Chapter 11: I Threw it All Away

Michael turned the stolen ident card over and over in his hands as they descended, and Lily pinched the damp ends of her hair.

The fifth blackout in almost as many days had hit while she was showering. When the power came back on Naomi’s voice had echoed promptly from the PA, urging everyone to stay calm and go back to work. That announcement bothered Lily more than silence would have.

Her eyes returned to the numbers counting up above the door. The point of swiping the card from a red-suited woman in the dining facility had been to keep their hands clean, but it wouldn’t mean a thing if these doors opened on a gang of patrolmen.

The lift didn't stop until it hit the bottom.

"What's down here," Lily asked. The air smelled of dust and plastic.

Michael shrugged, and hit the button to open the doors. Maybe she deserved that. That was all she'd done, after all, when he'd asked if she wanted to come with him.

They were buried alive in the guts of the earth. The flashlight beam grew a forest of long shadows from stacks of crates. Lily wondered how he’d known about this place, but asking would be a waste of breath.

Every day she left her door cracked when she went to work, and when she came back he was usually asleep on the second bed. Sometimes he wasn’t, and she lay awake in the hot, dark room, listening for footsteps that never came. Sometimes he dreamed. Sometimes she did. They didn’t talk.

Maggie was never going to speak to her again either; Lily had endured a week of silence from the closest thing she had to a friend. She wondered if it would be forever. She wondered if the next blackout would be the one that lasted.

She wondered if Michael was going to tell her what he was looking for.

“What are you looking for,” Lily demanded.

He read the labels on a stack of crates, wiping away the dust of centuries with his thumb. "I don't know.”

This sublevel was below even the Supply depots, below the generators, in the deep dark. Nothing existed outside the beam of their flashlight; they lived in that bubble of light like it held the world.

Lily shivered. "Can I help?"

Michael blinked at her. The light undercut his face, making it inhuman. "If you want."

"Then you have to tell me what to look for."

The beam wavered. “I want to find out who built this place.”

“We should be looking for a way out,” she protested.

Light glinted off glass. Michael froze mid-step, then continued. Lily saw a row of machines with arms, probably for retrieving crates; their dusty windows had caught the beam.

She caught up. “What did you think that was?”

“Tanks.”

She frowned at him. “How do you not know what a tank looks like?”

And of course he shrugged, and continued.

They paced in silence, following no particular path. Lily crammed her hands down in her pockets and chewed the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper.

"Different question," she said, watching the flashlight beam bounce around. “How are you here. In the Station.”

"I woke up here.” Michael cleared his throat. "I was in a cell for a few days, and then I was sent to Medical.”

"And you broke someone's arm," Lily said. She still couldn’t picture it, even though she’d seen him do far worse.

"Yes. When I woke up. How did you get here?”

“I thought it would be a normal settlement. Convinced them to bring me.” It struck her again how unlikely it was that in the impossible vastness of the Wasteland, they’d found each other twice. She refused to assign meaning to it.

They came to the end of the aisle of shelves. More machines formed ranks against the wall, rusting.

"They asked me about the Union,” Michael said. This was the longest conversation they’d ever had. “How could they know about that?”

“I told them, they asked where I was born. What did they ask you?”

“If I was an envoy of the USDC. Where I was born, also.”

“And?”

“I told them I wasn’t,” Michael said, after a short pause. “Born, I mean.”

Lily considered this. “Hatched?”

He was maybe holding back a smile. “There. Up ahead.”

A squat shape manifested beyond the next row of shelves; a door, the sort with a window in it. It looked like a closet, but when they reached it Michael wiped dust off a plaque and proclaimed it to be the auxiliary control room.

It was locked, the wall-mounted keypad dead and unresponsive, but before Lily could comment on it Michael had broken the glass with his elbow and reached inside.

The light switch worked. It resembled a storage closet, not the controls for anything. A desk took up the entire wall and a dead screen took up the entire desk, as wide as Lily’s outstretched arms.

She inspected a mug with a chipped handle, four bold block letters stamped across its face. A dry spider lay curled inside; she replaced it with a grimace.

Michael touched the screen, feeling along its knife-edge sides.

“Won’t come on when it’s cracked like that,” Lily said sagely, turning her attention to a canvas-draped bundle propped against the wall. “I saw one when I was a kid. They need some special kind of hook-up to get power, anyway.”

He ignored her.

The canvas fell away with a rasp and a puff of dust to reveal a metal sign, chest-high. Through the haze of ages Lily made out a rayed sun with a stern face, a desert, a cylindrical underground city, the number 2097…

Familiar, somehow. She was sure she’d seen it before.

“The sustainable city of the future,” Michael read aloud, over her shoulder. “Opening spring 2097. Reserve your place today. It’s on, by the way.”

“What is?” She looked back. The screen was illuminated. The crack marred its face and blurred the text and images, but it was living. It hummed. “Oh.”

Michael rubbed his eye. “It wants credentials.”

Lily didn’t like the way it seemed to hover, casting a blue square of light on the office floor like a window into nothing. “What kind?”

But he’d set the flashlight down and was clearing the desk around the machine like he’d mislaid something; either he hadn’t heard her or didn’t care to answer.

She turned back to the sign. It reminded her of something, and the half-memory troubled her like a bad tooth.

Behind her, Michael made a noise. Thinking he’d encountered a friend of the spider, Lily whipped around and saw him staring instead at a piece of flat black glass embedded into the desk.

He moved to touch it, then took his hand back. “Can you find your way back to the elevator from here?”

“Yes, but I’m not leaving,” Lily said. “What’s going to happen?”

Michael rubbed it clean with his sleeve. “I guess we’ll see.”

He pressed his palm against the thing like he was easing into an ice bath. For a long moment nothing happened. Some of the color crept back into his face.

Then the glass flashed red and emitted a dull beep. “Scanning.”

Michael kept his hand in place as the panel flashed red and green in a blurring sequence.

It landed on green. His shoulders jerked inward like he’d been struck in the back.

“Welcome, Operative Echo 1074. Access granted.”

“Why does it know you,” she said. It came out a whisper.

The voice spoke again, tinny and flat: “Executing New Dawn protocol. Please stand by.”

Lily pointed frantically. “It shouldn’t be executing anything! Turn it off, turn it off right—”

Black. Impenetrable, impossible black. This was the darkness at the bottom of a grave or the bottom of a throat; she froze, thinking she’d gone blind—

—and the banks of fluorescents overhead snapped back to life with a sad hum. The generators’ rumble shuddered up through the soles of Lily’s shoes and into her bones again as Michael looked at her in wide-eyed shock.

“Please stand by.”

He snatched something from the waistband of his pants; Lily’s eyes told her it was a little black pistol even as her common sense insisted it was the flashlight.

“Please sta—”

He fired twice, and the otherworldly glow vanished. The terminal was a piece of broken glass in a room full of other trash.

The sound of the reports echoed all down the long hallway of the warehouse outside, bouncing off the high stone ceiling. A high-pitched wine needled Lily’s eardrums.

“Where did you get a gun!” Lily’s voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a well. “And what is wrong with—”

Michael motioned for silence. Through the tinny ringing in her ears Lily heard it too: footsteps, heavy and unmistakeable, echoed through the cavernous hall.

Running.

Michael stepped behind a cabinet as Lily ducked under the desk, hugging her knees to her chest. Silence settled.

The the door flew open. Legs covered in familiar Security red stepped cautiously into the room. He’d see the disturbed dust. Their footprints, the marks of their hands, the still-smoking terminal…

His boots squeaked as he crossed to the desk and stopped inches from Lily’s face. She held her breath as he fumbled through the junk above her.

“Fuck!” He replaced the cup with a clatter and began to bend.

With a whisper of movement there were two sets of legs. After a brief struggle the man in red choked wetly and crumpled.

Michael peered under the desk and offered his hand, but Lily scrambled out alone. “Is he dead?”

He eyed the sprawled body. “He can be.”

“Leave him.” Lily plucked the pistol from Michael’s hand, engaged the safety, and flung it aside. He offered no resistance. “Let’s go before his friends get here.”