The chapter

It is the year 2110, somewhere deep beneath the hills of Fulton County, Georgia. A man named Troy wakes up inside something like a tomb. A sheet of frosted glass sits just above his face. He sees dark shapes moving beyond it. He tries to lift his arms and pound on the glass, but he is far too weak. He tries to scream, but he can only cough. His mouth tastes awful.

Heavy locks clank open. Air hisses. Old hinges squeak. Bright lights shine down, and warm hands help him sit up. His breath clouds in the cold air. Someone gives him cool water and some bitter pills. He can't even hold the glass by himself. Memories rush back as he drinks, like scraps of long nightmares. He has a strange feeling of deep time, as if yesterday and the far past are mixed together.

Two men dressed in white help him. They put him in a paper gown, peel tape off his skin and pull a tube out of his body. Then they lift him out of the coffin. Steam swirls around them. Troy blinks at the glare and looks around. Rows and rows of coffins stretch away toward curved walls in the distance. They are full of living people, still asleep. The ceiling feels low. He can sense the weight of all the dirt piled above him. He also feels the weight of the years. So many have passed. Anyone he cared about must be gone.

The pills sting his throat. His memories begin to fade, like dreams do after waking. He feels his hold on everything he knew starting to slip. He falls backward, but the men expected this. They catch him and lower him gently to the floor. Pictures from his past keep falling on him, then vanishing. The narrator explains that the pills can only do so much. Wiping out the past will take time.

Troy sobs into his hands. One of the men rests a kind hand on his head. They don't hurry him. This small kindness, the chapter says, is passed from each waking man to the next. Every man sleeping in these coffins will wake one day and go through the same thing. And, in time, they will forget.

The chapter

In Washington, DC, in 2049, Congressman Donald Keene waits to meet Senator Paul Thurman. Donald is newly elected, in his mid-thirties, and from Georgia, like the Senator. Other new Georgia congressmen wait too. One from Atlanta won't stop talking about a government guide for surviving zombies. Donald studies the glass cases instead. There is the Senator's old military uniform and coins from troops serving overseas now. That makes him think of his sister, Charlotte, who is deployed. Photos show Thurman shaking hands with the last four presidents. To Donald, the presidents look eager and the Senator looks bored, as if he is the more powerful man.

The receptionist calls Donald in. His old college friend Mick Webb comes out of the Senator's office holding a folder, pleased with how it went. Donald is nervous. He has known Thurman since childhood, when the Senator bounced him on his knee. Thurman is about seventy, fit and military-looking. He asks after Donald's wife, Helen. The dark storm clouds outside make Donald dread taking the underground tunnels back. He hates being below ground.

Thurman asks how good Donald is at keeping secrets. Then he lectures him on denial. The truth always gets out, he says, but it gets lost among the lies. So you deny everything the same way. He asks if Donald believes in aliens. He says they are real, then laughs and says of course not. He mocks the dream of living on other planets. Donald says humans have always wanted open space, like America. Thurman replies that settlers didn't find space here. They made people sick, killed them and made space.

The folder is about CAD-FAC, the Containment and Disposal Facility. It is the center of Thurman's new energy bill. It will one day hold most of the world's used nuclear fuel in Georgia. Online rumors call it everything from a secret base to a superbomb factory. Donald privately supports it. Inside the folder, he finds a drawing he made in college: a plain, round tower about a hundred floors tall, with homes, work and shops on different levels. There is also a list of requirements, like a client's request: traffic flow, air systems, hydroponics.

Thurman wants Donald to design this building for real, with much more detail. He should replace the sunlight with grow lights. Money is no problem, and there will be a team of engineers. Thurman calls it a just-in-case building. It is a shelter where workers could go if there were an attack or a leak. The fuel site can't be approved without it, like an emergency escape window in a basement. It must be perfect, or the whole project could be shut down. Mick is working on logistics. And Anna, Thurman's daughter, is taking leave from MIT to be the lead engineer. Donald's hand shakes at her name.

Donald realizes Thurman backed his election for this job, not because of old family ties. He asks again why it needs grow lights. Because, Thurman says, the building is going underground.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy is having a medical check after his long sleep. A doctor in white overalls takes his blood pressure. Troy tries to stay calm because he wants his numbers to look good. They are low, but normal. His legs look pale and bony in the blue paper gown. He still can't make a fist. The doctor says his strength will come back. Troy notices an unwrapped half-eaten sandwich in the fridge, next to urine samples.

The doctor says Troy is the third man he has brought out of sleep, and he has put two under. He himself has only been awake a few weeks. His assistant hands Troy another blue pill. It's a double dose this morning. After that, Troy will take one with breakfast and one with dinner. He must never skip one. When Troy asks what happens if he doesn't take it, the doctor just frowns and says nothing. Troy swallows it. He will have a check-up again in six months, though by then a different doctor will see him, since this one's shift will be over. The doctor asks if he's cold. Troy says no, not anymore.

Troy takes the lift. His orders tell him how to get to his office, but he half remembers anyway. His orientation survived the decades of sleep. He remembers studying the same book again and again, alongside thousands of men assigned to shifts. The women were put under too. Oddly, the orientation feels like yesterday, while older memories are slipping away. His apartment is on floor 37 and his office on 34. But some pull makes him press the very top button. He wants to rise through the soil. There are seventy floors. Many buttons are worn dull, which feels wrong. To him they were new just yesterday.

He is wearing stiff boots and itchy gray overalls. He thinks about waking like this nine more times: ten shifts of six months each, which he never volunteered for. In the top-floor cafeteria, the chatter dies down when he walks in. People wear red, yellow and orange. Nobody else wears gray. He isn't allowed real food for six hours, only the paste he was given. He remembers the canned food from orientation. Now he will eat it for months, even hundreds of years. A young man walks past and calls him "sir." Troy thinks he might know him.

An older man with wispy white hair asks if this is his first shift. It will be the older man's second. Troy notices the room is all men. He was told why this is safer, but can't remember the reason. Nobody gives names. On the huge wall screen, dust and low clouds hang over scorched gray hills. Mangled debris and sagging metal poles are scattered across a field, their tents and flags long gone. Troy almost remembers something about it. The man says the lounge has a better view. Troy knows this part of the building better than the man could guess. He says he has seen enough. He hurries back toward the lift, shaking. He wants to be alone to cry.

The chapter

In Washington, DC, in 2049, Donald hurries through the rain with Thurman's folder tucked inside his jacket. He would rather get soaked than take the underground tunnels, because tight spaces make him panic. He reaches the Rayburn building, where members of the House have their offices. A guard scans his badge. Donald checks that the folder is dry. He wonders why paper is still thought safer than email.

Upstairs, the hallway is busy. Pages rush by with coffee. A TV crew films outside Amanda Kelly's office. Worried voters look lost, while smiling lobbyists stride around like they own the place. Donald pretends to read so nobody stops him. In his office, his secretary, Margaret, says he has a visitor. She let a woman in with a delivery from the Senator. Donald asks Margaret to clear an hour or two every morning for this new project. She hisses at him to fix his wet hair.

Someone is wriggling under his desk. Donald knows who it is before she comes out: Anna Thurman. He feels guilty and angry that she turned up without warning. She has set up a second computer screen, a gift from her father, and scolds him about the dust under the desk. She acts relaxed, as if they saw each other yesterday. She says she moved to town last week and meant to visit him and Helen. Donald realizes she was installing the screen while her father was still asking him to take the job. What if he'd said no? Anna raises one eyebrow, just like her father. Her dad, she says flatly, practically handed him the election.

Donald mentions her father hasn't aged a day. Anna says he takes nano treatments almost religiously. They started because of his knees. Donald pretends he hadn't heard of them. They cost a fortune and slow down aging. When he says he would never use them, she asks if he thinks she needs them. He says no and backs off. She warns that he'll feel differently once his joints start aching.

Donald feels her closeness strongly: her perfume, her hand near his. He wonders if just sitting near her counts as cheating on Helen. Anna explains that her father wants her to design the mechanical spaces. She is taking a break from the Institute until this Atlanta project is up and running. She suggests meeting once a week. Donald thinks of what Helen would say. He says his schedule is crazy and suggests sharing files online, email or video calls instead. Anna looks disappointed, and he almost apologizes. But that would admit the real problem: he doesn't trust himself around her.

As she leaves with the empty box, she warns him again about the dust. Then she tells him he looks great and fixes his hair before he can stop her. Donald freezes. When he moves again, she's gone, and he stands there soaked in guilt.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy is running late on the first day of his first shift. Upset after the cafeteria, he took the slow lift by mistake. It stops at every floor. A man pushes in a heavy cart. Another man carrying green onions stands close, and the smell stays after he leaves. Nobody speaks. Troy gives one violent shiver but thinks nothing of it. When he gets off on floor 34, he can't remember why he was upset.

A security station blocks the hall. The carpet is worn and the turnstile's steel is rubbed dull. To Troy, these years of wear seem to have appeared by magic. He presses his palm to a hazy screen, and the bar clicks open. He follows a map on the back of his orders, past small offices full of typing and ringing phones. The noise makes him tired and unsure he can do this job.

A man in a doorway calls his name. It's Merriman, the man he is replacing. Merriman says Troy is late and waves him in. He sips a bright blue drink from a thermos, which tastes awful. Troy recognizes the office, though it has aged. Merriman says things have been quiet, apart from some mechanical problems at the start. He recommends a sharp worker named Jones, who works in the power plant on floor 68 and can fix nearly anything. Some workers have been put in the deep freeze because they were unfit for another shift. Merriman warns him not to do this lightly. Many men would rather sleep than work. Then Merriman leaves, and Troy is suddenly in charge.

Troy chases him down. Merriman praises him for leaving the light on: good habits. A heavyset man says goodbye to Merriman and shrugs at Troy, saying he's off in two weeks. Merriman hands him what's left of the thermos. In the express lift, Troy admits he fell behind at orientation because of a sudden promotion. Is he just here in case something goes wrong? No, Merriman says. His job is to make sure nothing goes wrong. Has he read the Order? Troy nods, but he studied to run a single silo, not the one that oversees all the others. Merriman's advice: follow the script and say little when other silos call. Their people are mostly second- and third-generation survivors, so their words have drifted. Troy's folder has a cheat sheet and a list of forbidden words.

Down below, the doctor is preparing an IV. Merriman strips to the waist and holds out his pale arm for the needle. He tells Troy to see Victor, in the psych office across the hall from his. Some silos are fracturing more than expected. Troy should try to get a handle on it.

Troy looks down the hall toward the deep freeze. The women and children are kept there, along with men who couldn't finish their shifts. He feels pulled toward it. The doctor and Merriman both say no. Merriman visited in his first weeks and calls it a mistake. Let it go, he says. The six months go fast. Troy heads back to the lift, hoping his shifts will flash by.

The chapter

In Washington, DC, in 2049, Donald works so late that it's past eleven before he notices. He panics. He promised his wife, Helen, he would always call before ten. She answers before it even rings, sleepy and more relieved than angry. She jokes about whether he wrote any good laws. He says he's busy with a project for the Senator. He has spent all week unsure how much to tell her. Anna's perfume still seems to hang in the air a week later. He feels guilty even though he has done nothing wrong.

He sips Scotch and tells Helen it's architecture work, for the facility outside Atlanta. He admits he loves it and would have made a decent architect. Helen asks why they don't hire someone who knows what they're doing. She reminds him he could have stayed home and been an architect. When Donald says the Senator sees it as a family project, she catches the word "family." He says it means he'll come home more, to visit the job site. She says his dog misses him.

Then Donald tells her the Senator's daughter is working with him, and Mick Webb too. There's a cold silence. Helen remembers Anna. She says Donald and Anna used to date, and Anna flirted with him even when Helen was there. Donald laughs it off as a lifetime ago. Helen suggests they talk tomorrow. Donald promises nothing will come between them. Helen says he's a good husband, but she doesn't trust the people around him. He promises to be careful.

Donald goes back to the plans. On screen is a wireframe apartment. Zooming out, he sees a hallway and dozens of identical wedge-shaped homes. The specs ask for a bunker that can hold ten thousand people for at least a year. He thinks that's overkill. He imagines workers fleeing underground after a toxic spill, a leak or an attack. Other floors wait to be filled, and some mechanical spaces are left empty for Anna.

Mick barges in, stubbled and loose-tied, and asks Donald out for a drink. Donald hides the plans. Mick teases him about the second screen and an abandoned card game. Donald says the plans are top secret. Mick points out that he's working on the same project. Donald explains that even his own team won't see the whole plan, and neither will he. That's how these things work. He agrees to one drink, even though Mick teases him for working on a Saturday.

As they leave, Donald's direct line rings. He expects Helen, but it's Senator Thurman. Somehow he knows Mick is there. He wants them both in his office Monday morning to plan their first trip to the job site. He reminds Donald not to share details with other project members, Mick included. Then he jokes that if Mick starts blabbing, Donald may kill him on the spot. He laughs and hangs up. Donald wonders how the Senator knew about Mick. As he leaves, the new monitor seems to watch him blankly.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy pushes his battered plastic tray along the cafeteria serving line. His badge is scanned. Measured portions drop out of tubes behind the glass: canned string beans, a perfectly round slice of turkey still ridged from the tin, a spurt of mashed potatoes and a squirt of gravy. A heavyset man in white coveralls stands behind the line with his hands clasped. He isn't watching the food. He is watching the workers.

At the end of the line, a young man in pale green coveralls adds silverware, a napkin and a glass of water. Then comes the last step, a ritual Troy remembers from orientation. He is handed a little plastic cup with a blue pill rattling inside. The young man calls him "sir." Everyone does, even much older men, and it makes Troy uncomfortable. He swallows the pill dry. The heavyset man is watching him. People think Troy is in charge, but he doesn't believe it. To him, he's just another man doing a job and following a script.

Troy sits facing the big screen. The scorched world outside no longer upsets him. It has become strangely comforting. It gives him a dull ache in his chest, which is almost like feeling something. Potatoes and gravy wash away the pill's bitterness, which water never can. The sun sets on the first week of his first shift. Twenty-five weeks to go. Put that way, it feels shorter than half a year.

An older man in blue overalls sits down diagonally across from him, careful not to block the view. Troy recognizes him from the recycling bin on his first day. Troy keeps feeling there is something he is supposed to know. Each morning he wakes with memories close by, but by breakfast they are fading, and by dinner they are gone. It leaves him sad and hollow, like rainy childhood days with nothing to do.

The man asks how things are going. He says he goes by Hal. They raise their glasses instead of shaking hands. Troy gives his name. Hal says he's noticed that some people sit facing the screen and some sit with their backs to it. He guesses that the watchers are trying to remember something. The ones who look away, like himself, are trying hard to forget. Troy knows they shouldn't be talking like this, but he wants to hear more.

Hal says it's only the bad things that slip away. The unimportant things, they remember just fine. Doesn't that make you wonder, he asks, why everyone feels so rotten inside? Then he finishes eating, nods goodbye and leaves. Troy sits alone, staring at the screen with an ache he can't name. The hills fade into the dark, cloudy sky.

The chapter

In Washington, DC, in 2049, Donald walks to a meeting with Senator Thurman. The rain has finally stopped. He wonders why the meeting is at Kramerbooks, an old bookshop with a café, when there are better coffee places near the office. Inside, the café is packed with people in suits. A Secret Service agent with an earpiece and indoor sunglasses nods him toward the back. There, among old shelves smelling of mildew and leather, the Senator is browsing.

Without saying hello, Thurman hands him a heavy, leather-bound French novel over a hundred years old. He asks what Donald thinks of the binding. The pages are very thin and stitched with blue and gold thread. Donald says it's beautiful. Thurman says it's a sample for another project. Then he asks about Donald's sister, Charlotte. She has gone back to the war for another tour. Thurman is proud of her. Donald explains she couldn't settle at home and may not relax until the war is over. Thurman says she may not find peace even then.

Thurman offers to write to her and suggest she see someone. Donald says she won't see a therapist. Thurman mentions pills that can help with battle fatigue. Donald says she took them, but they made her forgetful and gave her a tic. He thinks of tremors but doesn't say it. He remembers looking at photos from Mexico with her. She insisted she had never been to Cozumel as a child, though they went together. They argued, and Donald cried. Doctors said parts of her life were erased because she probably wanted to forget them. Thurman promises to talk to her. He says she pilots drones, so she isn't in physical danger. Not physical, Donald says. He has seen drone videos where people look up at the sky in their last moments.

Thurman changes the subject. Donald and Mick will go to Atlanta to check on the digging. Donald is shocked that it has already started. Thurman explains that the whole complex is being built at once. The outer walls and foundations are poured first, since their size is fixed. Then each structure will be filled from the bottom up, with whole furnished floors lowered by crane before the slabs between them are poured. A hundred crews from a dozen countries are working on top of one another. He needs the two of them to report back on the mess.

He also wants them to meet Charlie Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma, who served with Thurman and is handling most of the building materials. Thurman says he wants to move Donald and Mick into higher levels of the project, since the leadership team is short a few dozen people. Anna says she and Donald make a great team. Donald feels proud, but also burdened. Helen won't like it. Everything needs layers of clearance, and he can only talk about it with Mick and Anna.

The agent comes back with a shopping bag holding the French book and studies Donald through his sunglasses. Not for the first time, Donald feels watched. Thurman shakes his hand, and agents walk him out. Donald only relaxes once they are gone.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy studies the Book of the Order at his desk. Its spine is stitched to last. He is preparing for his first official act as head of Operation Fifty. To him it feels like cutting a ribbon, taking credit for others' work. He thinks the Order is more a recipe book than a manual. The psychologists who wrote it planned for every quirk of human nature. Troy wonders whether his own job matters. He was trained to run one silo and promoted at the last minute. Maybe he is only there so others feel they are being led.

He can see Victor across the hall in the Office for Psychological Services. Troy thinks the psych people designed this place more than any architect did. He wonders how they made everyone feel so empty. Part of it, he's sure, is that silo 1's women and children are kept asleep while the men take shifts. That removes passion, and stops the men fighting. The rest is mind-numbing routine with no days off: six months on, decades off. He envies the other silos, where he imagines children laughing and women's voices. Here, men sit in a daze in front of looping movies. No one is truly alive. They must have wanted it that way, he thinks.

He walks to the communications room. Two techs in orange coveralls frown up at him. Saul, a lead radio tech, greets him. They live on the same executive wing. Saul's face tickles some deeper memory that Troy has learned to ignore. Troy is given a headset. Saul plugs it into one of fifty numbered sockets, like an old phone switchboard. Shaky from the pills, Troy nearly bursts into nervous giggles.

The call is to test a future silo head. Saul gives him a card of set questions, and sensors in the young man's headset will measure him. The candidate says his name is Marcus Dent. He shadowed a Deputy Willis, moved to IT Security a year ago, and has studied the Order for six weeks. Troy almost says "facility" instead of "silo." Marcus's primary duty is to maintain the Order. He protects Life and Legacy above all. At that answer, Troy's eyes blur with tears and his hand shakes. Something is powerfully wrong with him. What does it take to protect what they hold dear? "Sacrifice," Marcus says.

For a relaxed baseline, Troy asks if he has a girlfriend. Marcus says yes, Melanie, who works in IT, and they've applied to marry. The shivers pass. Troy welcomes him to Operation Fifty of the World Order. Marcus asks one question. His great-grandmother, who had dementia, used to let slip things about the old world. Doctors said she resisted her medication. Troy dislikes hearing this. Marcus asks if everything in the Legacy is true. Troy pictures the rows of edited history books from orientation. Yes, he says. It's all true. He doesn't add that much was left out. The Legacy is the allowed truth. The lies, he thinks, are kept here in silo 1, a drug-hazed asylum somehow in charge of humanity's survival.

The chapter

In Fulton County, Georgia, in 2049, Donald and Mick visit the construction site. Loaders dump soil to build new hills, while dump trucks haul dirt out of deep pits through gaps between them. Those gaps will be closed later, leaving gentle creases between the hills. In their white shirts and ties, sweating in the heat, the two congressmen look out of place among the workers. Atlanta's towers rise in the distance. A whole corner of the county has been cleared, and bits of a golf course remain. A huge staging area holds thousands of shipping containers, more than Donald thinks necessary. On government projects, he is learning, things are done to excess or not at all.

A city of trailers houses thousands of workers. Flags from many nations fly above them, because spent nuclear fuel from around the world will be buried here. Many delays come from language barriers. Crews can't talk to their neighbors, so each works on its own plans and ignores the rest. Mick learns they are already two months behind, six months after breaking ground. Donald jokes that elected officials are pretending to do private-sector jobs.

They pass a deep bowl where mixer trucks pour concrete. Donald says it scares him that one of these holes will hold the building he drew, with billions of dollars spent on his design. Mick tells him to relax. It's about energy and the death of coal, he says. Who would ever use Donald's little bunker? Donald points out that it goes so many floors deep that, set on the ground, it would be the tallest building in the world.

A big man in a cowboy hat waves them over: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma. He calls them "Senator Thawman's boys" and has a delivery for them to sign, nearly a hundred containers. Donald asks why people call Thurman "Thawman." Mick jokes it's because he was an ice-cold killer in the war. Rhodes laughs: true, but unrelated. He explains that long ago Thurman wrote an anti-cryo bill. It banned freezing rich people in hopes that future doctors could cure them. The highest court upheld it five to four, and tens of thousands of frozen bodies were thawed and buried.

Donald notices the list shows two thousand spools of fiber-optic cable, when his plans call for forty. Rhodes scratches out the number and writes a new one, but the price stays the same. Donald signs anyway, uneasy. Rhodes says they'll find a use for it. Mick remembers from law school that families sued the government for murder. It didn't get far, Rhodes says. You can't easily prove you killed people already declared dead. And Thurman had lost a fortune invested in a cryo company before rethinking it, which made him look like a saint.

As they leave, jets streak overhead and anti-nuclear protestors chant outside the fences. Donald asks Mick if he can drop him at the airport early. He wants to reach Savannah in daylight. Mick teases him about his hot date and asks to come along. No chance. Mick wishes him a happy anniversary with Helen.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy sits in his office playing solitaire on his computer. It is a crude, home-made game. There are no pictures of cards, just letters, numbers and symbols for the suits. It bothers him that he doesn't know which symbol means hearts or clubs. He found the game by accident in some old folders. He thinks earlier heads kept it hidden because it numbs the mind. For him it works better than the pills.

Troy is struggling in private. He has lots of free time, and he spends some of it crying in his office bathroom until his nose runs. He shivers under scalding showers. He hides pills in his cheek and saves them for the worst moments. The drugs don't seem to work like they used to, even when he secretly doubles his dose. The pills dull the deep ache, but smaller hurts keep coming back. The game ends, and the screen flashes a message telling him he did a good job. Oddly, it pleases him.

He has real work waiting: changes to the Order, and memos for the heads of the other silos. The memos must use the approved words, and those words keep changing. He often slips and says "bunkers" instead of "silos". People who lived in the old days, the time of the Legacy, find this hard. He envies the people in the other silos. They are born, fall in love and die in their own small worlds, and they get to keep their hurts and learn from them. He even envies the women of his own silo, asleep in their pods.

Randall, from the psych office across the hall, knocks. Troy hides the game and pretends to be busy. Randall brings a folder with a beliefs report: typed notes from the comm room about each silo. Troy notes that the people who built this place, politicians and doctors, still love paper. The head of silo 6 has picked and processed a replacement, so another induction is coming. Then there is a worry. Silo 32 has over nine thousand people, close to its limit, and most are young. Doc Haines thinks some birth-control implants may be faulty. The head of silo 32, a man named Biggers, says no one with a working implant got pregnant. He blames a cheated lottery or Silo 1's computers.

Troy doesn't believe it. Silo 32 shouldn't even be running a lottery yet, and one computer keeps the counts for every silo. So someone is lying. Biggers either knew and hid it, or he has lost control. Troy decides to speak alone with Biggers's shadow, his trainee, the next day. The Order is clear: start at the top, and assume the excuse is a lie. Troy notices they are talking about removing a man as if he were a broken machine.

Before Randall can finish, Saul, the radio chief, rushes in looking terrified. They are needed in the comm room. As the three hurry down the hall, Troy asks if they have lost contact with silo 12. No, Saul says. They are losing the whole silo.

The chapter

In Savannah, Georgia, in 2049, Donald and Helen sit down for their anniversary dinner at the Corner Diner. It is fifteen years to the day since their first date, back in high school. The diner has changed. There are cloth napkins folded into little pyramids, a dish of sea salt, and a waiter who cracks pepper for you. Donald remembers dented paper-napkin holders and cheap salt shakers. Helen is staring at the booth behind him. An older couple sits in it. It is the booth where they had their first date. Donald says he asked them to save it, but maybe he described the wrong one.

Helen says it doesn't matter. She would be happy eating grilled cheese at home. She unfolds her napkin very carefully, as if studying how to fold it back. The waiter splashes water on the tablecloth and leaves them waiting. Donald toasts the night her father extended her curfew. Helen toasts to fifteen more years. Donald jokes that the diner will be too expensive by then. He thinks Helen has barely changed, the way you hardly notice a sibling aging.

Helen asks about his trip. Donald flies out in the morning, but to Boston, not Washington. He is meeting the Senator there. Thurman is having one of his nano treatments, and he stays shut in for about a week at a time. Helen teases that his "minions" travel to kiss his ring and bring him gifts. Donald laughs and says it isn't like that. Helen worries he is working too hard on this project. It's all he talks about. He wants to tell her how long the hours really are, but he knows how she would react, so he plays it down.

He says his part of the plans will be done in a few months. Helen reminds him that he chose not to be an architect. She also reminds him that, in moments of doubt, he has told her his part will never even be used. Donald has forgotten saying that. Helen says she'll be glad when it's over. They can bury the whole thing and stop talking about it. Donald thinks of the angry calls from voters about trucks carrying spent fuel rods from the port. He realizes Helen hears all this as him wasting time that should go to his real job.

Then Helen asks whether Anna was at the job site. Donald suddenly understands what really bothers her: Anna, and how far from home he is. He says no. He and Anna barely meet; they just send plans back and forth. He went to the site with Mick. Helen points out that he always mentions Mick when she brings up Anna. Donald insists he has seen Anna only once and feels nothing for her. He begs her to enjoy their night. Helen asks if working with Anna is giving him second thoughts about anything. He says no, and asks why she would say that.

The waiter returns. Helen orders her usual, once a simple grilled cheese, now a fancy dish. Flustered, Donald says he will try something different, and realizes too late it was a poor choice of words.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy, Saul and Randall reach the comm room. It is noisy, hot and full of panic. Four men crowd around one radio station. Two wear sleepshirts, so the late shift was woken up. Troy wonders how long silo 12 was in trouble before anyone fetched him. Oddly, their fear calms him. He can fake being in control. An older, bald operator says no one in silo 12 answers the server. Troy asks to hear only silo 12's radio. Shouting fills the speakers. Video shows a crowd shoving down silo 12's spiral stairs. Someone falls and is trampled. The server room, by contrast, is still, its lights blinking with an unanswered call.

Troy is handed a folder. There were no alarms. The last cleaning was two years ago. A fear score was a little high. A crowd gathers in the hallway to watch. A deputy in silo 12 screams on the radio that a mob is breaking down his door. Troy guesses which door: the single one between the cafeteria and the airlock. Saul confirms they have shut silo 12's repeaters, so its radios only reach inside the silo. Troy thinks of it like a cancer that must be cut out and not spread.

The Order says not to step in, but Troy's conscience is troubled. He takes the microphone, which stuns the room. The deputy thinks he is the sheriff. A camera on floor 72 shows the real sheriff slumped dead over a desk, a gun in his hand and blood on the keyboard. Troy tells the deputy the sheriff is dead. He realizes these people believe they are alone. To them, he is a voice from nowhere. He tells the deputy to lock himself in the holding cell and take every key. On camera, the door bulges and cracks. The deputy grabs the keys and runs out of view. No one can tell if he made it.

The mob opens the inner airlock door, then the outer one. Troy orders the canisters fired, and white fog fills the airlock. He orders silo 12's server room locked, a backup saved, and the silo switched to Silo 1's power. He has this part of the Order memorized. Then he asks for the outside view. On screen, the crowd runs out across dry land. People fall to their knees, clawing at their faces and throats. Someone in the hallway cries. Troy has the screen turned off.

He orders reports from everyone and wants to know who caused this, why and how. The other silo heads must not be told yet. Saul asks about the people still inside. Troy says everyone dies eventually. Silo 12 simply won't have future generations. For the first time, he feels like the boss.

In his office, Troy looks at a blueprint of fifty circles among the hills. They remind him of stars on an old flag he once served. A tremor shakes him. He takes a red marker and draws a big X through silo 12. Then he sinks to his knees against the plans and sobs as quietly as he can.

The chapter

In 2049, Donald goes to see Senator Thurman at the RYT hospital's Dwayne Medical Center. The security is tighter than anything he has seen in Washington. He is stripped, given green scrubs and a blood test, and his eyes and face are scanned. Guards block every corridor of the nanobiotech wing. Secret Service agents wait near the end. A young nurse brings him to the treatment chamber. It is a huge white machine, like a small submarine, with tiny round windows.

Donald asks if it's safe for him to go in. The nurse says the Senator's tiny machines won't affect him. He admits he is claustrophobic, but he lets her guide him into the small airlock. The door locks behind him with no handle on his side. The air hums and feels charged. He panics until the inner door unlocks. Inside, Thurman lounges on a bench with a thick book, a notepad and leftover dinner. He laughs and tells Donald to breathe, since the "buggers" could get through skin anyway. They know the difference between the two men, he says. Donald catches himself scratching his arm.

Thurman says Mick already briefed him. He likes the quiet in here: no electronics, only books and paper. He reminds Donald that Donald's grandfather taught him golf. He says Donald and his sister feel like family. Then he says he wants Donald in on the project "all the way". He explains that small, embarrassing secrets always leak. Big ones, like D-Day or Pearl Harbor, can be kept. He pinches the empty air and shows Donald his fingers. There is nothing to see, and that is the point.

Thurman claims the first war in Iran wasn't really about nuclear bombs. Iran had stolen Israeli research on tiny machines that could be set to a person's DNA. Such a weapon could kill people by their ancestry, invisibly. None were ever found, he says, because they destroyed themselves remotely. Donald laughs that this sounds like a conspiracy theory. Thurman says the conspiracy theorists sound like them. He explains that African sand blows across the ocean and colors Florida's sunrises. Things that small can travel the world. It's coming, he says. He wants Donald and Helen to have a seat at "the after party". It is a backup plan, beyond the mountain shelters kept for the president.

Thurman hands Donald his book. The cover looks familiar, but instead of French, it says The Order. This is Donald's bible now, Thurman says. He must memorize as much as he can, and he has a couple of years. Donald privately thinks it sounds ridiculous but won't refuse with re-election coming. As Donald leaves, Thurman tells him to keep the National Convention, a couple of years away, free, and to make sure Helen comes. Donald smiles, hoping for a promotion. Then Thurman says he lied about the machines: some of them are meant for Donald. He stares, then bursts out laughing. Donald rushes through the airlock, sweating, and only breathes again once the door seals.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy is locked in his office with the reports on silo 12. The shrinks bring his meals. They have kept him off his pills for two days, so his mind is clear while he writes his findings. When he is done, they will give him something for the pain. He can't stop crying. He spreads the papers over his keyboard so his tears don't smudge them. He keeps seeing the people outside, falling and choking. He gave the order, and he regrets most that someone else had to press the button.

Without the pills, other memories return. He remembers his father, and things from before his orientation. It troubles him that the billions who were wiped out feel like a dull ache, while the few thousand of silo 12 make him want to curl up and die.

The reports tell a simple, sad story. An IT shadow lost his nerve. The head of IT didn't see the danger at her feet. A decent Security chief chose the wrong side. Each video clip has a code in the margin, like references in an old book Troy once knew. One code brings up the shadow, Jason. He is a young man, about eighteen to twenty, thin and hollow-faced. He sits on the server-room floor with a tray as if eating. A noise startles him, and he tugs down his rolled-up sleeve. Troy sees dark parallel cuts on his forearm. Nothing on the tray needs a knife. The head of IT comes over and comforts him like a mother. Jason climbs back down through the hatch into the space under the floor.

Troy spots something the reports missed. Alone, the IT head moves toward the hatch, stops, and turns away. Troy senses she knew something dark was growing below her, and she could have stopped it. She couldn't bring herself to do it, and she was murdered. Troy writes that late teens is a dangerous age to shadow. He asks whether anyone so young can be ready, and mentions the young man at his first induction, who asked about his great-grandmother's stories. He suggests age limits. Privately, he wonders if anyone, at any age, is ever ready. He knows the report won't matter much. Sooner or later a madman takes charge. That is why they built so many silos.

He slaps the door. The printer warms out four pages, and he signs them. Victor, the gray-haired psychiatrist, unlocks the door and takes the folder. Troy tells him the signs were there but no one acted. Victor gives him a cup with two pills, a bigger dose. Troy wipes his copy of the videos. The cameras can't prevent anything, he thinks. They only help sort through the wreckage.

Troy asks how long until silo 12's people are gone. Days, Victor guesses. Troy tips the pills into his mouth and pretends to swallow. Victor says he is sorry it happened on Troy's shift and promises him a commendation. Troy says he is glad it was him, not someone else. When Victor turns away, Troy spits the pills into his hand. He smiles across the hall at Victor and opens solitaire. He is tired of forgetting. He has decided to remember.

The chapter

In Savannah, Georgia, in 2049, Donald speeds home down the highway at night. A red light on his dashboard warns him he is going too fast. He doesn't care. His car already tracks everything he does. Worse, he suspects machines in his own blood are doing the same. The Order sits in his lap, its gold title flashing under the street lights. He has read enough of it to be worried. He remembers Helen begging him long ago not to run for office. She said he couldn't fix anything up there, but he could come home broken.

Helen's Jeep sits in the middle of the driveway, so he parks at the curb. It reminds him that he no longer really lives here. He leaves his bags in the car and takes only the book. Their dog, Karma, rushes out, much bigger than a few weeks ago. Helen hugs him. Her kiss tastes of coffee. He glances at the dark street, as if someone might have followed him. Inside, he pours a large brandy, his hand on the bottle. He asks Helen what she would do if everything might end. Not someone, he says. Everyone. Everything.

On the sofa, he tells her he has been allowed to share some news. It is like an assignment, like being in the National Guard, just in case. In the weeks since meeting the Senator, he has been reading too much into the book and that talk. He can't tell if he is figuring something out or falling apart. Scratching his arm, he says enemies in Iran and Korea are building weapons that can't be stopped. It is beyond classified, he says. He pictures politicians and their families filing into a vault inside a mountain out west.

He explains that the Senator wants both of them on an alert team. Helen is upset that he has volunteered her. He shows her the book and calls it a manual for "the after". She gently asks if he was drinking on the plane. He talks about tiny machines like those in the Senator's treatments, made into a kind of virus. They could already be inside everyone, waiting. He fears the United States will strike first. Helen says he is scaring her and offers to call Dr. Martin, his sister's psychiatrist.

He tries comparing it to radium. People first saw it as medicine, then it led to the bomb. Tiny machines might go the same way: made to heal, then built to tear people apart. Helen goes quiet. Donald realizes he sounds like the crazy podcasts online. The Senator was right: mix truth and lies, and no one can tell them apart. He warns that the machines could spread like dust in the breeze. He knows anything more will only convince her he is unwell.

Feeling numb and alone, he tells her the National Convention will be in Atlanta. It isn't announced yet; Mick told him. The Senator wants them both there. Donald says he will ask to work from home more and watch the project. He wants them to be good to each other, for whatever time they have left. Helen soothes him like a patient and says they will get through this. Tearful, Donald agrees. But what about everyone else, he asks.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy sits in the cafeteria at supper. He still isn't taking his pills. He needs a doctor, but he can't see one. Sores have formed inside both cheeks, where he hides the bitter blue capsule. In the morning it goes on the left side, at supper on the right. It burns, but he puts up with it. At meals he has a routine. He takes a small bite, wipes his mouth with his napkin, spits the pill into it, then gulps water. He always wipes the same way, with both hands, so it looks normal.

He sits with his back to the big screen showing the outside. The man across from him stares past him at the view. Troy still feels a pull to be as high in the silo as possible, away from the deep floors. But he no longer wants to look outside. Something has changed. He spots Hal at the next table, recognizing his blotchy bald head. Hal also sits with his back to the screen. Troy waits for him to turn around, but he never does.

One of the doctors from Victor's office stands beyond the serving line with his arms crossed, watching the men and the tables. Troy wonders why. He has many questions like this, but the answers slip away when he tries to grab them. He notices that almost everyone sits facing the screen. Only a few, like him and Hal, face away. He has never noticed this before. Lately he spots patterns more easily, even as other parts of his mind slip.

He can barely sleep. He can't ask the doctors for help, because they might see his mouth and learn he is off his pills. Instead of clear memories, he has only dull aches, sudden sadness, and a strong feeling that something is badly wrong. A doctor catches his eye. Not long ago Troy loved staring at the gray hills on the screen. Now even a glimpse makes him feel sick and close to tears.

He stands with his tray. His napkin drops to the floor, and something skitters away from his foot. His heart jumps. He grabs the napkin and hurries after the pill, bumping a chair, his tray wobbling. He scoops it up. Sweat runs down his neck. He is sure everyone saw.

He walks to the water fountain as calmly as he can, without looking at the cameras or the doctors, and fills his glass. That was why he got up, he tells himself. He was thirsty. He knows he is growing paranoid, and there is still just over a month left on his shift. Back at the tables, he squeezes in between two men, this time facing the screen like everyone else. He hides the balled-up napkin, with the pill inside, between his thighs. He sips his water. But he doesn't dare look.

The chapter

In Washington, DC, in 2051, two years have passed. Rain drums on the canopy outside De'Angelo's restaurant. Donald swallows two pills. He has taken them for two years, and they keep him calm and numb. The prescription is in his sister Charlotte's name. On the phone, Helen is coaxing their dog, Karma, to pee. Their talks feel empty lately. Donald forgot Karma is four now. Time feels stuck, and he blames everything odd on the pills. Two homeless men argue in the street. Things like that used to bother him more. He pats the pill bottle in his pocket, a new comforting habit.

Helen asks if he is nearly done with the project. He says the outer shells are poured and the lower floors are in. She says she meant, is he nearly done working with Anna? He says they mostly work by email. He tells her Mick is there. Inside, Anna sits alone at a table set for three. She wears a sweater slipping off one shoulder, and she has refilled his wine. Donald twists his wedding ring. Mick hasn't answered four texts. Donald suggests rescheduling, but Anna says they might as well eat.

Anna wants to approve the bottom third of the design, mostly her mechanical floors, so builders can add more. Then she shows him a last-minute change. The lift is gone. The emergency stairwell has moved to the very center of the shaft. The medical board wants it simpler and more open, in case the workers are trapped for a few weeks. Donald is annoyed and imagines a strong, cheap spiral stair made of metal. He asks to keep a service lift, but Anna says no lifts at all. He jokes that clients like this are why he quit architecture. Anna says her father went into politics after the army and some failed businesses. This project is his legacy, she says. Donald says Thurman keeps calling it their legacy too.

Anna asks why he and Helen have no children. He says their careers came first. She thinks people now expect to live to 130 and want to be their own legacy instead of passing it to children. Donald feels the restaurant's double tablecloth and imagines the top layer removed to reveal a fresh one, like skin, or generations. Anna mentions her father's nano baths, his vitamins, and his old stock in a company that froze people. Tiny machines might one day repair frozen cells, she says. Donald insists he and Helen have time. She says everyone thinks that, but no one asks how much time.

Outside, he refuses to share her car. She kisses his cheek as Mick finally calls. Mick landed early that morning and has just left a movie. He never saw Anna's emails, he says, maybe they went to junk mail. Donald watches Anna's car drive away. Mick jokes about their old wild days. Donald says some things are better left in the past.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy is in the gym on level 12, fixing an exercise bike whose chain slipped off. Jones, the chief mechanic, lent him the tools. Troy notes the bike is already fifty years old and must last centuries more. He enjoys the greasy work. It beats checking the sores in his mouth or waiting to cry. Jones, who has a week left on shift, brings a radio. Dr. Henson needs him. Saying his own name, Troy, feels strange lately. Henson says a man isn't responding to treatment and must go into the deep freeze. Troy must sign the form. He remembers Merriman's warning to hand these out carefully. Jones finishes the bike.

Troy rides the lift down in his shorts and T-shirt, feeling he has no authority without his coveralls. Two men get off on level 44, and he glimpses others laughing and chasing a ball, then going quiet when they see him. He feels the earth pressing in. Each morning, more of his old self returns and lasts longer. The lift passes the fifties, full of emergency supplies. He remembers the code names given to everything at orientation, new labels hiding the past. It nags at him. Below are mechanical floors, storerooms, the two reactor levels, and finally the sleepers in their pods.

In the doctor's office, two security men are holding an old man down on a wheeled table. It is Hal. He is screaming that his name is Carlton. Troy helps hold his kicking legs. Henson says the meds aren't working. Troy privately thinks Hal may not have been taking them. An assistant injects a sky-blue liquid, and Hal goes limp. A tremor shakes Troy, and Henson frowns at him. Troy signs the form. He thinks Hal didn't go mad. He saw clearly for a moment. Troy wonders if everyone hides the same doubts, each feeling alone. He helps undress Hal and frees the table's wheel.

They push Hal to the thick steel doors of the deep freeze. The doors feel familiar to Troy. He thinks he once designed something like them, for a room of computers. Inside are rows of sealed pods. Each screen shows only a first name. Troy realizes they are made-up names, in alphabetical order: Cassie, Catherine, Gabriella, Gretchen, Gwynn, Halley, Heather, then a second Heather. Then he sees Helen. Then another Helen. A fierce tremor runs through him. He lets go of the table.

The next pod reads Helena. Troy staggers over and wipes the frost off the glass, ignoring the doctors' calls to keep moving. Inside is a sleeping woman with ice on her lashes. The face is familiar, but she is not his wife. Troy collapses between the pods and shakes violently, memories fighting the last of the drugs. The doctors shout and run. Troy asks himself who he is and why any of them are here. This is not Helen. His name is not Troy. As a needle goes in, a name comes to his tongue: Donny. That isn't right either. Then darkness swallows him.

The chapter

In Fulton County, Georgia, in October 2052, a giant festival has grown over the new nuclear facility. For two weeks Donald has helped prepare for the National Convention. Fifty state flags fly over fifty sunken bowls in the earth. There are stages, bands, farmers' markets, chickens, pigs, rabbits and dogs. Families picnic on the slopes. The hills work like stadium seats, almost as if they were built for this. Donald can't work out where all the supplies go. Little vehicles keep hauling boxes into tents, and the tents swallow them all.

Mick pulls up on a four-wheeler and drives Donald to the South Carolina area. Mick asks when Helen arrives. Tomorrow, Donald says, by bus with the Savannah delegates. From the ridgetops, Donald imagines future trucks hauling nuclear waste. Yet he can't shake the feeling that the facility was planned for more than its stated purpose. They enter a small tent where volunteers carry plastic containers down a concrete ramp. Donald gets excited. He thinks it's one of the fuel-rod storage sites he has never been allowed to see.

At the steel doors, he realizes it's his own design. He is confused, because he thought his bunker was in Tennessee's bowl, where he cut the ribbon. Mick says Anna told him Donald wimped out of the tour. Donald denies it, but privately admits it's true. After the ribbon, he fled to open grass and blue sky. Now he wants to leave again and reaches for his pills. Mick grabs his neck and wrist and steers him in. Mick is serious and sad. Today is the last day they can have this talk, he says. He needs Donald to see what he built.

Inside, a man paints cell bars gray. A worker wires a huge screen into a wall. Workers eat in the cafeteria, and Donald is glad it's being used. At the central shaft, the huge drop makes him forget he is underground. A conveyor carries trays of supplies down, like buckets on a waterwheel. Mick heads down the spiral stairs, and Donald follows, scared to be alone. A worker scans each passing box with a red light. Donald asks about all the supplies. Mick mutters something like "deadlines, lifelines". Two levels down, Mick opens an apartment. The bed is made, and water runs from the tap. Donald laughs with delight. In the mirror he sees gray in his hair.

Mick says he wants to tell him something. Donald guesses Mick is part of the Senator's Order project too, and asks him not to share secrets. Mick says it isn't a secret. He loves Donald like a brother and looks up to him and Helen. Thurman offered Mick a place on a top team months ago. Last night Mick asked that Donald take it instead. When Donald understands, Mick says, he should think of Mick here. If he could be anywhere in the coming years, it would be down here with the first group. Everything happens for a reason. Then Mick says the place gives him the creeps, and they leave. Donald almost connects the mix-up to the fiber optic ordered fifty times over, but loses the thought. Behind them, supplies keep dropping down the shaft.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy wakes in his bed a little after three in the morning. His head is pounding and his whole body aches. His first move is to reach up, expecting cold glass and a steel lid above his face, as if he were inside a deep-freeze pod. There is only air. He is wearing gym shorts, but he can't remember changing or going to bed. He dresses in the dark, because light would make his headache worse.

The hallway is still dimmed for the night. Troy walks to the lift and presses "up." Then something tugs at him, and he presses "down" too. He isn't sure where to go. He could watch the sunrise in the cafeteria, go jogging, or sit in a lounge watching TV until he has to be somewhere. That, he thinks, is how a shift is meant to go: a routine of waiting, eating and sleeping, with nothing to rebel against. The lift arrives and he steps in, still with no destination. He thinks about just standing there and letting someone else's call decide.

The lift starts moving down and stops at a lower apartment level. A man in red reactor coveralls, a face Troy knows from the cafeteria, gets in and presses a reactor floor. He notices Troy hasn't chosen a floor and asks if he's feeling okay. Troy presses sixty-eight, the power plant level, and says the button must not have worked the first time. Something is nagging at him, like a dream slipping away.

They chat as they ride. Troy has a couple of weeks left on his shift. The mechanic started a week ago, on his second shift. Troy can't help asking whether the second shift is easier. The man thinks about it and says it is less uncomfortable. He gets off at the power plant, saying goodbye in case they don't meet again. They never swap names. Troy also notices that floor numbers grow as the lift goes down, and he dislikes it. He feels the bottom should be level one.

The lift carries on to the medical level. Troy creeps down the corridor and hears an old movie playing. A man lies on a gurney in the main office, watching a TV, his back turned. Troy slips past him. Where the hallway splits, he pictures the layout in his head: pie-shaped storerooms, rows of deep-freeze coffins, and tubes running into the people inside.

He tries his code on one heavy door. The light turns green, but he doesn't go in. He only wanted to see if it worked. His arm throbs. Under his sleeve is a pinprick scab with a ring of redness around it. If something bad happened, he can't remember it. He tries his code on another door, and this time he opens it. He doesn't know why, but something inside is calling him.

The chapter

In Fulton County, Georgia, in 2052, it is the morning of the National Convention. Light rain has made the man-made hills soggy, but the party goes on. Hundreds of buses and a few muddy limos fill the parking lots. Crowds pass through the facility's security gates, under fences topped with razor wire. Protesters gather outside, some against what the site is now, some against what it will become. A woman is expected to win the nomination for president, and the mood says the world is about to change.

Donald stands on a hilltop under his umbrella, watching people head for their state's stage. His phone shows an error. The network is overloaded, and he is surprised the planners didn't add more towers. Anna walks up along the ridge. She stands close, as if to share his umbrella, and he moves it to give her room. He keeps searching the buses for Helen, who should have arrived by now. Anna laughs off the mud, saying the grounds won't matter after today. Donald takes this to mean the nuclear waste that will be trucked in.

Behind the Georgia stage, the only sign of the buried facility is a small concrete tower bristling with antennas. Anna says it is strange to think of people from Tennessee stomping over something they designed. Donald hasn't told anyone about Mick's tour yesterday. It feels too sacred. He says it is crazy how much work went into something nobody will ever use. Anna keeps leaning against his arm, and he realizes it is no accident. He thinks of his honeymoon in Hawaii, when he could always spot Helen on the beach from a high balcony.

Donald says he wanted to tour the other bunkers but lacks clearance. Anna says she tried too, and wonders about their competition. She says the place feels like it has a huge target painted on it, with the whole world watching. When her father appears, climbing the hill under a big black umbrella, she squeezes Donald's arm, says it was fun working together, and leaves. Thurman kisses her cheek as she goes.

Thurman grumbles about the rain. Donald says the country could have been his this year if he had run. Thurman laughs and says he set his sights higher. He calls Donald "Donny," which he hasn't done since their first meeting two years ago. He seems tense, his eyes dilated, older somehow. He tells Donald there has been a change of plans. Mick will cover for him at the Tennessee tent. Donald and Helen must stay near the Georgia stage with him. Thurman says Donald has contributed more to this day than he knows, and that the world will change today. A surprise visitor is coming too. The anthem starts at noon, followed by a flyover from the 141st, and Thurman wants Donald nearby for it. Donald stops asking questions and agrees. Alone again, he scans the buses, wondering where Helen is.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2110, Troy walks along the rows of deep-freeze pods as if he knows the way. The names on the panels are made up, and he somehow knows this. He remembers choosing his own name during orientation, before his shift. It was a way to honor his wife, a secret link so that one day he might remember her. He tastes a bitter pill, though nothing is there. Then he pictures a man screaming on a gurney. That wasn't him. He was holding that man's boots.

He stops at a pod marked Helen. Part of him doesn't want to remember, and the drugs feed on that. But a bigger part is now desperate to know. He wipes the frost away. He doesn't know the woman inside. As he moves on, a scene from before orientation returns: halls of crying men, pills that dried their tears, terrible clouds on a video screen. Women were put to sleep for safety, like a lifeboat: women and children first.

More comes back. It wasn't an accident. He remembers a talk in a bigger pod with another man, about the coming end of the world, about making room, about ending it before it ended on its own. Bombs, he thinks, are sometimes used to put out fires. The explosions were for show, to frighten people and make them run. The real threat was invisible, in the air. People poured down into the ground like marbles in a funnel. He remembers walking through a white fog and a metal taste on his tongue. The death was already in them.

The frost on one pod has already been wiped recently. Inside is a woman with auburn hair. She isn't his wife. She is someone who wanted to be. A young night-shift doctor finds him and asks him to come away. Troy feels strangely calm. He remembers everything now. He is barefoot, but he doesn't fight, because no kicking means no straps. Security men arrive, out of breath. Troy realizes he is like Hal, or Carlton. The pills won't take again, and he will be put away for good, with just two weeks left of his shift.

Walking out, Troy asks the doctor if he remembers everything. The doctor nods. Troy feels betrayed and asks why. The doctor says some of them remember because they know they've done nothing wrong. They are saving the world, not ending it. The medicine only touches regrets, and some people have none. He hands Troy a form, and Troy laughs as he signs off on himself. When Troy asks why he was put in charge, the doctor says it's good to have people like him in charge.

Troy wants a few more minutes with his thoughts, but they hold him down. Blue liquid floods his vein. He believes they are killing him, as surely as he knows his wife is dead and someone else tried to take her place. His last thought is that she is in Tennessee, waiting, with a space beside her for him. A name is on the tip of his tongue. Then he forgets.

The chapter

In Fulton County, Georgia, in 2052, the rain stops just before noon on convention day. Bands play on every stage. Donald waits at the bottom of the bowl by the Georgia stage. He feels shut in and longs to be up high where he can see. Mostly he wants the convention over, so he can go home and have time alone with Helen. His last few texts to her still haven't gone through. The anthem and the flyover are minutes away.

Anna joins him and says quietly, "Here we go." She seems nervous. Then she spots someone coming down the hill. Donald hopes it's Helen, but it is his sister, Charlotte, in her pressed air force uniform. He races over on his ATV and hugs her. The Senator arranged for her to come from Iran. She has just turned thirty and jokes about being put on stage as the token woman for the troops. Donald brings her back to Anna. Then a message finally arrives from Helen: she is in Tennessee. For a moment he thinks she means the state. Then he realizes she is just over the hill, in the Tennessee bowl. None of his messages about the Georgia stage reached her.

Donald starts the ATV to go to her. Anna reaches over, pulls the key out and hides it behind her back. "Not now," she says. On stage, Thurman takes the microphone beside a teenage girl who is about to sing. He talks about a new era and quotes Ronald Reagan about freedom being fought for. He asks whether any cost could be too great to protect their freedoms. Donald jogs off across the muddy grass and starts up the hill, quickly out of breath.

The anthem begins, sung by a sweet young voice that echoes from all fifty bowls. Anna chases him up the slope, muddy from a fall. At the top she grabs his wrist and begs him to come back. He refuses, because Helen doesn't know where he is. Jets roar in, in a diamond shape with wingtips almost touching, and peel away into the clouds as the anthem ends. Anna swears at him and tries to drag him down.

Then comes a bright flash toward downtown Atlanta, like daytime lightning. Another flash follows. Air-raid sirens blare from every speaker. Huge mushroom clouds rise in the distance. Anna and Charlotte pull Donald down the slope while he stumbles, half blinded. Below, people aren't fleeing the bowl. Volunteers are waving them into the tents. Thurman stands by a tent, directing the crowd, scowling at his daughter.

Inside the main tent, Donald is pushed down a concrete ramp in a crushing crowd. Families are being split apart. Husbands and wives. Suddenly he remembers what he has left behind: Helen. He shouts her name and tries to fight his way back up, but Anna and Charlotte hold him, and the crowd forces him down. He feels a charge in the air, a dead metal taste and a white mist rising. He remembers Thurman's talk about how it would all end, and most of the book he memorized. He knows what is happening. His world is gone, and a new one swallows him.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Troy wakes from terrible dreams. In them the world was on fire, and the people sent to put it out were asleep and frozen, still holding smoking matches. He feels buried in a tight coffin, with dark shapes moving beyond frosted glass, like men digging to free him.

He forces his crusted eyes open. Melting frost runs down his cheek. His arms are weak, an IV tugs at his wrist, and his whole body tingles with cold. The lid pops open with a hiss. A doctor and an assistant help him sit up and give him the bitter drink. They have to hold the cup for him. It tastes like metal, like death. They remove the tubes and dress him in a paper gown.

Troy asks what year it is. The doctor, a different one from before, only says it is early. Troy recognizes neither man. He feels worse than last time, because he has slept longer, and the cold is deep in his bones. He remembers that his name isn't Troy, and that he was supposed to be dead. Part of him wishes they had left him asleep. Another part hopes he slept through the worst.

The men talk over each other. They are sorry to wake him, but they need his help. Another silo is in trouble: silo 18. They offer him pills. Troy waves them away, because he doesn't want them any more. The doctor hesitates and looks to a third man, who seems to give an answer. The doctor closes his hand over the pills, and Troy feels relief.

A wheelchair waits for him. Behind it stands a man with stark white hair and white coveralls, with a square jaw and a strong frame. Troy knows him. This is the man who woke the frozen. When Troy asks what is happening with silo 18, the doctor frowns and says nothing. The man in white studies him closely.

Troy says he knows him. The man nods. Troy calls him the Thaw Man, though the name doesn't sound quite right to him. The others chatter nervously that a silo is falling and they need him. Troy only cares about the man in white. As he is lowered into the chair, he asks if it is over. He hopes he slept through everything. The Thaw Man shakes his head and, in a familiar voice, calls him "son." He says it has only begun.

The chapter

In silo 18, in a year the chapter calls the Year of the Great Uprising, people have a saying: deathdays are birthdays. When an old person dies, a lottery is won and a couple may have a child. Nobody feels this more than Mission Jones. Tomorrow he turns seventeen. It is also seventeen years since his mother died, on the day he was born. So he heads toward his birthday thinking about death, not celebrating.

Mission is a porter, carrying loads on the great spiral staircase. Today he and his friend Cam share a heavy load for two. They flipped a coin in Dispatch, and Cam lost, so he carries the back end while Mission leads and sets the pace. His dark mood makes it a fast, angry one. The stairs are quiet this early. Mission glares at a man carrying more than a non-porter should, but doesn't stop. The load is going to the farms, where he grew up. He hasn't seen his father in about four months, and he dreads arriving so close to his birthday.

Between levels, the concrete walls are covered in graffiti, new paint over old. One fresh slogan uses old slang for the silo that nobody says any more. Another, half painted over, begins with a demand to clean, the part that is a killing offense to say. One calls for down with the up top, and Mission laughs, guessing a rich kid from the upper levels wrote it, which is his own kind. Another says the end is coming. Mission can't argue. The silo creaks and rattles, and people hunch and clutch their belongings as they walk.

His father would disagree. He says every generation thinks the end will come in its time. He thinks people secretly hope for it, so that no one gets to live happily after them. Thoughts like this make Mission's neck itch. He tugs the cloth around his neck, a nervous habit. Then he reminds himself that their load is easier to think of as a load, not as what it really is: a dead man.

Mission thinks of his grandfather, who died in the uprising of '78 and left a son to farm and a daughter to chip rust. Nobody chips rust now. His father still farms the same plot generations of Jones men have farmed, and insists nothing changes. He once told Mission that revolution also means going around in a circle, back to where you started. Mission later passed this off as his own idea to friends, late at night while they sniffed potato glue. Only his best friend Rodny, now shadowing in IT, was unimpressed. Rodny said nothing changes until they make it change.

Mission remembers growing up in the Nest, believing his group of friends would stay together forever. But they all broke from their parents' jobs. Mission himself fought with his father, threw down his shovel and left the farm, sure he could choose his own fate. When he grew miserable, he blamed the farm and his family. Now he climbs with a dead man's head pressed against the back of his own, birth and death pressed together like two sides of one coin.

The chapter

In silo 18, still on the eve of his birthday, Mission and Cam deliver the body to the coroner's office on thirty-two. It sits at the end of dark, damp halls beneath the dirt farm, where pipes rattle and water drips into buckets. The coroner signs Mission's work log and tips them for being quick. The extra chits cheer Cam up, and he leaves. Mission envies him, because Cam hasn't been told about tonight's plan: a secret midnight meeting of porters.

Mission doesn't want to arrive at the farms carrying nothing and get a lecture from his father on laziness. So he asks Winters, a pump expert with a white beard in the maintenance room, if anything needs taking up. Winters is suspicious but loads a huge water pump onto his back. Climbing up, Mission smells soil and freshly turned earth, the smells of home.

The landing on thirty-one is jammed with people trying to get into the farms for food. A young mother in farm green sings a nursery rhyme to her wailing baby. She rocks it frighteningly close to the railing, and the baby looks terrified. Mission notices how few children there are now. After the violence of the last generation there was a boom of babies, but now only natural deaths and a few lottery winners make room for new ones.

Inside, the farms' entrance hall has become a second market. Farmers sell food directly, and people come from distant levels, afraid food won't reach their shops. Mission spots his aunt, the former rust chipper, at a vending stall, doing a job she never trained for and has no right to do. He avoids her eye. Kids in a dark corner seem to be dealing seeds. Fear breeds more fear, Mission thinks, and crowds can turn into mobs.

At the security gate is Frankie, a lanky childhood friend. Frankie's father works in security down in IT. Frankie chose to be a farmer, and their teacher, Mrs. Crowe, encouraged him. Now he works security for the farms, as if he couldn't escape his birth. Mission teases him about his long hair. Frankie gets someone to cover and walks with him. He whispers that things are going crazy. Up in the cafeteria they are starting to grow sprouts and corn by the wallscreens. Mission jokes that Roker, down in Dispatch, will be angry, but Frankie points out that Roker grows his own beans too. Everyone has an excuse, he says, and each group takes a bit more, like a ratchet that only turns one way.

Mission says the mayor is letting things slide. Frankie laughs and says the mayor isn't really in charge. The mayor is scared and old. He reminds Mission how they planned to run things differently one day. Mission says by then they'll be old and not care, and their own kids will hate them. As Mission leaves, Frankie asks him to say hello to Mrs. Crowe, whom they call the Crow. Mission says he'll pass her way tomorrow, if he survives the night. He carries so many friends' hellos that he could have afforded his own place by now. He has 384 chits saved and still sleeps in way stations. But friends' messages weigh less than his dark thoughts.

The chapter

In silo 18, Mission keeps the heavy pump on his back so his father will see him working. He walks through the planting halls to the plot his grandfather farmed, past beans, blueberries, squash and potatoes. In a patch of nearly ripe corn he finds his father on his knees, pulling weeds from habit. His father's smile flashes and fades. Mission's twelve-year-old half-brother, Riley, is much happier to see him and asks what he brought. Mission jokes that he is loaded down with work this time.

His father shakes his hand. Mission asks about the cafeteria growing its own sprouts. His father grumbles about it and warns, with an I-told-you-so tone, that this will hurt porters. Riley borrows Mission's knife to play with. Mission notices how old his father looks, his skin darkened and spotted from years under the grow lights. Mission's anger fades into sadness. He feels the gap his mother left, and what his birth cost. He remembers his first clear memory: digging in the corn as a small boy until his father grabbed his wrist and told him not to dig there. Later he learned that the dead are buried beneath the crops.

His father assumes Dispatch gave Mission the heavy load, and Mission lets him think so. Mission says young porters carry heavy loads because older porters have bad knees, and his bonus is paid by weight and speed. His father says they pay him in bonuses while he pays with his knees. He tells a familiar story about being stuck with potatoes after his own shadowing. He only wants Mission to look out for himself. Mission bristles, and feels the old mark around his neck burn.

Watching Riley, already getting a farmer's tan, Mission pictures the boy growing up to farm the same plot with his own child. He is glad he escaped. His father invites him to lunch, and Mission accepts so he won't hurt his stepmother's feelings. But he must leave afterward for a delivery tonight. His father asks if he will see Allie, who keeps asking about him. Allie was Mission's first, brief romance, but marrying her would mean returning to the farms and the buried dead. He says probably not. His father's disappointment is plain, but he squeezes Mission's hand and says it is good to see him.

Mission takes back his knife and fastens it, thinking he may need it tonight. He nearly warns his father and Riley to stay inside until morning, but says nothing. Walking to the pump room, he thinks of farmers selling food and grinding flour, the cafeteria growing corn, and newly found plans to move something heavy between landings without porters. Everyone is preparing to fend for themselves in case violence returns. Then a dangerous thought strikes him. If everyone is trying not to need one another, how will that help them get along?

The chapter

In silo 18, late at night, the stair lights are dimmed so people can sleep. Mission waits in the darkness with a gang of porters, his cheek pressed against the cold central post. From above comes the squeak of rope sliding over metal under a heavy weight. Mission knows that sound well. He feels the old raised scar on his neck, a mark people glance at but rarely mention.

While he waits, he thinks about the ledger kept down in Dispatch on seventy-four, the porters' main way station. It is a huge handwritten book, kept on paper so it can't leak into computer wires. Senior porters use it to track certain deliveries: some kinds of pipe, brass, and fluids and powders from Chemical. Order too much of these, or too much rope, and you end up on a watch list. Porters know where everything goes, and their rumors end up written down there. Mission finds it strange that nobody cares if you order enough rope to hang yourself. He knows what that rope feels like around his neck. Order enough to span a few levels, though, and people take notice. A man may end his own life, he thinks, as long as he doesn't take another man's job.

Two turns of the stairway above, farmers are lowering a heavy generator over the railing on a rope. They are doing a porter's job at night to save a hundred chits or two. Mission grips his knife. Porters carry knives for opening goods, cutting fruit and keeping the peace on long climbs. His old caster, Morgan, the porter who trained him, holds him back with a hand on his shoulder and whispers to wait. The gray shape of the generator drifts down past them in the dark.

Mission is surprised by the fear in his heart. He now cares about a life he once tried to end. He thinks of his mother. All he knows of her is that her birth-control implant failed, as maybe one in ten thousand do. Instead of reporting the pregnancy, she hid him under loose clothes until it was too late for the baby to be removed. Under the Pact, that meant one life for another. Mission was born behind bars, and his mother was sent outside to clean.

Morgan gives the order. Porters burst into action on the stairs above. Mission leans over the railing, gropes in the darkness and finds the rope, stiff as steel. He presses his blade against it. The first strands pop, and with a little sawing the rope parts. He thinks he hears the generator whistle as it falls. A huge crash follows, with men screaming below, where the farmers' partners were waiting. Above, fighting breaks out. Mission races up the stairs three at a time, knife in hand. He throws himself into the brawl, thinking not of what happens next, only of this one fight, a lesson in what happens when someone does another's job.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, the man we have known as Troy is wheeled out of the deep freeze. The chapter now calls him Donald. The wheelchair squeaks with every turn. Rows of pods slide past, their made-up names glowing orange. Donald is taken to a familiar room and asks how long he has slept. A hundred years, someone says. That makes a hundred and sixty since orientation. The wheelchair is older than he is.

The staff help him stand. He gives a urine sample the color of charcoal, which he takes to be dead machines flushed from his body. They give him more of the bitter drink and take his blood, blue from the cold. Someone asks how long before his head clears. A day, the doctor says, at least. An old man in white, with hair just as white, watches from the doorway, tells him to save his strength, and leaves before Donald can place him.

In the lift, Donald feels drugged, though he remembers he stopped taking the pills. He feels for the mouth ulcer where he hid them, but it healed long ago. The halls are scuffed and worn by centuries of use. Donald remembers designing halls like these to last for ages. The truth, he thinks, was in the design all along, too insane to be taken seriously.

He is taken to a small room like a cell, with a bunk, a dresser and a bathroom. An orderly says it will be his room. Donald asks why he is awake. He nearly says alive, because his last real memory is a needle, and dying. An orderly offers him two pills, but the man in the doorway says that won't be necessary and sends the orderlies out. Donald says he remembers him: the Thaw Man. The old man smiles and corrects him. "Thurman." Donald remembers now. This man was once a senator, in a place with rain, grass and cherry blossoms. Thurman says it is a mystery that Donald remembers, one they need to solve. For now, it's good, because they need him to remember everything. He looks tired and older than Donald recalls.

Donald says his own name aloud: Donald Keene. Thurman leaves a folded paper on the dresser, a report for Donald to study once the fog clears. He promises food, and tells him to rest. They will find answers together. Someone wants to see him. Then the door is sealed behind him.

Donald tries the knob, and it is locked. He unfolds the paper. It is a copy of the report on the troubled young man who brought down silo 12. He remembers people trampled and dying, and the order he gave. It is his handwriting, but the name signed at the bottom is Troy. Donald collapses as memories flood in. Troy and Helen. He pictures his wife vanishing over a hill as bombs fall, while his sister and a dark shadow drag him away. He sees people pouring down a slope into a hole full of white mist. He remembers what he helped do to the world. The boy in silo 12 killed one silo. Donald drew the plans that helped end the world. His tears fall on the report, tinged pale blue.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, a few hours after reading his old report, Donald is brought soup, bread and water. He eats hungrily. A heavyset older doctor checks his blood pressure. Donald introduces himself by his real name. The doctor seems unsure how to answer, then says he is Dr. Sneed, from level ten, working out of the shift office on sixty-eight. When Donald asks where he is from before, Sneed dodges and warns him about dizziness and trembling. Then Thurman appears in the doorway. Donald has to remind himself of the name. Thurman sends the doctor out and comes in alone.

Donald is furious. He says they both know what they did: they ended the world and killed everyone. Thurman says they saved it, and that everyone was already dead. He moves fast to catch Donald's sliding tray, and up close Donald sees he has aged. Donald wonders how long Thurman stayed awake while he slept. He stares at the old man's neck and grips his hands together to keep them still.

Thurman tells a war story. Near Kashmar, in Iran, his young medic, James Hannigan, was hit by shrapnel. The wound could have been survived, but the squad was trapped. Carrying him would have cost two or three more lives, and the enemy would have kept him alive only to kill him on film. So Thurman killed him himself. He says the end of the world was the same choice. He reminds Donald of Safed, an Israeli town hit by the war's deadliest weapons strike. Everyone was already infected, he says, and Safed was like a test. Someone would have flipped the switch eventually. Donald refuses to believe him.

Thurman says drugging Donald doesn't work. A small number of people resist the medicine, and they took his blood to find out why. He says he woke Donald because someone asked him to, as silos are being lost. Donald snaps that losing silos was the plan. Then he confesses that there is no mystery: he simply hid his pills in his gums and spat them out. Thurman calmly says they know. The pills have no drugs in them. Sore gums and changed urine are only the signs they watch for. People stop taking the pills because they are starting to remember, not the other way round. The medicine, he says, is in the water. Donald looks at his empty glass and feels sick.

Thurman says thousands may die if Donald doesn't help. Someone thinks his report may hold an answer, though Thurman himself doubts it. Donald thinks about making himself throw up. If Thurman is lying, the water is just water. If he is telling the truth, Donald really does resist the drug. All he wants is Helen, whom he only meets in dreams. He agrees to go. Thurman says he tends to agree that Donald knows nothing, but that is not what "she" thinks. Donald stiffens. She who? The one who had him woken, Thurman says. He will take Donald to her in the morning.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald is locked in his room with no clock. He can't sleep and can't tell night from day. Out of boredom he rereads his report. It is a copy, not the original. It says IT heads were shadowing too young and recommends raising the age. It also mentions the young man he once inducted, whose great-grandmother remembered the old world. Donald had suggested letting every new head ask one question.

Thurman unlocks the door and takes him down in the lift. He scans his badge to reach level fifty-four, a supply level that is normally skipped. It is a huge store of weapons: crates of ammunition, guns, armor, rations, and drones under tarps, like the ones his sister flew in the war. At the far end, light spills from an office. Inside, sitting at a big table, is Anna.

She isn't surprised. Her father kisses her cheek and leaves. Anna hugs Donald, and he sinks into her arms, worn out. The office is a war room that has become her home, with a cot, a bathroom and walls covered in notes. She has been awake almost a year. On the wall map of the fifty silos, Donald sees the red X he drew on Silo Twelve, a new X on what looks like Silo Ten, and a mess of red marks and question marks in the lower right corner. Ten or a dozen silos are marked up.

Anna pours herself Scotch and explains. A year ago Silo Forty went dark. Its cameras failed, and no one could reach its heads. Erskine, who was running the shift, followed the Order and shut it down, which Donald says means killing everyone. More silos went dark. Thurman was woken when Forty-two went, and he woke Anna because wireless networks are her specialty. They think Forty's IT head went rogue, took over the antenna, and talked to nearby silos at high frequencies. Eleven silos have lost contact. Anna thinks she has contained it, but she doesn't know if anyone is still alive there. Thurman wants to send scouts or drones, but others say it is too risky. Now Silo Eighteen looks ready to burn itself down. Only a few people know Anna is awake, and the assistants who woke her won't work another shift.

Donald asks why he is awake. Anna says her father didn't want him woken at all. It was his boss. Donald nearly chokes. Anna says no one is really in charge. The system just runs. Three men planned most of it. Her father dug the holes and hid them in plain sight as a nuclear waste site. The other two were Victor and Erskine, not their real names. Erskine discovered the original threat, the nanos. Victor, the psychiatrist across the hall from Donald's old office, wrote the Order and the Pact. He saw himself as a steward, almost like Noah. He wanted Donald woken months ago because of Eighteen, and he talked about him a lot.

Donald asks what she means by "was." Anna's lip trembles. Victor shot himself at his desk two days ago.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald and Anna are still sitting on her cot in the war room on level fifty-four. Donald can't picture calm Victor shooting himself. Anna says nobody knows why. Victor was obsessed with the first silo they lost, and he blamed himself. He liked to say he could see some things coming as near certainties. What tormented him was not knowing exactly when and where. Anna thinks he would have coped better if it had happened on someone else's shift.

Donald says Victor must have blamed him, since Silo Twelve fell on his shift. Anna says no one is to blame. Then she notices his report is only a copy. Victor was found at his desk, surrounded by notes on the lost silo, with Donald's original report on top. He had written on it, and in one spot he wrote three words: "This is why." Donald wonders if it means why Victor killed himself. Maybe, he says, Victor suddenly saw clearly what they had all done, and that they followed a madman underground. Anna insists they had to do this. Donald slaps the wall. Everyone keeps saying that.

Anna calms him and glances at the door, looking afraid. She admits she asked for Donald to be woken because she needs help. Victor was working on Silo Eighteen. If her father gets his way, he will simply end that silo to avoid dealing with it. Victor didn't want that, and neither does she. Victor wanted Donald woken weeks ago, because he thought Donald's report had touched on something. Donald suspects it was only because he happened to be around.

His mind is clear this time, and he has his own questions. He wants to find his sister, learn what happened to Helen, and get rid of the wild hope that she is still out there. When Anna touches his back, it reminds him of Helen, and he flinches. He agrees to help, but mainly so he can stay awake and search. He thinks of Mick and of Tennessee, and tries to remember which state matched which silo number on the map. He also wonders if Anna simply wants him near her.

Footsteps sound outside. Anna says only her father can reach this level now. Victor got his gun from a crate here while she was in the office, and she never heard him. She begs Donald to help, for her, and squeezes his hand. She hides the Scotch and cups under the table just before Thurman knocks. He says Erskine is planning a small ceremony for Victor, only for those who know. Anna announces that Donald will work down here with her. Donald is shocked. She asks her father for another computer, which Donald likes the sound of, and then, smiling, another cot.

The chapter

In silo 18, after the fight with the farmers, Mission slips away. He grabs a few hours of sleep at the way station on level ten, his nose numb and lips sore from a punch. Too restless to stay, he goes up to the cafeteria for breakfast and watches the sunrise on the wallscreen. The tall ruins in the distance, which his teacher calls skyscrapers, catch the light first. It is his birthday. He leaves a chit for whoever cleans his table and tries not to think about cleaning. Then he heads down to level nine, where a sign painted by generations of children reads "The Crow's Nest."

The Nest is the nursery and school for the up top. Mrs. Crowe, the Old Crow, has run it longer than anyone can remember. She lives in the only apartment on the level. Mission has come to her for comfort and for wisdom all his life. When he learned that his mother was sent to clean because of him, it was the only time he saw her cry.

He finds her erasing the blackboard from her electric chair, which runs on a wire from the ceiling. She greets him warmly. He lies that his bruised face was an accident. She says she is not well and shows him a bandage on her arm. The doctors took her blood, half of it, she claims. Mission jokes that they want to learn why she won't die. She fears they are working out how to kill her, but won't say why.

She mentions that Allie came by asking if he is still single. Mission blushes and changes the subject. Mrs. Crowe gives him a well-used envelope for his best friend Rodny, who is shadowing in IT. Mission says IT has turned him away twice. She tells him to ask for Jeffery, the bald head of Security there and one of her old students, and writes a note telling Jeffery to let Mission hand the letter to Rodny in person. While she writes, Mission looks at the old posters on the walls: children on a green hill under a blue sky, a sweep of colored bands whose name he has forgotten, and a crow about to fly from a huge tree.

He gives her cucumbers, peppers and a tomato for her vegetable drinks. He passes on Frankie's hello, and she says to tell Frankie she hasn't much time left. Mission laughs it off. She says if you predict the inevitable, you will be right one day. She holds out her old hands and asks what he sees. He says time, then feels guilty for finding them ugly. She says there are remnants too, and she remembers things being better once. She was beautiful once, she says, and so was the world. Mission is sure she knows it is his birthday, but she loves him enough not to say it. He asks her to tell him about the old world. As the little ones arrive and fall silent around her, she begins a story he has heard a thousand times.

The chapter

In silo 18, on his seventeenth birthday, Mission leaves the Nest and heads down the stairs. Mrs. Crowe's stories of blue skies and green lands make him angry at the world he lives in. He wishes he could go further away than the silo allows. He knows these are dangerous thoughts, the kind that remind him of where his mother was sent. Below the farms, the air is hazy with smoke. Mission doubts it is an accident. People on the stairs clutch their belongings and shelter their children.

At IT on level thirty-four, a crowd blocks the landing. Many are young men, some carrying computers. Security guards have put up a barrier. One guard tells Mission a power spike wrecked computers last night, there is a fire in Mechanical, and there was violence at the farms. IT is hiring new techs, but the man giving orders to the rows of nervous young recruits is from Security. Mission finds Jeffery, the bald security chief, who says Rodny is unavailable, maybe for weeks. When Mission mentions the Crow, Jeffery softens. He was one of her boys too. He agrees to let Mission come along when he takes Rodny his lunch, as long as Jeffery watches. He even suggests Mission apply.

While he waits in a conference room, Mission takes an application form to use as scrap paper. Across the table sits Bradley, a fellow porter, who is applying. Jeffery knocks: two minutes. Mission does something porters must never do. He quietly opens the Crow's envelope. Inside is homemade paper with a few chalk lines from an old nursery rhyme about a mother bird telling a young bird to take flight. Mission knows the rest by heart: beat your wings and fly away. There is nothing else. Jeffery bangs on the window, and Mission reseals the envelope with spit. On the way, Jeffery explains that people now bring their own computers to IT. Its head, Wyck, stopped sending techs out because they were being robbed.

Mission decides Rodny must be in trouble. Jeffery taps a code into a heavy steel door. Inside, red lights pulse like a fire alarm. Rodny appears, looking worn out. His cheeks are sunken, his eyes ringed, and his once-stylish hair chopped short. Behind him stand rows of tall black cabinets. Mission jokes that he is learning to fix refrigerators. Rodny says they are computers. Rodny asks for a moment alone, but Jeffery refuses. Then Rodny hears something deep in the room and rushes off barefoot.

Mission tells Jeffery that he and Rodny used to be punished together at school. Jeffery grins. If Mission thinks his friend is in trouble, he says, he has no idea. Rodny returns, breathless. He thanks Mission, refuses a hug, and offers a handshake instead, telling him to give everyone his best as if he will never see them again. As they shake like strangers, Mission feels a folded note pressed into his palm.

The chapter

In silo 18, still on his birthday, Mission keeps Rodny's note balled in his fist. He somehow knows not to say anything in front of Jeffery. As they walk back toward the security station in IT, someone calls out, "Porter!" Jeffery stops him with a hand on his chest. Striding toward them is Mr. Wyck, the head of IT. Porters know him well, since broken and fixed computers have kept the Upper Dispatch on ten very busy. Wyck is tall, with a tidy beard, bright eyes and chalk-white teeth. Mission hides the note behind his back and pushes it into his pocket.

Wyck asks if he is the Jones boy, "the zero." Mission's neck burns. The word means no lottery number was ever drawn for him. Wyck says he went to school with Mission's father, and with his mother too. He waits for Mission to answer. Mission grinds his teeth and says nothing.

Then Wyck makes an offer. He wants something moved without going through Dispatch, and without the kind of trouble that happened last night a few levels up. Mission finds it strange to hear this from a man in authority, right in front of Security, but Jeffery seems not to care. When a woman comes out of an office, Jeffery waves her to stay back out of earshot. Wyck offers two hundred chits to carry a package half a dozen levels up from Supply. That is a month's pay for half a day. Mission fears it may be a test, and wonders if Rodny failed a test like it.

Wyck says the offer is open. The next porter will hear it too, and only one will be paid. Mission should just go to the Supply counter, ask for Joyce, and say he is doing a job for Wyck. A delivery report will explain the rest. Mission says he will think about it. As he leaves, Wyck wishes him happy birthday. Mission doesn't thank him.

Two turns down the stairs, Mission finally unfolds the note. It is on the same homemade paper as the Crow's letter, with purple and red threads. He half expects more nursery rhyme. Instead, there are just two words, scratched faintly with something like a coin or spoon edge. It is addressed to no one. Mission feels suddenly alone. Smoke and fresh graffiti paint hang in the stairwell. He tears the note into tiny pieces and lets them drift down over the rail into the empty space.

The evidence is gone, but the words stay with him. They come from a friend who never needed anyone or asked for anything. The note says: Help me.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald sits at a computer in Anna's war room on level fifty-four. He is searching for his wife. Using the old map, he remembers standing on the hills above the bowls, with ATVs kicking up dust and workers spreading grass seed. He pictures the Tennessee delegation and works out that it must be Silo Two. Once he relearns the program, he can search the records of each silo's people. But the records only go back to the made-up names given at orientation. Nothing reaches back to the old world.

Anna is singing in the shower with the door open and steam pouring out. Donald takes it as an invitation and ignores it, though his body aches for her. He keeps searching. Silo Two's first generation held exactly four thousand people, about half of them women. There are three Helens, each with a grainy work photo. None is his wife. He cries and is furious at himself. He tries Sandra, Helen's mother's name, and Danielle, her sister's. No match. They once joked about naming children after gods and goddesses, and Helen loved Athena. Zero hits. He had chosen Troy as a hidden clue back to her, and he hopes she did the same.

Anna turns off the shower, humming a hymn for Victor's funeral. She asks if he needs to shower first. Donald doesn't want to go. He only remembers Victor as someone to fear, the watching man across the hall who handed out drugs. He says he will go as he is. He worries he will forget Helen's face, or that it will slowly turn into Anna's. Anna, in only a towel, reaches past him for a hairbrush. He feels angry and guilty. He reminds himself that he is still married and will stay loyal to Helen.

Loyalty makes him think of their dog. He searches for Karma. One hit. It is Helen. Her name in Silo Two was Karma Brewer. Her work photos show her as a teacher, a school master and then a judge, always with the same half-smile. Becoming a judge was her dream. Donald weeps as he reads about her life without him. She died at eighty-two. She was married, and left a husband, Rick Brewer, and two children, Athena and Mars.

The room seems to close in. Donald follows the links to her husband's file. Behind him, Anna whispers, "Mick." His best friend married his wife, and they had two children. Donald opens Athena's file. She has Helen's mouth. Anna begs him to stop, and he flinches from her hand. He clicks on, watching the girl grow into someone who looks like his wife, and then her own children appear. Anna says they will be late for the funeral. Donald sobs that he is a hundred years too late. On the screen, a granddaughter and great-granddaughter look out at him. None of them has his eyes.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald goes to Victor's funeral numb. It turns out not to be a funeral at all. On the medical level, the body is simply put back into a pod, because silo 1 has no soil for burying the dead. A thin man with glasses and a British accent, Erskine, explains that the tiny machines in their blood will keep the body from rotting. The deep freeze, Donald realizes, is also a graveyard. Some of these pods must hold men who died on shift, or who took their own lives like Victor.

Only five people are there: Thurman, Dr. Sneed, Anna, Erskine and Donald. Only they can know how Victor died, because everyone must believe someone is in charge. Thurman kisses his palm and touches Victor's cheek, and the lid is closed. Donald barely hears the speeches. He sobbed in the lift on the way down, with Anna holding him. Now he thinks of Helen, gone almost a century, and of the day of the bombs. Then he remembers that his sister Charlotte was there too. He knows she was saved, and he feels a fierce urge to find her and wake her.

Donald realizes the tiny crowd is also because of Anna. These five are the only ones who know a woman has been woken. He feels he doesn't belong. His whole life suddenly looks like puppet strings. A college girlfriend's father got him elected, dragged him into a murderous plan, and now he is here because she pulled him from the ice.

After the service, Anna and her father argue a few rows away. Erskine joins Donald at the pod. He says Victor was fond of Donald, though he wasn't good at telling people things. He and Victor worked in the same hospital before. Erskine looks somewhere between sixties and seventies, with the same ageless quality as Thurman. He says, sadly, that he is the one who discovered the great threat. Donald wants to see if Erskine's story matches Thurman's. Erskine explains that he built tiny medical machines to keep soldiers patched up. Then he found someone else's machines in a blood sample, built to fight theirs. Soon he was finding them everywhere.

Donald asks to talk more about this later, since it might help with Silo Eighteen. Anna, wearing a cap over her bun as a weak disguise, says she must get back. Donald now sees how trapped she is, stuck for a year in that war room, unable even to eat in the cafeteria. Erskine says he will bring Donald up later because he wants a chat with him. Thurman reluctantly agrees. Anna squeezes Donald's hand and leaves with her father. Then Erskine tells Donald to come with him. He wants to show him someone.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, right after Victor's funeral, Erskine leads Donald through the cold rows of pods. Donald asks straight out whether Thurman is right that everyone was already dead. Erskine says no design was ever perfect, but North Korea had built weapons that could have killed most people, so that part is true enough. Even the worst plagues burn out, though. Erskine wanted to build defenses. Victor argued for this, the silos, and Victor won. Erskine doesn't think Victor ever doubted the mission, and he doesn't know why he killed himself.

He stops at a pod holding a middle-aged woman with frost on her eyelids. It is his only child, Caroline, an accountant. When Anna was woken, he dreamed of waking his daughter too, but there was no reason, and it wouldn't be fair to her. He says finding the machines in her blood convinced him the plan was right. The world has always been cruel, he says. For every person trying to fix it, ten are trying to tear it down, and it only takes one to get lucky.

Donald suddenly understands his visit to Thurman's nano chamber years ago. He had feared he was being infected. Erskine says they were healing him. Donald angrily asks why they didn't heal everyone. Erskine says he wanted machines to kill the enemy machines, and Thurman wanted to take the war to the enemy. Victor showed them it would never end. Like computer viruses, sooner or later one attack would get through. Donald wonders if a kindly stranger has been sent to tell him what Thurman wants him to hear.

The real problem, Erskine says, was psychology. He remembers Victor explaining it in the cafeteria at Walter Reed hospital. When a storm kills people, we come together. When people learn others did it on purpose, panic and violence follow. We forgive God, but destroy each other. Victor even said terrorists only needed to announce their weapons and let fear do the rest. Thurman saw the answer quickly: start over. Space travel was too costly. Donald finishes the thought: why travel through space when you can travel through time? He realizes Thurman told him this on their very first day. Erskine fears the machines would have kept changing and fighting in the air, causing mass panic. Outside, he says, the world is being reset, its experiments wiped away. Donald recalls the shifts are meant to last five hundred years, and wonders what stops people from doing it all again.

Finally Erskine answers Donald's earlier question about regrets. After Silo Twelve, on Donald's first shift, Victor told him in the lift how hard it was to watch what they were doing to the men across the hall. Victor said the world might be better with people like Donald in charge. When Erskine asked what he meant, Victor said doing what is logically correct is a burden. Things would be better with people brave enough to do what is right instead.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, it is the night after Victor's funeral. Donald has spent the day numb, thinking about death. Thurman brought meals down to the war room on level fifty-four, and Donald didn't taste a bite. He watched Anna set up a computer for him and spread out folders of notes. Now, in the dark, Anna comes to him.

Donald protests and tries to push her away. She sits on the edge of his cot and holds his wrists while he sobs and grows weak. He thinks about Erskine's story and Victor's words about doing the right thing instead of the correct thing. He wonders what the difference really is. Meanwhile, Anna, his old lover, lies against him with her hand on the back of his neck and her cheek on his shoulder, while he cries.

He thinks that a century of sleep has weakened him. So has learning that Mick and Helen built a life together. Suddenly he feels angry at Helen. She didn't wait, didn't stay alone, didn't get his messages and meet him over the hill.

Anna kisses his cheek and whispers that everything will be fine. Donald cries harder. He realizes he is everything Victor thought he wasn't. He feels like a miserable person for wishing his wife had been lonely, just so he could sleep easier a hundred years later. And he feels just as miserable for begrudging her that comfort, when Anna's touch makes him feel so much better.

He whispers that he can't, for the dozenth time. Anna hushes him and strokes his hair in the darkness. The two of them are alone together in the room where wars are planned, surrounded by crates of guns and ammunition, and things far more dangerous.

The chapter

In silo 18, on the same day he saw Rodny, Mission walks down toward Central Dispatch. He is worried sick about his friend but feels powerless. The door they keep Rodny behind was thick, shiny and frightening. Mission thinks about the last cleaning, only a few months ago. He helped carry part of the cleaning suit up from IT. That felt worse than carrying a body, because the suit is a bag made for a living person who will die inside it. The suit gear came from a room just down the hall from where Rodny is kept. Rodny has always talked too freely, and Mission fears that one wrong word could send him outside.

First his mother, now his best friend. Mission wonders if the Pact lets a person volunteer to clean in someone else's place. He realizes he has never read the Pact. He just trusts that the people in charge have, and that they follow it honestly.

On level fifty-eight, a porter's 'chief is tied to the downbound railing. It is a signal that a shop wants something carried. The red edge and stamp show it belongs to Drexel, the apothecarist down the hall. Mission would rather hurry to his shower, but skipping a signal 'chief would earn him grief from Roker and the other porters. Drexel is a big, bearded, balding man. Many people in the mids go to him instead of the doctors. Mission is not sure that is wise. His waiting room is full of coughing people, and Mission holds his breath.

Drexel hands over a small sack of medicine for the down deep. Mission says he can take it as far as Central, and Dispatch will send it on. When he asks for a tip, Drexel says he must solve a riddle first. Which weighs more: a bag full of seventy-eight pounds of feathers, or a bag full of seventy-eight pounds of rocks? Mission says the feathers. Drexel says they weigh the same. But Mission explains: the contents weigh the same, yet the feathers need a bigger bag, and a bigger bag weighs more. Drexel, beaten, grudgingly pays him two coins.

Mission enjoys Drexel's annoyance, but the good mood fades on the way down. The silo is tense. Deputies with hands on their guns calm fighting neighbors. A shop window is smashed and covered in plastic. A woman sobs by the railing, and people walk past her. Graffiti warns of trouble to come.

Central Dispatch is oddly quiet. Katelyn, at the counter, says Cam just came through looking for him. Cam asked for any job heading to Supply, and seemed in a good mood. His last delivery was a broken computer, which means he was probably at IT. Mission realizes Cam has heard about Wyck's secret job and is racing to grab it. He calls Cam a little rat. He takes a forty-five-pound load going from Mechanical up to Supply. But he plans to race to Supply first and beat Cam to Wyck's job. He does not want the money. He wants an excuse to return to IT, see Rodny again, and learn what trouble his friend is really in.

The chapter

In silo 18, still on his birthday, Mission races down the great stairway to Supply. He makes record time, helped by light traffic. But he never passes Cam on the way, which worries him. Cam must have had a big head start. Mission still hasn't showered. He tells himself he will clean up at Lower Dispatch after this, then work out what to do about Rodny. At least all this busyness keeps his mind off his birthday.

Inside Supply, he asks for Joyce, just as Wyck told him to. She is a heavyset woman with long braids. Mission knows her, because she handles a lot of special equipment for IT. When he asks about a delivery for Wyck, she says it has already been handed off. Mission lies that he was sent to take over because the other porter's mother is very sick. Joyce doesn't believe him, but he begs. She tells him the package was going six levels down, to an apartment. Mission knows that level, one-sixteen. It is mostly homes, plus a few shady businesses run out of apartments. It is on his way to Mechanical anyway. He plans to find Cam and offer him a vacation chit to collect the pay, or simply explain that a friend is in trouble. Otherwise, he'll have to wait for an IT job to come into Dispatch, and hope Rodny has that much time.

He is four levels down when a huge blast goes off. The whole stairway jerks sideways. Mission slams into the rail and almost goes over. He hugs the shaking steel. Two levels below, he watches a landing twist away from the staircase and tumble into the depths. Several people fall with it, turning cartwheels in the air. Far below comes a crash. A woman on her hands and knees stares up at him with a silent question: what just happened? Has it begun? Mission has no answer.

He thinks about running up, away from the danger. But there are screams below, and a porter has a duty to people on the stairs. He helps the woman up and sends her upward. Smoke and a sharp smell fill the air. Then he heads down, against the crowd climbing up, because Cam is down there. He pushes through a packed landing, shouting Cam's name. He tells himself Cam is fine. Cam is always late or early, never right on time.

At the last turn, the landing for one-sixteen is simply gone. The railings are torn outward. Some steps sag away from the central post, and Mission feels the empty space pulling at him. Across the gap, the doorway to one-sixteen has become crumbling cement and bent iron bars. White dust drifts down, and behind it people are coughing and screaming for help.

Someone above yells "Porter!" Mission leans out, holding the warm, torn railing, and looks up at the crowd fifty feet above. People spot the porter's 'chief around his neck. One of the wild-eyed survivors who passed him on the stairs points down at him. She screams that the porter did it.

The chapter

In silo 18, moments after the blast, Mission turns and runs down the stairs. Behind him, an angry mob thunders after him. He keeps one hand on the inner post, because so much of the railing has been torn away. The damaged steps feel shaky. He has no idea why they are chasing him. It takes a full turn of the staircase before the railing comes back and he feels safe going fast.

It takes just as long for the truth to hit him. Cam is dead. His friend delivered a package, and now he and many others are gone. Someone above must have seen Mission's blue 'chief and decided he made the delivery. It very nearly was him.

At level one-seventeen there is another crowd. People are crying, shaking, covering their faces, staring over the rails. They saw the wreckage fall past. Mission keeps going. Lower Dispatch, on one-twenty, is the only safe place between him and Mechanical.

A scream comes rushing down from above, far too fast. Mission jumps, thinking someone is about to tackle him. But the sound flies past beyond the rail. It is a person, alive and screaming, falling into the depths. The broken steps above have claimed one of the people chasing him.

Mission moves to the outer rail, where the steps curve more gently and he can run faster. He tries not to think about what would happen if he hit another gap. Smoke stings his eyes. At first he thinks it is drifting from the wreck above. Then he realizes the smoke around him is rising. It is coming from below.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald sits in the war room on level 54 with a cold breakfast. He rarely eats the food Thurman and Erskine bring. He prefers bland fruit from unlabeled cans he found in the storeroom crates. Partly it is distrust. Partly it feels like taking charge of his own survival. Across the table, Anna sips cold coffee and listens to a radio hissing with static. She hopes it stays that way. Silence means silo 40 and its neighbors are still dead.

Donald thinks back over what he has learned. About a year ago, silo 40 hacked the system, probably through a rogue head of IT. Every safety control was cut before the cameras went dark. Silo 1 tried to shut the silo down but couldn't confirm it worked. Then the darkness spread. Thurman, Erskine and Victor were woken in turn. Erskine feared the hackers might even reprogram the machines in the air. Thurman finally persuaded the others to wake Anna, whose work at MIT was on controlling electronics by radio. She managed to take over the dark silos' collapse system. Donald has nightmares about it. Explosives cut loose the thick concrete floors, which fall like dominoes, crushing everyone inside. The silos were built from the start to be brought down from a distance. The other silo heads were never told.

Donald now believes the weight of this knowledge drove Victor to kill himself. He starts to see a sad truth: insane men in power followed each other, each assuming the others knew where they were going.

For three days he has studied two copies of his old silo 12 report. One is clean. The other shows Victor's red-pen notes, copied with fine specks of Victor's blood, because the report lay on his desk when he died. Victor told Thurman several times that the key to calming silo 18 lay in this report. Donald suspects it is just scrap paper. A few notes stand out, though. Across the middle, Victor wrote that the answer is the one who remembers. Donald feels it means him. Victor also wrote "This is why," and a phrase about an end to them all. Donald reads Victor's other files too. Silo 18's violence comes in waves, each generation rising against the last every fifteen to twenty years. Victor wrote about young apes overthrowing their fathers, males killing babies, and how slowly the human brain matures. Donald can't tell if it means something, or if Victor was losing his mind.

He falls into Anna's routine: sleep, eat, work, and Scotch at night. Anna showers openly, and Donald wishes she wouldn't. He drifts into fantasies. In one, his phone works on convention day, and Helen is asleep in a pod below. In another, he crosses the hill to Tennessee and grows old with her. At night Anna lies on his cot, and he puts up with how good it feels.

In Victor's files, Donald finds an often-opened list ranking all the silos. Silo 18 is near the top, but he can't tell why. He also searches for his sister, Charlotte. She was put to sleep at orientation, but she isn't in the pod records. She has vanished. Staring at Victor's notes, Donald wonders if studying them too closely might lead him to Victor's conclusion.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald takes his usual walk among the guns and drones of the level 54 storeroom. The walks are his escape from the radio static, the cramped war room, last night's Scotch and his mixed feelings for Anna. He wonders what Thurman and Victor planned after five hundred years underground. He feels most alive when he is digging for answers, just as he did when he refused his pills.

On these walks he has opened many crates. He found the one with the missing gun, which he thinks Victor took. Others hold sealed suits like astronauts wear, big domed helmets with metal collars, red-lensed flashlights, food, medical kits and endless ammunition. One crate held a laminated map of the fifty silos. Red lines run from each silo and meet at one point far away. He couldn't work out what it meant, so he put it back.

Today he does jumping jacks between the covered drones. Seventy-five, ten more than yesterday. The chill of the long sleep is leaving his body. Then, on the third day of what feels like captivity, he drops for push-ups. With his face near the floor, he notices a low door, waist-high but wide. It is a launch lift, big enough for the drones' wings. He pulls a red handle and the door slides up. He crawls into the space behind but finds no buttons or levers.

Turning to fetch a flashlight, he sees another door in the dark wall. It is unlocked. Beyond is a hallway with doors on both sides. The first room smells of mothballs. It holds rows of bunks, recent footprints in the dust, and a gap where two small beds used to stand. Across the hall are showers and toilets. The next rooms are the same, one with urinals. Donald doesn't remember anyone working on this level during his first shift. These quarters are being kept for some future time, like the drones.

At the end of the hall is a room of tables under plastic sheets. Underneath, he finds screens and seats with familiar controls. They are drone flight stations. He remembers the names his sister used for the parts. He remembers flying to Colorado for her graduation from flight school and watching a screen as her drone flew in formation. There are about a dozen stations here. Suddenly he can picture it all: pilots joking in the hallway, then sitting here with steaming coffee while death falls from the sky.

He covers the station again. He thinks of Charlotte, asleep and hidden somewhere he can't find her. Maybe she wasn't brought to the convention as a surprise for him. Maybe she was brought for some future purpose. Then, thinking of her, he catches himself patting his pockets for pills. An old prescription, in her name. Helen pushed him to see a doctor. And Donald suddenly understands why he can't forget, why their drugs don't work on him. Charlotte is the reason. She is the answer to one of Thurman's riddles, and he longs to find her.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald stands in Dr. Sneed's office on the cryopod wing with Sneed and Thurman. He has bargained his way down here. He believes his sister's medicine explains why he can't forget. He will share that discovery, but only after they let him see her. Thurman warns that Charlotte will not be woken, not even for this. Donald notes that only the people who make the rules get to break them.

Sneed offers to look her up, but Thurman says he knows where she is. He leads them past the shift rooms where Donald once woke as Troy, past the deep freeze where he slept a century, to another door. Its code makes a different tune. Above the keypad, small letters say Emergency Personnel. Inside, in the cold, are fewer than a dozen rows of pods, about fifty or sixty in all, close to a full shift. In one, Donald sees a tough, square face, a frozen soldier in his imagination.

Thurman stops at a pod and rests his hands on it almost fondly. Inside is Charlotte. She hasn't aged at all. Donald, thin and weak, feels how much older he has grown. He says he once froze her like this in his memory when she went to war. To him and their parents she was just little Charla. Sneed starts to speak, but Thurman stops him with a hand on his arm.

Donald talks about her, crying. She grew up more than they knew. She flew drones and killed people. She was woken at night whenever a target was ready, and later saw the missile's last view in her dreams. She told her doctor it felt wrong to be safe while doing it. Soldiers at the front had fear as a reason to kill. She would kill, then eat pie in the mess hall without tasting it. Sneed asks what doctor. Donald explains. Charlotte had a prescription after she was diagnosed with PTSD. Helen worried about his re-election, so they filled it under Charlotte's name and insurance. Thurman names the drug: propra. Donald says it kept him calm. He could study the Order and see only words, with no fear. Now he understands why Charlotte refused her pills. She wanted the fear. It kept her human.

He took the pills nearly every day for two or three years before the convention. He would have had some at orientation if he hadn't lost them on the hill when he fell. Sneed says Victor screened every leader for mind-altering drugs. Everyone was tested. Thurman admits Donald wasn't. There was a last-minute switch, and Thurman vouched for him. With the pills in Charlotte's name, nothing showed in his records. Sneed wants to tell Erskine. They might make a new formula, and this might explain resistance in other silos.

Donald would love to come back and visit. Thurman says only that they'll see. Donald doesn't look at the screen for his sister's new name. She will always be Charlotte. In the hall, Thurman praises him. He thinks Donald may have found why Victor was obsessed with the report. Victor was probably never interested in what Donald wrote, Thurman says. He was interested in Donald.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald and Thurman ride the lift up to the cafeteria to fetch dinner trays. Donald keeps thinking about Thurman's hunch that Victor only cared about Donald's resistance, not his report. As the lift passes level forty, Donald thinks of silo 40 and asks what this means for silo 18. Thurman says Victor wanted to try another reset there. A reset means what they did to the world, on a small scale: cut the population, wipe the computers and memories, start over. They have done it to silo 18 several times. It is messy and risky, Thurman says. At some point it's simpler to pull the plug. Donald now sees what Victor was fighting to prevent.

In the cafeteria, Donald feels strange among the men on shift. No one treats Thurman as anyone special. Most people face the wallscreen, and only one or two sit with their backs to it. Donald wishes he could tell those few it's okay to be afraid. Quietly, he asks why the other silos have screens. To keep them in, Thurman says. Humans have an urge to keep moving until they hit something, and then push through it. Even the fear of death barely holds that urge back. Without the screens, people would go and look for themselves.

Donald says he would rather see a reset than wipe out the whole silo. Thurman admits he is less eager to gas the place now. Victor wanted to save silo 18, and Thurman feels he must honor his last wishes, which he calls a dangerous trap. Donald thinks of the two Iran wars, with sons fighting the same battles as their fathers. Thurman wonders if Victor killed himself to win their argument by having the last word. It is what finally pushed him to wake Donald. Donald thinks that sounds crazy. Privately, and not for the first time, he wonders if Victor's death was really suicide.

Back in the war room, Thurman and Anna talk while Donald stares at the two reports. He tells himself to ignore the blood, which came after. Then he notices a blank space in Victor's notes, where nothing was written. He finds the same spot on the clean copy. It is the paragraph that didn't belong: the young inductee whose great-grandmother remembered the old times. Donald lays the two pages on top of each other and holds them to the light. Victor wrote around that paragraph, not over it.

Donald tells Thurman he was wrong. Victor wasn't interested in Donald at all. Someone in silo 18 remembers, he says. Maybe a group passing the old knowledge down in secret, or people immune like him. That is why the resets fail. Thurman says that's more reason to pull the plug. Donald disagrees. Victor wanted to find the one who remembers, and it wasn't Donald. They should call silo 18's head and ask who is stirring up trouble or talking about the old world. Anna asks: and then what? Donald realizes the answer. He remembers pressing the button on his earlier shift, killing some to save others. He knows he would do it again.

The chapter

In silo 18, Mission reaches level one-twenty and Lower Dispatch through thickening smoke. The mob chasing him seems to have stopped, maybe because of the gap that killed one of them. He is sure Cam is dead. He feels guilty at the thought that some porter will have to carry the dead up to the farms. Then the floating ash reminds him of Rodny's torn-up note, and of why he was chasing Cam. The explosion, Cam, the package, the delivery. He thinks of Wyck's huge fee, and suspects it was never meant to be paid.

A crowd stands staring into Dispatch. Buckets lie by the door and a fire hose trails inside. The smoke is coming from Dispatch itself. Mission pulls his 'chief over his nose, unsnaps his knife, and goes in low. The floors are flooded and dark, lit only by moving flashlights. He passes Lily, an older porter, running. Against a wall he sees Hackett, a kind dispatcher, with half his face badly burned. Mission thinks of deathdays. Then Morgan, his old caster, calls him over to help.

The place smells of cooked beans, wet burnt paper, fuel, and burnt flesh. In the main hall, porters are emptying filing cabinets of soggy papers into crates. Someone empties the wall safe of its old books. The bean plots along one wall are ash. A body lies under a sheet in a corner. The papers are carried to a dormitory, where Carter, Lyn and Jocelyn spread them out to dry. Amanda, managing the drawers, tells Mission what happened. The farmers came for the beans, and they burned it all.

The porters argue. Someone wants to burn the upper farms in return. Morgan says they don't know who did this. Mission asks about the body in the hall. Morgan confirms it was Roker. Carter swears he'll kill them. Mission starts to say Morgan is now the chief, and Morgan agrees, though it makes little sense to either of them. Joel says the porters will look weak if they don't strike back.

Mission sees a bigger pattern. People above think a porter bombed them. Now farmers have hit Dispatch, far from last night's fight. Porters, the nearest thing to roaming guards, are being taken out on purpose, he thinks. And IT's new recruits are being hired to break something, maybe the silo's spirit. He says he needs to go home, meaning up top. He pulls off his smoky 'chief, deciding he must wear a different color. Morgan's eyes fall on the red scar around his neck.

Mission tells them this isn't about porters. His friend Rodny is at the center of what's going wrong and isn't allowed to talk to anyone. Lyn, who knew them both at the Nest, says Rodny's name. Mission tells them Cam is dead and describes the blast. He thinks no one cares that they know. Everyone is supposed to be as angry as possible. He tells them about IT's new hires and about seeing Bradley there. Morgan, shaken in his new role, says they should take it easy and wants time to plan. Mission says there isn't time. He'll give away every vacation chit he owns, but he has to get up top.

The chapter

In silo 18, still in burned-out Lower Dispatch, Mission decides he first needs help from friends he can trust: the old gang from the Nest. While Morgan urges everyone back to work, Mission slips down the smoky hallway to the sorting room, where there is a computer. Lyn and Joel follow. They care more about Rodny than about cleaning up. The computer is dead, maybe from last night's power cut. Mission remembers all the broken computers at IT that morning. He doubts there's a working machine within five levels.

So he picks up the hard line, a radio to the other Dispatch offices. Lyn lights the dials with her flashlight while Joel moves crates off the wet floor. Central doesn't answer, though the radio has power. Mission has a bad feeling that something is happening at Central. Behind them, Morgan splashes past, complaining that his workers keep disappearing.

The second station up top finally answers. It's Robbie, a young porter left alone and panicking. He tells Mission he's in big trouble. Everyone is looking for him, Cam and a few others. There was some kind of fight at Central. Robbie's computers are also down. The only working terminal is at the mayor's office. Mission asks him to send some wires, messages to friends. Robbie worries whether they are official and whether he has permission. Mission snaps that it's important and says they can take the cost from his pay.

Mission gives three names, people most likely to pass the message on. He tells them to meet at the Nest, with or without him. Nobody would attack the school or the Crow. Once the gang is together, they can work out what to do. Maybe the Crow will know. The hard part will be getting there himself. Robbie grumbles that the message is over the character limit and must come out of Mission's pay.

Mission needs new coveralls, since people are hunting for porters in blue. Lyn says they will both come with him. Joel agrees. Mission worries that a group will be easier to spot. Joel opens a bin full of new white coveralls for Security, sent down from Garment in huge numbers. Nobody knows why so many were made. Mission remembers the young men being recruited at IT. It looks as if someone wants half the silo in white and the other half fighting each other. That makes no sense, unless the plan is to get everyone killed.

The word "killed" gives him an idea. He goes to another bin, one he and Cam were given a few days ago, and pulls out a heavy plastic bag with a silver zipper and carrying straps. He offers Lyn and Joel all 384 of his chits, split between them. He just needs them for one last tandem haul. Their flashlights show what he is holding. It is a black bag, the kind used for carrying the dead.

The chapter

In silo 18, in the wreck of Lower Dispatch, Mission gets ready to be carried up the stairs in a body bag. He takes off his soaked boots and socks to keep the bag dry and save weight. Always a porter. Lyn hands him a white Security coverall as an extra disguise. He swaps his porter blues for it while she looks away. He straps his knife back on.

He asks if they are sure about this. Lyn asks if he is sure. She straps his ankles and shoulders into the bag. Mission, nervous, asks whether they have eaten. Joel tells him to stop worrying. Lyn tells him to lie back and not talk unless they say it's okay. Joel says they will rest about every twenty levels and take him into a bathroom to stretch and drink. Lyn zips the bag up to his chin. Then she kisses her fingertips and touches his forehead, the way loved ones and priests bless the dead. She whispers a blessing that his steps may rise to the heavens. Joel jokes: or at least to Upper Dispatch. The bag closes over Mission's face.

They carry him down the hall. Porters step aside for the dead. Several reach out and touch him through the plastic to show respect. He fights not to flinch or cough. Joel takes the front, with Mission's shoulders against his back, and Lyn carries the feet several steps below. They climb in silence, saving their breath. Joel sets a fast pace.

As the steps go by, Mission grows more and more uncomfortable. It isn't the hard breathing, the plastic on his face, the dark, the smell of smoke or the pinching straps. He can handle all of those. It is lying still. Being carried. Being a burden. His arms go numb. He thinks of his mother carrying him for months, with no one to support her. His father found out only when it was too late to end the pregnancy. Mission wonders how long his father wished him gone. He never asked to be carried like that, and he never wanted to be carried by anyone again.

Today is two years to the day since he last felt like this. On that birthday, he tried to hang himself. His hands were shaking and his eyes full of tears, and the knot was poor. It slid instead of holding, and left his neck burned and bleeding. He had jumped from a low stairway in Mechanical, with the rope over pipes. From a higher landing, he thinks, the fall would have killed him. Now he is too scared to try again, as scared of that as of being a burden. He wonders if that is why he avoids Allie, who wants to care for him, and why he ran away from home.

The tears finally come, and with his arms pinned he can't wipe them. He thinks of his mother. He knows little about her, but he knows she wasn't afraid of life or death. She gave her life for his, a trade he feels he will never deserve. In the dark, swaying up the stairs like a body on its way to burial, Mission sees himself clearly for the first time. It is a sad awakening on his birthday.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald hunts for the one person in silo 18 who remembers. It should take months of digging through reports. Instead he takes a shortcut. He searches the database for someone like himself: fearful, suspicious, blending in while quietly working against the system. He looks for people who avoid doctors and refuse medicine. He finds one who doesn't even trust the water. He expected a young, angry group. What he finds is both strangely like him and not like him at all. The book does not say who it is.

The next morning Thurman studies the results and stands very still. "Of course," he says. He admits the reset of silo 18 has been running since Donald woke. Silo 18's head has taken on new recruits and stirred up conflict. Erskine and Dr. Sneed are working day and night on a new formula for the memory drug. Thurman plans to call silo 18. Donald insists on coming. If someone is going to die because of his theory, he won't hide from it.

In the lift, Donald asks why the reset began. "Vic won," Thurman says. He describes the bombs and the fighting between groups in different colors. It only takes a few sparks, he says. They walk down Donald's old hallway from his first shift. A balding man now sits at Donald's old desk, playing solitaire. Across the hall sits a man in white, the psychiatrist's office Donald now thinks of as the puppeteer's. That man joins them. He clearly knows Thurman is the one in charge. Donald envies people who don't remember. He sees that the pain of knowing never fades. It just becomes familiar.

In the comm room, Thurman has silo 18 called. Donald gets a headset too. A young shadow answers, then Mr. Wyck, silo 18's head, joins. When Thurman explains Donald's discovery, the shadow says he knows this person well. Something in his voice makes Thurman switch on the sensors in his headset. Screens show pulse, sweat and skin changes, like the induction ritual. The lines jump wildly. Donald fears the young man may be killed on the spot.

Instead Thurman is gentle but firm. He gets the shadow talking about his childhood, his rage and his feeling of not belonging. He says the shadow has now been fed the truth, the Legacy, and can see why truth must be shared carefully. He talks of sacrifice and the greater good. Then he asks the shadow what needs fixing. The young man says people value being alone too much. Children run from their families, and everyone has become replaceable. He sobs. The lines on the screen calm. Thurman says simply, "He's ready."

The questioning has become the shadow's initiation. Thurman gives him his first order, which we don't hear. Wyck says the young man will be set free. Riding back down toward Anna, Thurman says this Rodny will make a fine silo head one day.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald and Anna spend the afternoon packing up the war room so it is ready for some future shift. Their notes go into airtight plastic crates. Erskine wheels away the computers on a squeaky cart. Only the cots, a change of clothes and some toiletries are left, enough for one more night. Tomorrow they meet Dr. Sneed. Several shifts are ending. Anna and Thurman have been awake two full shifts, almost a year. Donald has been awake less than a week after a century asleep.

He takes a last shower and his first dose of the bitter drink that prepares the body for the deep sleep, so no one suspects anything. But he doesn't plan to go under again. If he goes back to the deep freeze, he believes no one will ever wake him, unless things are so bad he wouldn't want waking anyway. Or unless Anna, lonely, wakes him again for company. To him that isn't sleep. It is being stored away. Following Victor's trail of clues has given him a resolve: he means to die, as Victor did.

He takes a final walk among the guns and drones, then lies on his cot. Listening to Anna sing in the shower one last time, he thinks of Helen. His anger that she lived and loved without him has gone. It has been replaced by guilt at finding comfort with Anna. When Anna comes to him that night, he gives in. Afterward, once she is back on her own cot and asleep, he cries himself to sleep.

When he wakes, Anna is gone and her cot is neatly made. She was put under early so no one would see her. Donald makes his cot too, then checks the time. Thurman will come in less than an hour. He goes to the drone nearest the low hangar door and pulls off its dusty tarp. He drags out an empty plastic crate, opens the hangar door, and lowers the door onto the crate so it stays open. Then he hurries down the hall to the last pilot station and flips the lift switch up. Earlier he learned that once the switch is flipped, the door won't open. Pinning it open first was his solution.

He covers the station again, turns off the light and closes the door. From a second bin under the drone's wing he pulls out a thick plastic suit. He strips, tosses his clothes under the drone and works his way into the suit. He seals the boots at the cuffs. A shoelace he stole from a spare boot is tied to the zipper on the back, so he can pull it closed himself. He takes gloves, a flashlight and a helmet, then hides the bin and re-covers the drone. Victor left a mess behind. Donald will leave barely a trace.

He crawls into the lift. The motor strains against the pinned crate, buzzing like angry bees. He takes a last look at the storeroom and kicks the tub twice. The door slams shut, and the lift begins to move. He doesn't know what comes next, but he chose it.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, Donald rides the drone lift upward in his suit. The ride takes far longer than he expected. At times he can't tell if he is moving at all. He worries the misplaced bin and his tracks in the dust have given him away, and that the lift is being called back. Then his flashlight dies. He thinks its charge ran low in storage. In total darkness he can't tell up from down. Still, he is sure he made the right choice. Nothing is worse than lying trapped in the dark of a pod, able only to wait.

The lift arrives with a jolt. The motor stops, and the quiet feels eerie. A door opposite the one he entered slowly rises. A metal fitting the size of a fist slides forward on a track, the kind of thing that would guide a drone. Donald crawls after it. He finds himself not on open ground but in a sloping launch shaft. At the top of the slope, doors are sliding apart. Through the gap he sees the churning clouds he knows from the cafeteria screen, bright gray with sunrise.

He scrambles up the steep slope, staying off the track in case a launch starts automatically. Nothing moves. He pulls himself out, sweating and worn out. After a week in a windowless room, the open sky thrills him. He wants to tear off his helmet and breathe deeply. He is standing on a round concrete platform, with a cluster of antennae behind the launch opening. He grips one, lowers himself to a ledge, slides along on his belly, and drops clumsily to the dirt.

He circles the tower until he finds the city, then turns forty-five degrees to the left. He studied the maps, but now he realizes he could have found the way from memory. Here were the tents and the stage, there the dirt tracks where ATVs buzzed up the hill. He can almost smell the cooking and hear the dogs, the children and the anthems. Someone at breakfast in the cafeteria may already be pointing at him on the screen. But he has a head start. By the time they get into suits, it should be too late.

Climbing is hard in the bulky suit, and he slips again and again on the slick soil. Wind throws grit against his helmet with a hiss like Anna's radio. He knows from the cleaning that suits don't last forever. But Anna told him the machines in the air attack only certain things, not sensors, concrete or a well-made suit. He crawls the last fifty feet on hands and knees, never looking back. At the top he looks down into the next bowl. A concrete tower stands there like a gravestone for Helen. She is buried beneath it. He can never be buried beside her, but he can lie down under the clouds close by.

He pulls off one glove first. The wind sends it tumbling downhill, and the grit stings his bare hand like a windy day at the beach. As he tugs at the second glove, a hand grabs his shoulder and drags him back from the edge.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2212, right after the hand grabs his shoulder, Donald stumbles and falls on the hillside outside. The shock of being touched sends his heart racing. He waves his arms to break free, but more than one person has hold of his suit. They drag him back down until he can no longer see over the ridge. He screams inside his helmet. He has already taken off a glove. Can't they see it is too late? Why won't they let him be?

When he falls again, he manages to roll over and raise his arms to defend himself. Standing over him is Thurman, wearing only his white coveralls. He has no suit at all. Dust from the dead earth is collecting in his gray eyebrows. "It's time to go!" Thurman shouts into the wind. His voice sounds as far away as the clouds. Three men in white block the way back up the hill, squinting against the wind and flying soil.

Donald kicks and tries to crawl uphill, but they seize him again. They pull him along by his boots. He clutches at rocks and fistfuls of dirt, and his helmet knocks against the hard, lifeless ground. He watches the clouds boil overhead while his fingernails bend back and break as he tries to grip the soil.

By the time they reach the flat ground, he has no fight left. They carry him down a ramp and through the airlock, where more men wait. His helmet is thrown aside even before the outer door has fully shut. Thurman stands in a far corner, watching them strip off the suit. He dabs at blood running from his nose. Donald caught him with a kick.

Erskine and Dr. Sneed are there, both out of breath. As soon as the suit is off, Sneed jabs a needle into Donald. Erskine holds his hand and looks sad as the drug spreads. Someone calls it a bloody waste. Someone else complains about the mess. As Donald sinks into darkness, Erskine rests a hand on his cheek. Donald hears him say it would be better if someone like Donald were in charge. But the voice he hears is Victor's. Maybe it is a dream, or a memory of an earlier talk. He can't tell.

This time, unlike before, Donald is not afraid of dying. He goes into the dark gladly, hoping it will last forever. His last thoughts are of his sister, and of the drones under their tarps, things he hopes will never be woken.

The chapter

In silo 18, during the Year of the Great Uprising, Mission is being carried upward in the black body bag by Joel and Lyn. He feels buried alive. The bag grows hot and slippery with his breath. Part of him fears he'll pass out and die in there. Part of him hopes he will. On 117, just below the blast that killed Cam, workers repairing the stairs stop the porters. They are hunting a porter whose description is part Cam, part Mission. Mission lies deathly still. Joel complains about being held up with such a heavy, sensitive load. Opening a body bag is almost as taboo as talking about the outside, so they are let go. They are warned that the rail is out above, and someone has already fallen.

Mission fights back a cough. Somewhere a woman is wailing. Joel and Lyn gasp as they pass a whole landing torn from the stairs. On 107, above Supply, they carry him into a bathroom and let him out. He stretches, uses a stall and drinks some water. There are still thirty-odd levels to go. Joel seems worn down, maybe by the damage he has seen. Lyn is anxious to keep going and worried about Rodny. In the mirror, Mission sees himself in Security white with his porter's knife. He looks like the one they're hunting. He hacks off his hair with the knife, and Lyn helps. Joel holds the trash can. Mission cuts air slits near the bag's zipper, dries the inside with his undershirt and throws the shirt away. Then they zip him back in.

Inside, he goes over his long day: breakfast, the Crow, the note for Rodny, then losing Cam. He drifts off. When he jerks awake, Joel shushes him. They're nearly at Central. The slits are lost in the folds, and he gasps that he can't breathe. Lyn hushes him, but someone opens the zipper a little, and he gulps cool air. Boots and fighting echo nearby. He pictures Cam leaving the farms just yesterday with a bonus he never got to spend.

At Central Dispatch they let him out. The hallway is frighteningly empty. The walls are full of holes, each with a spiderweb of cracks. It's after dinner, so they're making good time. Lyn finds a dark patch that might be blood. Joel thinks the porters here were driven off. He says Security is everywhere, so Mission might dash up alone in his whites. Mission thinks he could reach the top before dim-time. Then Lyn steps into a bunk room and comes out with her hand over her mouth. She hugs Mission to keep him back, but he looks. The bunks are full of porters, tangled and still. They aren't sleeping.

Katelyn is among them. Lyn sobs while Joel and Mission load Katelyn's body into the bag. Mission feels guilty that she was chosen partly for her size. As they zip it, the power cuts out. The lights come back, flickering. Mission tells the pair to stop at the way station and check on Robbie if they can't reach the Nest. Lyn tells him to watch his steps. He heads for the stairs alone. The flickering lights mean something, somewhere, is burning.

The chapter

In silo 18, during the Year of the Great Uprising, Mission climbs alone through smoke. His throat burns. People whisper that an explosion in Mechanical caused the blackout, that a shaft is bent or broken, and that the silo is running on backup power. He takes the steps two or three at a time. It feels good to move and ache, and to carry only himself.

Whenever people see him, they go quiet or scatter off the landings, even people he knows. At first he fears they recognize him. Then he realizes it is the Security white he's wearing. Young men just like him are storming up and down the stairs, scaring everyone. Only yesterday they were farmers, welders and pumpmen. Now they carry dark weapons. Several groups stop Mission and ask where he's going and where his rifle is. He says he was in the fighting below and is reporting back, a story he heard someone else use. Many of them know as little as he does, so they let him pass. The color you wear, he thinks, is all people see.

Near IT the activity grows thicker. Over the railing, he watches recruits kick in the doors of the level below and storm inside. He hears screams, then a dozen sharp bangs, like a steel rod dropped on metal. After that, less screaming. Near the farms, farmers stand on the landing with shovels and rakes, and someone yells at him. He hurries on. He thinks of his father and brother, and for once he sees the sense in his father's refusal to leave his plot of soil.

After what feels like hours, he reaches the quiet of the Nest. The children are gone. Lockers stand open and a child's backpack lies on the floor. From the end of the hall comes the Crow's singing and the screech of steel on tile. Her door is open as always. Frankie and Allie are already there, both in the green and white of farm security. His wire reached them. They are setting out the stored desks while the Crow sings. Allie runs to hug him. Her overalls are bunched and knotted to fit. Mission guesses they are Frankie's. Frankie has cut his hair short too, and the two boys rub their scalps and laugh.

The Crow asks about Rodny. Mission pours out everything about the bombs, fires and armed guards. She waves it away. She has seen plenty of fighting. What of Rodny? Has he made them pay? She raises a small fist. Mission says Rodny is locked up and needs help. The Crow laughs. Not locked up, she says. He did something right. He is with the old books, and with the people who took the world from them. Allie whispers that the Crow has been trying to tell them, and everything will be okay. The Crow says her note was meant to give Rodny strength and tell him it was time to begin. Mission insists his friend was afraid. The Crow's face hardens. If so, she says shakily, she judged him wrongly.

The chapter

In silo 18, on the night of Mission's birthday, dim-time arrives at the Nest. Allie says a curfew has been announced, so the others probably won't come tonight. They lay out mats and agree to wait until morning. Frankie thinks his father could get them deeper into IT. Allie shares fruit from her plot. The Crow seems giddy and distracted. Restless, Mission steps onto the landing. He fears Rodny is already being marched to a cleaning. This violence is the burning his father warned of. From far below comes the sound of a mob and marching boots. Back inside, he keeps it to himself.

Allie has been crying while the Crow tells a story of Atlantis, a lost city. Mission is sure his father is dead and is flooded with regret for leaving home. But Allie says it's Riley. There was an attack on the farms. Riley begged to fight and was told no. Then he vanished. He was found holding a kitchen knife. Mission paces in tears. He wasn't there for Riley, or for Cam. Death seems to strike wherever he isn't.

Boots approach. Fearing Security, Mission wedges a desk under the door handle. Frankie hides Allie behind the Crow's desk. The Crow says there is nothing to fear. A knock, the handle jiggles, and the door is shoved open. The first one in is Rodny. He wears new white overalls, still creased. His hair is short and his face freshly shaved, with a nick on his chin. Armed men in white wait behind him, and he holds a small pistol. He orders an older man to shut the door. Frankie shouts "Father!" as if he spotted his dad outside. Rodny's eyes stay fixed on the Crow. Mission says they came to help. Rodny says he needed help yesterday.

The Crow scolds him: his fight is elsewhere, and he should be hurting them. Rodny tells her to confess what she has done. In IT, he says, they showed him the old stories are true, and he was furious, just as she predicted. But then a call came, and now he knows what she's been doing. Her posters, stories and songs made them all angry. The Crow says they should be angry. The killing will go on as always, she says, the silo wiped clean, and these desks filled again. Rodny says it ends here. She sells hope and fear together, he says, like the priests, only she reaches them first. Her better world makes them hate this one, and hate their fathers. He raises the gun.

Frankie lunges. Allie screams. Mission throws himself sideways as the gun fires. He feels a punch and then fire in his stomach. A second shot hits the Crow, and she slumps in her chair. A third shot strikes her needlessly. Frankie tackles Rodny, and armed men rush in. Allie presses on Mission's wound, crying. Rodny leans over him, worried, telling him to hold on. Mission wants only to sleep, to stop being a burden. Allie curses him and says she loves him. He imagines a life with her: children, their plots joined, rows of corn, families staying close. But all he manages to whisper is that today is his birthday. The chapter ends with a gentle lullaby.

The chapter

In silo 18, three years after the uprising, Mission comes home from work and changes out of his overalls while Allie cooks dinner. He scrubs the farm dirt from under his fingernails. The ring on his finger is getting hard to remove. His knuckles are sore and stiff from hoeing during planting season. He works it off with soap and sets it aside carefully, because he once lost it down the drain. Allie is whistling in the kitchen. When she opens the oven, he smells a pork roast. He knows he'll have to say something. They can't buy roasts when there's nothing to celebrate.

Back in the kitchen, he finds candles lit on the table. Candles are for emergencies, for the times when the people below switch generators and work on the broken main. Allie knows this. He's ready to complain about the roast, the candles and a disappointing bean crop. Then he sees how she is beaming. There is only one thing that could make her that happy, and it seems impossible.

He says no, he can't let himself believe it. Allie nods, tears running down her cheeks. He holds her and whispers that their ticket has run out. She sobs with joy. The doctor says it happened last month, inside their allowed window. They're having a baby. What Mission feels most is relief, because everything is legal. He kisses her and tells her he loves her. She hurries back to the stove, admitting she planned to tell him after dinner. He laughs. She'd have had to explain the candles first.

He pours water with shaking hands and they sit down together. He wishes he'd put his ring back on. Allie says a blessing for the food and those who fed its roots, and he answers amen. As they eat, she says that if the baby is a girl, she must be called Allison. Every woman in her family, as far back as anyone remembers, has been an Allison. Mission wonders how far back that could really be. Most people can't remember very far. He agrees, guessing the girl will end up being called Allie too. If it's a boy, he asks, could they call him Cam? Allie agrees. She asks if it was his grandfather's name. No, he says. He doesn't know any Cams. He just likes the sound.

Then he studies his glass of water and wonders. Does he know a Cam? Where is the name from? Parts of his past are hidden from him. He can't remember how he got the mark on his neck or the scar on his stomach. Everyone has gaps like these, but Mission has more than most. What drives him crazy is that he can't even remember when his birthday is. How hard can that be?

The chapter

In silo 1, in the year 2345, Donald is woken again, more than a hundred years after the events of Part 2. First comes a dream. Bones clatter under his feet in the dark, and winged dogs scatter at the sound of voices. A voice keeps calling him "sir." He feels curled inside his pod like a bean. Then he is sitting up, his skin icy, steam rising from his bare legs.

He doesn't remember going to sleep. He remembers a doctor and being in his office, talking. Then nothing, until now. He remembers waking many times, but never falling asleep. Someone gives him a drink. He struggles to swallow. He expects a pill, but none is offered. The men say they had instructions to wake him. Donald assumes he is in trouble again. He wonders vaguely about "that Troy fellow." They remove a catheter and a needle from his arm. His voice is thin as tissue paper.

Two men lift him into a wheelchair while a third holds it steady. This time there is a soft blanket instead of a paper gown. Someone says they lost one. Donald thinks of a lost silo and assumes it will be his fault again. Remembering his last shift, he whispers, "Eighteen." The men glance at each other, open-mouthed. Yes, one says in awe, from silo 18. They lost her over the hill and lost contact. For a moment Donald thinks of Helen, lost over a hill, and feels a flash of hope. But they explain it was a cleaner. One of them made it out of sight. Silo 18 has called them. Donald sinks in the chair. It isn't Helen.

He raises a shaking hand and asks them to speak one at a time. Why did they wake him? They say he told them to. It's protocol. He notices how gently, almost respectfully, they treat him. He looks down at the screen at the base of his steaming pod. It shows a rising temperature and a name. The name is not his. Donald thinks about how names mean nothing, unless a name is all anyone has to go by. If nobody remembers each other, a name is everything.

"Who am I?" he asks. "Why did you wake me?" They tell him he ordered it himself: "You told us to, Mr. Thurman."

They tuck the blanket around his shoulders and turn the chair. They treat him as someone with authority. This chair's wheels don't squeak. They promise his head will clear and that the doctor will clear him for duty. Donald doesn't know these people, and they don't know him. Nobody knows anyone, he thinks. So anyone can be anybody. In the end it hardly matters who is in charge: one man who does what is correct, or another who does what is right. One name is as good as any other.

The chapter

In silo 17, in the year 2312, the story jumps to a new silo and a new boy. The chapter is headed "Hour One." It opens with what it calls a Rule of the World: the loud comes before the quiet, because noise and falling bodies both need space. Jimmy Parker is sitting in class when the last great Loud begins.

It is the day before a cleaning. Tomorrow there will be no school. A man's death means extra sleep for Jimmy and his friends. His father will work overtime down in IT. In the afternoon his mother will take him up with his aunt and cousins to watch the clouds over the freshly cleaned view of the hills. Their teacher, Mrs. Pearson, says cleaning days are for calming unrest and quieting the Louds. She chalks rules from the Pact on the blackboard, listing all the reasons a man can be put to death. It is a lesson in rules that, the book warns, will soon no longer matter.

Jimmy is sixteen. Many friends will soon leave to shadow, but he needs one more year of study to follow his father. Mrs. Pearson moves on to choosing a life partner and registering relationships under the Pact. A girl named Sarah Jenkins turns and smiles at him. He didn't think she was cute at the start of the year, but now he does. The book says plainly that she will be dead within hours.

Mrs. Pearson asks for someone to read from the Pact. At that moment Jimmy's mother bursts in without a word. She marches between the desks, grabs his arm and drags him out. Jimmy's face burns with embarrassment. He thinks he's in trouble again. His best friend, Paul, grins behind his hand. Only Sarah speaks, calling out that he has forgotten his backpack, just before the door slams.

No other mothers are fetching their children. Jimmy's father works with the computers and always knows things first, but this time only by moments. People are already crowding onto the stairwell. The landing shakes with heavy, distant traffic, and a loose bolt rattles in the railing. It feels as if the silo could shake itself apart. His mother pulls him toward the spiral stairs as if he were still twelve.

Jimmy resists for a moment. This past year he has grown bigger than her, as big as his father, and it is strange to feel that power. Then she turns, and he sees her eyes. They aren't angry. They are wide and wet, the way they looked when his grandparents died. That frightens him more than the noise. He asks what's wrong. Something dark and empty claws at his insides, like the wild, tailless cat no one could catch in the upper apartments. His mother doesn't answer. She pulls him down the stairs, toward the thundering noise. Jimmy understands that he isn't in trouble at all. They all are.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, Jimmy races down the spiral staircase after his mother. The whole stairway shakes. He has never felt it tremble like this. His feet go numb from the vibration, and fear tastes like a dry spoon in his mouth. Angry screams come from below, and they are heading straight toward them. His mother keeps shouting at him to hurry. The fear in her voice scares him more than the shaking steel.

They pass level twenty-nine, then thirty. Many people run the other way, and lots of them wear coveralls the same color as his father's. On thirty-one, Jimmy sees a dead man with a smashed head, the first body he has seen since his grandpa's funeral. He has to step over the man's arms. By thirty-two he can feel the shaking in his teeth. Nobody notices anyone else. Everyone is looking out for themselves.

Below, a crowd jostles up the stairs. Some people carry pipes and bars of steel. Some are bruised, cut or bloody. Others have no weapons and just keep looking behind them. It is a mob scared of a mob. Jimmy hears loud bangs. A big man knocks his mother into the railing. At thirty-three she tells him there is one more level to go. That means they are going to his father, who works on thirty-four.

A few turns above thirty-four, the crowd becomes a crush, four people wide where only two fit. Jimmy loses his grip on his mother's arm. She is pushed ahead while he is pinned against the center post. Someone near the outer rail screams and falls over the edge. Jimmy climbs onto the inner rail and hugs the center post. He edges down the slippery rail after her, nearly slipping into the gap by the post. He finds her pushed toward the outside of the stairs. He sees a woman go down in the crowd and get trampled. His mother is carried a few steps upward. She cups her hands and screams at him to get to his father.

Then someone knocks his shins. Jimmy falls onto the sea of heads and rolls. Someone punches him in the ribs. Another man throws him aside, and he slides across elbows and skulls toward the open drop. His mother shrieks as she watches. At the last second he grabs the railing with one hand and a post with the other. His shoulder wrenches, and he hangs over empty space. People try to help, but the crowd sweeps them upward.

Two turns below him is the landing to thirty-four, packed with people. Someone in a full cleaning suit bursts out of the doors to IT and dives into the crowd. There are more bangs and a loud pop. Jimmy's hurt shoulder gives out. He slides down the post until he is clinging to the edge of a step, dangling by one hand. Nobody can help him, and he has no strength to climb back. He remembers his mother's order. He takes a deep breath, looks at the crowded landing below, and lets go.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, Jimmy falls two turns and lands on the crowd at level thirty-four, right on top of the man in the silver cleaning suit. His ribs, knee and shoulder hurt. Someone runs out of IT carrying a bundle. Someone yells about the forbidden Outside. Jimmy can't find his mother, so he follows her last order and goes inside to find his father.

IT is in chaos. At the security gate stands Yani, a big guard and a family friend. Today he looks terrified and holds a pistol. When Jimmy asks to get through, Yani says Jimmy's father won't let anyone in. Then he drags Jimmy over the turnstile with the gun to his chest, shouting that he has the boy. There is a deafening bang. Yani falls, wounded and gasping. Jimmy's father stands at the end of the hall holding a long gun that is still smoking. He has shot Yani.

His father rushes him through a huge steel door, and they push it shut as guards pound on it. He asks Jimmy for a four-digit number he will remember. Jimmy picks one-two-one-eight, for level twelve, where he goes to school, and level eighteen, where he lives. Inside is the room of servers his father once told him about. At the far wall, his father takes a key on a cord from around his neck. He calls it the key to the silo and says only two exist. He opens the back of one machine, the comm hub, and pulls a lever. Then he gives Jimmy the key, which has the silo's symbol on it, and lifts a section of floor grating. Below is a very long ladder.

At the bottom is a narrow passage with pulsing red lights. It leads to a room with shelves, a desk with a book, and a computer. His father uses a box of knobs to view camera feeds. Jimmy sees the hallway, where men stand over Yani. Then he sees the stairs, packed with people. His father says there has been a breach. Someone opened their airlock, claiming the gas supply was bad, to shut the silo down. On the screen they find Jimmy's mother, her mouth bloody, pinned against the rail.

His father decides to go get her. First, in a rush, he shows Jimmy the rest of the hideout: a stove, a storeroom, bunks and showers, with food for four people for ten years. He tells Jimmy to keep the key hidden and asks him to repeat the number. He shows him how the wall radio and the handheld radios work. Jimmy begs to come along, but his father says no. He must not open the door for anyone but his father or mother.

His father kisses his forehead. Jimmy remembers the last time he did that, years ago, before he vanished for three months to become a shadow. His father says the grate will lock behind him, and there is a handle below to open it. Then he climbs away up the ladder, and Jimmy is alone.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald has just been woken. His bare feet are still numb, and everywhere around him are boots: on the men wheeling him past the pods, in the lift, stomping up and down a busy hall. They leave him in a small apartment to clean up and thaw. He sits on the bed, half asleep, his thoughts slowly lining up like tired soldiers.

The apartment is down the hall from his old office, on the operations wing. At the foot of the bed is a pair of boots with "Thurman" written on the backs. Everyone has been calling him Mr. Thurman, but that is not who he is. A mistake, or a cruel trick. He reminds himself firmly that his name is Donald. He notices a dent in the mattress shaped by someone else's body, and a hole in the wall where the door was once flung open. There is an ID badge with Thurman's name but no photo. A bandage marks where Dr. Wilson drew his blood. His urine is pink, not dark as he remembers. In the hot shower he scrubs at the memory of the poisoned outside air.

The overalls are too big, and so are the boots. Donald thinks of how he became Congressman Keene overnight, with sudden power. It is happening again. Outside, Eren, the Ops head, asks how he feels and leads him to the comm room. Everyone there turns to look at him, waiting.

On a screen, a video plays from earlier that morning. Through swirling dust, a figure in a bulky suit walks up a hill, away from the camera. At first Donald fears it is him on his own escape, caught on film. But it is not. A cleaning was scheduled in silo 18 that morning, and it "didn't go through," says an operator in orange. The cleaner was heading toward silo 17. When Donald asks about seventeen, the operator says it is gone. It was shut down shifts ago, and the cleaner did nothing to it. The operator notices Donald seems off. Eren explains he has only been up half an hour. The operator jokes that he expected the Shepherd to wake up tough as nails.

The men ask whether they need permission to go after her. Silo 18 reports her suit was modified, so she could still be alive out there. Donald asks for her file and for everything on silo 17, "to refresh his memory." Eren asks about the protocols. Should they send a drone or someone after her, or shut down silo 18? A cleaning has never failed before, and there will be violence. Donald looks at his hand and remembers tearing off his own glove outside. He shouldn't be alive. He wonders what Thurman would order, but he isn't Thurman. Someone once said people like him should be in charge. He tells them to do nothing yet. She won't get far. They accept it, trusting the system.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald walks the short way from his new room to the central offices. He knocks on the door marked Office of Psychological Services. He once thought of the people inside as shrinks who kept others sane. Now he knows they are in charge of the insanity. To him the door now just reads OPS, operations, the head of the heads. The office across the hall, his old one, only gets the drudge work. He thinks of how each silo has a mayor for show, and how the old world had presidents who came and went. The real power always sat with the men in the shadows.

Eren welcomes him and helps him into the chair behind the desk. Eren's whites are crumpled from months on shift. He says they are still waiting on the full report about the cleaner. The head of silo 18 warned it's a thick one. Word is she was a sheriff, though Eren isn't sure he believes it. Donald points out that nobody has ever gotten out of sight before. Eren agrees. The closest was "that gentleman you stopped," he says. That is why the protocol says to wake him. Some of the men call him the Shepherd. Donald flinches. He feels more like a sheep.

He asks about silo 17. Claiming his fingers are still tingly, he slides the keyboard to Eren, who looks it up. A man named Cooper was on shift when 17 fell. Eren asks if Donald read the reports on his last shift. Donald dodges. Eren remembers he was in the deep freeze. Donald wonders if his body was moved, or if someone like Erskine simply swapped two entries in a database. To cover himself, he says he likes being near his daughter. Eren understands. He has a wife down there and still visits her first thing every shift.

Eren explains that seventeen was lost over thirty years ago. Nobody knows the cause, and there was no sign of unrest. A cleaning was planned, but the airlock opened a day early, out of order. It might have been a glitch or tampering. Sensors showed a gas purge in the lower levels and a riot surging up. Silo 1 "pulled the plug" as people scrambled out of the airlock. Donald remembers silo 12 ending the same way, with people on the hillside and white mist.

There were a few stragglers. Silo 1 lost the radio and cameras but kept making routine calls in case anyone was in the safe room. Someone did pick up on the day it fell, Eren says, some young shadow or tech. Soon after, they sent the collapse codes. So if the cleaner reaches seventeen, she will find only a hole in the ground. Donald suggests she might keep walking, and asks Eren to warn silo 16 and the silos on either side of 17. Eren agrees. Donald marvels at being treated like the man in charge. Then Eren taps two keys, logs himself out, and hurries off. Donald is left staring at a login screen. Suddenly he feels much less in charge.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald sits at the Ops desk facing his old office across the hall. A heavier, balder man sits there now, probably playing solitaire. Donald has his own puzzle: the login screen. His old Troy login fails. Old bank codes fail. Someone has tampered with the shifts, and he suspects Erskine, the old Brit who liked him. But why? For a moment he wants to walk into the hall and shout that he is Donald, not Thurman or the Shepherd or Troy, the way old Hal once screamed his real name. Instead he tries Erskine's name with his own passkey. It fails. Then, on a whim, he tries Thurman with his own passkey, 2156. It works.

Thurman has messages. Donald scrolls back through centuries of reports and automatic notes. One from Erskine mentions the deep freeze overflowing into a lower level. Then he finds a starred message from Victor, sent before Donald's second shift, and opens it.

It is Victor's suicide note to his "old friend." Victor writes that he has found out why one silo has had so much turmoil: someone there remembers, and she both disturbs him and confirms what he knows of humanity. Space gets cleared so it can be filled again. People spread fear because cleaning up afterward becomes a habit they crave. Instead of presenting a theory, he has gone to a dusty room to get a gun. He asks whether the world, and the people in it, were ever worth saving. Cleansing the world was their great achievement, he says, but saving humanity may have been their worst mistake. He leaves that choice to his friend, saying the final shift is his. He signs it with a full name: Vincent Wayne DiMarco.

Donald is shaken. Thurman knew all along. During Donald's last shift, while Donald wondered whether Victor was murdered, Thurman had this note and kept it secret. Donald pushes away the thought that it could be fake. He finds another message, titled "Urgent, The Pact." It says only: wake me when you get this. It is signed Anna, with a number after the word Locket: 20391102. It is a note from daughter to father. The number looks like an old date, maybe from a locket. Donald wonders what could be urgent about the Pact, the name the silos use for their rules.

Eren returns, and Donald hides the message. Eren reports that the head of silo 16 took the news badly and wanted to close his cafeteria or switch off the wallscreen. Eren told him that was only a last resort. Eren gives Donald the desk for the day and notes all the shifts "Thurman" has taken, including a double. He hands over two folders: one on silo 17, and a thick one on the cleaner. He suggests Donald call the head of silo 18, a shaken man named Bernard, who has no official second because his last shadow didn't work out. Eren told him to hurry a replacement.

Eren adds that the man across the hall goes by Gable. He couldn't cut it in Ops and chose a memory wipe over the deep freeze. Donald feels sad that anyone would volunteer for that empty job. Eren shakes his hand and says he is glad Donald is here.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, on Day One, Jimmy waits alone in the hidden rooms between levels. The radio on the wall hisses and spits nonstop. Its steel cage looks to him like a mouth with iron teeth. He wants to silence it but is scared to touch anything. He wonders how many secret places like this exist. He hopes his parents will come back soon, that they'll all stay the night, and that he'll see his friends again before long.

His body aches from the fall: sore ribs, a knot in his thigh, a painful shoulder. He checks the key on his chest. His mother is no longer on the screen. He tries the control box himself. Turning one knob changes the view. Another changes the level number in the corner. He finds an empty hall on thirty-three with a trail of dropped clothes. On the stairs, people lean over the rail in silent horror as something falls past. He tells himself it is too far up to be his mother. His dad has a gun and will find her.

He can't make the screen split into many windows again. On thirty-four, he finds the main hallway. Yani lies still and is surely dead. The men who stood over him are gone, and a new body lies near the steel door. Its overalls tell Jimmy it isn't his father. He guesses his father shot that man on the way out.

To pass the time, Jimmy looks at the thick book on the wooden desk. Paper like this is worth a fortune, and the desk and chair are real wood. The cover says Order. He realizes he has lost someone's place in it. On the shelves are heavy metal containers. He opens one with a soft sigh of air. Inside is another book. He puts it back, assuming it's boring. Under the desk, the computer is off, and its power switch does nothing. There is a slot for a key.

Suddenly the radio crackles. Someone asks for a report. Jimmy bangs his head on the desk and grabs the handset. He asks if it's his dad. A voice asks, "Sheriff? Who is this?" He gives his full name. The voice asks if he is Russ's boy and where he is. Jimmy doesn't want to say. It is Deputy Hines, who asks for his father.

Then his father's voice cuts in: "Mitch, this is Russ." Jimmy begs him to come back, but his father tells him to be quiet. With screaming in the background, his father orders the deputy to stop the traffic, because people are being crushed. There is a breach up top, he says, and Mitch is probably sheriff "until the end." The deputy treats Jimmy's father like the man in charge. His father says he is going to get Jimmy's mother and tells him to stay put. Jimmy hangs up the handset, trembling. He feels helpless and alone. He wishes he were out there helping.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, hours have passed since his father left. Jimmy hates the cramped hidden room. He creeps down the dark passage to the foot of the ladder and stares up at the grating, listening. He hears a faint buzzing that comes and goes, and he can't tell what it is. From there, the radio's hiss is barely audible. He wants to stay near the radio, but he also worries his dad might need him at the door. He wishes he could be in two places at once.

Back in the room with the desks, he eyes the long gun leaning against the wall. It is the same kind his father used to kill Yani, and Jimmy is afraid to touch it. He blames himself. If he had been faster on the stairs, he and his mother wouldn't have been caught in the crowd. Then he realizes something worse. His mother was only out there because she came to get him. Without him, his parents would both be down here, together and safe.

Suddenly his father's voice fills the room. The hiss has stopped, and his father is calling for him by his full name, James. Jimmy grabs the handset. On the monitor he sees his father standing outside the steel door at the end of the hall, with his back to the camera and the portable radio in his hand. Yani still lies in front. Jimmy shouts that he is coming and runs for the ladder.

His father yells "No," and then grunts. Jimmy spins back to the screen. Another man has come around the corner holding a long gun. His father is doubled over in pain. The man picks up the dropped radio and asks if this is Russ's boy. Jimmy answers the screen, begging him not to hurt his dad, then remembers he must press the button to be heard. He pleads again. The man looks straight at the camera. He is one of the security guards, and more people are hiding around the corner.

The guard aims the gun at Jimmy's father and demands the new code. Jimmy is torn. He doesn't want to tell, but he wants his father back inside. His father straightens up, calms someone out of sight with his hand, and asks for the radio. The guard hands it over.

Calmly, his father tells Jimmy they will kill him. As others wrestle him, he shouts that they'll kill everyone anyway, and they'll kill Jimmy the moment he opens the door. The men beat him. Then the guard waves the others away and fires. With only static in the room, Jimmy sees the flashes but hears no shot. His father jerks and slumps, as still as Yani. Jimmy screams at the screen. Then more guards appear, dragging his mother behind them, kicking and screaming without a sound.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, Jimmy stares at the monitor, saying no over and over. Two men wrestle his mother, who kicks and twists in their grip. His father lies still beneath her. Over the radio, the man shouts for him to open the door. Jimmy grabs a handheld radio from the rack, turns it on, and tells them not to hurt her. He is crying. He says he's coming.

He runs down the passage with the radio strap in his teeth, climbs the ladder despite his hurt shoulder and knee, and throws the grating aside. He races between the dark machines under the pulsing red lights, one bootlace flapping. All the while he pictures his mother's legs kicking in the air. He crashes into the steel door. He can hear muffled shouts through the door and through the radio. He shouts that he's here.

The man demands the code. Shaking and blinded by tears, Jimmy starts typing. He puts in eighteen first, the level of his home, then hesitates. Was it twelve-eighteen or eighteen-twelve? He finishes, and the keypad flashes red. The door stays shut. The man yells at him to just say the code aloud. Jimmy begs him not to hurt her. The man says she will die if he doesn't obey. He sounds terrified, maybe as scared as Jimmy.

Jimmy tries again. He gets the first two numbers right, then stops, remembering his father's words. They would kill him and his mother both if he let them in. But it is his mom. The man yells about three wrong tries in a row meaning a wait of another day. Jimmy can't move. The keypad times out with a red flash. A gun fires on the other side as a warning. His mother shrieks. The man says the next shot won't be a warning and orders him not to touch the pad again, just to say the numbers.

Jimmy sobs and tries to speak, but nothing comes out. With his forehead against the wall, he hears his mother fighting on the other side. Someone curses her. She screams for Jimmy not to do it. There is a slap against the door, someone pressed right up against it, his mother only inches away. Then come four quick beeps of the same number, and an angry buzz as the third try fails. That was probably his mother, locking them out on purpose (my guess, because she was pressed against the door and had just begged him not to give in).

Shouts follow, then the roar of a gun, very loud with his head against the door. Jimmy screams and pounds the steel. There are screams through the radio and through the door, but none of them are his mother's. He slides to the floor and curls up around the radio, shaking with sobs, his cheek against the rough grating. The lights overhead keep flashing. They are steady, he notices, not like a pulse at all.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald returns to his room to find a plastic bag waiting on his bunk. He shuts the door against the noise of hurrying feet and office chatter. There is no lock. This is a lone bedroom among the offices, made for men who are always on call. Donald realizes it is where Thurman stays when he is woken for an emergency. And that is exactly what is happening now, with Donald wearing his name.

The wheelchair is gone, and a glass of water stands on the nightstand. Donald tosses Eren's two folders onto the bed and picks up the bag. Stenciled on it in big letters is the word Shift. Inside are a few lumpy items. When he tips it over, out slide a pair of dog tags on a fine chain. They are Thurman's, thin and dented, without the rubber edges his sister's tags had. They look like antiques, which he supposes they are.

Next comes a small pocketknife with a handle that looks like ivory but probably isn't. Both edges of the blade are dull, and the tip has been snapped off, maybe from prying something open. It seems like a keepsake, no longer useful for cutting.

The last item is a coin, a quarter. Holding something once so ordinary makes it hard for him to breathe. A whole civilization is gone. He thinks of Roman and Mayan coins in museums. Normally people die and their cultures last. Now it is the other way around, and he is still here to marvel at it. Turning the coin over, he notices it has heads on both sides. It feels real, not a joke coin. On one side, a faint arc shows where the stamp missed. Perhaps it was a mistake, or a gift to Thurman from a friend in the Treasury.

He sets the items on the bedside table. He is surprised there is no locket, given Anna's note about a locket and a date. He folds the bag and slides it under his glass. Outside, the silo is in a panic. The real Thurman, he imagines, would be storming the halls, barking orders, shutting down facilities, ordering lives to be taken.

Donald coughs into his arm. Someone put him here: Erskine, or Victor from beyond the grave, or maybe a hacker with darker aims. He has nothing to go on. The runaway cleaner and the coming violence in another silo are not his mysteries, he thinks. He wants to know why he is awake, and why he is even alive. What is really outside? What is the plan when the shifts end? Will the people underground ever be set free? He suspects more lies are waiting, and perhaps that is why he was put in Thurman's boots: to keep digging.

He pats the badge in his pocket. It can open doors that were once locked to him. He is in charge now, and he can ask questions. He coughs again, drinks some water, and opens a folder. He doesn't notice the spot of blood left in the crook of his elbow.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, during Week One, Jimmy lies curled on the steel grating by the door. He can't move. The red lights keep flashing. On the other side, people yell at him and at each other. Guns pop and bullets ping off the door. Someone presses one digit on the keypad, and it buzzes. Jimmy sleeps in fits. He dreams of blood seeping under the door and rising into the shapes of his parents, scolding him silently.

At last hunger and a full bladder force him up. His cheek peels off the grating, deeply creased. He pees in a corner through the floor. He wants to waste away. He presses "1" on the keypad and it buzzes angrily, like everything else. His stomach reminds him there is food below, so he stumbles between the warm servers toward the hole in the floor.

At the ladder he notices the buzzing again. It comes and goes in time with the red lights. He follows it to the server with its back off, the comm hub. He can't quite remember where his father went. Inside hangs a headset. Below it is a row of sockets with numbers above them. One socket, marked "40," is blinking. He plugs in. The lights stop flashing, and a clear voice says hello.

The man asks if everyone is okay. Jimmy says no, everyone is not okay. He tells him people ran up the stairs, he fell, and his mom and dad... The man asks if there were casualties. Jimmy thinks of the body on the stairs and the woman who fell, and says yes. The man curses and says, as if to someone else, that they were too late. When Jimmy asks too late for what, the line clicks dead.

Jimmy studies the sockets. There are fifty numbers. He thinks they are levels, and wonders if other boxes handle the mids and the deeps. Looking for 18, his home, he notices there is no socket for 17. Then the lights flash again, and now socket "1" is blinking. He plugs in. An angry voice demands to know what's going on over there and asks if this is Jerry or Russ. Russ was his dad, and Jerry was his dad's boss. Jimmy gives his name and says the man on level forty said they were too late. The voice asks how he got in. "My dad let me in," Jimmy admits.

The voice says they are shutting him down. White steam hisses from the vents above. It has no smell, but it tastes like metal, like a dry spoon. Jimmy coughs. The voice mutters about this happening on his shift, then says that did it, he's gone. The lights inside the box die, the headset goes silent, and the whole room goes black and still. Jimmy wonders if he is blind or dead, but hears his own pulse. He wants his parents, and even his forgotten backpack.

As he crawls toward the ladder, the power clunks back on. The red lights flash again, and socket "40" is blinking. Afraid of being yelled at, he plugs the jack into "40." The flashing stops. The headset lies in the bottom of the box, its voice too faint to hear, and Jimmy leaves it there.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, a day or two after his parents were killed, Jimmy climbs down the ladder from the server room to the hidden rooms below. He can't remember when he last ate. Probably breakfast before school. As he goes down, he imagines he is a bite of food sliding down a huge metal throat. The silo feels hollow and hungry, and so does he.

The radio on the wall is still hissing, so he turns it down low. He somehow knows his father will never call him again. He thinks of this as a new Rule of the World. In the little apartment, the table is covered with loose pages from a book. A needle and thread sit on top, coiled like a snake. Someone has been sewing the spine back together.

Jimmy almost sees his father's ghost pointing out the doors, the way he did that first day. He uses the key around his neck to open the pantry across from the stove. His father said there was food for two people for ten years, though Jimmy isn't sure he remembers that right. The door opens with a sucking sound and a little breeze. Inside are shelves of cans stretching so far back he has to squint. These cans are strange to him. They have bright paper labels with printing, not the black ink scribbled on tins that he knows. One corn label shows a large, smiling man with green skin. It all feels like a dream.

He takes a can of corn and a red and white can of soup. He hunts through the drawers. One holds pencils, thread, old swollen batteries, a child's whistle and a screwdriver. He finds a rusty can opener. It still works if he squeezes hard, but the lid sinks into the soup, and he has to fish it out with a knife. He puts the soup on the stove and thinks of his home and his parents. Part of him knows no food can fill the real ache inside. He keeps wanting to scream, or to drop to the floor and cry.

While the soup heats, he looks at huge printed sheets hanging on one wall, like blankets drying. One is a plan of many circles with fine lines inside them, numbers above them, and labels everywhere. Three circles are crossed out in red ink. Each circle is labeled a silo. To Jimmy, that makes no sense.

A hiss behind him sounds like the radio, or ghosts whispering. It is his soup boiling over and spitting onto the hot burner. He turns away and leaves the strange drawing alone.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2312, the days crawl by until almost a week has passed. Jimmy can already picture weeks turning into months. Outside the steel door upstairs, men are still trying to get in. On the radio they yell and argue about the dead, the dying, and forbidden things like the outside.

Jimmy flips through the camera views. Most show empty, silent places. Sometimes there are bursts of violence. He sees a man held down and beaten, a woman dragged down a hall, and a man attacking a child over a loaf of bread. He switches the monitor off, shaken, and promises himself not to watch again. That night, alone in a bunk room full of empty beds, he barely sleeps. When he does, he dreams of his mother. He feels his days are numbered and running out.

He drags a mattress into the room with the computer and the radio. Even angry voices and ugly scenes feel like company. He soon breaks his promise and eats warm soup in front of the cameras, looking for people. Some days he creeps up to the steel door and listens. The men try three codes at a time, and each try ends in an angry buzz. Jimmy strokes the door and thanks it for staying shut. Among the humming servers, he feels ignored, like a small boy in a room of big ones. He learns a new Rule of the World: people aren't meant to live alone. But with no one to remind him, he keeps forgetting it. He talks to the machines instead.

The radio voices talk about killing. Some men have guns from the deputy stations. One man on ninety-one keeps telling everyone he has a gun. Jimmy wants to tell them that his key has opened a storeroom past the bunk room, full of racks of rifles and boxes of bullets. He wants them to know he has more guns than anyone and should be left alone. But he senses that would only make them try harder to reach him, so he keeps quiet.

On the sixth night, unable to sleep, he reads the book on the desk labeled Order. It is all disasters and how to prevent or soften them, with pages pointing to other pages. There is nothing in the index about being completely alone. Then he remembers the hundreds of sealed metal tins on the shelves. He opens the one labeled Li to Lo, hoping to find "loneliness." The tin sighs open like a soup can.

Inside the book, he finds a glossy color picture of a huge black machine on wheels, towering over a man. It is called a locomotive. Jimmy decides the word must mean a crazy reason for doing something. He turns the page and screams. A giant bug! He leaps onto his mattress, heart pounding, before he realizes it's just another picture, a locust. This book's cover says Legacy, not Order. It is full of bright pictures and impossible things. And there are hundreds more on the shelves, in alphabetical order. Jimmy finds the locomotive again and settles in. He won't be sleeping for a long time.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald, still posing as Thurman, waits in the comm room for his first call with the head of silo 18. He turns the dials and flips through 18's cameras. From one chair he can watch a whole world. He could end it with a button. He mutters that it's like the afterlife. The operator beside him, a man with messy black hair eating a sandwich, gives him a look. Donald says it's like a view from heaven. The operator is watching two women argue on his own screen, like a show without the laugh track.

Donald tunes in 18's cafeteria. A small crowd stares at the wallscreen, maybe waiting for their cleaner to come back over the hills. He'd like to tell them she won't. Secretly, though, he shares their dream of what's beyond. He wishes he could send a drone to look. But Eren told him drones are for dropping bombs, have a short range, and would be torn apart by the air. Donald wants to show Eren his blotchy pink hand and say he's been out there and come back. He knows this is hope, the dangerous kind. He thinks of old gods who fell for mortals and got tangled in their lives. When the operator glances at his screen, Donald switches to a school hallway.

The call comes. Donald has two folders: a thick one on the missing cleaner, and a thin one on a possible shadow named Lukas Kyle. On camera, a short, pudgy man stands behind a server cabinet. Donald says only "Report." The system makes every voice sound flat. The head of 18 says he has picked a shadow, a good kid who has already worked on the servers. The operator points to a line in the file. Donald reads it out. This man was considered two years ago, and a report called him a possible gazer, someone who has spent hundreds of hours at the wallscreen. The head of 18 says that report came from another eager candidate, now moved to Security. He insists Lukas doesn't dream of the outside. He only goes up at night to look at the stars. He also knew the young man's stern father, and uses a stair saying Donald doesn't understand.

Donald approves the shadow and orders him put on the Legacy at once. Then he asks about the uprising. The head of 18 says Mechanical is holed up behind a barricade, but his men drove them back and will break through soon. The operator points at blank screens. Donald asks how Mechanical knew about the cameras. Silo 1 is blind from level 140 down. The head of 18 says the mechanics do their own wiring, and he doesn't think anyone tipped them off. He plans to send in a priest, who shadowed with Security, to bless their dead. Donald tells him to hurry and get his house in order.

The man, whom Donald thinks of as Bernard, hangs up his headset and wipes his forehead. Donald quietly wipes his own. He tells the operator to keep a close eye on Bernard. The operator promises he will. As Donald leaves, the operator's screen splits into four views, including the server room and the two arguing women.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald takes his folders up to the cafeteria before breakfast. He pours a mug of cold, weak coffee and faces the wallscreen as dawn lights the clouds. The view is the real mystery to him. People die when they go out to clean. But he went out and survived, and so did the men who dragged him back. His palm looks pink and raw, though he has scrubbed it many times since he got here. He coughs into his handkerchief. He wonders whether the kitchen workers, who serve for six months and then sleep for decades, think they're going anywhere.

The thick folder is labeled Nichols, Juliette. She was a mechanic from the lower levels who was sheriff for only a short time. One memo, from the head of 18, lists why she was unfit for power. It sounds to Donald like a list about himself. The mayor of 18, an old woman called Jahns, pushed her into the job despite objections. Later reports describe her defiance, her walk out of sight, and her refusal to clean. Again Donald feels he is reading about himself. His colleagues fear her walk will give 18 dangerous hope. The worse fear is that she reached another silo. Donald doubts she lasted long.

He opens the Silo 17 file. There was no warning before its collapse. Every department blamed another. The comm officer on duty thought it was sabotage, to stop a cleaning. The cameras caught people pouring out of the airlock before a blackout. Silo 1's first call was answered by the IT shadow, Russ, who soon hung up. A later call went unanswered for hours. Then someone young picked up. He asked a flood of questions, including what was happening down on level forty.

Donald designed these silos and knows level forty is just housing, farms and shops. Why would a dying boy care? He pictures the boy fleeing upward and reaching the server room. Then it clicks. Forty wasn't a level. It was Silo Forty. The boy had found the back of the comm station and talked to another silo without knowing what it was. And the blackout is just like the dark silos Anna fought on his last shift. Donald wonders if 17 was never destroyed at all, and if the cleaner wandered into its bowl and found something.

He thinks of Anna's note asking her father to wake her. She would know what to do. She should be in charge, not him. But he has no one to trust and doesn't know how to wake anyone. Still, he is supposedly in charge. He can demand to learn.

He feels an urge to walk outside and climb the hill himself. He goes to the yellow airlock door and looks through its small window. The memory of being dragged back hits him hard, and he rubs his arm where the needle went in. Maybe the machines in his blood protected him out there. Then a new thought chills him. Why does silo 1 have a wallscreen at all? Perhaps for the same reason as the other silos: to keep its people from going out.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, it takes Donald days to work up the nerve to ask Dr. Wilson for an appointment, and days more to get one. Meanwhile he tells Eren his idea about Silo Forty. It sets off a rush of activity. Donald signs an order for a bombing run without really understanding it. The target is probably Silo Forty (my guess, because the order follows straight from his report). Old, unused levels are brought back to life. Days later, others say they felt the ground shake. Donald only finds fresh dust on his things.

On the day of the appointment, he slips down to the deep freeze to test his code. He still doesn't trust his disguise. The day before, he saw a man in the gym he might know from his first shift. The light over the Emergency Personnel door turns green. Inside is a small chamber, a bump in the walls of the huge main freeze. He searches the pods until he finds his sister. Her screen shows no name, only a number. "Hey, Sis," he says, rubbing the frost away. He hopes Charlotte knew nothing of Thurman's plans before she came here. He likes to think she is less to blame than he is.

He remembers her visit to Washington. She spent precious leave campaigning for Thurman and seeing him. She was shocked he had never visited the free museums. At the Air and Space Museum, a sidewalk model of the solar system put Pluto blocks away, impossibly distant. That day now feels just as far off.

Then she dragged him to the Holocaust Museum, which he had always avoided. By then he was on pills to forget what he read in the Order. He saw rooms of shoes and photographs of bodies tumbling into a pit. The worst part was the calm man driving the bulldozer, a cigarette in his mouth, just doing a job. Donald fled into an exhibit called Architects of Death, hoping blueprints would feel safe. Instead he found plans for the death camps, including the gas chambers. Jewish draftsmen had been forced to help draw them, sketching the walls that would hold them. Donald remembers grabbing for his pills and wondering how they could draw such things and not know what they were for.

Back in the present, he looks at the walls around him. He helped design this place. When he tried to escape it, he was dragged back, a prisoner inside his own walls.

The keypad beeps and Dr. Wilson walks in. He saw Donald on his monitor and guessed he had lost track of time. He asks if the frozen woman is someone Donald knows. Donald says she is someone he worked with. He thanks the doctor for a refresher on the waking procedure. Wilson says a reactor tech coming on for his fourth shift is ready to be woken, and everyone is waiting. Donald pats his sister's pod. She has waited hundreds of years, so another day or two won't hurt. Then, he thinks, the two of them will find out together what he helped to build. He seems to plan to wake her (my guess, because he wants lessons in waking and tells her the wait is nearly over).

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2313, Jimmy has been alone for a whole year. He is surrounded by paper, but he won't write on any of it, not even in the margins. The books feel far too precious. Instead he counts the days by scratching marks into the black paint of the server labeled 17, using the key around his neck.

He has learned that 17 is his silo. The number is stamped inside his copy of the Order and written on the wall chart of all the silos. He knows what that means. He may be alone in his world, but his world is not the only one.

Every night before bed, he scratches one silver mark. He only does it at night, because marking a day in the morning feels like cheating. His first marks were big and messy, in the middle of the machine. After two months he ran out of room. He crossed them out and started again on the other side, small and neat. Four ticks and a slash, the way his mother used to count the days he was good. Six of those make a month, and twelve rows plus five extra make a year. Tonight he makes the last mark of the year. It fills half of one side of the server.

He knows this can't go on forever. His father said there was food for ten years for two people, or maybe four. Jimmy can't remember which. Either way, alone, it might last twenty years. He looks down the aisle at the great silver door. Someday he will have to go out, or he will go mad. He feels he already is. The cameras stopped working a while ago, and not being able to see outside is torture. He is tempted to type the code and peek. Not yet. Bad people out there want to know why this level still has power, and who is inside.

When he finds the courage to speak, he tells them he's nobody. Mostly he just listens. One group works the farms. Another fights to stop floodwater from the mines drowning Mechanical. A third has guns and takes what the others gather. Once, a lone woman screamed for help, but what could he do? He guesses a hundred or more people are left in small groups, still killing each other. Surely they must stop soon. Maybe not.

Time has become strange. There is no dimming of lights at night, no sunshine up top, just numbers on a computer screen. Counting tells him he is still alive. Before bed he thinks of games, chores, books and target practice, but none appeals. He'll probably just lie awake until the numbers say it's tomorrow.

The chapter

In silo 17, in Jimmy's second year alone, weeks go by and the scratches pile up. The tip of the key he scratches with wears down. One morning he carries his breakfast, a can of peaches and a can of pineapple, up to the great steel door. He sits with his back against server number eight, which is warm from working, and lays a rifle across his lap.

The gun took some figuring out. His father vanished with the loaded one, so Jimmy had to learn from the crates of weapons in the storeroom. He made it a Project, the way his dad made chores into projects. His father used to take electronics apart and lay every screw and bolt out in a neat pattern, so he could put them back. Jimmy did the same with a rifle. Then he had to do it again with a second rifle, after kicking over the pieces of the first. He worked out how the bullets feed in, through a holder with a stiff spring. Weeks later, he read in the Legacy, under G for "gun," that it's called a clip. By then he had already put a hole in the ceiling.

Pineapple is his favorite. He had never heard of it, so he looked it up in the book tins. That led him to "beach," then "ocean," which confused him with its sheer size, then "fish." He got so lost exploring that he forgot to eat, and his room ended up buried in open books. It took a week to tidy. He has learned not to eat from a can unless it pops when opened. Luckily the toilets still worked when he learned that lesson. They don't anymore, and he misses them badly.

He is drinking the peach juice when the keypad beeps. He whispers that his visitors are early. He lifts the gun, ready to shoot the moment the door cracks. Four beeps, then a buzz: wrong code. The keypad takes four digits, so there are ten thousand possible codes, and the door allows only three wrong tries a day. The code is twelve-eighteen. Jimmy curses himself for even thinking it, then remembers that thoughts can't be heard.

This happens every morning: three tries, three buzzes. It frightens him, but it is also his only human contact, and he has come to rely on it. He has done the math on the side of a server. If they started at 0000 and are counting up, they will hit the right code on day 406, on the second try. That is less than a month away. But maybe they skip numbers, or started at 9999, or guess at random. He never learned how his father changed the code, so he can't move it. Letting them in by mistake would be worse than doing nothing. He doesn't want to die, and he doesn't want to kill anyone.

The third try buzzes. Jimmy relaxes and wipes his sweaty palms. He greets his pineapples and punctures the can. It pops. They're safe to eat.

The chapter

In silo 17, still in Jimmy's second year alone, the water stops flushing. Jimmy learns a new Rule of the World: life comes down to meals and going to the toilet. Nobody thinks about the toilet until it stops working. Then it's all you think about. He starts using a far corner of the server room, away from the door. When the tap runs dry, he follows a page in the Order and draws from the cistern. The Order is boring, but handy. To save water, he drinks the juice from every can. He hates tomato soup but drinks one a day.

One morning, he is finishing a can of fruit when the men outside try their codes. Four numbers, then a beep. Not a buzz. The light that has always been red flashes green. Jimmy jumps, and the can spills across the floor. They're two days early. Maybe he lost track of a day when he had a fever, or they skipped a number. He fumbles with the rifle and flicks off the safety, wishing he had practiced yesterday. The door begins to open.

He has expected this moment for so long. Still, it shocks him, like a bag blown up until it bursts. For one brief moment, he wonders if this could be someone to talk to. A partner for his projects. Someone with a new can opener, since his has broken.

Then he sees a face with an angry sneer. Jimmy pulls the trigger. The man falls, looking startled and sad. A second man pushes past, holding something black. Jimmy fires again and again. The man keeps coming, then crumples a few steps away, inside the room. A third man is out in the hall, cursing. The first man, still moving outside the door, lifts his head. For a second, Jimmy sees his own father lying there, dying in the hallway, and doesn't know why.

The cursing fades as the third man backs away. Jimmy could shut the door now. Then he realizes that man knows the code and is taking it with him. He whispers the numbers to himself. He peeks out and sees a flash of green overalls ducking into an office far down the bright hall.

Jimmy braces the rifle and lines up the sights on the edge of that office door. He pictures a soup can, like his practice targets. His barrel trembles as he thinks of his parents. Some part of him knows they are gone for good. The wounded man crawls toward him, groaning, blood frothing on his bearded lips. Jimmy looks away and counts. At thirty-two, weak fingers paw at his boots. At fifty-one, a head peeks out of the office. Jimmy fires and hits him.

He pulls his boot free and shoulders the heavy door shut. The locks thunk deep inside the walls. He drops the gun and covers his face, weeping, while a man lies dying inside the server room with him. The keypad chirps and goes quiet, waiting for another day.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald watches Dr. Wilson's team prepare to wake the reactor tech. Clipboards on the office wall remind him of the day he signed the form to put himself under. An empty gurney waits with a crisp clean sheet. One assistant stirs two scoops of green powder into warm water, the bitter wake-up drink. Donald notes which cabinet the powder comes from and how much is used, and he asks every question he can think of. The other assistant readies a blanket, a paper gown and a medical kit.

The tech's number is read out to confirm who they're waking. Like Donald's sister, he is just a number in a grid. Donald suddenly sees how easily his own switch with Thurman could have happened. Paperwork is filled out without his signature and dropped in a box. There will be no record of what he is planning.

They ride the lift two levels down. One assistant jokes that he has only three days left on his shift, so they should go easy with his catheter. Even the doctor laughs. Donald doesn't. He is wondering what the final shift will be like. Nobody here seems to think beyond the next one. It reminds him of Washington, where everyone hoped to survive the next term while dreading the next campaign. They reach a cold hall of sleeping shift workers. The pod is twenty rows down and four over.

Dr. Wilson admits most of the process is automatic. A trained monkey could do it, he jokes. He is like the Shepherd, only there in case something goes wrong. He enters his code and presses a red button. The pod will warm to thirty-one degrees Celsius. A flashing light means nanos are being injected into the blood. Freezing would kill a normal person, he says, which is probably why it was outlawed. Donald looks at his blotchy red palm and wonders what that makes him. At thirty degrees the lid will release. Wilson resets the dial early so he won't forget. Once started, the process only runs one way.

Donald asks what to do if something goes wrong, or if the doctor gets called away. Wilson says to dial the temperature back down and close the lid to put them back under. The nanos might even fix the problem. He can't see why it would come up. Donald can. He asks if his own code will start the process. Wilson chuckles. His code would probably open the airlock. Is there anything he can't access? The truth, Donald thinks.

The lid pops open. A handsome young man lies inside, twitching awake. The assistants remove the catheter and the needle and give him the bitter drink. Wilson explains that they'll take samples upstairs, and send someone to fetch any personal items from the man's locker, saved from his last shift. As they lift the man into the wheelchair, Donald remembers the Shift bag on his bed, with Thurman's things. It had a small number on it, like the number in Anna's note. That number wasn't a date. And "locket" was probably a typo for "locker." For a moment, he forgets about waking his sister. Other sleeping ghosts are whispering to him.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald helps take the groggy reactor tech up to the medical offices. Then he volunteers to fetch the man's personal things from storage. There are sixteen levels of stores, not counting the armory. He rides the lift to the storeroom on fifty-seven, with the tech's ID number on a scrap of paper. Anna's number is vivid in his mind too. He had read it as a date, November 2nd, 2039.

The storeroom is dark. When he flips the switches, the lights pop on in random patches, revealing a maze of tall shelves. Sealed plastic tubs tower over him. Many are empty, waiting for future shifts. His and Anna's notes from his last shift must be in tubs like these, telling of Silo Forty and of his efforts to save silo 18. He wonders if saving 18 was a mistake, and if this wandering cleaner is somehow his fault. At the far wall, his fear of being buried in the dark rises. What if the lights all went out? He coughs into his handkerchief and tells himself dying wouldn't be the worst thing.

There are thousands of small lockers. Erskine's and Victor's must be here too, and he makes a note to check them later. Anna's number is far from where he stands. But nearby are lockers starting with 44, like his own ID. He finds his locker, Troy's locker, and presses the button. It opens with a sigh. Everything down here is sealed from the air, which slowly eats at all things. Inside is a vacuum-packed bag marked Legacy, not Shift. Through the plastic he sees tan slacks and a red shirt, the clothes he wore the day he came underground.

He wonders why they were kept. Maybe storing things is simply how a sealed world gets rid of them. He opens the bag and smells mud and grass from long ago. Under the clothes is a flash of yellow: his wedding ring. In the slacks pocket is something hard. Not his pills, which he lost in a fall. Not the ATV key, which Anna took. It's his phone. Of course it's dead. It wasn't even working properly the day he lost Helen. He slips the ring on. It still fits. He thinks of Helen, and of Mick, and their children, and feels sad and sick. He pockets the ring and the phone and goes to look for Anna's locker.

Something nags at him. A patch of the storeroom is dark where a bulb has died. It reminds him of Silo Forty, and the darkness that spread through the silos. Eren has now ended whatever was happening there with a bomb. He thinks of Anna's skill with wireless systems and hacking. Another light pops out, and the pieces come together. His phone failed on the day the bombs fell. Before that, there were all the times he couldn't reach Mick, and the nights he and Anna ended up alone. Mick swapped places with him at the last minute.

Donald slaps a locker and curses. Mick got the home life, with help. Donald has blamed himself, and Helen, and Mick, all this time. Now, in a murderous rage, he believes the truth is Anna. She hacked his life. She brought him here.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald collects the things from the other two lockers as if he is in a dream. Numb, he takes the reactor tech's belongings back to Dr. Wilson's office. He asks Wilson for something to help him sleep and watches where the pills come from. When Wilson goes off to his lab, Donald takes more pills. He crushes them and mixes them with two scoops of the green powder to make the bitter drink. He has no plan. He just wants to end a cruelness in his life.

He pushes a loaded wheelchair down to the deep freeze and finds Anna's pod easily. He touches the pod warily, remembering how touching her always felt wrong, an insult to Helen. He kneels and enters his code. Part of him hopes it won't work, because this is too much power: to give a life or take it. But the panel beeps, and he turns the dial the way Dr. Wilson showed him. As the pod warms, his anger fades. When the lid opens, he removes the tube from the needle in her arm, stops the drip, and wraps her in a blanket.

Anna wakes slowly, stiff and shivering. She recognizes him and whispers "Donny." She thinks he has come for her. She asks what year it is and whether "it is time." Donald says it is time for the truth. He asks if she is the reason he is here. Still foggy, she says yes. She says her father was never going to wake them, and that she knew Donald would come. He hands her the thermos but won't help her out of the pod.

Donald shows her his old phone. He asks if she kept him from Helen on the day the bombs fell, and if she was behind all the times Mick missed their meetings. Anna does not deny it. She looks sad, not defiant. She says it was so long ago, and that what she and Mick did seemed right at the time. Then she keeps trying to tell him something more important. Her father woke her for another shift while Donald was frozen, and she found something. Her father made a pact. They were never meant to be woken. They need to get out. Donald tells her to stop. He wants no more stories.

Anna says it was meant to be, the two of them together, because they built this place. She couldn't bear the thought of him dying alone. Donald, shaking with rage, says he would not have been alone, and that it was not her choice. Then his rage drains away. He tells her to drink, and then she can explain. He guides the straw to her lips. She says it is bitter, but keeps drinking and keeps warning him that they are not safe. He agrees. To him, the danger is her.

Soon she grows sleepy and confused. Donald tells her she shouldn't have brought him here. He sits on the pod's edge and holds her. He remembers the night of their first kiss in college, when she fell asleep on his shoulder and called him her guardian angel. Then Anna takes one last trembling breath, grips his shoulder, and dies in his arms.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2318, it is Year Seven of Jimmy's time alone in the rooms under IT. Something is going wrong with the cans. Brown spots appeared on a can of beets months ago, and now more and more cans have them. Some food tastes a little off, and he gets sick to his stomach more often. That makes the server room smell awful. Flies swarm the corner he uses as a toilet, so he has to go further and further out. He knows he must leave. No one has tried the door in a long time. Yet the room that once felt like a prison now feels like the only safe place, and the thought of leaving terrifies him.

He delays for two days by turning the preparing into a Project. He takes apart his favorite rifle and oils every piece. He fills two clips with his lucky bullets, the ones that rarely jammed during his shooting games. He turns a spare pair of overalls into a backpack by knotting the arms to the legs. Inside go two cans each of sausage, pineapple and tomato juice. He pats his chest to check the key on its chain. He does this so often that he has a purple bruise there. A fork and a rusty screwdriver for stabbing cans open go in his pocket. He most needs a can opener and batteries for his flashlight. The power has failed twice over the years, and the dark terrified him.

Scratching his beard, he adds two old empty bottles, dug out from behind a hill of empty cans, in case he finds water. He packs the big kitchen knife. On the second day he decides it is too late to start. He oils the gun again and promises to go in the morning. That night the radio's hiss makes him dream that outside air is leaking in under the steel door, and he wakes gasping.

In the morning the cameras still don't work, so he can't see the hallway. He tells himself no one is there. He climbs the ladder, humming a tune his parents used to sing, because his mouth is too dry to whistle. At the top he pauses to enjoy the hum of the servers. He has taken the backs off most of them, hoping for secrets, but they only look like the computers his dad used to build.

At the great steel door, he thinks about how his world has been shrinking. First he was at ease on both levels. Then only below. In the end, only on his cot by the radio. Now he stands where his father dragged him in and where he killed three men. He worries the outside air might be poisonous, but people have lived out there for years, talking on the radio.

He types the code for school, then thinks of home. He imagines his mother waiting on his parents' bed, then pictures her as bones. His shaking hand hits the wrong key, and he waits for the keypad to buzz. He tells himself he is alone, and oddly that comforts him. He enters the code again. The door beeps and unlocks. Jimmy raises his rifle to his shoulder. All he has to do now is pull.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2318, Jimmy steps out of the server room for the first time in seven years. The hallway shows signs of both life and death. There is a burned ring and a scatter of ash on the tiles, left by an old fire. The outside of the steel door is covered in scratches and dents. The dents remind him of his own missed shots in his game of Kick the Can. Right by his feet is a brown stain on the floor. He remembers a man dying there. He looks away and walks into the hall.

As he starts to pull the door shut, he panics. What if the code doesn't work from the outside? What if he can never get back in? He sees deep gouges around the keypad, where someone once tried to pry it off the wall. So many people wanted in so badly over the years. It makes him feel crazy for wanting out. He shuts the door anyway. The locks slide into place with a hollow thunk that sounds horribly final.

At once he imagines men charging down all three hallways, screaming and waving weapons. He rushes to the keypad and enters the code. The door opens. He takes a deep breath of home and nearly gags, because it smells of his own waste warmed by the servers. No one is coming. He reminds himself what he needs: a can opener, a working toilet, overalls that aren't in rags, and more food and water.

He closes the door again. Even though he has just tested it, the fear comes straight back. He knows that part of him could check the code a hundred times and still worry it would fail the next time. He forces himself to walk away.

The hallway is brightly lit. He slips past offices that have been torn apart. The only sounds are a dying light fixture buzzing and a sheet of paper fluttering under an air vent. The security station is empty. He climbs over its gate, remembering Yani. He half expects the stairwell to be packed with people, the way it was on the day it all began. But when he opens the door, the landing is empty and dim, lit only by green emergency lights.

He closes the door slowly so the rusty hinges groan instead of squeal. At his feet lies a white bone as long as his forearm. He recognizes the shape from the skeleton of the man who wasted away beside the servers. Jimmy feels sure that his own bones will lie exposed one day, maybe even today. Strangely, this scares him less than it should. The open space, the cool air and the green glow feel like a huge relief after being shut in for so long. The levels of the silo that once penned him in are now his great outside, a place of endless death but also of hope.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2318, Jimmy has no real plan once he is out of IT, but he feels a pull upward. His flashlight is running low, so he explores carefully. In a dark apartment he finds a toilet and uses it. It doesn't flush. The sink doesn't run either, and neither does the washing nozzle beside the toilet. He has to clean himself with a bedsheet in total darkness.

Then he starts climbing. There was a general store on level nineteen, just below his family's home. He hopes to find batteries there, though he fears most useful things are long gone. The garment district should have overalls. A plan is starting to form.

Then he feels a shaking in the steps. Footsteps are clanging down from above. The landing overhead is closer than the one below, so he runs up toward it, his rifle banging against the jugs tied to his pack. He is scared, but also relieved not to be alone. He ducks through the doors and leaves a small crack to peek through. Two figures race past. The first squeaks a hand along the railing. The second is close behind, shouting threats. Both are just blurs. Jimmy stays in the dark hall until the noise fades. Then he starts imagining clawed hands creeping across the floor to tangle in his long, wild hair. He finds himself back out on the landing, panting, not sure what was real.

He decides he is alone either way. Even if others have survived, the only company he can expect is the kind that chases you or kills you.

He climbs on, now feeling the rail for vibrations and listening for footsteps. He passes the water plant on thirty-two, the dirt farm on thirty-one and sanitation on twenty-six. His legs warm up in a good way. Familiar levels from another life now look worn, rusty and tangled with wires and pipes, as rusty as his memory of them.

The general store on nineteen is almost bare. Under a fallen stand of shelves lie the remains of a person. The boots sticking out are small, a woman's or a child's, with white ankle bones showing above them. Some goods are trapped under the shelf too, but Jimmy doesn't want to look. The other shelves hold only toys and useless trinkets, no batteries and no can opener. Many people must have picked over these goods before him. He sneaks out in the dark to save his flashlight.

He decides his family's old apartment on eighteen isn't worth searching. It doesn't feel like home anymore. He feels a sadness he can't name, a sense that he failed his parents, an ache like sucking on ice. Still something calls him from above. Only when he is half a turn from the schoolhouse does he understand. It is the past. His classroom is the last place he saw his mother, the place where his friends still sit in his mind. Part of him feels that if he could sit at his desk again, he could undo that day and make it end differently.

The chapter

In silo 17, in 2318, Jimmy reaches his old classroom with his flashlight on. He sees at once that there is no going back. His old backpack lies in the middle of the floor. Desks are knocked out of their rows. He can picture his friends rushing out the door. They took their bags. His was left behind, lying as still as a body.

As he steps inside, he almost feels Mrs. Pearson look up and smile. He remembers Barbara, who sat by the door. When he was fourteen, on the way back from a class trip to the livestock pens, she hung back and took his hand, and he didn't pull away. That touch was his only taste of what might have been with someone. He runs his fingers through the dust on her desk. His best friend Paul's desk is one of the ones pushed aside. Standing alone by his bag, he says out loud that he is all alone. His dry lips tear apart as he speaks, as if they are opening for the first time.

The bag has been emptied of food. Only the plastic wrap his mother reused for his lunch is left. He oddly remembers that lunch exactly. But the calculator his father built from scratch is still there, and so are the little glass soldiers his uncle gave him for his thirteenth birthday. He moves everything from his knotted overalls into his old backpack. The stiff zipper still works. He leaves the worn-out overalls behind.

On the blackboard, someone has scrawled a swear word over and over. Jimmy finds Mrs. Pearson's crusty erasing rag and wipes it away. He remembers happy days writing at the board, and Mrs. Pearson once praising his poetry. He picks up a stub of chalk. No one is watching, so he isn't nervous. First he writes that he is Jimmy. Then he writes a poem about being alone. In it, ghosts watch him, corpses laugh, his parents are missing, and the silo is empty and full of death. One line says nobody calls him Jimmy anymore. The last line claims that being alone makes him stronger. He knows that part is a lie, but decides it doesn't count in a poem. As always, his lines sag downward and the letters shrink toward the end. He wonders what that says about him.

He notices a problem. The line about nobody calling him Jimmy doesn't match the words above the poem, which say he is Jimmy. He reaches to erase the poem line but stops. He is afraid of making the poem worse by trying to fix it. This is his own voice, and it is too rare to wipe out. He feels the ghosts of his teacher and classmates watching him work.

Then the answer comes, with the thrill of solving a puzzle. He wipes out the first line instead. He starts to write that he is Solitude, but his deeper thoughts take over and he shortens it. He writes that he is Solo. Then he picks up his bag and leaves, with chalk dust drifting down like ghostly words. Readers of Wool will know this name. It is what the lonely man in silo 17 called himself.

The chapter

In silo 1, in 2345, Donald pushes the empty wheelchair back to Dr. Wilson's office, a damp blanket dragging on the floor. He feels numb. That morning he dreamed of giving life, not taking it. Now the permanence of what he has done sinks in, and he can hardly breathe. He stops and lists what he has become: an architect who didn't know, a prisoner, a puppet, a hangman. Thinking of Helen and Mick, and the life taken from him, he wipes away angry tears. Everything that led him here was someone else's doing. He feels like a puppet with its strings cut.

He parks the chair and puts the vial of sleeping pills back in the cabinet. Then he sees a note on the gurney from Wilson: Donald forgot something. It is stuck to a thin folder. Donald had handed it over with the reactor tech's things without noticing. The trip to the other lockers was a blur. All he remembers is clutching his phone and realizing that Anna had used Mick and her father to arrange his last-minute switch. This folder came from the locker number in Anna's message. It seems unimportant now, but he opens it anyway.

Inside is one old, yellowed sheet with crumbling edges. It is typed and signed by five people. At the top it reads RE: THE PACT, the same words as the subject of Anna's urgent note. It is far too short to be the Pact that runs the silos, with its lotteries and cleanings. It looks like a memo from his days in Congress. It is signed only with a V.

The memo says the planners first thought ten facilities and one century would be enough for a cleanse. Now they want thirty facilities and two centuries. There had been talk of letting two facilities reach something called E-Day, as a backup. That idea is rejected. The writer says it is better to have all baskets in one egg than to risk two eggs hatching. All the founders must sign this change. The writer will work the E-shift himself and pull the lever. He says the long-term survival chance is now 42 percent, and calls it marvelous progress.

Donald recognizes Thurman's signature. Another may be Erskine's. One looks like Charles Rhodes, the Oklahoma governor. There is no date. Slowly he understands. He remembers Victor's ranked list of silos, with eighteen near the top. Only one silo is meant to survive. The others will be destroyed, because no one trusts what the silos would do to each other if they met on the hills centuries from now. Donald drew this place. He feels he should have known all along. He wonders how the choice of which silo lives could be anything but arbitrary.

He coughs into his shaking hand. Now he knows what Anna was trying to tell him, and it is too late. His only ally is gone. But there is someone else he could wake, the person he hoped to wake from the start. Then he grasps the full meaning. It is a suicide pact. Silo 1 itself is meant to die too. The women and children asleep below are only there to keep the men working their shifts. They are all meant to drown.