from the intern programme hurried past, most likely fetching coffee. A TV crew stood outside Amanda Kelly’s office, camera lights bathing her and a young reporter in a daytime glow. Concerned voters and eager lobbyists were identifiable by the guest passes hanging around their necks. They were easy to distinguish from one another, these two groups. The voters wore frowns and invariably seemed lost. The lobbyists were the ones with the Cheshire Cat grins who navigated the halls more confidently than even the newly elected.

Donald opened the folder and pretended to read as he made his way through the chaos, hoping to avoid conversation. He squeezed behind the cameraman and ducked into his office next door.

Margaret, his secretary, stood up from her desk. ‘Sir, you have a visitor.’

Donald glanced around the waiting room. It was empty. He saw that the door to his office was partway open.

‘I’m sorry, I let her in.’ Margaret mimed carrying a box, her hands at her waist and her back arched. ‘She had a delivery. Said it was from the Senator.’

Donald waved her concerns aside. Margaret was older than him, in her mid-forties, and had come highly recommended, but she did have a conspiratorial streak. Perhaps it came with the years of experience.

‘It’s fine,’ Donald assured her. He found it interesting that there were a hundred senators, two from his state, but only one was referred to as the Senator. ‘I’ll see what it’s about. In the meantime, I need you to free up a daily block in my schedule. An hour or two in the morning would be ideal.’ He flashed her the folder. ‘I’ve got something that’s going to eat up quite a bit of time.’

Margaret nodded and sat down in front of her computer. Donald turned towards his office.

‘Oh, sir…’

He looked back. She pointed to her head. ‘Your hair,’ she hissed.

He ran his fingers through his hair and drops of water leapt off him like startled fleas. Margaret frowned and lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug. Donald gave up and pushed his office door open, expecting to find someone sitting across from his desk.

Instead, he saw someone wiggling underneath it.

‘Hello?’

The door had bumped into something on the floor. Donald peeked around and saw a large box with a picture of a computer monitor on it. He glanced at the desk, saw the display was already set up.

‘Oh, hey!’

The greeting was muffled by the hollow beneath his desk. Slender hips in a herringbone skirt wiggled back towards him. Donald knew who it was before her head emerged. He felt a flush of guilt, of anger at her being there unannounced.

‘You know, you should have your cleaning lady dust under here once in a while.’ Anna Thurman stood up and smiled. She slapped her palms together, brushing them off before extending one his way. Donald took her hand nervously. ‘Hey, stranger.’

‘Yeah. Hey.’ Rain dribbled down his cheek and neck, hiding any sudden flush of perspiration. ‘What’s going on?’ He walked around his desk to create some space between them. A new monitor stood innocently, a film of protective plastic blurring the screen.

‘Dad thought you might need an extra one.’ Anna tucked a loose clump of auburn hair behind her ear. She still possessed the same alluring and elfin quality when her ears poked out like that. ‘I volunteered,’ she explained, shrugging.

‘Oh.’ He placed the folder on his desk and thought about the drawing of the building he had briefly suspected was from her. And now, here she was. Checking his reflection in the new monitor, he saw the mess he had made of his hair. He reached up and tried to smooth it.

‘Another thing,’ Anna said. ‘Your computer would be better off on your desk. I know it’s unsightly, but the dust is gonna choke that thing to death. Dust is murder on these guys.’

‘Yeah. Okay.’

He sat down and realised he could no longer see the chair across from his desk. He slid the new monitor to one side while Anna walked around and stood beside him, her arms crossed, completely relaxed. As if they’d seen each other yesterday.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re in town.’

‘Since last week. I was gonna stop by and see you and Helen on Saturday, but I’ve been so busy getting settled into my apartment. Unboxing things, you know?’

‘Yeah.’ He accidentally bumped the mouse, and the old monitor winked on. His computer was running. The terror of being in the same room with an ex subsided just enough for the timing of the day’s events to dawn on him.

‘Wait.’ He turned to Anna. ‘You were over here installing this while your father was asking me if I was interested in his project? What if I’d declined?’

She raised an eyebrow. Donald realised it wasn’t something one learned — it was a talent that ran in the family.

‘He practically gift-wrapped the election for you,’ she said flatly.

Donald reached for the folder and riffled the pages like a deck of cards. ‘The illusion of free will would’ve been nice, that’s all.’

Anna laughed. She was about to tousle his hair, he could sense it. Dropping his hand from the folder and patting his jacket pocket, he felt for his phone. It was as though Helen were there with him. He had an urge to call her.

‘Was Dad at least gentle with you?’

He looked up to see that she hadn’t moved. Her arms were still crossed, his hair untousled — nothing to panic about.

‘What? Oh, yeah. He was fine. Like old times. In fact, it’s like he hasn’t aged a day.’

‘He doesn’t really age, you know.’ She crossed the room and picked up large moulded pieces of foam, then slid them noisily into the empty box. Donald found his eyes drifting towards her skirt and forced himself to look away.

‘He takes his nano treatments almost religiously. Started because of his knees. The military covered it for a while. Now he swears by them.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Donald lied. He’d heard rumours, of course. It was ‘Botox for the whole body’, people said. Better than testosterone supplements. It cost a fortune, and you wouldn’t live forever, but you sure as hell could delay the pain of ageing.

Anna narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, do you?’

‘What? No. It’s fine, I guess. I just wouldn’t. Wait — why? Don’t tell me you’ve been…’

Anna rested her hands on her hips and cocked her head to the side. There was something oddly seductive about the defensive posture, something that whisked away the years since he’d last seen her.

‘Do you think I would need to?’ she asked him.

‘No, no. It’s not that…’ He waved his hands. ‘It’s just that I don’t think I ever would.’

A smirk thinned her lips. Maturity had hardened Anna’s good looks, had refined her lean frame, but the fierceness from her youth remained. ‘You say that now,’ she said, ‘but wait until your joints start to ache and your back goes out from something as simple as turning your head too fast. Then you’ll see.’

‘Okay. Well.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘This has been quite the day for catching up on old times.’

‘Yes, it has. Now, what day works best for you?’ Anna interlocked the flaps on the large box and slid it towards the door with her foot. She walked around the back of the desk and stood beside him, a hand on his chair, the other reaching for his mouse.

‘What day… ?’

He watched while she changed some settings on his computer and the new monitor flashed to life. Donald could feel the pulse in his crotch, could smell her familiar perfume. The breeze she had caused by walking across the room seemed to stir all around him. This felt near enough to a caress, to a physical touch, that he wondered if he was cheating on Helen right at that very moment while Anna did little more than adjust sliders on his control panel.

‘You know how to use this, right?’ She slid the mouse from one screen to the other, dragging an old game of solitaire with it.

‘Uh, yeah.’ Donald squirmed in his seat. ‘Um… what do you mean about a day that works best for me?’

She let go of the mouse. It felt as though she had taken her hand off his thigh.

‘Dad wants me to handle the mechanical spaces on the plans.’ She gestured towards the folder as if she knew precisely what was inside. ‘I’m taking a sabbatical from the Institute until this Atlanta project is up and running. I thought we’d want to meet once a week to go over things.’

‘Oh. Well. I’ll have to get back to you on that. My schedule here is crazy. It’s different every day.’

He imagined what Helen would say to him and Anna getting together once a week.

‘We could, you know, set up a shared space in AutoCAD,’ he suggested. ‘I can link you into my document—’

‘We could do that.’

‘And email back and forth. Or video-chat. You know?’

Anna frowned. Donald realised he was being too obvious. ‘Yeah, let’s set up something like that,’ she said.

There was a flash of disappointment on her face as she turned for the box, and Donald felt the urge to apologise, but doing so would spell out the problem in neon lights: I don’t trust myself around you. We’re not going to be friends. What the fuck are you doing here?

‘You really need to do something about the dust.’ She glanced back at his desk. ‘Seriously, your computer is going to choke on it.’

‘Okay. I will.’ He stood and hurried around his desk to walk her out. Anna stooped for the box.

‘I can get that.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ She stood with the large box pinned between one arm and her hip. She smiled and tucked her hair behind her ear again. She could’ve been leaving his dorm room in college. There was that same awkward moment of a morning goodbye in last night’s clothes.

‘Okay, so you have my email?’ he asked.

‘You’re in the blue pages now,’ she reminded him.

‘Yeah.’

‘You look great, by the way.’ And before he could step back or defend himself, she was fixing his hair, a smile on her lips.

Donald froze. When he thawed some time later, Anna was gone, leaving him standing there alone, soaked in guilt.

4 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY WAS GOING to be late. The first day of his first shift, already a blubbering mess, and he was going to be late. In his rush to get away from the cafeteria, to be alone, he had taken the non-express by accident. Now, as he tried to compose himself, the lift seemed intent on stopping at every floor on the way down to load and unload passengers.

He stood in the corner as the lift stopped again and a man wrestled a cart full of heavy boxes inside. A gentleman with a load of green onions crowded behind him and stood close to Troy for a few stops. Nobody spoke. When the man with the onions got off, the smell remained. Troy shivered, one violent quake that travelled up his back and into his arms, but he thought nothing of it. He got off on thirty-four and tried to remember why he had been upset earlier.

The central lift shaft emptied onto a narrow hallway, which funnelled him towards a security station. The floor plan was vaguely familiar and yet somehow alien. It was unnerving to note the signs of wear in the carpet and the patch of dull steel in the middle of the turnstile where thighs had rubbed against it over the years. These were years that hadn’t existed for Troy. This wear and tear had shown up as if by magic, like damage sustained from a night of drunkenness.

The lone guard on duty looked up from something he was reading and nodded in greeting. Troy placed his palm on a screen that had grown hazy from use. There was no chit-chat, no small talk, no expectation of forming a lasting relationship. The light above the console flashed green, the pedestal gave a loud click, and a little more sheen was rubbed off the revolving bar as Troy pushed through.

At the end of the hallway, Troy paused and pulled his orders out of his breast pocket. There was a note on the back from the doctor. He flipped it over and turned the little map around to face the right direction; he was pretty sure he knew the way, but everything was dropping in and out of focus.

The red dash marks on the map reminded him of fire safety plans he’d seen on walls somewhere else. Following the route took him past a string of small offices. Clacking keyboards, people talking, phones ringing — the sounds of the workplace made him feel suddenly tired. It also ignited a burn of insecurity, of having taken on a job he surely couldn’t perform.

‘Troy?’

He stopped and looked back at the man standing in a doorway he’d passed. A glance at his map showed him he’d almost missed his office.

‘That’s me.’

‘Merriman.’ The gentleman didn’t offer his hand. ‘You’re late. Step inside.’

Merriman turned and disappeared into the office. Troy followed, his legs sore from the walk. He recognised the man, or thought he did. Couldn’t remember if it was from the orientation or some other time.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Troy started to explain. ‘I got on the wrong elevator—’

Merriman raised a hand. ‘That’s fine. Do you need a drink?’

‘They fed me.’

‘Of course.’ Merriman grabbed a clear Thermos off his desk, the contents a bright blue and took a sip. Troy remembered the foul taste. The older man smacked his lips and let out a breath as he lowered the Thermos.

‘That stuff’s awful,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Troy looked around the office, his post for the next six months. The place, he figured, had aged quite a bit. Merriman, too. If he was a little greyer from the past six months, it was hard to tell, but he had kept the place in order. Troy resolved to extend the same courtesy to the next guy.

‘You remember your briefing?’ Merriman shuffled some folders on his desk.

‘Like it was yesterday.’

Merriman glanced up, a smirk on his face. ‘Right. Well, there hasn’t been anything exciting for the last few months. We had some mechanical issues when I started my shift but worked through those. There’s a guy named Jones you’ll want to use. He’s been out a few weeks and is a lot sharper than the last guy. Been a lifesaver for me. He works down on sixty-eight with the power plant, but he’s good just about anywhere, can fix pretty much anything.’

Troy nodded. ‘Jones. Got it.’

‘Okay. Well, I left you some notes in these folders. There have been a few workers we had to deep-freeze, some who aren’t fit for another shift.’ He looked up, a serious expression on his face. ‘Don’t take that lightly, okay? Plenty of guys here would love to nap straight through instead of work. Don’t resort to the deep freeze unless you’re sure they can’t handle it.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Good.’ Merriman nodded. ‘I hope you have an uneventful shift. I’ve got to run before this stuff kicks in.’ He took another fierce swig and Troy’s cheeks sucked in with empathy. He walked past Troy, slapped him on the shoulder and started to reach for the light switch. He stopped himself at the last minute and looked back, nodded, then was gone.

And just like that, Troy was in charge.

‘Hey, wait!’ He glanced around the office, hurried out and caught up with Merriman, who was already turning down the main hall towards the security gate. Troy jogged to catch up.

‘You leave the light on?’ Merriman asked.

Troy glanced over his shoulder. ‘Yeah, but—’

‘Good habits,’ Merriman said. He shook his Thermos. ‘Form them.’

A heavyset man hurried out of one of the offices and laboured to catch up with them. ‘Merriman! You done with your shift?’

The two men shared a warm handshake. Merriman smiled and nodded. ‘I am. Troy here will be taking my place.’

The man shrugged, didn’t introduce himself. ‘I’m off in two weeks,’ he said, as if that explained his indifference.

‘Look, I’m running late,’ Merriman said, his eyes darting towards Troy with a trace of blame. He pushed the Thermos into his friend’s palm. ‘Here. You can have what’s left.’ He turned to go and Troy followed along.

‘No thanks!’ the man called out, waving the Thermos and laughing.

Merriman glanced at Troy. ‘I’m sorry, did you have a question?’ He passed through the turnstile and Troy went through behind him. The guard never looked up from his tablet.

‘A few, yeah. You mind if I ride down with you? I was a little… behind at orientation. Sudden promotion. Would love to clarify a few things.’

‘Hey, I can’t stop you. You’re in charge.’ Merriman jabbed the call button on the express.

‘So, basically, I’m just here in case something goes wrong?’

The lift opened. Merriman turned and squinted at Troy almost as if to gauge if he was being serious.

‘Your job is to make sure nothing goes wrong.’ They both stepped into the lift and the car raced downward.

‘Right. Of course. That’s what I meant.’

‘You’ve read the Order, right?’

Troy nodded. But not for this job, he wanted to say. He had studied to run just a single silo, not the one that oversaw them all.

‘Just follow the script. You’ll get questions from the other silos now and then. I found it wise to say as little as possible. Just be quiet and listen. Keep in mind that these are mostly second- and third-generation survivors, so their vocabulary is already a little different. There’s a cheat-sheet and a list of forbidden words in your folder.’

Troy felt a bout of dizziness and nearly sagged to the ground as weight was added, the lift slowing to a stop. He was still incredibly weak.

The door opened; he followed Merriman down a short hallway, the same one he had emerged from hours earlier. The doctor and his assistant waited in the room beyond, preparing an IV. The doctor looked curiously at Troy, as if he hadn’t planned on seeing him again so soon, if ever.

‘You finish your last meal?’ the doctor asked, waving Merriman towards a stool.

‘Every vile drop of it.’ Merriman unclasped the tops of his overalls and let them flop down around his waist. He sat and held out his arm, palm up. Troy saw how pale Merriman’s skin was, the loose tangle of purple lines weaving past his elbow. He tried not to watch the needle go in.

‘I’m repeating my notes here,’ Merriman told him, ‘but you’ll want to meet with Victor in the psych office. He’s right across the hall from you. There’s some strange things going on in a few of the silos, more fracturing than we thought. Try and get a handle on that for the next guy.’

Troy nodded.

‘We need to get you to your chamber,’ the doctor said. His young assistant stood by with a paper gown. The entire procedure looked very familiar. The doctor turned to Troy as if he were a stain that needed scrubbing away.

Troy backed out of the door and glanced down the hall in the direction of the deep freeze. The women and children were kept there, along with the men who couldn’t make it through their shifts. ‘Do you mind if I… ?’ He felt a very real tug pulling him in that direction. Merriman and the doctor both frowned.

‘It’s not a good idea—’ the doctor began.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Merriman said. ‘I made a few visits the first weeks. It’s a mistake. Let it go.’

Troy stared down the hallway. He wasn’t exactly sure what he would find there, anyway.

‘Get through the next six months,’ Merriman said. ‘It goes by fast. It all goes by fast.’

Troy nodded. The doctor shooed him away with his eyes while Merriman began tugging off his boots. Troy turned, gave the heavy door down the hall one last glance, then headed in the other direction for the lift.

He hoped Merriman was right. Jabbing the button to call the express, he tried to imagine his entire shift flashing by. And the one after that. And the next one. Until this insanity had run its course, little thought to what came after.

5 2049 Washington, DC

TIME FLEW BY for Donald Keene. Another day came to an end, a week, and still he needed more time. It seemed the sun had just gone down when he looked up and it was past eleven.

Helen. There was a rush of panic as he fumbled for his phone. He had promised his wife he would always call before ten. A guilty heat wedged around his collar. He imagined her sitting around, staring at her phone, waiting and waiting.

It didn’t even ring on his end before she picked up.

‘There you are,’ she said, her voice soft and drowsy, her tone hinting more at relief than anger.

‘Sweetheart. God, I’m really sorry. I totally lost track of time.’

‘That’s okay, baby.’ She yawned, and Donald had to fight the infectious urge to do the same. ‘You write any good laws today?’

He laughed and rubbed his face. ‘They don’t really let me do that. Not yet. I’m mostly staying busy with this little project for the Senator—’

He stopped himself. Donald had dithered all week on the best way to tell her, what parts to keep secret. He glanced at the extra monitor on his desk. Anna’s perfume was somehow frozen in the air, still lingering a week later.

Helen’s voice perked up: ‘Oh?’

He could picture her clearly: Helen in her nightgown, his side of the bed still immaculately made, a glass of water within her reach. He missed her terribly. The guilt he felt, despite his innocence, made him miss her all the more.

‘What does he have you doing? It’s legal, I hope.’

‘What? Of course it’s legal. It’s… some architectural stuff, actually.’ Donald leaned forward to grab the finger of gold Scotch left in his tumbler. ‘To be honest, I’d forgotten how much I love the work. I would’ve been a decent architect if I’d stuck with it.’ He took a burning sip and eyed his monitors, which had gone dark to save the screens. He was dying to get back to it. Everything fell away, disappeared, when he lost himself in the drawing.

‘Sweetheart, I don’t think designing a new bathroom for the Senator’s office is why the taxpayers sent you to Washington.’

Donald smiled and finished the drink. He could practically hear his wife grinning on the other end of the line. He set the glass back on his desk and propped up his feet. ‘It’s nothing like that,’ he insisted. ‘It’s plans for that facility they’re putting in outside of Atlanta. Just a minor portion of it, really. But if I don’t get it just right, the whole thing could fall apart.’

He eyed the open folder on his desk. His wife laughed sleepily.

‘Why in the world would they have you doing something like that?’ she asked. ‘If it’s so important, wouldn’t they pay someone who knows what they’re doing?’

Donald laughed dismissively, however much he agreed. He couldn’t help but feel victim to Washington’s habit for assigning jobs to people who weren’t qualified for them. ‘I’m actually quite good at this,’ he told his wife. ‘I’m starting to think I’m a better architect than a congressman.’

‘I’m sure you’re wonderful at it.’ His wife yawned again. ‘But you could’ve stayed home and been an architect. You could work late here.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Donald remembered their discussions on whether or not he should run for office, if it would be worth them being apart. Now he was spending his time away doing the very thing they’d agreed he should give up. ‘I think this is just something they put us through our first year,’ he said. ‘Think of it like your internship. It’ll get better. And besides, I think it’s a good sign he wants me in on this. He sees the Atlanta thing as a family project, something to keep in-house. He actually took notice of some of my work at—’

‘Family project.’

‘Well, not literally family, more like—’ This wasn’t how he wanted to tell her. It was a bad start. It was what he got for putting it off, for waiting until he was exhausted and tipsy.

‘Is this why you’re working late? Why you’re calling me after ten?’

‘Baby, I lost track of the time. I was on my computer.’ He looked to his tumbler, saw that it held the barest of sips, just the golden residue that had slid down the glass after his last pull. ‘This is good news for us. I’ll be coming home more often because of this. I’m sure they’ll need me to check out the job site, work with the foremen—’

‘That would be good news. Your dog misses you.’

Donald smiled. ‘I hope you both do.’

‘You know I do.’

‘Good.’ He swilled the last drop in the glass and gulped it down. ‘And listen, I know how you’re gonna feel about this, and I swear it’s out of my control, but the Senator’s daughter is working on this project with me. Mick Webb, too. You remember him?’

Cold silence.

Then, ‘I remember the Senator’s daughter.’

Donald cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, well, Mick is doing some of the organisational work, securing land, dealing with contractors. It’s practically his district, after all. And you know neither of us would be where we are today without the Senator stumping for us—’

‘What I remember is that you two used to date. And that she used to flirt with you even when I was around.’

Donald laughed. ‘Are you serious? Anna Thurman? C’mon, honey, that was a lifetime ago—’

‘I thought you were going to come home more often, anyway. On the weekends.’ He heard his wife let out a breath. ‘Look, it’s late. Why don’t we both get some sleep? We can talk about this tomorrow.’

‘Okay. Yeah, sure. And sweetheart?’

She waited.

‘Nothing’s gonna come between us, okay? This is a huge opportunity for me. And it’s something I’m really good at. I’d forgotten how good at it I am.’

A pause.

‘There’s a lot you’re good at,’ his wife said. ‘You’re a good husband, and I know you’ll be a good congressman. I just don’t trust the people you’re surrounding yourself with.’

‘But you know I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.’

‘I know.’

‘Look, I’ll be careful. I promise.’

‘Okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Sleep tight. I love you.’

She hung up, and Donald looked down at his phone, saw that he had a dozen emails waiting for him. He decided to ignore them until morning. Rubbing his eyes, he willed himself awake, to think clearly. He shook the mouse to stir his monitors. They could afford to nap, to go dark awhile, but he couldn’t.

A wireframe apartment sat in the middle of his new screen. Donald zoomed out and watched the apartment sink away and a hallway appear, then dozens of identical wedge-shaped living quarters squeeze in from the edges. The building specs called for a bunker that could house ten thousand people for at least a year — utter overkill. Donald approached the task as he would any design project. He imagined himself in their place, a toxic spill, a leak or some horrible fallout, a terrorist attack, something that might send all of the facility workers underground where they would have to stay for weeks or months until the area was cleared.

The view pulled back further until other floors appeared above and below, empty floors he would eventually fill with storerooms, hallways, more apartments. Entire other floors and mechanical spaces had been left empty for Anna—

‘Donny?’

His door opened — the knock came after. Donald’s arm jerked so hard his mouse went skidding off the pad and across his desk. He sat up straight, peered over his monitors and saw Mick Webb grinning at him from the doorway. Mick had his jacket tucked under one arm, tie hanging loose, a peppery stubble on his dark skin. He laughed at Donald’s harried expression and sauntered across the room. Donald fumbled for the mouse and quickly minimised the AutoCAD window.

‘Shit, man, you haven’t taken up day-trading, have you?’

‘Day-trading?’ Donald leaned back in his chair.

‘Yeah. What’s with the new set-up?’ Mick walked around behind the desk and rested a hand on the back of Donald’s chair. An abandoned game of Freecell sat embarrassingly on the smaller of the two screens.

‘Oh, the extra monitor.’ Donald minimised the card game and turned in his seat. ‘I like having a handful of programs up at the same time.’

‘I can see that.’ Mick gestured at the empty monitors, the wallpaper of cherry blossoms framing the Jefferson Memorial.

Donald laughed and rubbed his face. He could feel his own stubble, had forgotten to eat dinner. The project had only begun a week ago and he was already a wreck.

‘I’m heading out for a drink,’ Mick told him. ‘You wanna come?’

‘Sorry. I’ve got a little more to do here.’

Mick clasped his shoulder and squeezed until it hurt. ‘I hate to break it to you, man, but you’re gonna have to start over. You bury an ace like that, there’s no coming back. C’mon, let’s get a drink.’

‘Seriously, I can’t.’ Donald twisted out from his friend’s grasp and turned to face him. ‘I’m working on those plans for Atlanta. I’m not supposed to let anyone see them. It’s top secret.’

For emphasis, he reached out and closed the folder on his desk. The Senator had told him there would be a division of labour and that the walls of that divide needed to be a mile high.

‘Ohhh. Top secret.’ Mick waggled both hands in the air. ‘I’m working on the same project, asshole.’ He waved at the monitor. ‘And you’re doing the plans? What gives? My GPA was higher than yours.’ He leaned over the desk and stared at the taskbar. ‘AutoCAD? Cool. C’mon, let’s see it.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Come the fuck on. Don’t be a child about this.’

Donald laughed. ‘Look, even the people on my team aren’t going to see the entire plan. And neither will I.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘No, it’s how government shit like this gets done. You don’t see me prying into your part in all this.’

Mick waved a hand dismissively. ‘Whatever. Grab your coat. Let’s go.’

‘Fine, sure.’ Donald patted his cheeks with his palms, trying to wake up. ‘I’ll work better in the morning.’

‘Working on a Saturday. Thurman must love you.’

‘Let’s hope so. Just give me a couple of minutes to shut this down.’

Mick laughed. ‘Go ahead. I’m not looking.’ He walked over to the door while Donald finished up.

When Donald stood to go, his desk phone rang. His secretary wasn’t there, so it was someone with his direct line. Donald reached for it and held up a finger to Mick.

‘Helen—’

Someone cleared their throat on the other end. A deep and rough voice apologised: ‘Sorry, no.’

‘Oh.’ Donald glanced up at Mick, who was tapping his watch. ‘Hello, sir.’

‘You boys going out?’ Senator Thurman asked.

Donald turned to the window. ‘Excuse me?’

‘You and Mick. It’s a Friday night. Are you hitting the town?’

‘Uh, just the one drink, sir.’

What Donald wanted to know was how the hell the Senator knew Mick was there.

‘Good. Tell Mick I need to see him first thing Monday morning. My office. You too. We need to discuss your first trip down to the job site.’

‘Oh. Okay.’

Donald waited, wondering if that was all.

‘You boys will be working closely on this moving forward.’

‘Good. Of course.’

‘As we discussed last week, there won’t be any need to share details about what you’re working on with other project members. The same goes for Mick.’

‘Yes, sir. Absolutely. I remember our talk.’

‘Excellent. You boys have a good time. Oh, and if Mick starts blabbing, you have my permission to kill him on the spot.’

There was a breath of silence, and then the hearty laugh of a man whose lungs sounded much younger than his years.

‘Ah.’ Donald watched Mick, who had taken out the plug from a decanter to take a sniff. ‘Okay, sir. I’ll be sure to do that.’

‘Great. See you Monday.’

The Senator hung up abruptly. As Donald returned the phone to its cradle and grabbed his coat, his new monitor remained quietly perched on his desk, watching him blankly.

6 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY’S BEATEN-UP plastic meal tray slid down the line behind the spattered sheet of glass. Once his badge was scanned, a measured portion of canned string beans fell out of a tube and formed a steaming pile on his plate. A perfectly round cut of turkey plopped from the next tube, the ridges still visible from the tin. Mashed potatoes spat out at the end of the line like a spit wad from a child’s straw. Gravy followed with an unappetising squirt.

Behind the serving line stood a heavyset man in white overalls, hands clasped behind his back. He didn’t seem interested in the food. He concentrated on the workers as they lined up for their meals.

When Troy’s tray reached the end of the line, a younger man in pale green overalls and probably not out of his twenties arranged silverware and napkins by the plate. A glass of water was added from a tightly packed tray nearby. The final step was like a ritualised handshake, one Troy remembered from the months of orientation: a small plastic shot glass was handed over, a pill rattling in the bottom, a blurry blue shape barely visible through the translucent cup.

Troy shuffled into place.

‘Hello, sir.’

A young grin. Perfect teeth. Everyone called him sir, even those much older. It was discomfiting no matter who it came from.

The pill rattled in the plastic. Troy took the cup and tossed the pill down. He swallowed it dry, grabbed his tray and tried not to hold up the line. Searching for a seat, he caught the heavyset man watching him. Everyone in the facility seemed to think Troy was in charge, but he wasn’t fooled. He was just another person doing a job, following a script. He found an empty spot facing the screen. Unlike that first day, it no longer bothered him to see the scorched world outside. The view had grown oddly comforting. It created a dull ache in his chest, which was near to feeling something.

A mouthful of potatoes and gravy washed away the taste of the pill. Water was never up to the task, could never take away the bitterness. Eating methodically, he watched the sun set on the first week of his first shift. Twenty-five more weeks to go. It was a countable number phrased like that. It seemed shorter than half a year.

An older gentleman in blue overalls with thinning hair sat down diagonally across from him, polite enough not to block the view. Troy recognised the man, had spoken with him once by the recycling bin. When he looked up, Troy nodded in greeting.

The cafeteria hummed pleasantly as they both ate. A few hushed conversations rose and faded. Plastic, glass and metal beat out a rhythmless tune.

Troy glanced at the view and felt there was something he was supposed to know, something he kept forgetting. He awoke each morning with familiar shapes at the edges of his vision, could feel memories nearby, but by the time breakfast came, they were already fading. By dinner, they were lost. It left Troy with a sadness, a cold sensation, and a feeling like a hollow stomach — different from hunger — like rainy days as a child when he didn’t know how to fill his time.

The gentleman across from him slid over a little and cleared his throat. ‘Things going okay?’ he asked.

He reminded Troy of someone. Blotchy skin hung slightly loose around his weathered face. He had a drooping neck, an unsightly pinch of flesh hanging from his Adam’s apple.

‘Things?’ Troy repeated. He returned the smile.

‘Anything, I suppose. Just checking in. I go by Hal.’ The gentleman lifted his glass. Troy did the same. It was as good as a handshake.

‘Troy,’ he said. He supposed to some people it still mattered what they called themselves.

Hal took a long pull from his glass. His neck bobbed, the gulp loud. Self-conscious, Troy took a small sip and worked on the last of his beans and turkey.

‘I’ve noticed some people sit facing it and some sit with their backs to it.’ Hal jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Troy looked up at the screen. He chewed his food, didn’t say anything.

‘I reckon those who sit and watch, they’re trying to remember something,’ Hal said.

Troy swallowed and forced himself to shrug.

‘And those of us who don’t want to watch,’ Hal continued. ‘I figure we’re trying our best to forget.’

Troy knew they shouldn’t be having this conversation, but now it had begun, and he wanted to see where it would lead.

‘It’s the bad stuff,’ Hal said, staring off towards the lifts. ‘Have you noticed that? It’s just the bad stuff that slips away. All the unimportant things, we remember well.’

Troy didn’t say anything. He jabbed his beans, even though he didn’t plan on eating them.

‘It makes you wonder, don’t it? Why we all feel so rotten inside?’

Hal finished up his food, nodded a wordless goodbye and got up to leave. Troy was left alone. He found himself staring at the screen, a dull ache inside that he couldn’t name. It was the time of evening just before the hills disappeared, before they darkened and faded into the cloud-filled sky.

7 2049 Washington, DC

DONALD WAS GLAD he had decided to walk to his meeting with the Senator. The rain from the week before had finally let up, and the traffic in Dupont Circle was at a crawl. Heading up Connecticut and leaning into a stiffening breeze, Donald wondered why the meeting had been moved to Kramerbooks of all places. There were a dozen superior coffee houses much closer to the office.

He crossed a side street and hurried up the short flight of stone steps to the bookshop. The front door to Kramer’s was one of those ancient wooden affairs older establishments hung like a boast, a testament to their endurance. Hinges squeaked and actual bells jangled overhead as he pushed open the door, and a young woman straightening books on a centre table of bestsellers glanced up and smiled hello.

The cafe, Donald saw, was packed with men and women in business suits sipping from white porcelain cups. There was no sign of the Senator. Donald started to check his phone, see if he was too early, when a Secret Service agent caught his eye.

The agent stood broad-shouldered at the end of an aisle of books in the small corner of Kramer’s that acted as the cafe’s bookshop. Donald laughed at how conspicuously hidden the man was: the earpiece, the bulge by his ribs, the sunglasses indoors. Donald headed the agent’s way, the wooden boards underfoot groaning with age.

The agent’s gaze shifted his way, but it was hard to tell if he was looking at Donald or towards the front door.

‘I’m here to see Senator Thurman,’ Donald said, his voice cracking a little. ‘I have an appointment.’

The agent turned his head to the side. Donald followed the gesture and peered down an aisle of books to see Thurman browsing through the stacks at the far end.

‘Ah. Thanks.’ He stepped between the towering shelves of old books, the light dimming and the smell of coffee replaced with the tang of mildew mixed with leather.

‘What do you think of this one?’

Senator Thurman held out a book as Donald approached. No greeting, just the question.

Donald checked the title embossed in gold on the thick leather cover. ‘Never heard of it,’ he admitted.

Senator Thurman laughed. ‘Of course not. It’s over a hundred years old — and it’s French. I mean, what do you think of the binding?’ He handed Donald the book.

Donald was surprised by how heavy the volume was. He cracked it open and flipped through a few pages. It felt like a law book, had that same dense heft, but he could see by the white space between lines of dialogue that it was a novel. As he turned a few pages, he admired how thin the individual sheets were. Where the pages met at the spine, they had been stitched together with tiny ropes of blue and gold thread. He had friends who still swore by physical books — not for decoration, but to actually read. Studying the one in his hand, Donald could understand their nostalgic affection.

‘The binding looks great,’ he said, brushing it with the pads of his fingers. ‘It’s a beautiful book.’ He handed the novel back to the Senator. ‘Is this how you shop for a good read? You mostly go by the cover?’

Thurman tucked the book under his arm and pulled another from the shelf. ‘It’s just a sample for another project I’m working on.’ He turned and narrowed his eyes at Donald. It was an uncomfortable gaze. He felt like prey.

‘How’s your sister doing?’ he asked.

The question caught Donald off guard. A lump formed in his throat at the mention of her.

‘Charlotte? She’s… she’s fine, I guess. She redeployed. I’m sure you heard.’

‘I did.’ Thurman slotted the book in his hand back into a gap and weighed the one Donald had appraised. ‘I was proud of her for re-upping. She does her country proud.’

Donald thought about what it cost a family to do a country proud.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know my parents were really looking forward to having her home, but she was having trouble adjusting to the pace back here. It… I don’t think she’ll be able to really relax until the war’s over. You know?’

‘I do. And she may not find peace even then.’

That wasn’t what Donald wanted to hear. He watched the Senator trace his finger down an ornate spine adorned with ridges, bumps and recessed lettering. The old man’s eyes seemed to focus beyond the rows of books.

‘I can drop her a line if you want. Sometimes a soldier just needs to hear that it’s okay to see someone.’

‘If you mean a shrink, she won’t do it.’ Donald recalled the changes in his sister around the time of her sessions. ‘We already tried.’

Thurman’s lips pursed into a thin, wrinkled line, his worry revealing hidden signs of age. ‘I’ll talk to her. I’m familiar enough with the hubris of youth, believe me. I used to have the same attitude when I was younger. I thought I didn’t need any help, that I could do everything on my own.’ He turned to face Donald. ‘The profession’s come a long way. They have pills now that can help her with the battle fatigue.’

Donald shook his head. ‘No. She was on those for a while. They made her too forgetful. And they caused a…’ He hesitated, didn’t want to talk about it. ‘… a tic.’

He wanted to say tremors, but that sounded too severe. And while he appreciated the Senator’s concern — this feeling as if the man was family — he was uncomfortable discussing his sister’s problems. He remembered the last time she was home, the disagreement they’d had while going through his and Helen’s photographs from Mexico. He had asked Charlotte if she remembered Cozumel from when they were kids, and she had insisted she’d never been. The disagreement had turned into an argument, and he had lied and said his tears were ones of frustration. Parts of his sister’s life had been erased, and the only way the doctors could explain it was to say that it must’ve been something she wanted to forget. And what could be wrong with that?

Thurman rested a hand on Donald’s arm. ‘Trust me on this,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll talk to her. I know what she’s going through.’

Donald bobbed his head. ‘Yeah. Okay. I appreciate it.’ He almost added that it wouldn’t do any good, could possibly cause harm, but the gesture was a nice one. And it would come from someone his sister looked up to, rather than from family.

‘And hey, Donny, she’s piloting drones.’ Thurman studied him, seemed to be picking up on his worry. ‘It’s not like she’s in any physical danger.’

Donald rubbed the spine of a shelved book. ‘Not physical, no.’

They fell silent, and Donald let out a heavy breath. He could hear the chatter from the cafe, the clink of a spoon stirring in some sugar, the clang of bells against the old wooden door, the squeal and hiss of milk being steamed.

He had seen videos of what Charlotte did, camera feeds from the drones and then from the missiles as they were guided in to their targets. The video quality was amazing. You could see people turning to look up to the heavens in surprise, could see the last moments of their lives, could cycle through the video frame by frame and decide — after the fact — if this had been your man or not. He knew what his sister did, what she dealt with.

‘I spoke with Mick earlier,’ Thurman said, seeming to sense that he’d brought up a sore topic. ‘You two are going to head down to Atlanta and see how the excavation is going.’

Donald snapped to. ‘Of course. Yeah, it’ll be good to get the lay of the land. I got a nice head start on my plans last week, gradually filling in the dimensions you set out. You do realise how deep this thing goes, right?’

‘That’s why they’re already digging the foundations. The outer walls should be getting a pour over the next few weeks.’ Senator Thurman patted Donald’s shoulder and nodded towards the end of the aisle, signalling that they were finished looking through books.

‘Wait. They’re already digging?’ Donald walked alongside Thurman. ‘I’ve only got an outline ready. I hope they’re saving mine for last.’

‘The entire complex is being worked on at the same time. All they’re pouring are the outer walls and foundations, the dimensions of which are fixed. We’ll fill each structure from the bottom up, the floors craned down completely furnished before we pour the slabs between. But look, this is why I need you boys to go check things out. It sounds like a damned nightmare down there with the staging. I’ve got a hundred crews from a dozen countries working on top of one another while materials pile up everywhere. I can’t be in ten places at once, so I need you to get a read on things and report back.’

When they reached the Secret Service agent at the end of the aisle, the Senator handed him the old book with the French embossing. The man in the dark shades nodded and headed towards the counter.

‘While you’re down there,’ Thurman said, ‘I want you to meet up with Charlie Rhodes. He’s handling delivery of most of the building materials. See if he needs anything.’

‘Charles Rhodes? As in the governor of Oklahoma?’

‘That’s right. We served together. And hey, I’m working on transitioning you and Mick into some of the higher levels of this project. Our leadership team is still short a few dozen members. So keep up the good work. You’ve impressed some important people with what you’ve put together so far, and Anna seems confident you’ll be able to stay ahead of schedule. She says the two of you make a great team.’

Donald nodded. He felt a blush of pride — and also the inevitability of extra responsibilities, more bites out of his ever-dwindling time. Helen wouldn’t like hearing that his involvement with the project might grow. In fact, Mick and Anna might be the only people he could share the news with, the only ones he could talk to. Every detail about the build seemed to require convoluted layers of clearance. He couldn’t tell if it was the fear of nuclear waste, the threat of a terrorist attack or the likelihood that the project would fall through.

The agent returned and took up a position beside the Senator, shopping bag in hand. He looked over at Donald and seemed to study him through those impenetrable sunglasses. Not for the first time, Donald felt watched.

Senator Thurman shook Donald’s hand and said to keep him posted. Another agent materialised from nowhere and formed up on Thurman’s flank. They marched the Senator through the jangling door, and Donald only relaxed once they were out of view.

8 2110 • Silo 1 •

THE BOOK OF the Order lay open on his desk, the pages curling up from a spine stitched to last. Troy studied the upcoming procedure once again, his first official act as head of Operation Fifty, and it brought to mind a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a grand display where the man with the shears took credit for the hard work of others.

The Order, he had decided, was more recipe book than operations manual. The shrinks who had written it had accounted for everything, every quirk of human nature. And like the field of psychology, or any field that involved human nature, the parts that made no sense usually served some deeper purpose.

It made Troy wonder what his purpose was. How necessary his position. He had studied for a much different job, was meant to be head of a single silo, not all of them. He had been promoted at the last minute, and that made him feel arbitrary, as if anyone could be slotted into his place.

Of course, even if his office was mostly titular, perhaps it served some symbolic purpose. Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

Troy skipped back two paragraphs in the Order. His eyes had passed over every word, but none of them had registered. Everything about his new life made him prone to distraction, made him think too much. It had all been perfectly arranged — all the levels and tasks and job descriptions — but for what? For maximum apathy?

Glancing up, he could see Victor sitting at his desk in the Office for Psychological Services across the hall. It would be easy enough to walk over there and ask. They, more than any one architect, had designed this place. He could ask them how they had done it, how they had managed to make everyone feel so empty inside.

Sheltering the women and the children played some part; Troy was sure of that. The women and children of silo one had been gifted with a long sleep while the men stayed and took shifts. It removed the passion from the plans, forestalled the chance that the men might fight among themselves.

And then there was the routine, the mind-numbing routine. It was the castration of thought, the daily grind of an office worker who drooled at the clock, punched out, watched TV until sleep overtook him, slapped an alarm three times, did it again. It was made worse by the absence of weekends. There were no free days. It was six months on and decades off.

It made him envious of the rest of the facility, all the other silos, where hallways must echo with the laughter of children, the voices of women, the passion and happiness missing from this bunker at the heart of it all. Here, all he saw was stupor, dozens of communal rooms with movies playing in loops on flat-panel TVs, dozens of unblinking eyes in comfortable chairs. No one was truly awake. No one was truly alive. They must have wanted it that way.

Checking the clock on his computer, Troy saw that it was time to go. Another day behind him. Another day closer to the end of his shift. He closed his copy of the Order, locked it away in his desk and headed for the communications room down the hall.

A pair of heads looked up from the radio stations as he walked in, all frowns and lowered brows in their orange coveralls. Troy took a deep breath, pulled himself together. This was an office. It was a job. And he was the man in charge. He just had to keep his shit together. He was there to cut a ribbon.

Saul, one of the lead radio techs, took off his headset and rose to greet him. Troy vaguely knew Saul; they lived on the same executive wing and saw each other in the gym from time to time. While they shook hands, Saul’s wide and handsome face tickled some deeper memory, an itch Troy had learned to ignore. Maybe this was someone he had met at his orientation, from before his long sleep.

Saul introduced him to the other tech in comm room orange, who waved and kept his headset on. The name faded immediately. It didn’t matter. An extra headset was pulled from a rack. Troy accepted it and lowered it around his neck, keeping the muffs off his ears so he could still hear. Saul found the silvery jack at the end of the headset and ran his fingers across an array of fifty numbered receptacles. The layout and the room reminded Troy of ancient photographs of phone operators back before they were replaced with computers and automated voices.

The mental image of a bygone day mixed and fizzed with his nerves and the shivers brought on by the pills, and Troy felt a sudden bout of giggles bubble beneath the surface. The laughter nearly burst out of him, but he managed to hold it together. It wouldn’t be a good sign for the head of overall operations to lurch into hysterics when he was about to gauge the fitness of a future silo head.

‘—and you’ll just run through the set questions,’ Saul was telling him. He held out a plastic card to Troy, who was pretty sure he didn’t need it but took it anyway. He’d been memorising the routine for most of the day. Besides, he was sure it didn’t matter what he said. The task of gauging a candidate’s fitness was better left to the machines and the computers, all the sensors embedded in a distant headset.

‘Okay. There’s the call.’ Saul pointed to a single flashing light on a panel studded with flashing lights. ‘I’m patching you through.’

Troy adjusted the muffs around his ears as the tech made the connection. He heard a few beeps before the line clicked over. Someone was breathing heavily on the other end. Troy reminded himself that this young man would be far more nervous than he was. After all, he had to answer the questions — Troy simply had to ask them.

He glanced down at the card in his hand, his mind suddenly blank, thankful that he’d been given the thing.

‘Name?’ he asked the young man.

‘Marcus Dent, sir.’

There was a quiet confidence in his young voice, the sound of a chest thrust out with pride. Troy remembered feeling that once, a long time ago. And then he thought of the world Marcus Dent had been born into, a legacy he would only ever know from books.

‘Tell me about your training,’ Troy said, reading the lines. He tried to keep his voice even, deep, full of command, although the computers were designed to do that for him. Saul made a hoop with his finger and thumb, letting him know he was getting good data from the boy’s headset. Troy wondered if his was similarly equipped. Could anyone in that room — or any other room — tell how nervous he was?

‘Well, sir, I shadowed under Deputy Willis before transferring to IT Security. That was a year ago. I’ve been studying the Order for six weeks. I feel ready, sir.’

Shadowing. Troy had forgotten it was called that. He had meant to bring the latest vocabulary card with him.

‘What is your primary duty to the… silo?’ He had nearly said facility.

‘To maintain the Order, sir.’

‘And what do you protect above all?’ He kept his voice flat. The best readings would come from not imparting too much emotion into the man being measured.

‘Life and Legacy,’ Marcus recited.

Troy had a difficult time seeing the next question. It was obscured by an unexpected blur of tears. His hand trembled. He lowered the shaking card to his side before anyone noticed.

‘And what does it take to protect the things we hold dear?’ he asked. His voice sounded like someone else’s. He ground his teeth together to keep them from chattering. Something was wrong with him. Powerfully wrong.

‘Sacrifice,’ Marcus said, steady as a rock.

Troy blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and Saul held up his hand to let him know he could continue, that the measures were coming through. Now they needed baselines so the biometrics could tease out the boy’s sincerity towards the first questions.

‘Tell me, Marcus, do you have a girlfriend?’

He didn’t know why that was the first thing that came to mind. Maybe it was the envy that other silos didn’t freeze their women, didn’t freeze anyone at all. Nobody in the comm room seemed to react or care. The formal portion of the test was over.

‘Oh, yessir,’ Marcus said, and Troy heard the boy’s breathing change, could imagine his body relaxing. ‘We’ve applied to be married, sir. Just waiting to hear back.’

‘Well, I don’t think you’ll have to wait too much longer. What’s her name?’

‘Melanie, sir. She works here in IT.’

‘That’s great.’ Troy wiped at his eyes. The shivers passed. Saul waved his finger in a circle over his head, letting him know he could wrap it up. They had enough.

‘Marcus Dent,’ he said, ‘welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ The young man’s voice lifted an octave.

There was a pause, then the sound of a deep breath being taken and held.

‘Sir? Is it okay if I ask a question?’

Troy looked to the others. There were shrugs and not much else. He considered the role this young man had just assumed, knew well the sensation of being promoted to new responsibilities, that mix of fear, eagerness and confusion.

‘Sure, son. One question.’ He figured he was in charge. He could make a few rules of his own.

Marcus cleared his throat, and Troy pictured this shadow and his silo head sitting in a distant room together, the master studying his student.

‘I lost my great-grandmother a few years ago,’ Marcus said. ‘She used to let slip little things about the world before. Not in a forbidden way, but just as a product of her dementia. The doctors said she was resistant to her medication.’

Troy didn’t like the sound of this, that third-generation survivors were gleaning anything about the past. Marcus may be newly cleared for such things, but others weren’t.

‘What’s your question?’ Troy asked.

‘The Legacy, sir. I’ve done some reading in it as well — not neglecting my studies of the Order and the Pact, of course — and there’s something I have to know.’

Another deep breath.

‘Is everything in the Legacy true?’

Troy thought about this. He considered the great collection of books that contained the world’s history — a carefully edited history. In his mind, he could see the leather spines and the gilded pages, the rows and rows of books they had been shown during their orientation.

He nodded and found himself once again needing to wipe his eyes.

‘Yes,’ he told Marcus, his voice dry and flat. ‘It’s true.’

Someone in the room sniffled. Troy knew the ceremony had gone on long enough.

‘Everything in there is absolutely true.’

He didn’t add that not every true thing was written in the Legacy. Much had been left out. And there were other things he suspected that none of them knew, that had been edited out of books and brains alike.

The Legacy was the allowed truth, he wanted to say, the truth that was carried from each generation to the next. But the lies, he thought to himself, were what they carried there in silo one, in that drug-hazed asylum charged somehow with humanity’s survival.

9 2049 Fulton County, Georgia

THE FRONT-END loader let out a throaty blat as it struggled up the hill, a charcoal geyser streaming from its exhaust pipe. When it reached the top, a load of dirt avalanched out of its toothy bucket, and Donald saw that the loader wasn’t climbing the hill so much as creating it.

Hills of fresh dirt were taking shape like this all over the site. Between them — through temporary gaps left open like an ordered maze — burdened dump trucks carried away soil and rock from the cavernous pits being hollowed from the earth. These gaps, Donald knew from the topographical plans, would one day be pushed closed, leaving little more than a shallow crease where each hill met its neighbour.

Standing on one of these growing mounds, Donald watched the ballet of heavy machinery while Mick Webb spoke with a contractor about the delays. In their white shirts and flapping ties, the two congressmen seemed out of place. The men in hard hats with the leather faces, calloused hands and busted knuckles belonged there. He and Mick, blazers tucked under their arms, sweat stains spreading in the humid Georgia heat, were somehow — nominally, at least — supposed to be in charge of that ungodly commotion.

Another loader released a mound of soil as Donald shifted his gaze towards downtown Atlanta. Past the massive clearing of rising hills and over the treetops still stripped bare from fading winter rose the glass-and-steel spires of the old Southern city. An entire corner of sparsely populated Fulton County had been cleared. Remnants of a golf course were still visible at one end where the machines had yet to disturb the land.

Down by the main parking lot, a staging zone the size of several football fields held thousands of shipping containers packed with building supplies, more than Donald thought necessary. But he was learning by the hour that this was the way of government projects, where public expectations were as high as the spending limits. Everything was done in excess or not at all. The plans he had been ordered to draw up practically begged for proportions of insanity, and his building wasn’t even a necessary component of the facility. It was only there for the worst-case scenario.

Between Donald and the field of shipping containers stood a sprawling city of trailers; a few functioned as offices, but most of them served as housing. This was where the thousands of men and women working on the construction could ditch their hard hats, clock off and take their well-earned rest.

Flags flew over many of the trailers, the workforce as multinational as an Olympic village. Spent nuclear fuel rods from the world over would one day be buried beneath the pristine soil of Fulton County. It meant that the world had a stake in the project’s success. The logistical nightmare this ensured didn’t seem to concern the back-room dealers. He and Mick were finding that many of the early construction delays could be traced to language barriers, as neighbouring work crews couldn’t communicate with one another and had evidently given up trying. Everyone simply worked on their set of plans, heads down, ignoring the rest.

Beside this temporary city of tin cans sat the vast parking lot he and Mick had trudged up from. He could see their rental car down there, the only quiet and electric thing in sight. Small and silver, it seemed to cower among the belching dump trucks and loaders on all sides. The overmatched car looked precisely how Donald felt, both on that little hill at the construction site and back at the Hill in Washington.

‘Two months behind.’

Mick smacked him on the arm with his clipboard. ‘Hey, did you hear me? Two months behind already, and they just broke ground six months ago. How is that even possible?’

Donald shrugged as they left the frowning foremen and trudged down the hill to the parking lot. ‘Maybe it’s because they have elected officials pretending to do jobs that belong to the private sector,’ he offered.

Mick laughed and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Jesus, Donny, you sound like a goddamned Republican!’

‘Yeah? Well, I feel like we’re in over our heads here.’ He waved his arm at the depression in the hills they were skirting, a deep bowl scooped out of the earth. Several mixer trucks were pouring concrete into the wide hole at its centre. More trucks waited in line behind them, their butts spinning impatiently.

‘You do realise,’ Donald said, ‘that one of these holes is going to hold the building they let me draw up? Doesn’t that scare you? All this money? All these people. It sure as hell scares me.’

Mick’s fingers dug painfully into Donald’s neck. ‘Take it easy. Don’t go getting all philosophical on me.’

‘I’m being serious,’ Donald said. ‘Billions of taxpayer dollars are gonna nestle in the dirt out there in the shape that I drew up. It seemed so… abstract before.’

‘Christ, this isn’t about you or your plans.’ He popped Donald with the clipboard and used it to point towards the container field. Through a fog of dust, a large man in a cowboy hat waved them over. ‘Besides,’ Mick said, as they angled away from the parking lot, ‘what’re the chances anyone even uses your little bunker? This is about energy independence. It’s about the death of coal. You know, it feels like the rest of us are building a nice big house over here, and you’re over in a corner stressing about where you’re gonna hang the fire extinguisher—’

‘Little bunker?’ Donald held his blazer up over his mouth as a cloud of dust blew across them. ‘Do you know how many floors deep this thing is gonna be? If you set it on the ground, it’d be the tallest building in the world.’

Mick laughed. ‘Not for long it wouldn’t. Not if you designed it.’

The man in the cowboy hat drew closer. He smiled widely as he kicked through the packed dirt to meet them, and Donald finally recognised him from TV: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma.

‘You Senator Thawman’s boys?’

Governor Rhodes had the authentic drawl to go with the authentic hat, the authentic boots and the authentic buckle. He rested his hands on his wide hips, a clipboard in one of them.

Mick nodded. ‘Yessir. I’m Congressman Webb. This is Congressman Keene.’

The two men shook hands. Donald was next. ‘Governor,’ he said.

‘Got your delivery.’ He pointed the clipboard at the staging area. ‘Just shy of a hundred containers. Should have somethin’ rollin’ in about every week. Need one of you to sign right here.’

Mick reached out and took the clipboard. Donald saw an opportunity to ask something about Senator Thurman, something he figured an old war buddy would know.

‘Why do some people call him Thawman?’ he asked.

Mick flipped through the delivery report, a breeze pinning back the pages for him.

‘I’ve heard others call him that when he wasn’t around,’ Donald explained, ‘but I’ve been too scared to ask.’

Mick looked up from the report with a grin. ‘It’s because he was an ice-cold killer in the war, right?’

Donald cringed. Governor Rhodes laughed.

‘Unrelated,’ he said. ‘True, but unrelated.’

The governor glanced back and forth between them. Mick passed the clipboard to Donald, tapped a page that dealt with the emergency housing facility. Donald looked over the materials list.

‘You boys familiar with his anti-cryo bill?’ Governor Rhodes asked. He handed Donald a pen, seemed to expect him to just sign the thing and not look over it too closely.

Mick shook his head and shielded his eyes against the Georgia sun. ‘Anti-cryo?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. Aw, hell, this probably dates back before you squirts were even born. Senator Thawman penned the bill that put down that cryo fad. Made it illegal to take advantage of rich folk and turn them into ice cubes. It went to the big court, where they voted five–four, and suddenly tens of thousands of popsicles with more money than sense were thawed out and buried proper. These were people who’d frozen themselves in the hopes that doctors from the future would discover some medical procedure for extracting their rich heads from their own rich asses!’

The governor laughed at his own joke and Mick joined him. A line on the delivery report caught Donald’s eye. He turned the clipboard around and showed the governor. ‘Uh, this shows two thousand spools of fibre optic. I’m pretty sure my plans call for forty spools.’

‘Lemme see.’ Governor Rhodes took the clipboard and procured another pen from his pocket. He clicked the top of it three times, then scratched out the quantity. He wrote in a new number to the side.

‘Wait, will the price reflect that?’

‘Price is the same,’ he said. ‘Just sign the bottom.’

‘But—’

‘Son, this is why hammers cost the Pentagon their weight in gold. It’s government accounting. Just a signature, please.’

‘But that’s fifty times more fibre than we’ll need,’ Donald complained, even as he found himself scribbling his name. He passed the clipboard to Mick, who signed for the rest of the goods.

‘Oh, that’s all right.’ Rhodes took the clipboard and pinched the brim of his hat. ‘I’m sure they’ll find a use for it somewhere.’

‘Hey, you know,’ Mick said, ‘I remember that cryo bill. From law school. There were lawsuits, weren’t there? Didn’t a group of families bring murder charges against the Feds?’

The governor smiled. ‘Yeah, but it didn’t get far. Hard to prove you killed people who’d already been pronounced dead. And then there were Thawman’s bad business investments. Those turned out to be a lifesaver.’

Rhodes tucked his thumb in his belt and stuck out his chest.

‘Turned out he’d sunk a fortune into one of these cryo companies before digging deeper and reconsidering the… ethical considerations. Old Thawman may have lost most of his money, but it ended up savin’ his ass in Washington. Made him look like some kinda saint, suffering a loss like that. Only defence better woulda been if he’d unplugged his dear momma with all them others.’

Mick and the governor laughed. Donald didn’t see what was so funny.

‘All right, now, you boys take care. The good state of Oklahoma’ll have another load for ya in a few weeks.’

‘Sounds good,’ Mick said, grasping and pumping that huge Midwestern paw.

Donald shook the governor’s hand as well, and he and Mick trudged off towards their rental. Overhead, against the bright blue Southern sky, vapour trails like stretched ropes of white yarn revealed the flight lines of the numerous jets departing the busy hub of Atlanta International. And as the throaty noise of the construction site faded, the chants from the anti-nuke protestors could be heard outside the tall mesh of security fences beyond. They passed through the security gate and into the parking lot, the guard waving them along.

‘Hey, you mind if I drop you off at the airport a little early?’ Donald asked. ‘It’d be nice to get a jump on traffic and get down to Savannah with some daylight.’

‘That’s right,’ Mick said with a grin. ‘You’ve got a hot date tonight.’

Donald laughed.

‘Sure, man. Abandon me and go have a good time with your wife.’

‘Thanks.’

Mick fished out the keys to the rental. ‘But you know, I was really hoping you’d invite me to come along. I could join you two for dinner, crash at your place, hit some bars like old times.’

‘Not a chance,’ Donald said.

Mick slapped the back of Donald’s neck and squeezed. ‘Yeah, well, happy anniversary anyway.’

Donald winced as his friend pinched his neck. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll be sure to give Helen your regards.’

10 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY PLAYED A hand of solitaire while silo twelve collapsed. There was something about the game that he found blissfully numbing. The repetition held off the waves of depression even better than the pills. The lack of skill required moved beyond distraction and into the realm of complete mindlessness. The truth was, the player won or lost the very moment the computer shuffled the deck. The rest was simply a process of finding out.

For a computer game, it was absurdly low-tech. Instead of cards, there was just a grid of letters and numbers with an asterisk, ampersand, per cent or plus sign to designate the suit. It bothered Troy not to know which symbol stood for hearts or clubs or diamonds. Even though it was arbitrary, even though it didn’t really matter, it frustrated him not to know.

He had stumbled upon the game by accident while digging through some folders. It took a bit of experimenting to learn how to flip the draw deck with the space bar and place the cards with the arrow keys, but he had plenty of time to work things like this out. Besides meeting with department heads, going over Merriman’s notes and refreshing himself on the Order, all he had was time. Time to collapse in his office bathroom and cry until snot ran down his chin, time to sit under a scalding shower and shiver, time to hide pills in his cheek and squirrel them away for when the hurt was the worst, time to wonder why the drugs weren’t working like they used to, even when he doubled the dosage on his own.

Perhaps the game’s numbing powers were the reason it existed at all, why someone had spent the effort to create it, and why subsequent heads had kept it secreted away. He had seen it on Merriman’s face during that lift ride at the end of his shift. The chemicals only cut through the worst of the pain, that indefinable ache. But lesser wounds resurfaced. The bouts of sudden sadness had to be coming from somewhere.

The last few cards fell into place while his mind wandered. The computer had shuffled for a win, and Troy got all the credit for verifying it. The screen flashed GOOD JOB! in large block letters. It was strangely satisfying to be told this by a home-made game — told that he had done a good job. There was a sense of completion, of having done something with his day.

He left the message flashing and glanced around his office for something else to do. There were amendments to be made in the Order, announcements to write up for the heads of the other silos, and he needed to make sure the vocabulary in these memos adhered to the ever-changing standards.

He got it wrong himself, often calling them bunkers instead of silos. It was difficult for those who had lived in the time of the Legacy. An old vocabulary, a way of seeing the world, persisted despite the medication. He felt envious of the men and women in the other silos, those who were born and who would die in their own little worlds, who would fall in and out of love, who would keep their hurts in memory, feel them, learn from them, be changed by them. He was jealous of these people even more than he envied the women of his silo who remained in their long-sleep lifeboats—

There was a knock on his open door. Troy looked up and saw Randall, who worked across the hall in the psych office, standing in the doorway. Troy waved him inside with one hand and minimised the game with the other. He fidgeted with the copy of the Order on his desk, trying to look busy.

‘I’ve got that beliefs report you wanted.’ Randall waved a folder.

‘Oh, good. Good.’ Troy took the folder. Always with the folders. He was reminded of the two groups that had built that place: the politicians and the doctors. Both were stuck in a prior era, a time of paperwork. Or was it possible that neither group trusted any data they couldn’t shred or burn?

‘The head of silo six has a new replacement picked out and processed. He wants to schedule a talk with you, make the induction formal.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ Troy flipped through the folder and saw typed transcripts from the comm room about each of the silos. He looked forward to another induction ceremony. Any task he had already done once before filled him with less dread.

‘Also, the population report on silo thirty-two is a little troubling.’ Randall came around Troy’s desk and licked his thumb before sorting through the reports, and Troy glanced at his monitor to make sure he’d minimised the game. ‘They’re getting close to the maximum and fast. Doc Haines thinks it might be a bad batch of birth control implants. The head of thirty-two, a Biggers… Here we go.’ Randall pulled out the report. ‘He denies this, says no one with an active implant has gotten pregnant. He thinks the lottery is being gamed or that there’s something wrong with our computers.’

‘Hmm.’ Troy took the report and looked it over. Silo thirty-two had crept above nine thousand inhabitants, and the median age had fallen into the low twenties. ‘Let’s set up a call for first thing in the morning. I don’t buy the lottery being gamed. They shouldn’t even be running the lottery, right? Until they have more space?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘And all the population accounts for every silo are run from the same computer.’ Troy tried not to make this sound like a question, but it was. He couldn’t remember.

‘Yup,’ Randall confirmed.

‘Which means we’re being lied to. I mean, this doesn’t happen overnight, right? Biggers had to see this coming, which means he knew about it earlier, so either he’s complicit, or he’s lost control over there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Okay. What do we know about Biggers’s second?’

‘His shadow?’ Randall hesitated. ‘I’d have to pull that file, but I know he’s been in place for a while. He was there before we started our shifts.’

‘Good. I’ll speak with him tomorrow. Alone.’

‘You think we should replace Biggers?’

Troy nodded grimly. The Order was clear on problems that defied explanation: Start at the top. Assume the explanation is a lie. Because of the rules, he and Randall were talking about a man being put out of commission as if he were broken machinery.

‘Okay, one more thing—’

The thunder of boots down the hallway interrupted the thought. Randall and Troy looked up as Saul bolted into the room, his eyes wide with fear.

‘Sirs—’

‘Saul. What’s going on?’

The communications officer looked like he’d seen a thousand ghosts.

‘We need you in the comm room, sir. Right now.’

Troy pushed away from his desk. Randall was right behind him.

‘What is it?’ Troy asked.

Saul hurried down the hallway. ‘It’s silo twelve, sir.’

The three of them ran past a man on a ladder who was replacing a long light bulb that had gone dim, the large rectangular plastic cover above him hanging open like a doorway to the heavens. Troy found himself breathing hard as he struggled to keep up.

‘What about silo twelve?’ he huffed.

Saul flashed a look over his shoulder, his face screwed up with worry. ‘I think we’re losing it, sir.’

‘What, like contact? You can’t reach them?’

‘No. Losing it, sir. The silo. The whole damn thing.’

11 2049 Savannah, Georgia

DONALD WASN’T ONE for napkins, but he obeyed decorum by shaking the folded cloth loose and draping it in his lap. Each of the napkins at the other settings around the table had been bent into a decorative pyramid that stood upright amid the silverware. He didn’t remember the Corner Diner having cloth napkins when he was in high school. Didn’t they used to have those paper napkin dispensers that were all dented up from years of abuse? And those little salt and pepper shakers with the silver caps, even those had gotten fancier. A dish of what he assumed was sea salt sat near the flower arrangement, and if you wanted pepper, you had to wait for someone to come around and crack it on your food for you.

He started to mention this to his wife, and saw that she was gazing past him at the booth behind. Donald turned in his seat, the original vinyl squeaking beneath him. He glanced back at the older couple sitting in the booth where he and Helen had sat on their first date.

‘I swear I asked them to reserve it for us,’ Donald said.

His wife’s gaze drifted back to him.

‘I think they might’ve gotten confused when I described which one it was.’ He stirred the air with his finger. ‘Or maybe I got turned around when I was on the phone.’

She waved her hand. ‘Sweetie, forget about it. We could be eating grilled cheese at home and I’d be thrilled. I was just staring off into space.’

Helen unfolded her own napkin with delicate care, almost as if she were studying the folds, seeing how to piece it back together, how to return a disassembled thing to its original state. The waiter came over in a bustle and filled their glasses with water, careless drips spotting the white tablecloth. He apologised for the wait, and then left them to wait some more.

‘This place sure has changed,’ he said.

‘Yeah. It’s more grown-up.’

They both reached for their waters at the same time. Donald smiled and held his glass up. ‘Fifteen years to the day that your father made the mistake of extending your curfew.’

Helen smiled and tapped her glass against his. ‘To fifteen more,’ she said.

They took sips.

‘If this place keeps up, we won’t be able to afford to eat here in fifteen years,’ Donald said.

Helen laughed. She had barely changed since that first date. Or maybe it was because the changes were so subtle. It wasn’t like coming to a restaurant every five years and seeing the leaps all at once. It was how siblings aged rather than distant cousins.

‘You fly back in the morning?’ Helen asked.

‘Yeah, but to Boston. I have a meeting with the Senator.’

‘Why Boston?’

He waved his hand. ‘He’s having one of those nano treatments of his. I think he stays locked up in there for a week or so at a time. He still somehow gets his work done—’

‘Yeah, by having his minions go out of their way—’

‘We’re not his minions,’ Donald said, laughing.

‘—to come kiss his ring and leave gifts of myrrh.’

‘C’mon, it’s not like that.’

‘I just worry that you’re pushing yourself too hard. How much of your free time are you spending on this project of his?’

A lot, he wanted to say. He wanted to tell his wife how gruelling the hours were, but he knew how she would react. ‘It’s not as time-consuming as you’d think.’

‘Really? Because it seems like it’s the only thing I hear you talking about. I don’t even know what else it is you do.’

Their waiter came past with a tray full of drinks and said it would be just a moment longer. Helen studied the menu.

‘I’ll be done with my portion of the plans in another few months,’ he told her. ‘And then I won’t bore you with it any more.’

‘Honey, you don’t bore me. I just don’t want him taking advantage of you. This isn’t what you signed up for. You decided not to become an architect, remember? Otherwise, you could’ve stayed home.’

‘Baby, I want you to know…’ He dropped his voice. ‘This project we’re working on is—’

‘It’s really important, I know. You’ve told me, and I believe you. And then in your moments of self-doubt, you admit that your part in the entire scheme of things is superfluous anyway and will never be used.’

Donald had forgotten they’d had that conversation.

‘I’ll just be glad when it’s done,’ she said. ‘They can truck the fuel rods through our neighbourhood for all I care. Just bury the whole thing and smooth the dirt over and stop talking about it.’

This was something else. Donald thought about the phone calls and emails he’d been getting from the district, all the headlines and fear-mongering over the route the spent rods would take from the port as the trucks skirted Atlanta. Every time Helen heard a peep about the project, all she could likely think of was him wasting his time on it rather than doing his real job. Or the fact that he could’ve stayed in Savannah and done the same work.

Helen cleared her throat. ‘So…’ She hesitated. ‘Was Anna at the job site today?’

She peered over the lip of her glass, and Donald realised, in that moment, what his wife was really thinking when the CAD-FAC project and the fuel rods came up. It was the insecurity of him working with her, of being so far from home.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, we don’t really see each other. We send plans back and forth. Mick and I went, just the two of us. He’s coordinating a lot of the materials and crews—’

The waiter arrived, pulled his black folio from his apron and clicked his pen. ‘Can I start you off with drinks?’

Donald ordered two glasses of the house Merlot. Helen declined the offer of an appetiser.

‘Every time I bring her up,’ she said, once their waiter had angled off towards the bar, ‘you mention Mick. Stop changing the subject.’

‘Please, Helen, can we not talk about her?’ Donald folded his hands together on the table. ‘I’ve seen her once since we started working on this. I set it up so that we didn’t have to meet, because I knew you wouldn’t like it. I have no feelings for her, honey. Absolutely none. Please. This is our night.’

‘Is working with her giving you second thoughts?’

‘Second thoughts about what? About taking on this job? Or about being an architect?’

‘About… anything.’ She glanced at the other booth, the booth he should’ve reserved.

‘No. God, no. Honey, why would you even say something like that?’

The waiter came back with their wine. He flipped open his black notebook and eyed the two of them. ‘Have we decided?’

Helen opened her menu and looked from the waiter to Donald. ‘I’m going to get my usual,’ she said. She pointed to what had once been a simple grilled cheese sandwich with fries that now involved fried green heirloom tomatoes, Gruyère cheese, a honey-maple glaze and matchstick frites with tartar.

‘And for you, sir?’

Donald looked over the menu. The conversation had him flustered, but he felt the pressure to choose and to choose swiftly.

‘I think I’m going to try something different,’ he said, picking his words poorly.

12 2110 • Silo 1 •

SILO TWELVE WAS collapsing, and by the time Troy and the others arrived, the communication room was awash in overlapping radio chatter and the stench of sweat. Four men crowded around a comm station normally manned by a single operator. The men looked precisely how Troy felt: panicked, out of their depth, ready to curl up and hide somewhere. It had a calming effect on him. Their panic was his strength. He could fake this. He could hold it together.

Two of the men wore sleepshirts rather than their orange overalls, suggesting that the late shift had been woken up and called in. Troy wondered how long silo twelve had been in trouble before they finally came and got him.

‘What’s the latest?’ Saul asked an older gentleman, who held a headphone to one ear.

The gentleman turned, his bald head shining in the overhead light, sweat in the wrinkles of his brow, his white eyebrows high with concern. ‘I can’t get anyone to answer the server,’ he said.

‘Give us just the feeds from twelve,’ Troy said, pointing to one of the other three workers. A man he had met just a week or so ago pulled off his headset and flipped a switch. The speakers in the room buzzed with overlapping shouts and orders. The others stopped what they were doing and listened.

One of the other men, in his thirties, cycled through dozens of video feeds. It was chaos everywhere. There was a shot of a spiral staircase crammed with people pushing and shoving. A head disappeared, someone falling down, presumably being trampled as the rest moved on. Eyes were wide with fear, jaws clenched or shouting.

‘Let’s see the server room,’ Troy said.

The man at the controls typed something on his keypad. The crush of people disappeared and was replaced with a calm view of perfectly still cabinets. The server casings and the grating on the floor throbbed from the blinking overhead lights of an unanswered call.

‘What happened?’ Troy asked. He felt unusually calm.

‘Still trying to determine that, sir.’

A folder was pressed into his hands. A handful of people gathered in the hallway, peering in. News was spreading, a crowd gathering. Troy felt a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck, but still that eerie calmness, that resignation to this statistical inevitability.

A desperate voice from one of the radios cut through the rest, the panic palpable:

‘—they’re coming through. Dammit, they’re bashing down the door. They’re gonna get through—’

Everyone in the comm room held their breath, all the jitters and activity ceasing as they listened and waited. Troy was pretty sure he knew which door the panicked man was talking about. A lone door stood between the cafeteria and the airlock. It should have been made stronger. A lot of things should have been made stronger.

‘—I’m on my own up here, guys. They’re gonna get through. Holy shit, they’re gonna get through—’

‘Is that a deputy?’ Troy asked. He flipped through the folder. There were status updates from silo twelve’s IT head. No alarms. Two years since the last cleaning. The fear index had been pegged at an eight the last time it’d been measured. A little high, but not too low.

‘Yeah, I think that’s a deputy,’ Saul said.

The man at the video feed looked back at Troy. ‘Sir, we’re gonna have a mass exodus.’

‘Their radios are locked down, right?’

Saul nodded. ‘We shut down the repeaters. They can talk among themselves, but that’s it.’

Troy fought the urge to turn and meet the curious faces peering in from the hallway. ‘Good,’ he said. The priority in this situation was to contain the outbreak: don’t let it spread to neighbouring cells. This was a cancer. Excise it. Don’t mourn the loss.

The radio crackled:

‘—they’re almost in, they’re almost in, they’re almost in—’

Troy tried to imagine the stampede, the crush of people, how the panic had spread. The Order was clear on not intervening, but his conscience was muddled. He held out a hand to the radioman.

‘Let me speak to him,’ Troy said.

Heads swivelled his way. A crowd that thrived on protocol sat stunned. After a pause, the receiver was pressed into his palm. Troy didn’t hesitate. He squeezed the mic.

‘Deputy?’

‘Hello? Sheriff?’

The video operator cycled through the feeds, then waved his hand and pointed to one of the monitors. The floor number ‘72’ sat in the corner of the screen, and a man in silver overalls lay slumped over a desk. There was a gun in his hand, a pool of blood around a keyboard.

‘That’s the sheriff?’ Troy asked.

The operator wiped his forehead and nodded.

‘Sheriff? What do I do?’

Troy clicked the mic. ‘The sheriff is dead,’ he told the deputy, surprised by the steadiness of his own voice. He held the transmit button and pondered this stranger’s fate. It dawned on him that most of these silo dwellers thought they were alone. They had no idea about each other, about their true purpose. And now Troy had made contact, a disembodied voice from the clouds.

One of the video feeds clicked over to the deputy, who was gripping a handset, the cord spiralling to a radio mounted on the wall. The floor number in the corner read ‘1’.

‘You need to lock yourself in the holding cell,’ Troy radioed, seeing that the least obvious solution was the best. It was a temporary solution, at least. ‘Make sure you have every set of keys.’

He watched the man on the video screen. The entire room, and those in the hallway, watched the man on the video screen.

The door to the upper security office was just visible in the warped bubble of the camera’s view. The edges of the door seemed to bulge outward because of the lens. And then the centre of the door bulged inward because of the mob. They were beating the door down. The deputy didn’t respond. He dropped the microphone and hurried around the desk. His hands shook so violently as he reached for the keys that the grainy camera was able to capture it.

The door cracked along the centre. Someone in the comm room drew in an audible breath. Troy wanted to launch into the statistics. He had studied and trained to be on the other end of this, to lead a small group of people in the event of a catastrophe, not to lead them all.

Maybe that’s why he was so calm. He was watching a horror that he should have been in the middle of, that he should have lived and died through.

The deputy finally secured the keys. He ran across the room and out of sight. Troy imagined him fumbling with the lock on the cell as the door burst in, an angry mob forcing their way through the splintered gap in the wood. It was a solid door, strong, but not strong enough. It was impossible to tell if the deputy had made it to safety. Not that it mattered. It was temporary. It was all temporary. If they opened the doors, if they made it out, the deputy would suffer a fate far worse than being trampled.

‘The inner airlock door is open, sir. They’re trying to get out.’

Troy nodded. The trouble had probably started in IT, had spread from there. Maybe the head — but more likely his shadow. Someone with override codes. Here was the curse: a person had to be in charge, had to guard the secrets. Some wouldn’t be able to. It was statistically predictable. He reminded himself that it was inevitable, the cards already shuffled, the game just waiting to play out.

‘Sir, we’ve got a breach. The outer door, sir.’

‘Fire the canisters now,’ Troy said.

Saul radioed the control room down the hall and relayed the message. The view of the airlock filled with a white fog.

‘Secure the server room,’ Troy added. ‘Lock it down.’

He had this portion of the Order memorised.

‘Make sure we have a recent backup just in case. And put them on our power.’

‘Yessir.’

Those in the room who had something to do seemed less anxious than the others, who were left shifting about nervously while they watched and listened.

‘Where’s my outside view?’ Troy asked.

The mist-filled scene of people pushing on one another’s backs through a white cloud was replaced by an expansive shot of the outside, of a claustrophobic crowd scampering across a dry land, of people collapsing to their knees, clawing at their faces and their throats, a billowing fog rising up from the teeming ramp.

No one in the comm room moved or said a word. There was a soft cry from the hallway. Troy shouldn’t have allowed them to stay and watch.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Shut it down.’

The view of the outside went black. There was no point in watching the crowd fight their way back in, no reason to witness the frightened men and women dying on the hills.

‘I want to know why it happened.’ Troy turned and studied those in the room. ‘I want to know, and I want to know what we do to prevent this next time.’ He handed the folder and the microphone back to the men at their stations. ‘Don’t tell the other silo heads just yet. Not until we have answers for the questions they’ll have.’

Saul raised his hand. ‘What about the people still inside twelve?’

‘The only difference between the people in silo twelve and the people in silo thirteen is that there won’t be future generations growing up in silo twelve. That’s it. Everyone in all the silos will eventually die. We all die, Saul. Even us. Today was just their day.’ He nodded to the dark monitor and tried not to picture what was really going on over there. ‘We knew this would happen, and it won’t be the last. Let’s concentrate on the others. Learn from it.’

There were nods around the room.

‘Individual reports by the end of this shift,’ Troy said, feeling for the first time that he was actually in charge of something. ‘And if anyone from twelve’s IT staff can be raised, debrief them as much as you can. I want to know who, why and how.’

Several of the exhausted people in the room stiffened before trying to look busy. The gathering in the hallway shrank back as they realised the show was over and the boss was heading their way.

The boss.

Troy felt the fullness of his position for the first time, the heavy weight of responsibility. There were murmurs and sidelong glances as he headed back to his office. There were nods of sympathy and approval, men thankful that they occupied lower posts. Troy strode past them all.

More will try to escape, Troy thought. For all their careful engineering, there was no way to make a thing infallible. The best they could do was plan ahead, stockpile spares, not mourn the dark and lifeless cylinder as it was discarded and others were turned to with hope.

Back in his office, he closed the door and leaned back against it for a moment. His shoulders stuck to his overalls with the light sweat worked up from the swift walk. He took a few deep breaths before crossing to his desk and resting his hand on his copy of the Order. The fear persisted that they’d gotten it all wrong. How could a room full of doctors plan for everything? Would it really get easier as the generations went along, as people forgot and the whispers from the original survivors faded?

Troy wasn’t so sure. He looked over at his wall of schematics, that large blueprint showing all the silos spread out amid the hills, fifty circles spaced out like stars on an old flag he had once served.

A powerful tremor coursed through Troy’s body: his shoulders, elbows and hands twitched. He gripped the edge of his desk until it passed. Opening the top drawer, he picked up a red marker and crossed to the large schematic, the shivers still wracking his chest.

Before he could consider the permanence of what he was about to do, before he could consider that this mark of his would be on display for every future shift, before he could consider that this may become a trend, an action taken by his replacements, he drew a bold ‘X’ through silo twelve.

The marker squealed as it was dragged violently across the paper. It seemed to cry out. Troy blinked away the blurry vision of the red X and sagged to his knees. He bent forward until his forehead rested against the tall spread of papers, old plans rustling and crinkling as his chest shook with heavy sobs.

With his hands in his lap, shoulders bent with the weight of another job he’d been pressured into, Troy cried. He bawled as silently as he could so those across the hall wouldn’t hear.

13 2049 RYT Hospital, Dwayne Medical Center

DONALD HAD TOURED the Pentagon once, had been to the White House twice, went in and out of the Capitol building a dozen times a week, but nothing he’d seen in DC prepared him for the security around RYT’s Dwayne Medical Center. The lengthy checks hardly made the hour-long meeting with the Senator seem worthwhile.

By the time he passed through the full body scanners leading into the nanobiotech wing, he’d been stripped, given a pair of green medical scrubs to wear, had a blood sample taken, and had allowed every sort of scanner and bright light to probe his eyes and record — so they said — the infrared capillary pattern of his face.

Heavy doors and sturdy men blocked every corridor as they made their way deeper and deeper into the NBT wing. When Donald spotted the Secret Service agents — who had been allowed to keep their dark suits and shades — he knew he was getting close. A nurse scanned him through a final set of stainless steel doors. The nanobiotic chamber awaited him inside.

Donald eyed the massive machine warily. He’d only ever seen them on TV dramas, and this one loomed even larger in person. It looked like a small submarine that had been marooned on the upper floors of the RYT. Hoses and wires led away from the curved and flawless white exterior in bundles. Studded along the length were several small glass windows that brought to mind the portholes of a ship.

‘And you’re sure it’s safe for me to go in?’ He turned to the nurse. ‘Because I can always wait and visit him later.’

The nurse smiled. She couldn’t be out of her twenties, had her brown hair wrapped in a knot on the back of her head, was pretty in an uncomplicated way. ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ she assured him. ‘His nanos won’t interact with your body. We often treat multiple patients in a single chamber.’

She led him to the end of the machine and spun open the locking wheel at the end. A hatch opened with a sticky, ripping sound from the rubber seals and let out a slight gasp of air from the difference in pressure.

‘If it’s so safe, then why are the walls so thick?’

A soft laugh. ‘You’ll be fine.’ She waved him towards the hatch. ‘There’ll be a slight delay and a little buzz after I seal this door, and then the inner hatch will unlock. Just spin the wheel and push to open.’

‘I’m a little claustrophobic,’ Donald admitted.

God, listen to himself. He was an adult. Why couldn’t he just say he didn’t want to go in and have that be enough? Why was he allowing himself to be pressured into this?

‘Just step inside please, Mr Keene.’

The nurse placed her hand on the small of Donald’s back. Somehow, the pressure of a young and pretty woman watching was stronger than his abject terror of the oversized capsule packed with its invisible machines. He wilted and found himself ducking through the small hatch, his throat constricting with fear.

The door behind him thumped shut, leaving him in a curved space hardly big enough for two. The locks clanked into the jamb. There were tiny silver benches set into the arching walls on either side of him. He tried to stand up, but his head brushed the ceiling.

An angry hum filled the chamber. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, and the air felt charged with electricity. He looked for an intercom, some way to communicate with the Senator through the inner door so he didn’t have to go in any further. It felt as though he couldn’t breathe; he needed to get out. There was no wheel on the outer door. Everything had been taken out of his control—

The inner locks clanked. Donald lunged for the door and tried the handle. Holding his breath, he opened the hatch and escaped the small airlock for the larger chamber in the centre of the capsule.

‘Donald!’ Senator Thurman looked up from a thick book. He was sprawled out on one of the benches running the length of the long cylinder. A notepad and pen sat on a small table; a plastic tray held the remnants of dinner.

‘Hello, sir,’ he said, barely parting his lips.

‘Don’t just stand there, get in. You’re letting the buggers out.’

Against his every impulse, Donald stepped through and pushed the door shut, and Senator Thurman laughed. ‘You might as well breathe, son. They could crawl right through your skin if they wanted to.’

Donald let out his held breath and shivered. It may have been his imagination, but he thought he felt little pinpricks all over his skin, bites like Savannah’s no-see-ums on summer days.

‘You can’t feel ’em,’ Senator Thurman said. ‘It’s all in your head. They know the difference between you and me.’

Donald glanced down and realised he was scratching his arm.

‘Have a seat.’ Thurman gestured to the bench opposite his. He had the same colour scrubs on and a few days’ growth on his chin. Donald noticed the far end of the capsule opened onto a small bathroom, a showerhead with a flexible hose clipped to the wall. Thurman swung his bare feet off the bench and grabbed a half-empty bottle of water, took a sip. Donald obeyed and sat down, a nervous sweat tickling his scalp. A stack of folded blankets and a few pillows sat at the end of the bench. He saw how the frames folded open into cots but couldn’t imagine being able to sleep in this tight coffin.

‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ He tried to keep his voice from cracking. The air tasted metallic, a hint of the machines on his tongue.

‘Drink?’ The Senator opened a small fridge below the bench and pulled out a bottle of water.

‘Thanks.’ Donald accepted the water but didn’t open it, just enjoyed the cool against his palm. ‘Mick said he filled you in.’ He wanted to add that this meeting felt unnecessary.

Thurman nodded. ‘He did. Met with him yesterday. He’s a solid boy.’ The Senator smiled and shook his head. ‘The irony is, this class we just swore in? Probably the best bunch the Hill has seen in a very long time.’

‘The irony?’

Thurman waved his hand, shooing the question away. ‘You know what I love about this treatment?’

Practically living for ever? Donald nearly blurted.

‘It gives you time to think. A few days in here, nothing with batteries allowed, just a few books to read and something to write on — it really clears your head.’

Donald kept his opinions to himself. He didn’t want to admit how uncomfortable the procedure made him, how terrifying it was to be in that room right then. Knowing that tiny machines were coursing through the Senator’s body, picking through his individual cells and making repairs, repelled him. Supposedly, your urine turned the colour of charcoal once all the machines shut down. He trembled at the thought.

‘Isn’t that nice?’ Thurman asked. He took a deep breath and let it out. ‘The quiet?’

Donald didn’t answer. He realised he was holding his breath again.

Thurman looked down at the book in his lap, then lifted his gaze to study Donald.

‘Did you know your grandfather taught me how to play golf?’

Donald laughed. ‘Yeah. I’ve seen the pictures of you two together.’ He flashed back to his grandmother flipping through old albums. She had this outmoded obsession with printing the pictures from her computer and stuffing them in books. Said they became more real once they were displayed like that.

‘You and your sister have always felt like family to me,’ the Senator said.

The sudden openness was uncomfortable. A small vent in the corner of the pod circulated some air, but it still felt warm in there. ‘I appreciate that, sir.’

‘I want you in on this project,’ Thurman said. ‘All the way in.’

Donald swallowed. ‘Sir. I’m fully committed, I promise.’

Thurman raised his hand and shook his head. ‘No, not like—’ He dropped his hand to his lap, glanced at the door. ‘You know, I used to think you couldn’t hide anything any more. Not in this age. It’s all out there, you know?’ He waggled his fingers in the air. ‘Hell, you ran for office and squeezed through that mess. You know what it’s like.’

Donald nodded. ‘Yeah, I had a few things I had to own up to.’

The Senator cupped his hands into the shape of a bowl. ‘It’s like trying to hold water and not letting a single drop through.’

Donald nodded.

‘A president can’t even get a blow job any more without the world finding out.’

Donald’s confused squint had Thurman waving at the air. ‘Before your time. But here’s the thing, here’s what I’ve found, both overseas and in Washington. It’s the unimportant drips that leak through. The peccadilloes. Embarrassments, not life-and-death stuff. You want to invade a foreign country? Look at D-Day. Hell, look at Pearl Harbor. Or 9/11. Not a problem.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t see what—’

Thurman’s hand flew out, his fingers thudding shut as he pinched the air. Donald thought for a moment that he meant for him to keep quiet, but then the Senator leaned forward and held the pinched pads of his fingers for Donald to see, as if he had snatched a mosquito.

‘Look,’ he said.

Donald leaned closer, but he still couldn’t make anything out. He shook his head. ‘I don’t see, sir…’

‘That’s right. And you wouldn’t see it coming, either. That’s what they’ve been working on, those snakes.’

Senator Thurman released the invisible pinch and studied the pad of his thumb for a moment. He blew a puff of air across it. ‘Anything these puppies can stitch, they can unstitch.’

He peered across the pod at Donald. ‘You know why we went into Iran the first time? It wasn’t about nukes, I’ll tell you that. I crawled through every hole that’s ever been dug in those dunes over there, and those rats had a bigger prize they were chasing than nukes. You see, they’ve figured out how to attack us without being seen, without having to blow themselves up, and with zero repercussions.’

Donald was sure he didn’t have the clearance to hear any of this.

‘Well, the Iranians didn’t figure it out for themselves so much as steal what Israel was working on.’ He smiled at Donald. ‘So, of course, we had to start playing catch-up.’

‘I don’t understa—’

‘These critters in here are programmed for my DNA, Donny. Think about that. Have you ever had your ancestry tested?’ He looked Donald up and down as if he were surveying a mottled mutt. ‘What are you, anyway? Scottish?’

‘Maybe Irish, sir. I honestly couldn’t tell you.’ He didn’t want to admit that it was unimportant to him; it seemed like a topic close to Thurman’s heart.

‘Well, these buggers can tell. If they ever get them perfected, that is. They could tell you what clan you came from. And that’s what the Iranians are working on: a weapon you can’t see, that you can’t stop, and if it decides you’re Jewish, even a quarter Jew…’ Thurman drew his thumb across his own neck.

‘I thought we were wrong about that. We never found any NBs in Iran.’

‘That’s because they self-destructed. Remotely. Poof.’ The old man’s eyes widened.

Donald laughed. ‘You sound like one of those conspiracy theorists—’

Senator Thurman leaned back and rested his head against the wall. ‘Donny, the conspiracy theorists sound like us.’

Donald waited for the Senator to laugh. Or smile. Neither came.

‘What does this have to do with me?’ he asked. ‘Or our project?’

Thurman closed his eyes, his head still tilted back. ‘You know why Florida has such pretty sunrises?’

Donald wanted to scream. He wanted to beat on the door until they hauled him out of there in a straightjacket. Instead, he took a sip of water.

Thurman cracked an eye. Studied him again.

‘It’s because the sand from Africa blows clear across the Atlantic.’

Donald nodded. He saw what the Senator was getting at. He’d heard the same fear-mongering on the twenty-four-hour news programmes, how toxins and tiny machines can circle the globe, just like seeds and pollens have done for millennia.

‘It’s coming, Donny. I know it is. I’ve got eyes and ears everywhere, even in here. I asked you to meet me here because I want you to have a seat at the after party.’

‘Sir?’

‘You and Helen both.’

Donald scratched his arm and glanced at the door.

‘It’s just a contingency plan for now, you understand? There are plans in place for anything. Mountains for the president to crawl inside of, but we need something else.’

Donald remembered the congressman from Atlanta prattling on about zombies and the CDC. This sounded like more of that nonsense.

‘I’m happy to serve on any committee you think is important—’

‘Good.’ The Senator took the book from his lap and handed it to Donald. ‘Read this,’ Thurman said.

Donald checked the cover. It was familiar, but instead of French script, it read: The Order. He opened the heavy tome to a random page and started skimming.

‘That’s your bible from now on, son. When I was in the war, I met boys no higher than your knee who had the entire Qur’an memorised, every stinkin’ verse. You need to do better.’

‘Memorise?’

‘As near as you can. And don’t worry, you’ve got a couple of years.’

Donald raised his eyebrows in surprise, then shut the book and studied the spine. ‘Good. I’ll need it.’ He wanted to know if there would be a raise involved or a ton of committee meetings. This sounded ludicrous, but he wasn’t about to refuse the old man, not with his re-election coming up every two years.

‘All right. Welcome.’ Thurman leaned forward and held out his hand. Donald tried to get his palm deep into the Senator’s. It made the older man’s grip hurt a lot less. ‘You’re free to go.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He stood and exhaled in relief. Cradling the book, he moved to the airlock door.

‘Oh, and Donny?’

He turned back. ‘Yessir?’

‘The National Convention is in a couple of years. I want you to go ahead and pencil it into your schedule. And make sure Helen is there.’

Donald felt goosebumps run down his arms. Did that mean a real possibility of promotion? Maybe a speech on the big stage?

‘Absolutely, sir.’ He knew he was smiling.

‘Oh, and I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with you about the critters in here.’

‘Sir?’ Donald swallowed. His smile melted. He had one hand on the hatch’s wheel. His mind resumed playing tricks on him, the taste on his tongue metallic, the pricks everywhere on his skin.

‘Some of the buggers in here are very much for you.’

Senator Thurman stared at Donald for a beat, and then he started laughing.

Donald turned, sweat glassy on his brow as he worked the wheel in the door with a free hand. It wasn’t until he secured the airlock, the seals deadening the Senator’s laughter, that he could breathe again.

The air around him buzzed, a jolt of static to kill any strays. Donald blew out his breath, harder than usual, and unsteadily walked away.

14 2110 • Silo 1 •

THE SHRINKS KEPT Troy’s door locked and delivered his meals while he went through the silo twelve reports alone. He spread the pages across his keyboard — safely away from the edge of his desk. This way, when stray tears fell, they didn’t smudge the paper.

For some reason, Troy couldn’t stop crying. The shrinks with the strict meal plans had taken him off his meds for the last two days, long enough to compile his findings with Troy sober, free from the forgetfulness the pills brought about. He had a deadline. After he put his final notes together, they would get him something to cut through the pain.

Images of the dying interfered with his thoughts, the picture of the outside, of people suffocating and falling to their knees. Troy remembered giving the order. What he regretted most was making someone else push the button.

Coming off his meds had brought back other random haunts. He began to remember his father, events from before his orientation. And it worried him that the billions who had been wiped out could be felt as an ache in his gut while the few thousand of silo twelve who had scrambled to their deaths made him want to curl up and die.

The reports on his keyboard told a story of a shadow who had lost his nerve, an IT head who couldn’t see the darkness rising at her feet, and an honest enough Security chief who had chosen poorly. All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.

The keycodes for each video feed sat in the margins. It reminded him of an old book he had once known; the references had a similar style.

Jason 2:17 brought up a slice of the feed from the IT head’s shadow. Troy followed the action on his monitor. A young man, probably in his late teens or early twenties, sat on a server-room floor. His back was to the camera, the corners of a plastic tray visible in his lap. He was bent over a meal, the bony knots of his spine casting dots of shadow down the back of his overalls.

Troy watched. He glanced at the report to check the timecode. He didn’t want to miss it.

In the video, Jason’s right elbow worked back and forth. He looked to be eating. The moment was coming. Troy willed himself not to blink, could feel tears coat his eyes from the effort.

A noise startled Jason. The young IT shadow glanced to the side, his profile visible for a moment, an angular and gaunt face from weeks of privation. He grabbed the tray from his lap; it was the first time Troy could spot the rolled-up sleeve. And there, as he fought with the cuff to roll it back down, were the dark parallel lines across his forearm, and nothing on his tray that called for a knife.

The rest of the clip was of Jason speaking to the IT head, her demeanour motherly and tender, a touch on his shoulder, a squeeze of his elbow. Troy could imagine her voice. He had spoken to her once or twice to take down a report. In a few more weeks, they would’ve scheduled a time to speak with Jason and induct him formally.

The clip ended with Jason descending back into the space beneath the server-room floor, a shadow swallowing a shadow. The head of IT — the true head of silo twelve — stood alone for a moment, hand on her chin. She looked so alive. Troy had a childlike impulse to reach out and brush his fingers across the monitor, to acknowledge this ghost, to apologise for letting her down.

Instead, he saw something the reports had missed. He watched her body twitch towards the hatch, stop, freeze for a moment, then turn away.

Troy clicked the slider at the bottom of the video to see it again. There she was rubbing her shadow’s shoulder, talking to him, Jason nodding. She squeezed his elbow, was concerned about him. He was assuring her everything was fine.

Once he was gone, once she was alone, the doubts and fears overtook her. Troy couldn’t know it for sure, but he could sense it. She knew a darkness was brewing beneath her feet, and here was her chance to destroy it. It was a mask of concern, a twitch in that direction, reconsidering, turning away.

Troy paused the video and made some notes, jotted down the times. The shrinks would have to verify his findings. Shuffling the papers, he wondered if there was anything he needed to see again. A decent woman had been murdered because she could not bring herself to do the same, to kill in order to protect. And a Security chief had let loose a monster who had mastered the art of concealing his pain, a young man who had learned how to manipulate others, who wanted out.

He typed up his conclusions. It was a dangerous age for shadowing, he noted in his report. Here was a boy between his teens and twenties, an age deep in doubts and shallow in control. Troy asked in his report if anyone at that age could ever be ready. He made mention of the first head of IT he had inducted, the question the boy had asked after hearing tales from his demented great-grandmother. Was it right to expose anyone to these truths? Could men at such a fragile age be expected to endure such blows without shattering?

What he didn’t add, what he asked himself, was if anyone at any age could ever be ready.

There was precedence, he typed, for limiting certain positions of authority by age. And while this would lead to shorter terms — which meant subjecting more unfortunate souls to the abuse of being locked up and shown their Legacy — wasn’t it better to go through a damnable process more often rather than take risks such as these?

He knew this report would matter little. There was no planning for insanity. With enough revolutions and elections, enough transfers of power, eventually a madman would take the reins. It was inevitable. These were the odds they had planned for. This was why they had built so many.

He rose from his desk and walked to the door, slapped it soundly with the flat of his palm. In the corner of his office, a printer hummed and shot four pages out of its mouth. Troy took them; they were still warm as he slid them into the folder, these reports on the newly dead and still dying. He could feel the life and warmth draining from those printed pages. Soon, they would be as cool as the air around them. He grabbed a pen from his desk and signed the bottom.

A key rattled in his lock before the door opened.

‘Done already?’ Victor asked. The grey-haired psychiatrist stood across from his desk, keys jangling as they returned to his pocket. He held a small plastic cup in his hand.

Troy handed him the folder. ‘The signs were there,’ he told the doctor, ‘but they weren’t acted upon.’

Victor took the folder with one hand and held out the plastic cup with the other.

Troy typed a few commands on his computer and wiped his copy of the videos. The cameras were of no use for predicting and preventing these kinds of problems. There were too many to watch all at once. You couldn’t get enough people to sit and monitor an entire populace. They were there to sort through the wreckage, the aftermath.

‘Looks good,’ Victor said, flipping through the folder. The plastic cup sat on Troy’s desk, two pills inside. They had increased the dosage to what he had taken at the start of his shift, a little extra to cut through the pain.

‘Would you like me to fetch you some water?’

Troy shook his head. He hesitated. Looking up from the cup, he asked Victor a question: ‘How long do you think it’ll take? Silo twelve, I mean. Before all of those people are gone.’

Victor shrugged. ‘Not long, I imagine. Days.’

Troy nodded. Victor watched him carefully. Troy tilted his head back and rattled the pills past his trembling lips. There was the bitter taste on his tongue. He made a show of swallowing.

‘I’m sorry that it was your shift,’ Victor said. ‘I know this wasn’t the job you signed up for.’

Troy nodded. ‘I’m actually glad it was mine,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’d hate for it to have been anyone else’s.’

Victor rubbed the folder with one hand. ‘You’ll be given a commendation in my report.’

‘Thank you,’ Troy said. He didn’t know what the fuck for.

With a wave of the folder, Victor finally turned to leave and go back to his desk across the hall where he could sit and glance up occasionally at Troy.

And in that brief moment it took for Victor to walk over, with his back turned, Troy spat the pills into the palm of his hand.

Shaking his mouse with one hand, waking up his monitor so he could boot a game of solitaire, Troy smiled across the hallway at Victor, who smiled back. And in his other hand, still sticky from the outer coating dissolved by his saliva, the two pills nestled in his palm. Troy was tired of forgetting. He had decided to remember.

15 2049 Savannah, Georgia

DONALD SPED DOWN highway 17, a flashing red light on his dash warning him as he exceeded the local speed limit. He didn’t care about being pulled over, didn’t care about being wired a ticket or his insurance rates creeping up. It all seemed trivial. The fact that there were circuits riding along in his car keeping track of everything he did paled in comparison to the suspicion that machines in his blood were doing the same.

The tyres squealed as he spiralled down his exit ramp too fast. He merged onto Berwick Boulevard, the overhead lights strobing through the windshield as he flew beneath them. Glancing down at his lap, he watched the gold inlay text on the book throb with the rhythm of the passing lights.

Order. Order. Order.

He had read enough to worry, to wonder what he’d gotten himself mixed up in. Helen had been right to warn him, had been wrong about the scale of the danger.

Turning into his neighbourhood, Donald remembered a conversation from long before — he remembered her begging him not to run for office, saying that it would change him, that he couldn’t fix anything up there, but that he could sure as hell come home broken.

How right had she been?

He pulled up to the house and had to leave the car by the kerb. Her Jeep was in the middle of the driveway. One more habit formed in his absence, a reminder that he didn’t live there any more, didn’t have a real home.

Leaving his bags in the boot, he took just the book and his keys. The book was heavy enough.

The motion light came on as he neared the porch. He saw a form by the window, heard frantic scratching on the other side. Helen opened the door, and Karma rushed out, tail whacking the side of the jamb, tongue lolling, so much bigger in just the few weeks that he’d been away.

Donald crouched down and rubbed her head, let the dog lick his cheek.

‘Good girl,’ he said. He tried to sound happy. The cool emptiness in his chest intensified from being home. The things that should have felt comforting only made him feel worse.

‘Hey, honey.’ He smiled up at his wife.

‘You’re early.’

Helen wrapped her arms around his neck as he stood. Karma sat down and whined at them, tail swishing on the concrete. Helen’s kiss tasted like coffee.

‘I took an earlier flight.’

He glanced over his shoulder at the dark streets of his neighbourhood. As if anyone needed to follow him.

‘Where’re your bags?’

‘I’ll get ’em in the morning. C’mon, Karma. Let’s go inside.’ He steered his dog through the door.

‘Is everything okay?’ Helen asked.

Donald went to the kitchen. He set the book down on the island and fished in the cabinet for a glass. Helen watched him with concern as he pulled a bottle of brandy out of the cabinet.

‘Baby? What’s going on?’

‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. ‘Lunatics—’ He poured three fingers of brandy, looked to Helen and raised the bottle to see if she wanted any. She shook her head. ‘Then again,’ he continued, ‘maybe there’s something to it.’ He took more than a sip. His other hand hadn’t left the neck of the bottle.

‘Baby, you’re acting strange. Come sit down. Take off your coat.’

He nodded and let her help him remove his jacket. He slid his tie off, saw the worry on her face, knew it to be a reflection of his own.

‘What would you do if you thought it all might end?’ he asked his wife. ‘What would you do?’

‘If what? You mean us? Oh, you mean life. Honey, did someone pass away? Tell me what’s going on.’

‘No, not someone. Everyone. Everything.’

He tucked the bottle under his arm, grabbed his drink and the book and went to the living room. Helen and Karma followed. Karma was already on the sofa waiting for him to sit down before he got there, oblivious to anything he was saying, just thrilled for the pack to be reunited.

‘It sounds like you’ve had a very long day,’ Helen said, trying to find excuses for him.

Donald sat on the sofa and put the bottle and book on the coffee table. He pulled his drink away from Karma’s curious nose.

‘I have something I have to tell you,’ he said.

Helen stood in the middle of the room, her arms crossed. ‘That’d be a nice change.’ She smiled to let him know she was joking. Donald nodded.

‘I know, I know,’ he said. His eyes fell to the book. ‘This isn’t about that project. And honestly, do you think I enjoy keeping my life from you?’

Helen crossed to the recliner next to the sofa and sat down. ‘What is this about?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been told it’s okay to tell you about a… promotion. Well, more of an assignment than a promotion. Not an assignment, really, more like being on the National Guard. Just in case—’

Helen reached over and squeezed his knee. ‘Take it easy,’ she whispered. Her eyebrows were lowered, confusion and worry lurking in the shadows there.

Donald took a deep breath. He was still revved up from running the conversation over in his head, from driving too fast. In the weeks since his meeting with Thurman he had been reading too much into the book — and too much into that conversation. He couldn’t tell if he was piecing something together, or just falling apart.

‘How much have you followed what’s going on in Iran?’ he asked, scratching his arm. ‘And Korea?’

She shrugged. ‘I see blurbs online.’

‘Mmm.’ He took a burning gulp of the brandy, smacked his lips and tried to relax and enjoy the numbing chill as it travelled through his body. ‘They’re working on ways to take everything out,’ he said.

‘Who? We are?’ Helen’s voice rose. ‘We’re thinking of taking them out?’

‘No, no—’

‘Are you sure I’m allowed to hear this—’

‘No, sweetheart, they’re designing weapons to take us out. Weapons that can’t be stopped, that can’t be defended against.’

Helen leaned forward, her hands clasped, elbows on her knees. ‘Is this stuff you’re learning in Washington? Classified stuff?’

He waved his hand. ‘Beyond classified. Look, you know why we went into Iran—’

‘I know why they said we went in—’

‘It wasn’t bullshit,’ he said, cutting her off. ‘Well, maybe it was. Maybe they hadn’t figured it out yet, hadn’t mastered how—’

‘Honey, slow down.’

‘Yeah.’ He took another deep breath. He had an image in mind of a large mountain out west, a concrete road disappearing straight into the rock, thick vault doors standing open as files of politicians crowded inside with their families.

‘I met with the Senator a few weeks ago.’ He stared down into the ginger-coloured liquor in his glass.

‘In Boston,’ Helen said.

He nodded. ‘Right. Well, he wants us to be on this alert team—’

‘You and Mick.’

He turned to his wife. ‘No — us.’

‘Us?’ Helen placed a hand on her chest. ‘What do you mean, us? You and me?’

‘Now listen—’

‘You’re volunteering me for one of his—’

‘Sweetheart, I had no idea what this was all about.’ He set his glass on the coffee table and grabbed the book. ‘He gave me this to read.’

Helen frowned. ‘What is that?’

‘It’s like an instruction manual for the — well, for the after. I think.’

Helen got up from the recliner and stepped between him and the coffee table. She nudged Karma out of the way, the dog grunting at being disturbed. Sitting down beside him, she put a hand on his back, her eyes shiny with worry.

‘Donny, were you drinking on the plane?’

‘No.’ He pulled away. ‘Just please listen to me. It doesn’t matter who has them, it only matters when. Don’t you see? This is the ultimate threat. A world-ender. I’ve been reading about the possibilities on this website—’

‘A website,’ she said, voice flat with scepticism.

‘Yeah. Listen. Remember those treatments the Senator takes? These nanos are like synthetic life. Imagine if someone turned them into a virus that didn’t care about its host, that didn’t need us in order to spread. They could be out there already.’ He tapped his chest, glanced around the room suspiciously, took a deep breath. ‘They could be in every one of us right now, little timer circuits waiting for the right moment—’

‘Sweetheart—’

‘Very bad people are working on this, trying to make this happen.’ He reached for his glass. ‘We can’t sit back and let them strike first. So we’re gonna do it.’ There were ripples in the liquor. His hand was shaking. ‘God, baby, I’m pretty sure we’re gonna do it before they can.’

‘You’re scaring me, honey.’

‘Good.’ Another burning sip. He held the glass with both hands to keep it steady. ‘We should be scared.’

‘Do you want me to call Dr Martin?’

‘Who?’ He tried to make room between them, bumped up against the armrest. ‘My sister’s doctor? The shrink?’

She nodded gravely.

‘Listen to what I’m telling you,’ he said, holding up a finger. ‘These tiny machines are real.’ His mind was racing. He was going to babble and convince her of nothing but his paranoia. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We use them in medicine, right?’

Helen nodded. She was giving him a chance, a slim one. But he could tell she really wanted to go call someone. Her mother, a doctor, his mother.

‘It’s like when we discovered radiation, okay? The first thing we thought was that this would be a cure, a medical discovery. X-rays, but then people were taking drops of radium like an elixir—’

‘They poisoned themselves,’ Helen said. ‘Thinking they were doing something good.’ She seemed to relax a little. ‘Is this what you’re worried about? That the nanos are going to mutate and turn on us? Are you still freaked out from being inside that machine?’

‘No, nothing like that. I’m talking about how we looked for medicinal uses first, then ended up building the bomb. This is the same thing.’ He paused, hoping she would get it. ‘I’m starting to think we’re building them too. Tiny machines, just like the ones in the nanobaths that stitch up people’s skin and joints. Only these would tear people apart.’

Helen didn’t react. Didn’t say a word. Donald realised he sounded crazy, that every bit of this was already online and in podcasts that radiated out from lonely basements on lonely airwaves. The Senator had been right. Mix truth and lies and you couldn’t tell them apart. The book on his coffee table and a zombie survival guide would be treated the same way.

‘I’m telling you they’re real,’ he said, unable to stop himself. ‘They’ll be able to reproduce. They’ll be invisible. There won’t be any warning when they’re set loose, just dust in the breeze, okay? Reproducing and reproducing, this invisible war will wage itself all around us while we’re turned to mush.’

Helen remained silent. He realised she was waiting for him to finish, and then she would call her mom and ask what to do. She would call Dr Martin and get his advice.

Donald started to complain, could feel the anger welling up, and knew that anything he said would confirm her fears rather than convince her of his own.

‘Is there anything else?’ she whispered. She was looking for permission to leave and make her phone calls, to talk to someone rational.

Donald felt numb. Helpless and alone.

‘The National Convention is going to be held in Atlanta.’ He wiped underneath his eyes, tried to make it look like weariness, like the strain of travel. ‘The DNC hasn’t announced it yet, but I heard from Mick before I got on the flight.’ He turned to Helen. ‘The Senator wants us both there, is already planning something big.’

‘Of course, baby.’ She rested her hand on his thigh and looked at him as if he were her patient.

‘And I’m going to ask that I spend more time down here, maybe do some of my work from home on weekends, keep a closer eye on the project.’

‘That’d be great.’ She rested her other hand on his arm.

‘I want us to be good to each other,’ he said. ‘For whatever time we have left—’

‘Shh, baby, it’s okay.’ She wrapped her arm around his back and shushed him again, trying to soothe him. ‘I love you,’ she said.

He wiped at his eyes again.

‘We’ll get through this,’ she told him.

Donald bobbed his head. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know we will.’

The dog grunted and nuzzled her head into Helen’s lap, could sense something was wrong. Donald scratched the pup’s neck. He looked up at his wife, tears in his eyes. ‘I know we’ll get through this,’ he said, trying to calm himself. ‘But what about everyone else?’

16 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY NEEDED TO see a doctor. Ulcers had formed in both sides of his mouth, down between his gums and the insides of his cheeks. He could feel them like little wads of tender cotton embedded in his flesh. In the morning, he kept the pill tucked down on the left side. At supper, on the right. On either side, it would burn and dry out his mouth with the bitter bite of the medicine, but he would endure it.

He rarely employed napkins during meals, a bad habit he had formed long ago. They went into his lap to be polite and then onto his plate when he was finished. Now he had a different routine. One quick small bite of something, wipe his mouth, spit out the burning blue capsule, take a huge gulp of water, swish it around.

The hard part was not checking to see if anyone was watching while he spat it out. He sat with his back to the wall screen, imagining eyes drilling through the side of his head, but he kept his gaze in front of him and chewed his food.

He remembered to use his napkin occasionally, to wipe with both hands, always with both hands, pinching across his mouth, staying consistent. He smiled at the man across from him and made sure the pill didn’t fall out. The man’s gaze drifted over Troy’s shoulder as he stared at the view of the outside world on the screen.

Troy didn’t turn to look. There was still the same draw to the top of the silo, the same compulsion to be as high as possible, to escape the suffocating depths, but he no longer felt any desire to see outside. Something had changed.

He spotted Hal at the next table over — recognised his bald and splotchy scalp. The old man was sitting with his back to Troy. Troy waited for him to turn and catch his eye, but Hal never looked around.

He finished his corn and worked on his beets. It had been long enough since spitting out his pill to risk a glance towards the serving line. Tubes spat food; plates rattled on trays; one of the doctors from Victor’s office stood beyond the glass serving line, arms crossed, a wan smile on his face. He was scanning the men in line and looking out over the tables. Why? What was there to keep an eye on? Troy wanted to know. He had dozens of burning questions like this. Answers sometimes presented themselves, but they skittered away if he trained his thoughts on them.

The beets were awful.

He ate the last of them while the gentleman across the table stood with his tray. It wasn’t long before someone took his place. Troy looked up and down the row of adjoining tables. The vast majority of the workers sat on the other side so they could see out. Only a handful sat like Hal and himself. It was strange that he’d never noticed this before.

In the past weeks, it seemed patterns were becoming easier to spot, even as other faculties slipped and stumbled. He cut into a rubbery hunk of canned ham, his knife screeching against his plate, and wondered when he’d get some real sleep. He couldn’t ask the doctors for anything to help, couldn’t show them his gums. They might find out he was off his meds. The insomnia was awful. He might doze off for a minute or two, but deep sleep eluded him. And instead of remembering anything concrete, all he had were these dull aches, these bouts of terrible sadness, and the inescapable feeling that something was deeply wrong.

He caught one of the doctors watching him. Troy looked down the table and saw men shoulder to shoulder on the other side, eyeing the view. It wasn’t long ago that he’d wanted to sit and stare, mesmerised by the grey hills on the screen. And now he felt sick when he caught even a glimpse; the view brought him close to tears.

He stood with his tray, then worried he was being obvious. The napkin fell from his lap and landed on the floor, and something skittered away from his foot.

Troy’s heart skipped a beat. He bent and snatched the napkin, hurried down the line, looking for the pill. He bumped into a chair that had been pulled back from the table, felt all the room’s eyes on him.

The pill. He found it and scooped it up with his napkin, the tray teetering dangerously in his palm. He stood and composed himself. A trickle of sweat itched his scalp and ran down the back of his neck. Everyone knew.

Troy turned and walked towards the water fountain, not daring to glance up at the cameras or over at the doctors. He was losing it. Growing paranoid. And there was just over a month left on this shift. A month that would test every inch of will he had left.

Trying to walk naturally with so many eyes on him was impossible. He rested the edge of his tray on the water fountain, stepped on the lever with his foot and topped up his glass. This was why he had gotten up: he was thirsty. He felt like announcing the fact out loud.

Returning to the tables, Troy squeezed between two other workers and sat down facing the screen. He balled up his napkin, felt the pill hidden within its folds, and tucked it between his thighs. He sat there, sipping his water, facing the screen like everyone else, like he was supposed to. But he didn’t dare look.

17 2051 Washington, DC

THE FAT RAINDROPS on the canopy outside De’Angelo’s restaurant sounded like rhythmless fingers tapping on a drum. The traffic on L Street hissed through puddles gathering against the kerb, and the asphalt that flashed between the cars gleamed shiny and black from the streetlights. Donald shook two pills out of a plastic vial and into his palm. Two years on the meds. Two years completely free of anxiety, gloriously numb.

He glanced at the label and thought of Charlotte, of the necessity of fulfilling the prescription under his sister’s name, then popped them in his mouth. Donald swallowed. He was sick of the rain, preferred the cleanliness of the snow. Winter had been too warm again.

Keeping out of the foot traffic flowing through the front doors, he cradled his phone against his ear and listened patiently while his wife urged Karma to pee.

‘Maybe she doesn’t need to go,’ he suggested. He dropped the vial into his coat pocket and cupped his hand over the phone as the lady beside him wrestled with her umbrella, water flicking everywhere.

Helen continued to cajole Karma with words the poor dog didn’t understand. This was typical of Helen and Donald’s conversations of late. There was nothing real to say to one another.

‘But she hasn’t been since lunch,’ Helen insisted.

‘She didn’t go somewhere in the house, did she?’

‘She’s four years old.’

Donald had forgotten. Lately, time felt locked in a bubble. He wondered if his medication was causing that or if it was the workload. Whenever anything seemed… off any more, he always assumed it must be the medication. Before, it could have been the vagaries of life; it could have been anything. Somehow, it felt worse to have something concrete and new to pin it on.

There was shouting across the street, two homeless men yelling at each other in the rain, squabbling over a bag of tin cans. More umbrellas were shaken and more fancy dresses flowed into the restaurant. Here was a city charged with governing all the others, and it couldn’t even take care of itself. These things used to worry him more. He patted the capsule in his jacket pocket, a comforting twitch he’d developed.

‘She won’t go,’ his wife said exhaustedly.

‘Baby, I’m sorry I’m up here and you have all that to take care of. But look, I really need to get inside. We’re trying to wrap up final revisions on these plans tonight.’

‘How is everything going with that? Are you almost done?’

A file of taxis drove by, hunting for fares, fat tyres rolling across sheets of water like hissing snakes. Donald watched as one of them slowed to a stop, brakes squealing from the wet. He didn’t recognise the man stepping out, coat held over his head. It wasn’t Mick.

‘Huh? Oh, it’s going great. Yeah, we’re basically done, maybe a few tweaks here and there. The outer shells are poured, and the lower floors are in—’

‘I meant, are you almost done working with her?’

He turned away from the traffic to hear better. ‘Who, Anna? Yeah. Look, I’ve told you. We’ve only consulted here and there. Most of it’s done electronically.’

‘And Mick is there?’

‘Yup.’

Another cab slowed as it passed by. Donald turned, but the car didn’t stop.

‘Okay. Well, don’t work too late. Call me tomorrow.’

‘I will. I love you.’

‘Love you— Oh! Good girl! That’s a good girl, Karma—’

‘I’ll talk to you tomorr—’

But the line was already dead. Donald glanced at his phone before putting it away, shivered once from the cool evening and from the moisture in the air. He pressed through the crowd outside the door and made his way to the table.

‘Everything okay?’ Anna asked. She sat alone at a table with three settings. A wide-necked sweater had been pulled down to expose one shoulder. She pinched her second glass of wine by its delicate stem, a pink half-moon of lipstick on its rim. Her auburn hair was tied up in a bun, the freckles across her nose almost invisible behind a thin veil of make-up. She looked, impossibly, more alluring than she had in college.

‘Yeah, everything’s fine.’ Donald twisted his wedding ring with his thumb — a habit. ‘Have you heard from Mick?’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, checked his texts. He thought of firing off another, but there were already four unanswered messages sitting there.

‘Nope. Wasn’t he flying in from Texas this morning? Maybe his flight was delayed.’

Donald saw that his glass, which he’d left near empty when he made the call outside, had been topped up. He knew Helen would disapprove of him sitting there alone with Anna, even though nothing was going to happen. Nothing ever would.

‘We could always do this another time,’ he suggested. ‘I’d hate for Mick to be left out.’

She set down her glass and studied the menu. ‘Might as well eat while we’re here. Be a little late to find something else. Besides, Mick’s logistics are independent of our design. We can send him our materials report later.’

Anna leaned to the side and reached for something in her bag, her sweater falling dangerously open. Donald looked away quickly, a flush of heat on the back of his neck. She pulled out her tablet and placed it on top of his Manilla folder, the screen flashing to life.

‘I think the bottom third of the design is solid.’ She spun the tablet for him to see. ‘I’d like to sign off on it so they can start layering the next few floors in.’

‘Well, a lot of these are yours,’ he said, thinking of all the mechanical spaces at the bottom. ‘I trust your judgement.’

He picked the tablet up, relieved that their conversation hadn’t veered away from work. He felt like a fool for thinking Anna had anything else in mind. They had been exchanging emails and updating each other’s plans for over two years and there had never been a hint of impropriety. He warned himself not to let the setting, the music, the white tablecloths, fool him.

‘There is one last-minute change you’re not going to like,’ she said. ‘The central shaft needs to be modified a little. But I think we can still work with the same general plan. It won’t affect the floors at all.’

He scrolled through the familiar files until he spotted the difference. The emergency stairwell had been moved from the side of the central shaft to the very middle. The shaft itself seemed smaller, or maybe it was because all the other gear they’d filled it with was gone. Now there was empty space, the discs turned to doughnuts. He looked up from the tablet and saw their waiter approaching.

‘What, no lift?’ He wanted to make sure he was seeing this right. He asked the waiter for a water and said he’d need more time with the menu.

The waiter bowed and left. Anna placed her napkin on the table and slid over to the adjacent chair. ‘The board said they had their reasons.’

‘The medical board?’ Donald exhaled. He had grown sick of their meddling and their suggestions, but he had given up fighting with them. He never won. ‘Shouldn’t they be more worried about people falling over these railings and breaking their necks?’

Anna laughed. ‘You know they’re not into that kind of medicine. All they can think about is what these workers might go through, emotionally, if they’re ever trapped in there for a few weeks. They wanted the plan to be simpler. More… open.’

‘More open.’ Donald chuckled and reached for his glass of wine. ‘And what do they mean, trapped for a few weeks?’

Anna shrugged. ‘You’re the elected official. I figure you should know more about this government silliness than I do. I’m just a consultant. I’m just getting paid to lay out the pipes.’

She finished her wine, and the waiter returned with Donald’s water and to take their orders. Anna raised her eyebrow, a familiar twitch that begged a question: Are you ready? It used to mean much more, Donald thought, as he glanced at the menu.

‘How about you pick for me?’ he finally said, giving up.

Anna ordered and the waiter jotted down her selections.

‘So now they want a single stairwell, huh?’ Donald imagined the concrete needed for this, then thought of a spiral design made of metal. Stronger and cheaper. ‘We can keep the service lift, right? Why couldn’t we slide this over and put it in right here?’

He showed her the tablet.

‘No. No lifts. Keep everything simple and open. That’s what they said.’

He didn’t like this. Even if the facility would never be used, it should be built as if it might. Why else bother? He’d seen a partial list of supplies they were going to stockpile inside. Lugging them by stair seemed impossible, unless they planned to stock the floors before the prebuilt sections were craned inside. That was more Mick’s department. It was one of many reasons he wished his friend were there.

‘You know, this is why I didn’t go into architecture.’ He scrolled through their plans and saw all the places where his design had been altered. ‘I remember the first class we had where we had to go out and meet with mock clients, and they always wanted either the impossible or the downright stupid — or both. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t for me.’

‘So you went into politics.’ Anna laughed.

‘Yeah. Good point.’ Donald smiled, saw the irony. ‘But hey, it worked for your father.’

‘My dad went into politics because he didn’t know what else to do. He got out of the army, sank too much money into busted venture after busted venture, then figured he’d serve his country some other way.’

She studied him a long moment.

‘This is his legacy, you know.’ She leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, bent a graceful finger at the tablet. ‘This is one of those things they said would never get done, and he’s doing it.’

Donald put the tablet down and leaned back in his chair. ‘He keeps telling me the same thing,’ he said. ‘That this is our legacy, this project. I told him I feel too young to be working on my crowning achievement.’

Anna smiled. They both took sips of wine. A basket of bread was dropped off, but neither of them reached for it.

‘Speaking of legacies and leaving things behind,’ Anna asked, ‘is there a reason you and Helen decided not to have kids?’

Donald placed his glass back on the table. Anna lifted the bottle, but he waved her off. ‘Well, it’s not that we don’t want them. We just both went directly from grad school to our careers, you know? We kept thinking—’

‘That you’ll have for ever, right? That you’ll always have time. There’s no hurry.’

‘No. It’s not that…’ He rubbed the tablecloth with the pads of his fingers and felt the slick and expensive fabric slide over the other tablecloth hidden below. When they were finished with their meals and out the door, he figured this top layer would be folded back and carried off with their crumbs, a new layer revealed beneath. Like skin. Or the generations. He took a sip of wine, the tannins numbing his lips.

‘I think that’s it exactly,’ Anna insisted. ‘Every generation is waiting longer and longer to pull the trigger. My mom was almost forty when she had me, and that’s getting more and more common.’

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

‘Maybe we all think we might be the first generation that simply doesn’t die,’ she continued, ‘that lives for ever.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Now we all expect to hit a hundred and thirty, maybe longer, like it’s our right. And so this is my theory—’ She leaned closer. Donald was already uncomfortable with where the conversation was going. ‘Children used to be our legacy, right? They were our chance to cheat death, to pass these little bits of ourselves along. But now we hope it can simply be us.’

‘You mean like cloning? That’s why it’s illegal.’

‘I don’t mean cloning — and besides, just because it’s illegal, you and I both know people do it.’ She took a sip of her wine and nodded at a family in a distant booth. ‘Look. He has daddy’s everything.’

Donald followed her gaze and watched the kid for a moment, then realised she was just making a point.

‘Or how about my father?’ she asked. ‘Those nano baths, all the stem-cell vitamins he takes. He truly thinks he’s gonna live for ever. You know he bought a load of stock in one of those cryo firms years back?’

Donald laughed. ‘I heard. And I heard it didn’t work out so well. Besides, they’ve been trying stuff like that for years—’

‘And they keep getting closer,’ she said. ‘All they ever needed was a way to stitch up the cells damaged from the freezing, and now that’s not so crazy a dream, right?’

‘Well, I hope the people who dream such things get whatever it is they’re looking for, but you’re wrong about us. Helen and I talk about having kids all the time. I know people having their first kid in their fifties. We’ve got time.’

‘Mmm.’ She finished what was in her glass and reached for the bottle. ‘You think that,’ she said. ‘Everyone thinks they’ve got all the time left in the world.’ She levelled her cool grey eyes at him. ‘But they never stop to ask just how much time that is.’

After dinner, they waited under the awning for Anna’s car service. Donald declined to share a ride, saying he needed to get back to the office and would just take a cab. The rain hitting the awning had changed, had grown sombre.

Her ride pulled up, a shiny black Lincoln, just as Donald’s phone began vibrating. He fumbled in his jacket pocket while she leaned in for a hug and kissed his cheek. He felt a flush of heat despite the cool air, saw that it was Mick calling and picked up.

‘Hey, you just land or what?’ Donald asked.

A pause.

‘Land?’ Mick sounded confused. There was noise in the background. The driver hurried around the Lincoln to get the door for Anna. ‘I took a red-eye,’ Mick said. ‘My flight got in early this morning. I’m just walking out of a movie and saw your texts. What’s up?’

Anna turned and waved. Donald waved back.

‘You’re getting out of a movie? We just wrapped up our meeting at De’Angelo’s. You missed it. Anna said she emailed you like three times.’

He glanced up at the car as Anna drew her leg inside. Just a glimpse of her red heels, and then the driver pushed the door shut. The rain on the tinted glass stood out like jewels.

‘Huh. I must’ve missed them. Probably went to junk mail. Not a big deal. We’ll catch up. Anyway, I just got out of this trippy movie. If you and I were still in our getting-high days, I would totally force you to blast one with me right now and go to the midnight showing. My mind is totally bent—’

Donald watched the driver hurry around the car to get out of the rain. Anna’s window lowered a crack. One last wave, and the car pulled out into light traffic.

‘Yeah, well, those days are long gone, my friend,’ Donald said distractedly. Thunder grumbled in the distance. An umbrella opened with a pop as a gentleman prepared to brave the storm. ‘Besides,’ Donald told Mick, ‘some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.’

18 2110 • Silo 1 •

THE EXERCISE ROOM on level twelve smelled of sweat, of having been used recently. A line of iron weights sat in a jumble in one corner, and a forgotten towel had been left draped over the bar of the bench press, over a hundred pounds of iron discs still in place.

Troy eyed the mess as he worked the last bolt free from the side of the exercise bike. When the cover plate came off, washers and nuts rained down from recessed holes and bounced across the tile. Troy scrambled for them and pushed the hardware into a tidy pile. He peered inside the bike’s innards and saw a large cog, its jagged teeth conspicuously empty.

The chain that did all the work hung slack around the cog’s axle. Troy was surprised to see it there, would have thought the thing ran on belts. This seemed too fragile. Not a good choice for the length of time it would be expected to serve. It was strange, in fact, to think that this machine was already fifty years old — and that it needed to last centuries more.

He wiped his forehead. Sweat was still beading up from the handful of miles he’d gotten in before the machine broke. Fishing around in the toolbox Jones had loaned him, he found the flathead screwdriver and began levering the chain back onto the cog.

Chains on cogs. Chains on cogs. He laughed to himself. Wasn’t that the way?

‘Excuse me, sir?’

Troy turned to find Jones, his chief mechanic for another week, standing in the gym’s doorway.

‘Almost done,’ Troy said. ‘You need your tools back?’

‘Nossir. Dr Henson is looking for you.’ He raised his hand, had one of those clunky radios in it.

Troy grabbed an old rag out of the toolbox and wiped the grease from his fingers. It felt good to be working with his hands, getting dirty. It was a welcome distraction, something to do besides checking the blisters in his mouth with a mirror or hanging out in his office or apartment waiting to cry again for no reason.

He left the bike and took the radio from Jones. Troy felt a wave of envy for the older man. He would love to wake up in the morning, put on those denim overalls with the patches on the knees, grab his trusty toolbox and work down a list of repairs. Anything other than sitting around while he waited for something much bigger to break.

Squeezing the button on the side of the radio, he held it up to his mouth.

‘This is Troy,’ he said.

The name sounded strange. In recent weeks, he hadn’t liked saying his own name, didn’t like hearing it. He wondered what Dr Henson and the shrinks would say about that.

The radio crackled. ‘Sir? I hate to disturb you—’

‘No, that’s fine. What is it?’ Troy walked back to the exercise bike and grabbed his towel from the handlebars. He wiped his forehead and saw Jones hungrily eyeing the disassembled bike and scattering of tools. When he lifted his brows questioningly, Troy waved his consent.

‘We’ve got a gentleman in our office who’s not responding to treatment,’ Dr Henson said. ‘It looks like another deep freeze. I’ll need you to sign the waiver.’

Jones glanced up from the bike and frowned. Troy rubbed the back of his neck with the towel. He remembered Merriman saying to be careful handing these out. There were plenty of good men who would just as soon sleep through all this mess than serve out their shifts.

‘You’re sure?’ he asked.

‘We’ve tried everything. He’s been restrained. Security is taking him down the express right now. Can you meet us down here? You’ll have to sign off before he can be put away.’

‘Sure, sure.’ Troy rubbed his face with his towel, could smell the detergent in the clean cloth cut through the odour of sweat in the room and the tinge of grease from the open bike. Jones grabbed one of the pedals with his thick hands and gave it a turn. The chain was back on the cog, the machine operational again.

‘I’ll be right down,’ Troy said before releasing the button and handing the radio back to the mechanic. Some things were a pleasure to fix. Others weren’t.

The express had already passed when Troy reached the lifts; he could see the floor display racing down. He pressed the call button for the other one and tried to imagine the sad scene playing out below. Whoever it was had his sympathies.

He shook violently, blamed it on the cool air in the hallway and his damp skin. A ping-pong ball clocked back and forth in the rec room around the corner, sneakers squeaking as players chased the next shot. From the same room, a television was playing a movie, the sound of a woman’s voice.

Looking down, Troy was self-conscious about his shorts and T-shirt. The only authority he really felt was lent by his overalls, but there was no time to ride up and change.

The lift beeped and opened, and the conversation inside fell quiet. Troy nodded a greeting, and two men in yellow said hello. The three of them rode in silence for a few levels until the men got off on forty-four, a general living level. Before the doors could close, Troy saw a bright ball skitter across the hallway, two men racing after it. There were shouts and laughter followed by guilty silence when they noticed Troy.

The metal doors squeezed shut on the brief glimpse of lower and more normal lives.

With a shudder, the lift sank deeper into the earth. Troy could feel the dirt and concrete squeezing in from all sides, piling up above. Sweat from nerves mixed with that from his exercise. He was coming out of the other side of the medication, he thought. Every morning, he could feel some semblance of his old self returning, and it lasted longer and longer into the day.

The fifties went by. The lift never stopped on the fifties. Emergency supplies he hoped would never be needed filled the corridors beyond. He remembered parts of the orientation, back when everyone had been awake. He remembered the code names they came up with for everything, the way new labels obscured the past. There was something here nagging him, but he couldn’t place it.

Next were the mechanical spaces and the general storerooms, followed by the two levels that housed the reactor. Finally, the most important storage of all: the Legacy, the men and women asleep in their shiny coffins, the survivors from the before.

There was a jolt as the lift slowed and the doors chimed open. Troy immediately heard a commotion in the doctor’s office, Henson barking commands to his assistant. He hurried down the hallway in his gym attire, sweat cooling on his skin.

When he entered the ready room, he saw an elderly man being restrained on a gurney by two men from Security. It was Hal — Troy recognised him from the cafeteria, remembered speaking with him the first day of his shift and several times since. The doctor and his assistant fumbled through cabinets and drawers, gathering supplies.

‘My name is Carlton!’ Hal roared, his thin arms flailing while unbuckled restraints dangled from the table and swayed from the commotion. Troy assumed they would’ve had him under control to get him down the lift, wondered if he had broken free when he had come to. Henson and his assistant found what they needed and gathered by the gurney. Hal’s eyes widened at the sight of the needle; the fluid inside was a blue the colour of open sky.

Dr Henson looked up and saw Troy standing there in his exercise clothes, paralysed and watching the scene. Hal screamed once more that his name was Carlton and continued to kick at the air, his heavy boots slamming against the table. The two security men jerked with effort as they held him down.

‘A hand?’ Henson grunted, teeth clenched as he began to wrestle with one of Hal’s arms.

Troy hurried to the gurney and grabbed one of Hal’s legs. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the security officers and wrestled with a boot while trying not to get kicked. Hal’s legs felt like a bird’s inside the baggy overalls, but they kicked like a mule’s. One of the officers managed to work a strap across his thighs. Troy leaned his weight on Hal’s shin while a second strap was pulled tight.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ he asked. His concerns about himself vanished in the presence of true madness. Or was this where he was heading?

‘Meds aren’t taking,’ Henson said.

Or he’s not taking them, Troy thought.

The medical assistant used his teeth to pull the cap off the sky-coloured syringe. Hal’s wrist was pinned. The needle disappeared into his trembling arm, the plunger moving the bright blue liquid into his pale and blotchy flesh.

Troy cringed at the sight of the needle being stabbed into Hal’s jerking arm — but the power in the old man’s legs faded immediately. Everyone seemed to take deep breaths as he wilted into unconsciousness, his head drifting to the side, one last incomprehensible scream fading into a moan, and then a deep and breathy exhalation.

‘What the hell?’ Troy wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. He was dripping with sweat, partly from the exertion but mostly from the scene before him, from feeling a man go under like that, sensing the life and will drain from his kicking boots as he was forced asleep. His own body shook with a sudden and violent tremor, gone before he knew it was coming. The doctor glanced up and frowned.

‘I apologise for that,’ Henson said. He glared at the officers, directing his blame.

‘We had him no problem,’ one of them said, shrugging.

Henson turned to Troy. His jowls sagged with disappointment. ‘I hate to ask you to sign off on this…’

Troy wiped his face with the front of his shirt and nodded. The losses had been accounted for — individual losses as well as silos, spares stocked accordingly — but they all stung.

‘Of course,’ he said. This was his job, right? Sign this. Say these words. Follow the script. It was a joke. They were all reading lines from a play none of them could remember. But he was beginning to. He could feel it.

Henson shuffled through a drawer of forms while his assistant unbuckled Hal’s overalls. The men from Security asked if they were needed, checked the restraints a final time and were waved away. One of them laughed out loud over something the other said as the sound of their boots faded towards the lift.

Troy, meanwhile, lost himself in Hal’s slack face, the slight rise and fall of his old and narrow chest. Here was the reward for remembering, he thought. This man had woken up from the routine of the asylum. He hadn’t gone crazy; he’d had a sudden bout of clarity. He’d cracked open his eyes and seen through the mist.

A clipboard was procured from a peg on the wall, the right form shoved into its metal jaws. Troy was handed a pen. He scratched his name, passed the clipboard back and watched the two doctors work; he wondered if they felt any of what he felt. What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every one of them was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt so completely alone?

‘Could you get that one for me?’

The medical assistant was down on his knees, twisting a knob on the base of the table. Troy saw that it was on wheels. The assistant nodded at Troy’s feet.

‘Of course.’ Troy crouched down to free the wheel. He was a part in this. It was his signature on the form. It was him twisting the knob that would free the table and allow it to roll down the hall.

With Hal under, the restraints were loosened, his overalls peeled off with care. Troy volunteered with the boots, unknotting the laces and setting them aside. There was no need for a paper gown — his modesty was no longer a concern. An IV needle was inserted and taped down; Troy knew it would plug into the cryopod. He knew what it felt like to have ice crawl through his veins.

They pushed the gurney down the hall and to the reinforced steel doors of the deep freeze. Troy studied the doors. They seemed familiar. He seemed to remember speccing something similar for a project once, but that was for a room full of machines. No — computers.

The keypad on the wall chirped as the doctor entered his code. There was the heavy thunk of rods withdrawing into the thick jamb.

‘The empties are at the end,’ Henson said, nodding into the distance.

Rows and rows of gleaming and sealed beds filled the freezing chamber. His eyes fell to the readout screens on the bases of each pod. There were green lights solid with life, no space needed for a pulse or heartbeat, first names only, no way to connect these strangers to their past lives.

Cassie, Catherine, Gabriella, Gretchen.

Made-up names.

Gwynn. Halley. Heather.

Everyone in order. No shifts for them. Nothing for the men to fight over. It would all be done in an instant. Step inside the lifeboat, dream a moment, step out onto dry land.

Another Heather. Duplicates without last names. Troy wondered how that would work. He steered blindly between the rows, the doctor and his assistant chatting about the procedure, when a name caught his peripheral vision and a fierce tremor vibrated through his limbs.

Helen. And another: Helen.

Troy lost his grip on the gurney and nearly fell. The wheels squealed to a stop.

‘Sir?’

Two Helens. But before him, on a crisp display showing the frozen temps of a deep, deep slumber, another:

Helena.

Troy staggered away from the gurney and Hal’s naked body. The echo of the old man’s feeble screams came back to him, insisting he was someone named Carlton. Troy ran his hands along the curved top of the cryopod.

She was here.

‘Sir? We really need to keep moving—’

Troy ignored the doctor. He rubbed the glass shield, the cold inside leaching into his hand.

‘Sir—’

A spiderweb of frost covered the glass. He wiped the frozen film of condensation away so he could see inside.

‘We need to get this man installed—’

Closed eyes lay inside that cold and dark place. Blades of ice clung to her lashes. It was a familiar face, but this was not his wife.

‘Sir!’

Troy stumbled, hands slapping at the cold coffin for balance, bile rising in his throat with remembrance. He heard himself gag, felt his limbs twitch, his knees buckle. He hit the ground between two of the pods and shook violently, spit on his lips, strong memories wrestling with the last residue of the drugs still in his veins.

The two men in white shouted at each other. Footsteps slapped frosted steel and faded towards the distant and heavy door. Inhuman gurgles hit Troy’s ears and sounded faintly as though they came from him.

Who was he? What was he doing there? What were any of them doing?

This was not Helen. His name was not Troy.

Footsteps stomped towards him in a hurry. The name was on his tongue as the needle bit his flesh.

Donny.

But that wasn’t right, either.

And then the darkness took him, tightening down around anything from his past that his mind deemed too awful to bear.

19 2052 Fulton County, Georgia

SOME MASH-UP of music festival, family reunion and state fair had descended on the southernmost corner of Fulton County. For the past two weeks, Donald had watched while colourful tents sprang up over a brand-new nuclear containment facility. Fifty state flags flew over fifty depressions in the earth. Stages had been erected, an endless parade of supplies flowing over the rolling hills, golf carts and four-wheelers forming convoys of food, Tupperware containers, baskets of vegetables — some even pulled small enclosed trailers loaded with livestock.

Farmers’ markets had been staked out in winding corridors of tents and booths, chickens clucking and pigs snorting, children petting rabbits, dogs on leashes. Owners of the latter guided dozens of breeds through the crowds. Tails wagged happily, and wet noses sniffed the air.

On Georgia’s main stage, a local rock band performed a sound check. When they fell quiet to adjust levels, Donald could hear the twangs of bluegrass spilling over from the general direction of North Carolina’s delegation. In the opposite direction, someone was giving a speech on Florida’s stage while the convoys moved supplies over the rise, and families spread blankets and picnicked on the banks of sweeping bowls. The hills, Donald saw, formed stadium seating, as if they’d been designed for the task.

What he couldn’t figure out was where they were putting all those supplies. The tents seemed to keep gobbling them up with no end in sight. The four-wheelers with their little boxed trailers had been rumbling up and down the slopes the entire two weeks he’d been there helping prep for the National Convention.

Mick rumbled to a stop beside him, sitting atop one of the ubiquitous all-terrain vehicles. He grinned at Donald and goosed the throttle while still holding the brakes. The Honda lurched, tyres growling against the dirt.

‘Wanna go for a ride to South Carolina?’ he yelled over the engine. He shifted forward on the seat to make room.

‘You got enough gas to make it there?’ Donald held his friend’s shoulder and stepped on the second set of pegs. He threw his leg over the seat.

‘It’s just over that hill, you idiot.’

Donald resisted the urge to assure Mick he’d been joking. He held on to the metal rack behind him as Mick shifted through the gears. His friend stuck to the dusty highway between the tents until they reached the grass, then angled towards the South Carolina delegation, the tops of the buildings of downtown Atlanta visible off to one side.

Mick turned his head as the Honda climbed the hill. ‘When is Helen getting here?’ he yelled.

Donald leaned forward. He loved the feel of the crisp October morning air. It reminded him of Savannah that time of year, the chill of a sunrise on the beach. He had just been thinking of Helen when Mick asked about her.

‘Tomorrow,’ he shouted. ‘She’s coming on a bus with the delegates from Savannah.’

They crested the hill, and Mick throttled back and steered along the ridgeline. They passed a loaded-down ATV heading in the opposite direction. The network of ridges formed an interlocked maze of highways high above each containment facility’s sunken bowl.

Peering into the distance, Donald watched the ballet of scooting ATVs weave across the landscape. One day, he imagined, the flat roads on top of the hills would rumble with much larger trucks bearing hazardous waste and radiation warnings.

And yet, seeing the flags waving over the Florida delegation to one side and the Georgia stage to the other, and noting the way the slopes would carry record crowds and afford everyone a perfect view of each stage, Donald couldn’t help but think that all the happy accidents had some larger purpose. It was as if the facility had been planned from the beginning to serve the 2052 National Convention, as if it had been built with more than its original goal in mind.

A large blue flag with a white tree and crescent moon swayed lazily over the South Carolina stage. Mick parked the four-wheeler in a sea of other ATVs ringing the large hospitality tent.

Following Mick through the parked vehicles, Donald saw that they were heading towards a smaller tent, which was swallowing a ton of traffic.

‘What kind of errand are we on?’ he asked.

Not that it mattered. In recent days they’d done a little of everything around the facility: running bags of ice to various state headquarters, meeting with congressmen and senators to see if they needed anything, making sure all the volunteers and delegates were settling into their trailers okay — whatever the Senator needed.

‘Oh, we’re just taking a little tour,’ Mick said cryptically. He waved Donald into the small tent where workers were filing through in one direction with their arms loaded and coming out the other side empty-handed.

The inside of the small tent was lit up with floodlights, the ground packed hard from the traffic, the grass matted flat. A concrete ramp led deep into the earth, workers with volunteer badges trudging up one side. Mick jumped into the line heading down.

Donald knew where they were going. He recognised the ramp. He hurried up beside Mick.

‘This is one of the rod storage facilities.’ He couldn’t hide the excitement in his voice, didn’t even try. He’d been dying to see the other design, either on paper or in person. All he was privy to was his bunker project; the rest of the facility remained shrouded in mystery. ‘Can we just go in?’

As if to answer, Mick started down the ramp, blending with the others.

‘I begged for a tour the other day,’ Donald hissed, ‘but Thurman spouted all this national security crap—’

Mick laughed. Halfway down the slope, the roof of the tent seemed to recede into the darkness above, and the concrete walls on either side funnelled the workers towards gaping steel doors.

‘You’re not going to see inside one of those other facilities,’ Mick told him. He put his hand on Donald’s back and ushered him through the industrial-looking and familiar entrance chamber. The foot traffic ground to a halt as people took turns entering or leaving through the small hatch ahead. Donald felt turned around.

‘Wait.’ Donald caught glimpses through the hatch. ‘What the hell? This is my design.’

They shuffled forward. Mick made room for the people coming out. He had a hand on Donald’s shoulder, guiding him along.

‘What’re we doing here?’ Donald asked. He could’ve sworn his own bunker design was in the bowl set aside for Tennessee. Then again, they’d been making so many last-minute changes the past weeks, maybe he’d been mixed up.

‘Anna told me you wimped out and skipped the tour of this place.’

‘That’s bullshit.’ Donald stopped at the oval hatch. He recognised every rivet. ‘Why would she say that? I was right here. I cut the damn ribbon.’

Mick pushed at his back. ‘Go. You’re holding up the line.’

‘I don’t want to go.’ He waved the people out. The workers behind Mick shifted in place, heavy Tupperware containers in their hands. ‘I saw the top floor last time,’ he said. ‘That was enough.’

His friend clasped his neck with one hand and gripped his wrist with the other. As his head was bent forward, Donald had to move along to avoid falling on his face. He tried to reach for the jamb of the interior door, but Mick had his wrist.

‘I want you to see what you built,’ his friend said.

Donald stumbled through to the security office. He and Mick stepped aside to let the congestion they’d caused ease past.

‘I’ve been looking at this damn thing every day for three years,’ Donald said. He patted his pocket for his pills, wondered if it was too soon to take another. What he didn’t tell Mick was that he’d forced himself to envision his design being above ground the entire time he’d worked on it, more a skyscraper than a buried straw. No way could he share that with his best friend, tell him how terrified he felt right then with no more than ten metres of dirt and concrete over his head. He seriously doubted Anna had used the phrase ‘wimped out’, but that’s exactly what he had done after cutting the ribbon. While the Senator led dignitaries through the complex, Donald had hurried up to find a patch of grass with nothing but bright blue sky above.

‘This is really fucking important,’ Mick said. He snapped his fingers in front of Donald. Two lines of workers filed past. Beyond them, a man sat in a small cubicle, a brush in one hand and a can of paint in the other. He was applying a coat of flat grey to a set of steel bars. A technician behind him worked to wire some kind of massive screen into the wall. Not everything looked as if it was being finished precisely the way Donald had drawn it.

‘Donny, listen to me. I’m serious. Today is the last day we can have this talk, okay? I need you to see what you built.’ Mick’s permanent and mischievous grin was gone, his eyebrows tilted. He looked, if anything, sad. ‘Will you please come inside?’

Taking a full breath and fighting the urge to rush out to the hills and fresh air, away from the stifling crowds, Donald found himself agreeing. It was the look on Mick’s face, the feeling that he needed to tell Donald about a loved one who had just passed away, something deathly serious.

Mick patted his shoulder in gratitude as Donald nodded.

‘This way.’

Mick led him towards the central shaft. They passed through the cafeteria, which was being used. It made sense. Workers sat at tables and ate off plastic trays, taking a break. The smell of food drifted from the kitchens beyond. Donald laughed. He never thought they’d be used at all. Again, it felt as though the convention had given this place a purpose. It made him happy. He thought of the entire complex devoid of life one day, all the workers milling about outside storing away nuclear rods, while this massive building that would have touched the clouds had it been above ground, would sit perfectly empty.

Down a short hallway, the tile gave way to metal grating, and a broad cylinder dived straight through the heart of the facility. Anna had been right. It really was worth seeing.

They reached the railing of the central shaft, and Donald paused to peer over. The vast height made him forget for a moment that he was underground. On the other side of the landing, a conveyor lift rattled on its gears while a never-ending series of flat loading trays spun empty over the top. It reminded Donald of the buckets on a waterwheel. The trays flopped over before descending back down through the building.

The men and women from outside deposited each of their containers onto one of the empty trays before turning and heading back out. Donald looked for Mick and saw him disappearing down the staircase.

He hurried after, his fear of being buried alive chasing him.

‘Hey!’

His shoes slapped the freshly painted stairs, the diamond plating keeping him from skidding off in his haste. He caught up with Mick as they made a full circuit of the thick inner post. Tupperware containers full of emergency supplies — supplies Donald figured would rot, unused — drifted eerily downward beyond the rail.

‘I don’t want to go any deeper than this,’ he insisted.

‘Two levels down,’ Mick called back up. ‘C’mon, man, I want you to see.’

Donald numbly obeyed. It would’ve been worse to make his way out alone.

At the first landing they came to, a worker stood by the conveyor with some type of gun. As the next container passed by, he shot its side with a flash of red, the scanner buzzing. The worker leaned on the railing, waiting for the next one while the container continued its ratcheting plummet.

‘Did I miss something?’ Donald asked. ‘Are we still fighting deadlines? What’s with all the supplies?’

Mick shook his head. ‘Deadlines, lifelines,’ he said.

At least, that’s what Donald thought his friend said. Mick seemed lost in thought.

They spiralled down another level to the next landing, ten more metres of reinforced concrete between, thirty-three feet of wasted depth. Donald knew the floor. And not just from the plans he’d drawn. He and Mick had toured a floor like this in the factory where it had been built.

‘I’ve been here before,’ he told Mick.

Mick nodded. He waved Donald down the hallway until it made a turn. Mick picked one of the doors, seemingly at random, and opened it for Donald. Most of the floors had been prefabbed and furnished before being craned into place. If that wasn’t the exact floor the two of them had toured, it had been one of the many just like it.

Once Donald was inside, Mick flicked on the apartment’s overhead lights and closed the door. Donald was surprised to see that the bed was made. Stacks of linen were piled up in a chair. Mick grabbed the linens and moved them to the floor. He sat down and nodded to the foot of the bed.

Donald ignored him and poked his head into the small bathroom. ‘This is actually pretty cool to see,’ he told his friend. He reached out and turned the knob on the sink, expecting nothing. When clear water gurgled out, he found himself laughing.

‘I knew you’d dig it once you saw it,’ Mick said quietly.

Donald caught sight of himself in the mirror, the joy still on his face. He tended to forget how the corners of his eyes wrinkled up when he smiled. He touched his hair, sprinkles of grey even though he had another five years before he was over that proverbial hill. His job was ageing him prematurely. He had feared it might.

‘Amazing that we built this, huh?’ Mick asked. Donald turned and joined his friend in the tight quarters. He wondered if it was the work they’d been elected to perform that had aged them both or if it had been this one project, this all-consuming build.

‘I appreciate you forcing me down here.’ He almost added that he would love to see the rest, but he figured that would be pushing it. Besides, the crews back in the Georgia tents were probably looking for them already.

‘Look,’ Mick said, ‘there’s something I want to tell you.’

Donald looked at his friend, who seemed to be searching for the words. He glanced at the door. Mick was silent. Donald finally relented and sat at the foot of the bed.

‘What’s up?’ he asked.

But he thought he knew. The Senator had included Mick in his other project, the one that had driven Donald to seek help from the doctor. Donald thought of the thick book he had largely memorised. Mick had done the same. And he’d brought him there not just to let him see what they’d accomplished, but to find a spot of perfect privacy, a place where secrets could be divulged. He patted his pocket where he kept his pills, the ones that kept his thoughts from running off to dangerous places.

‘Hey,’ Donald said, ‘I don’t want you saying anything you’re not supposed to—’

Mick looked up, eyes wide with surprise.

‘You don’t need to say anything, Mick. Assume I know what you know.’

Mick shook his head sadly. ‘You don’t,’ he said.

‘Well, assume it anyway. I don’t want to know anything.’

‘I need you to know.’

‘I’d rather not—’

‘It’s not a secret, man. It’s just… I want you to know that I love you like a brother. I always have.’

The two of them sat in silence. Donald glanced at the door. The moment was uncomfortable, but it somehow filled his heart to hear Mick say it.

‘Look—’ Donald started.

‘I know I’m always hard on you,’ Mick said. ‘And hell, I’m sorry. I really do look up to you. And Helen.’ Mick turned to the side and scratched at his cheek. ‘I’m happy for the two of you.’

Donald reached across the narrow space and squeezed his friend’s arm.

‘You’re a good friend, Mick. I’m glad we’ve had this time together, the last few years, running for office, building this—’

Mick nodded. ‘Yeah. Me too. But listen, I didn’t bring you down here to get all sappy like this.’ He reached for his cheek again, and Donald saw that he was wiping at his eyes. ‘I had a talk with Thurman last night. He — a few months ago, he offered me a spot on a team, a top team, and I told him last night that I’d rather you take it.’

‘What? A committee?’ Donald couldn’t imagine his friend giving up an appointment, any kind of appointment. ‘Which one?’

Mick shook his head. ‘No, something else.’

‘What?’ Donald asked.

‘Look,’ Mick said, ‘when you find out about it, and you understand what’s going on, I want you to think of me right here.’ Mick glanced around the room. There were a few breaths of complete silence punctuated by drips of water from the bathroom sink. ‘If I could choose to be anywhere, anywhere in the coming years, it would be right down here with the first group.’

‘Okay. Yeah, I’m not sure what you mean—’

‘You will. Just remember this, all right? That I love you like a brother and that everything happens for a reason. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. For you or for Helen.’

‘Okay.’ Donald smiled. He couldn’t tell if Mick was fucking with him or if his friend had consumed a few too many Bloody Marys from the hospitality tent that morning.

‘All right.’ Mick stood abruptly. He certainly moved as though he were sober. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.’

Mick threw open the door and flicked off the lights.

‘Wimping out, eh?’ Donald called after his friend.

Mick shook his head and the two of them headed back down the hallway. Behind them, they left the small, random apartment in darkness, its little sink dripping. And Donald tried to sort out how he’d gotten turned around, how the Tennessee tent where he’d cut the ribbon had become the one from South Carolina. He almost had it, his subconscious flashing to a delivery of goods, to fifty times more fibre optic than needed, but the connection was lost.

Meanwhile, containers loaded with supplies rumbled down the mammoth shaft. And empty trays rattled up.

20 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY WOKE UP in a fog, groggy and disoriented, his head pulsing. He lifted his hands and groped in front of his face, expecting to find the chill of icy glass, the press of domed steel, the doom of a deep freeze. His hands found only empty air. The clock beside his bed showed it was a little after three in the morning.

He sat up and saw that he had on a pair of gym shorts. He couldn’t remember changing the night before, couldn’t remember going to bed. Planting his feet on the floor, he rested his elbows on his knees, sank his head into his palms and sat there a moment. His entire body ached.

After a few minutes slipped by, he dressed himself in the dark, buckling up his overalls. Light would be bad for his headache. It wasn’t a theory he needed to test.

The hallway outside was still dimmed for the evening, just bright enough to grope one’s way to the shared bathrooms. Troy stole down the hall and headed for the lift.

He hit the ‘up’ button, hesitated, wasn’t sure if that was right. Something tugged at him. He pressed the ‘down’ button as well.

It was too early to go into his office, not unless he wanted to fiddle on the computer. He wasn’t hungry, but he could go up and watch the sun rise. The late shift would be up there drinking coffee. Or he could hit the rec room and go for a jog. That would mean going back to his room to change.

The lift arrived with a beep while he was still deciding. Both lights went off, the up and the down. He could take this lift anywhere.

Troy stepped inside. He didn’t know where he wanted to go.

The lift closed. It waited on him patiently. Eventually, he figured, it would whisk off to heed some other call, pick up a person with purpose, someone with a destination. He could stand there and do nothing and let that other soul decide.

Running his finger across the buttons, he tried to remember what was on each level. There was a lot he’d memorised, but not everything he knew felt accessible. He had a sudden urge to head for one of the lounges and watch TV, just let the hours slide past until he finally needed to be somewhere. This was how the shift was supposed to go. Waiting and then doing. Sleeping and then waiting. Make it to dinner and then make it to bed. The end was always in sight. There was nothing to rebel against, just a routine.

The lift shook into motion. Troy jerked his hand away from the buttons and took a step back. It didn’t show where he was going but it felt as if it had started downwards.

Only a few floors passed before the lift lurched to a halt. The doors opened on a lower apartment level. A familiar face from the cafeteria, a man in reactor red, smiled as he stepped inside.

‘Morning,’ he said.

Troy nodded.

The man turned and jabbed one of the lower buttons, one of the reactor levels. He studied the otherwise blank array, turned and gave Troy a quizzical look.

‘You feeling okay, sir?’

‘Hmm? Oh, yeah.’

Troy leaned forward and pressed sixty-eight. The man’s concern for his well-being must’ve had him thinking of the doctor, even though Henson 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 win nomination for president, only the second such nomination in Donald’s lifetime. And if the pollsters could be believed, this one had more than a chance. Unless the war in Iran took a sudden turn, a milestone would be reached, a final glass ceiling shattered. And it would happen right there in those grand divots in the earth.

More buses churned through the lot and let off their passengers, and Donald pulled out his phone and checked the time. He still had an error icon, the network choked to death from the overwhelming demand. He was surprised, with so much other careful planning, that the committee hadn’t accounted for this and erected a temporary tower or two.

‘Congressman Keene?’

Donald started and turned to find Anna walking along the ridgeline towards him. He glanced down at the Georgia stage but didn’t see her ride. He was surprised she would just walk up. And yet, it was like her to do things the difficult way.

‘I couldn’t tell if that was you,’ she said, smiling. ‘Everyone has the same umbrella.’

‘Yeah, it’s me.’ He took a deep breath, found his chest still felt constricted with nerves whenever he saw her, as though any conversation could get him into trouble.

Anna stepped close as if she expected him to share his umbrella. He moved it to his other hand to give her more space, the drizzle peppering his exposed arm. He scanned the bus lot and searched impossibly for any sign of Helen. She should have been there by now.

‘This is gonna be a mess,’ Anna said.

‘It’s supposed to clear up.’

Someone on the North Carolina stage checked her microphone with a squawk of feedback. ‘We’ll see,’ Anna said. She wrapped her coat tighter against the early morning breeze. ‘Isn’t Helen coming?’

‘Yeah. Senator Thurman insisted. She’s not gonna be happy when she sees how many people are here. She hates crowds. She won’t be happy about the mud, either.’

Anna laughed. ‘I wouldn’t worry about the conditions of the grounds after this.’

Donald thought about all the loads of radioactive waste that would be trucked in. ‘Yeah.’ He saw her point.

He peered down the hill again at the Georgia stage. It would be the site of the first national gathering of delegates later that day, all the most important people under one tent. Behind the stage and among the smoking food tents, the only sign of the underground containment facility was a small concrete tower rising up from the ground, a bristle of antennae sprouting from the top. Donald thought of how much work it would take to haul away all the flags and soaked buntings before the first of the spent fuel rods could finally be brought in.

‘It’s weird to think of a few thousand people from the state of Tennessee stomping around on top of something we designed,’ Anna said. Her arm brushed against Donald’s. He stood perfectly still, wondering if it had been an accident. ‘I wish you’d seen more of the place.’

Donald shivered, more from fighting to remain still than from the cold and moist morning air. He hadn’t told anyone about Mick’s tour the day before. It felt too sacred. He would probably tell Helen about it and no one else. ‘It’s crazy how much time went into something nobody will ever use,’ he said.

Anna murmured her agreement. Her arm was still touching his. There was still no sign of Helen. Donald felt irrationally that he would somehow spot her among the crowds. He usually could. He remembered the high balcony of a place they’d stayed in during their honeymoon in Hawaii. Even from up there, he could spot her taking her early morning walks along the foam line, looking for seashells. There might be a few hundred strollers out on the beach, and yet his eyes would be drawn immediately to her.

‘I guess the only way they were going to build any of this was if we gave them the right kind of insurance,’ Donald said, repeating what the Senator had told him. But it still didn’t feel right.

‘People want to feel safe,’ Anna said. ‘They want to know, if the worst happens, they’ll have someone — something — to fall back on.’

Again, Anna rested against his arm. Definitely not an accident. Donald felt himself withdraw and knew she would sense it too.

‘I was really hoping to tour one of the other bunkers,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘It’d be interesting to see what the other teams came up with. Apparently, though, I don’t have the clearance.’

Anna laughed. ‘I tried the same thing. I’m dying to see our competition. But I can understand them being sensitive. There’s a lot of eyes on this joint.’ She leaned into him once more, ignoring the space he’d made.

‘Don’t you feel that?’ she asked. ‘Like there’s some huge bull’s-eye over this place? I mean, even with the fences and walls down there, you can bet the whole world is gonna be keeping an eye on what happens here.’

Donald nodded. He knew she wasn’t talking about the convention but about what the place would be used for afterwards.

‘Hey, it looks like I’ve got to get back down there.’

He turned to follow her gaze, saw Senator Thurman climbing the hill on foot, a massive black golf umbrella shedding the rain around him. The man seemed impervious to the mud and grime in a way no one else was, the same way he seemed oblivious to the passing of time.

Anna reached over and squeezed Donald’s arm. ‘Congrats again. It was fun working together on this.’

‘Same,’ he said. ‘We make a good team.’

She smiled. He wondered for a moment if she would lean over and kiss his cheek. It would feel natural in that moment. But it came and went. Anna left his protective cover and headed off towards the Senator.

Thurman lifted his umbrella, kissed his daughter’s cheek and watched her descend the hill. He hiked up to join Donald.

They stood beside each other for a pause, the rain dripping off their umbrellas with a muted patter.

‘Sir,’ Donald finally said. He felt newly comfortable in the man’s presence. The last two weeks had been like summer camp, where being around the same people almost every hour of the day brought a level of familiarity and intimacy that knowing them casually for years could never match. There was something about forced confinement that brought people together. Beyond the obvious, physical ways.

‘Damn rain,’ was Thurman’s reply.

‘You can’t control everything,’ Donald said.

The Senator grunted as if he disagreed. ‘Helen not here yet?’

‘No, sir.’ Donald fished in his pocket and felt for his phone. ‘I’ll message her again in a bit. Not sure if my texts are getting through or not — the networks are absolutely crushed. I’m pretty sure this many people descending on this corner of the county is unprecedented.’

‘Well, this will be an unprecedented day,’ Thurman said. ‘Nothing like it ever before.’

‘It was mostly your doing, sir. I mean, not just building this place, but choosing not to run. This country could’ve been yours for the taking this year.’

The Senator laughed. ‘That’s true most years, Donny. But I’ve learned to set my sights higher than that.’

Donald shivered again. He couldn’t remember the last time the Senator had called him that. Maybe that first meeting in his office, more than two years ago? The old man seemed unusually tense.

‘When Helen gets here, I want you to come down to the state tent and see me, okay?’

Donald pulled out his phone and checked the time. ‘You know I’m supposed to be at the Tennessee tent in an hour, right?’

‘There’s been a change of plans. I want you to stay close to home. Mick is going to cover for you over there, which means I need you with me.’

‘Are you sure? I was supposed to meet with—’

‘I know. This is a good thing, trust me. I want you and Helen near the Georgia stage with me. And look—’

The Senator turned to face him. Donald peeled his eyes away from the last of the unloading buses. The rain had picked up a little.

‘You’ve contributed more to this day than you know,’ Thurman said.

‘Sir?’

‘The world is going to change today, Donny.’

Donald wondered if the Senator had been skipping his nanobath treatments. His eyes seemed dilated and focused on something in the distance. He appeared older somehow.

‘I’m not sure I understand—’

‘You will. Oh, and a surprise visitor is coming. She should be here any moment.’ He smiled. ‘The national anthem starts at noon. There’ll be a flyover from the 141st after that. I want you nearby when that happens.’

Donald nodded. He had learned when to stop asking questions and just do what the Senator expected of him.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, shivering against the cold.

Senator Thurman left. Turning his back to the stage, Donald scanned the last of the buses and wondered where in the world Helen was.

22 2110 • Silo 1 •

TROY WALKED DOWN the line of cryopods as if he knew where he was going. It was just like the way his hand had drifted to the button that had brought him to that floor. There were made-up names on each of the panels. He knew this somehow. He remembered coming up with his name. It had something to do with his wife, some way to honour her, or some kind of secret and forbidden link so that he might one day remember.

That all lay in the past, deep in the mist, a dream forgotten. Before his shift there had been an orientation. There were familiar books to read and reread. That’s when he had chosen his name.

A bitter explosion on his tongue brought him to a halt. It was the taste of a pill dissolving. Troy stuck out his tongue and scraped it with his fingers, but there was nothing there. He could feel the ulcers on his gums against his teeth but couldn’t recall how they’d formed.

He walked on. Something wasn’t right. These memories weren’t supposed to return. He pictured himself on a gurney, screaming, someone strapping him down, stabbing him with needles. That wasn’t him. He was holding that man’s boots.

Troy stopped at one of the pods and checked the name. Helen. His gut lurched and groped for its medicine. He didn’t want to remember. That was a secret ingredient: the not wanting to remember. Those were the parts that slipped away, the parts the drugs wrapped their tentacles around and pulled beneath the surface. But now, there was some small part of him that was dying to know. It was a nagging doubt, a feeling of having left some important piece of himself behind. It was willing to drown the rest of him for the answers.

The frost on the glass wiped away with a squeak. He didn’t recognise the person inside and moved on to the next pod, a scene from before orientation coming back to him.

Troy recalled halls packed with people crying, grown men sobbing, pills that dried their eyes. Fearsome clouds rose on a video screen. Women were put away for safety. Like a lifeboat, women and children first.

Troy remembered. It wasn’t an accident. He remembered a talk in another pod, a bigger pod with another man there, a talk about the coming end of the world, about making room, about ending it all before it ended on its own.

A controlled explosion. Bombs were sometimes used to put out fires.

He wiped another frost-covered sheet of glass. The sleeping form in the next chamber had eyelashes that glittered with ice. She was a stranger. He moved on, but it was coming back to him. His arm throbbed. The shakes were gone.

Troy remembered a calamity, but it was all for show. The real threat was in the air, invisible. The bombs were to get people to move, to make them afraid, to get them crying and forgetting. People had spilled like marbles down a bowl. Not a bowl — a funnel. Someone explained why they were spared. He remembered a white fog, walking through a white fog. The death was already in them. Troy remembered a taste on his tongue, metallic.

The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that.

‘Hello?’

Troy turned towards the voice. The night-shift doctor was heading his way, weaving between the pods, coming for him. Troy clasped his hand over the soreness on his arm. He didn’t want to be taken again. They couldn’t make him forget.

‘Sir, you shouldn’t be in here.’

Troy didn’t answer. The doctor stopped at the foot of the pod. Inside, a woman who wasn’t his wife lay in slumber. Wasn’t his wife, but had wanted to be.

‘Why don’t you come with me?’ the doctor asked.

‘I’d like to stay,’ Troy said. He felt a bizarre calmness. All the pain had been ripped away. This was more forceful than forgetting. He remembered everything. His soul had been cut free.

‘I can’t have you in here, sir. Come with me. You’ll freeze in here.’

Troy glanced down. He had forgotten to put on shoes. He curled his toes away from the floor… then allowed them to settle.

‘Sir? Please.’ The young doctor gestured down the aisle. Troy let go of his arm and saw that things were handled as needed. No kicking meant no straps. No shivering meant no needles.

He heard the squeak of hurrying boots out in the hallway. A large man from Security appeared by the open vault door, visibly winded. Troy caught a glimpse of the doctor waving the man down. They were trying not to scare him. They didn’t know that he couldn’t be scared any more.

‘You’ll put me away for good,’ Troy said. It was something between a statement and a question. It was a realisation. He wondered if he was like Hal — like Carlton — if the pills would never take again. He glanced towards the far end of the room, knew the empties were kept there. This was where he would be buried.

‘Nice and easy,’ the doctor said.

He led Troy to the exit; he would embalm him with that bright blue sky. The pods slid by as the two of them walked in silence.

The man from Security took deep breaths as he filled the doorway, his great chest heaving against his overalls. There was a squeak from more boots as he was joined by another. Troy saw that his shift was over. Two weeks to go. He’d nearly made it.

The doctor waved the large men out of the way, seemed to hope they wouldn’t be needed. They took up positions to either side, seemed to think otherwise. Troy was led down the hallway, hope guiding him and fear flanking him.

‘You know, don’t you?’ Troy asked the doctor, turning to study him. ‘You remember everything.’

The doctor didn’t turn to face him. He simply nodded.

This felt like a betrayal. It wasn’t fair.

‘Why are you allowed to remember?’ Troy asked. He wanted to know why those dispensing the medicine didn’t have to take some of their own.

The doctor waved him into his office. His assistant was there, wearing a sleepshirt and hanging an IV bag bulging with blue liquid.

‘Some of us remember,’ the doctor said, ‘because we know this isn’t a bad thing we’ve done.’ He frowned as he helped Troy onto the gurney. He seemed truly sad about Troy’s condition. ‘We’re doing good work here,’ he said. ‘We’re saving the world, not ending it. And the medicine only touches our regrets.’ He glanced up. ‘Some of us don’t have any.’

The doorway was stuffed with security. It overflowed. The assistant unbuckled Troy’s overalls. Troy watched numbly.

‘It would take a different kind of drug to touch what we know,’ the doctor said. He pulled a clipboard from the wall. A sheet of paper was fed into its jaws. There was a pause, and then a pen was pressed into Troy’s palm.

Troy laughed as he signed off on himself.

‘Then why me?’ he asked. ‘Why am I here?’ He had always wanted to ask this of someone who might know. These were the prayers of youth, but now with a chance of some reply.

The doctor smiled and took the clipboard. He was probably in his late twenties, had come on shift just a few weeks ago. Troy was a few years shy of forty. And yet this man had all the wisdom, all the answers.

‘It’s good to have people like you in charge,’ the doctor said, and he seemed to genuinely mean it. The clipboard was returned to its peg. One of the security men yawned and covered his mouth. Troy watched as his overalls were unsnapped and flopped to his waist. A fingernail makes a distinctive click when it taps against a needle.

‘I’d like to think about this,’ Troy said. He felt a sudden panic wash over him. He knew this needed to happen, but wanted just a few more minutes alone with his thoughts, to savour this brief bout of comprehension. He wanted to sleep, certainly, but not quite yet.

The men in the doorway stirred as they sensed Troy’s doubts, could see the fear in his eyes.

‘I wish there was some other way,’ the doctor said sadly. He rested a hand on Troy’s shoulder, guided him back against the table. The men from Security stepped closer.

There was a prick on his arm, a deep bite without warning. He looked down and saw the silver barb slide into his vein, the bright blue liquid pumped inside.

‘I don’t want—’ he said.

There were hands on his shins, his knees, weight on his shoulders. The heaviness against his chest was from something else.

A burning rush flowed through his body, chased immediately by numbness. They weren’t putting him to sleep. They were killing him. Troy knew this as suddenly and swiftly as he knew that his wife was dead, that some other person had tried to take her place. He would go into a coffin for good this time. And all the dirt piled over his head would finally serve some purpose.

Darkness squeezed in around his vision. He closed his eyes, tried to yell for it to stop, but nothing came out. He wanted to kick and fight it, but more than mere hands had a hold of him now. He was sinking.

His last thoughts were of his beautiful wife, but the thoughts made little sense — they were the dream world invading.

She’s in Tennessee, he thought. He didn’t know why or how he knew this. But she was there — and waiting. She was already dead and had a spot hollowed out by her side just for him.

Troy had just one more question, one name he hoped to grope for and seize before he went under, some part of himself to take with him to those depths. It was on the tip of his tongue like a bitter pill, so close that he could taste it—

But then he forgot.

23 2052 Fulton County, Georgia

THE RAIN FINALLY let up just as warring announcements and battling tunes filled the air above the teeming hills. While the main stage was prepped for the evening’s gala, it sounded to Donald as though the real action was taking place at all the other states. Opening bands ripped into their sets as the buzz of ATVs subsided to a trickle.

It felt vaguely claustrophobic to be down in the bottom of the bowl by the Georgia stage. Donald sensed an unquenchable urge for height, to be up on the ridge where he could see what was going on. It left him imagining the sight of thousands of guests arrayed across each of the hills, picturing the political fervour in the air everywhere, the gelling of like-minded families celebrating the promise of something new.

As much as Donald wanted to celebrate new beginnings with them, he was mostly looking forward to the end. He couldn’t wait for the convention to wrap up. The weeks had worn on him. He was looking forward to a real bed, to some privacy, his computer, reliable phone service, dinners out and, most of all: time alone with his wife.

Fishing his phone out of his pocket, he checked his messages for the umpteenth time. They were minutes away from the anthem, and then the flyover from the 141st. He had also heard someone mention fireworks to start the convention off with a bang.

His phone showed that the last half-dozen messages still hadn’t gone through. The network was clogged, an error message popping up that he’d never seen before. At least some of the earlier ones looked as if they’d been sent. He scanned the wet banks for her, hoping to see her making her way down, a smile he could spot from any distance.

Someone stepped up beside him. Donald looked away from the hills to see that Anna had joined him by the stage.

‘Here we go,’ she said quietly, scanning the crowd.

She looked and sounded nervous. Maybe it was for her father, who had done so much to arrange the main stage and make sure everyone was in the right place. Glancing back, he saw that people were taking their seats, chairs wiped down from the morning drizzle, not nearly as many people as it seemed before. They must be either working in the tents or off to the other stages. This was the quiet brewing before the—

‘There she is.’

Anna waved her arms. Donald felt his heart swell up into his neck as he turned and followed Anna’s gaze. His relief was mixed with the panic of Helen seeing him there with her, the two of them waiting side by side.

Shuffling down the hill was certainly someone familiar. A young woman in a pressed blue uniform, a hat tucked under one arm, a dark head of hair wrapped up in a crisp bun.

‘Charlotte?’ Donald shielded his eyes from the glare of the noonday sun filtering through wispy clouds. He gaped in disbelief. All other events and concerns melted away as his sister spotted them and waved back.

‘She sure as hell cut this close,’ Anna muttered.

Donald hurried over to his four-wheeler and turned the key. He hit the ignition, gave the handle some gas, and raced across the wet grass to meet her.

Charlotte beamed as he hit the brakes at the base of the hill. He killed the engine.

‘Hey, Donny.’

His sister leaned in to him before he could dismount. She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed.

He returned her embrace, worried about denting the creases of her neat uniform. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked.

She let go and took a step back, smoothed the front of her shirt. The air-force dress hat disappeared back under her arm, every motion like an ingrained and precise habit.

‘Are you surprised?’ she asked. ‘I thought the Senator would’ve let it slip by now.’

‘Hell, no. Well, he said something about a visitor but not who. I thought you were in Iran. Did he swing this?’

She nodded, and Donald felt his cheeks cramping from smiling so hard. Every time he saw her, there came a relief from discovering that she was still the same person. The sharp chin and splash of freckles across her nose, the shine in her eyes that had not yet dulled from the horrible things she’d seen. She had just turned thirty, had been half a world away with no family on her birthday, but she was frozen in his mind as the young teen who had enlisted.

‘I think I’m supposed to be on the stage for this thing tonight,’ she said.

‘Of course.’ Donald smiled. ‘I’m sure they’ll want you on camera. You know, to show support for the troops.’

Charlotte frowned. ‘Oh, God, I’m one of those people, aren’t I?’

He laughed. ‘I’m sure they’ll have someone from the army, navy and marines there with you.’

‘Oh, God. And I’m the girl.’

They laughed together, and one of the bands beyond the hills finished their set. Donald scooted forward and told his sister to hop on, his chest suddenly less constricted. There had been a shift in the weather, these breaking clouds, the quietening stages, and now the arrival of family.

He cranked the engine and raced through the least muddy path on the way back to the stage, his sister holding on tight behind him. They pulled up beside Anna, his sister hopping off and into her arms. While they chatted, Donald killed the ignition and checked his phone for messages. Finally, one had gotten through.

There was a jarring moment as his brain tried to make sense of the message. It was from Helen. What the hell was she doing in Tennessee?

Another stage fell silent. It took only a heartbeat or two for Donald to realise that she wasn’t hundreds of miles away. She was just over the hill. None of his messages about meeting at the Georgia stage had gone through.

‘Hey, I’ll be right back.’

He cranked the ATV. Anna grabbed his wrist.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

He smiled. ‘Tennessee. Helen just texted me.’

Anna glanced up at the clouds. His sister was inspecting her hat. On the stage, a young girl was being ushered up to the mic. She was flanked by a colour guard, and the seats facing the stage were filling up, necks stretched with anticipation.

Before he could react or put the ATV in gear, Anna reached across, twisted the key and pulled it out of the ignition.

‘Not now,’ she said.

Donald felt a flash of rage. He reached for her hands, for the key, but it disappeared behind her back.

‘Wait,’ she hissed.

Charlotte had turned towards the stage. Senator Thurman stood with a microphone in hand, the young girl, maybe sixteen, beside him. The hills had grown deathly quiet. Donald realised what a racket the ATV had been making. The girl was about to sing.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Democrats—’

There was a pause. Donald got off the four-wheeler, took a last glance at his phone, then tucked it away.

‘—and our handful of Independents.’

Laughter from the crowd. Donald set off at a jog across the flat at the bottom of the bowl. His shoes squished in the wet grass and the thin layer of mud. Senator Thurman’s voice continued to roar through the microphone:

‘Today is the dawn of a new era, a new time.’

Donald was out of shape, his shoes growing heavy with mud.

‘As we gather in this place of future independence—’

By the time the ground sloped upward, he was already winded.

‘—I’m reminded of the words from one of our enemies. A Republican.’

Distant laughter, but Donald paid no heed. He was concentrating on the climb.

‘It was Ronald Reagan who once said that freedom must be fought for, that peace must be earned. As we listen to this anthem, written a long time ago as bombs dropped and a new country was forged, let’s consider the price paid for our freedom and ask ourselves if any cost could be too great to ensure that these liberties never slip away.’

A third of the way up — and Donald had to stop and catch his breath. His calves were going to give out before his lungs did. He regretted puttering around on the ATV the past weeks while some of the others slogged it on foot. He promised himself he’d get in better shape.

He started back up the hill, and a voice like ringing crystal filled the bowl. It spilled in synchrony over the looming rise. He turned towards the stage below where the national anthem was being sung by the sweetest of young voices—

And he saw Anna hurrying up the hill after him, a scowl of worry on her face.

Donald knew he was in trouble. He wondered if he was dishonouring the anthem by scurrying up the hill. Everyone had assigned places for the anthem and he was ignoring his. He turned his back on Anna and set off with renewed resolve.

‘—o’er the ramparts we watched—’

He laughed, out of breath, wondering if these mounds of earth could be considered ramparts. It was easy to see the bowls for what they’d become in the last weeks, individual states full of people, goods and livestock, fifty state fairs bustling at once, all for this shining day, all to be gone once the facility was up and running.

‘—and the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air—’

He reached the top of the hill and sucked in deep lungfuls of crisp, clean air. On the stage below, flags swayed idly in a soft breeze. A large screen showed a video of the girl singing about proof and still being there.

A hand seized his wrist.

‘Come back,’ Anna hissed.

He was panting. Anna was also out of breath, her knees covered in mud and grass stains. She must’ve slipped on the way up.

‘Helen doesn’t know where I am,’ he said.

‘—bannerrr yet waaaaave—’

Applause stirred before the end, a compliment. The jets streaking in from the distance caught his eye even before he heard their rumble. A diamond pattern with wing tips nearly touching.

‘Get the fuck back down here,’ Anna yelled. She yanked on his arm.

Donald twisted his wrist away. He was mesmerised by the sight of the jets approaching.

‘—o’er the laaand of the freeeeeee—’

That sweet and youthful voice lifted up from fifty holes in the earth and crashed into the thunderous roar of the powerful jets, those soaring and graceful angels of death.

‘Let go,’ Donald demanded, as Anna grabbed him and scrambled to pull him back down the hill.

‘—and the hooome of the… braaaaave…’

The air shook from the grumble of the perfectly timed fly-by. Afterburners screamed as the jets peeled apart and curved upward into the white clouds.

Anna was practically wrestling him, arms wrapped around his shoulders. Donald snapped out of a trance induced by the passing jets, the beautiful rendition of the anthem amplified across half a county, the struggle to spot his wife in the bowl below.

‘Goddammit, Donny, we’ve got to get down—’

The first flash came before she could get her hands over his eyes. A bright spot in the corner of his vision in the direction of downtown Atlanta. It was a daytime strike of lightning. Donald turned towards it, expecting thunder. The flash of light had become a blinding glow. Anna’s arms were around his waist, jerking him backward. His sister was there, panting, covering her eyes, screaming, ‘What the fuck?’

Another flash of light, starbursts in one’s vision. Sirens spilled out of all the speakers. It was the recorded sound of air-raid klaxons.

Donald felt half blinded. Even when the mushroom clouds rose up from the earth — impossibly large to be so distant — it still took a heartbeat to realise what was happening.

They pulled him down the hill. Applause had turned to screams audible over the rise and fall of the blaring siren. Donald could hardly see. He stumbled backward and nearly fell as the three of them slipped and slid down the bowl, the wet grass funnelling them towards the stage. The puffy tops of the swelling clouds rose up higher and higher, staying in sight even as the rest of the hills and the trees disappeared from view.

‘Wait!’ he yelled.

There was something he was forgetting. He couldn’t remember what. He had an image of his ATV sitting up on the ridge. He was leaving it behind. How did he get up there? What was happening?

‘Go. Go. Go,’ Anna was saying.

His sister was cussing. She was frightened and confused, just like him. He had never known his sister to be either one.

‘The main tent!’

Donald spun around, his heels slipping in the grass, hands wet with rain and studded with mud and grass. When had he fallen?

The three of them tumbled down the last of the slope as the sound of distant thunder finally reached them. The clouds overhead seemed to race away from the blasts, pushed aside by an unnatural wind. The undersides of the clouds strobed and flashed as if more strikes of lightning were hitting, more bombs detonating. Down by the stage, people weren’t running to escape the bowl — they were instead running into the tents, guided by volunteers with waving arms, the markets and food stalls clearing out, the rows of wooden chairs now a heaped and upturned tangle, a dog still tied to a post, barking.

Some people still seemed to be aware, to have their faculties intact. Anna was one of them. Donald saw the Senator by a smaller tent coordinating the flow of traffic. Where was everyone going? Donald felt empty as he was ushered along with the others. It took long moments for his brain to process what he’d seen. Nuclear blasts. The live view of what had for ever been resigned to grainy wartime video. Real bombs going off in the real air. Nearby. He had seen them. Why wasn’t he completely blind? Was that even what happened?

The raw fear of death overtook him. Donald knew, in some recess of his mind, that they were all dead. The end of all things was coming. There was no outrunning it. No hiding. Paragraphs from a book he’d read came to mind, thousands of memorised paragraphs. He patted his pants for his pills, but they weren’t there. Looking over his shoulder, he fought to remember what he’d left behind—

Anna and his sister pulled him past the Senator, who wore a hard scowl of determination. He frowned at his daughter. The tent flap brushed Donald’s face, the darkness within interspersed with a few hanging lights. The spots in his vision from the blasts made themselves known in the blackness. There was a crush of people, but not as many as there should have been. Where were the crowds? It didn’t make sense until he found himself shuffling downward.

A concrete ramp, bodies on all sides, shoulders jostling, people wheezing, yelling for one another, hands outstretched as the flowing crush drove loved ones away, husband and wife separated, some people crying, some perfectly poised—

Husband and wife.

Helen!

Donald yelled her name over the crowd. He turned and tried to swim against the flowing torrent of the frightened mob. Anna and his sister pulled on him. People fighting to get below pushed from above. Donald was forced downward, into the depths. He wanted to go under with his wife. He wanted to drown with her.

‘Helen!’

Oh, God, he remembered.

He remembered what he had left behind.

Panic subsided and fear took its place. He could see. His vision had cleared. But he could not fight the push of the inevitable.

Donald remembered a conversation with the Senator about how it would all end. There was an electricity in the air, the taste of dead metal on his tongue, a white mist rising around him. He remembered most of a book. He knew what this was, what was happening.

His world was gone.

A new one swallowed him.