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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.
Troy glanced at the view and felt there was something he was supposed to know, something he kept forgetting.
Donald thought about what it cost a family to do a country proud.
TROY PLAYED A hand of solitaire while silo twelve collapsed.
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 thinks the lottery is being gamed or that there’s something wrong with our computers.’
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.
11
The interspersed chapters interrupt the flow of tension. This one in particular is badly placed.
Heavy doors and sturdy men
Somehow, the pressure of a young and pretty woman watching was stronger than his abject terror
‘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.
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.
Here was a boy between his teens and twenties, an age deep in doubts and shallow in control.
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.
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.
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.
‘That word means something else, you know,’ his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. ‘It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.’
There had been an explosion of newborns after the violence the last generation had wrought, but these days it was just the trickle of natural deaths and the handful of lottery winners.
His skin was the colour of oiled wood, an unhealthy darkness from working too long under the grow lights. It was called a ‘tan’, and you could spot a farmer two landings away because of it.
‘The old ports have bad knees is why we get the heavy loads. Besides, my bonus pay is judged by the pound and the time I make, so I don’t mind.’ ‘Oh, yes.’ His father waved at Mission’s feet. ‘They pay you in bonuses and you pay them with your knees.’
Everyone was trying to look after themselves in case the violence returned. Mission could feel it brewing, the suspicion and the distrust, the walls being built. Everyone was trying to get a little less reliant on the others, preparing for the inevitable, hunkering down.
A man may take his own life, he supposed, as long as he didn’t take another’s job.
He thought of his mother and wondered what she had been like, beyond the disobedience that had cost her life. That was all he knew of his mom. He knew the implant in her hip had failed, as one in ten thousand might. And instead of reporting the malfunction – and the pregnancy – she had hidden him in loose clothes until it was past the time the Pact allowed a child to be treated as a cyst.
But past a certain date, and one life was traded for another. Such was the Pact. Born behind bars, Mission had been allowed free while his mother had been sent outside to clean.
I think Victor was fond of you. He talked about you a lot.’ ‘Victor talked about me?’ Donald remembered the man across the hall from him, the shrink. Anna reached up and wiped underneath her eyes. ‘Yes. He was a brilliant man, could tell what you were thinking, what anyone was thinking. He planned most of this. Wrote the Order, the original Pact. It was all his design.’
‘I was beautiful, once, you know.’ Mrs Crowe withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap. ‘Once that’s gone, once it leaves us for good, no one will ever see it again.’
‘When I found nanos in her blood, I knew this was the right thing to do.’
Could the Syndrome in the show be nano related?
‘When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.’
And the two of them were alone in that room where wars were waged. They were trapped together with those crates of arms, with guns and ammo, and far more dangerous things.
Often, it was the man with the most promises who got the chits, not the one who made people better.
He stabbed a yellowish-orange gelatinous blob that he assumed had once been part of a peach and put it in his mouth. He chewed, tasting nothing. He pretended it tasted like a peach.
He speared another wedge of mystery fruit and popped it into his mouth. Mango, he told himself, just for variety.
So this was all Donald had: a liar’s account of what a dead man had said. Liars and dead men – two parties unskilled at dispensing the truth.
He had found a laminated map in one crate, a chart of the fifty silos. There were red lines that radiated from the silos, one from each, and met at a single point in the distance.
He saw how only those who made the laws were allowed to break them.
‘Someone in silo eighteen remembers,’ Donald said with confidence. ‘Maybe a bunch of people, passing the knowledge in secret from generation to generation. Or they’re immune like me. They remember.’
The torchbearers or whatever
‘May your steps rise to the heavens,’ she whispered.
He laboured not to sob, seeing himself for the first time in that utter darkness, knowing his soul more fully in that deathly ritual of being ported to his grave, this sad awakening on his birthday.
The shadow spoke of a culture forming that overvalued individuality, of children that wanted to get away from their families, of generations living levels apart and independence stressed until no one relied on anyone and everyone was dispensable.
As ever, the colour you wore said everything. People thought they could know you at a glance.
They told him to stay awake, but all he’d ever wanted was to sleep. To not be. To not be a burden to anyone.
THE LOUD CAME before the quiet. That was a Rule of the World, for the bangs and shouts need somewhere to echo, just as bodies need space in which to fall.
Jimmy tasted fear in his mouth like a dry spoon on his tongue.
The difference in tone for Jimmy/Solo as a narrator is clear and fascinating
One side of the key formed a circle with three wedges inside – the symbol of the silo.
Standing was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Jimmy’s cheek made a tearing sound as he lifted it from the grating. He wiped the drool from the side of his face and felt the ridges there, the deep creases and the places his skin puckered out. His joints were stiff. His eyes were crusted together from crying.
His stomach rumbled and spun inside his belly, but he didn’t want to eat. He wanted to waste away completely. He glared up at the lights overhead that drilled into his skull. His stomach was angry with him. Everything was angry with him.
Halfway down the ladder, he thought of himself as a piece of food sliding through some great metal neck. This was what a swallowed bite felt like.
