Hugh Howey - Dust

Lukas appeared next to her in the pitch black, his arm around her, a kiss lighting on her shoulder. “Come back to bed,” he said. “I’m sorry. We can leave the light out.”

Juliette hesitated. “I don’t like you knowing them so well,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of your star charts.”

“I know,” he said. “I can’t help it. They’re a part of you, the only you I’ve ever known. Maybe we should have your father take a look—?”

She pulled away from him, only to click the light back on. She studied the crook of her arm in the mirror, first her right arm and then her left, thinking he must be wrong.

“Are you sure it was there?” she asked, studying the web of scars for some bare patch, some piece of open sky.

Lukas took her tenderly by the wrist and elbow, lifted her arm to his mouth, and kissed it.

“Right there,” he said. “I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”

Juliette wiped a tear from her eye and laughed in that mix of gasp and sigh that comes from a sad burst of emotion. Locating a particularly offensive knot of flesh, a welt that ran right around her forearm, she showed it to Lukas, forgiving him if not believing him.

“Do this one next,” she said.

The silicon-carbon batteries the drones ran on were the size of toaster ovens. Charlotte judged each one to weigh between thirty and forty pounds. They had been pulled from two of the drones and wrapped in webbing taken from one of the supply crates. Charlotte gripped one battery in each hand and took lunging squats in a slow lap around the warehouse, her thighs screaming and quivering, her arms numb.

A trail of sweat marked her progress, but she had a long way to go. How had she let herself get so out of shape? All the running and exercise during basic, just to sit at a console and fly a drone, to sit on her butt and play war games, to sit in a cafeteria and eat slop, to sit and read.

She’d gotten overweight, is what. And it hadn’t bothered her until she’d woken up in this nightmare. She’d never felt the urge to get up and move around until someone had frozen her stiff for a few hundred years. Now she wanted the body back that she remembered. Legs that worked. Arms that weren’t sore just from brushing her teeth. Maybe it was silly of her, thinking she could go back, be who she once was, return to a world she remembered. Or maybe she was being impatient with her recovery. These things took time.

She made it back around to the drones, a full lap. That she could complete a circuit of the room meant progress. It’d been a few weeks since her brother had woken her, and the routine of eating, exercising, and working on the drones was beginning to seem normal. The insane world she had been woken up to was starting to feel real. And that terrified her.

She lowered the batteries to the ground and took a series of deep breaths. Held them. The routine of military life had been similar. It had prepared her for this, was all that kept her from going crazy. Being cooped up was not new. Living in the middle of a desert wasteland where it wasn’t safe to go out was not new. Being surrounded by men she ought to fear was not new. Stationed in Iraq during the Second Iranian War, Charlotte had grown accustomed to these things, to not leaving base, to not wanting to leave her bunk or a bathroom stall. She was used to this struggle to keep sane. It was mental as much as physical exercise that was required.

She showered in one of the stalls down from drone control, toweled off, sniffed each of her three sets of coveralls, and decided it was time to prod Donny into doing laundry again. She pulled on the least offensive of the three, hung the towel to dry from the foot of an upper bunk, and then made up her bed Air Force crisp. Donald had once lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse, but Charlotte had almost grown comfortable in the barracks with its ghosts. It felt like home.

Down the hall from the barracks stood a room of pilot stations. Most were covered in plastic sheets. There was a flat desk along the same wall that bore a mosaic of large monitors. It was here that the radio set was being pieced together. Her brother had gathered a jumble of spare parts one at a time from the lower storerooms. It might be decades or even centuries before anyone noticed they were gone.

Charlotte flicked on the light bulb she’d rigged over the table and powered up the set. She could already get quite a few stations. She tuned the knob until she heard static and left it there, waiting on voices. Until then, she pretended it was the sea rolling up onto a beach. Sometimes it was rain on a canopy of fat leaves. Or a crowd of people quietly talking in a dark theater. She pawed through the bin of parts Donald had amassed and looked for a better set of speakers, still needed a microphone or some way to transmit. She wished she was more mechanically inclined. All she knew how to do was plug things together. It was like assembling a rifle or a computer — she just joined anything that would mate and flicked on the power. It had only resulted in smoke the one time. What it mostly took was patience, which she didn’t have a lot of. Or time, which she was drowning in.

Footsteps down the hall signaled breakfast. Charlotte turned down the volume and cleared room on the desk as Donny entered, a tray in his hands.

“Morning,” she said, getting up to take the tray from him. Her legs felt wobbly from the workout. As her brother stepped into the spill of light from the dangling bulb, she noted his frown. “Everything okay?” she asked.

He shook his head. “We might have a problem.”

Charlotte set the tray down. “What is it?”

“I ran into a guy I knew from my first shift. Was stuck on the lift with him. A handyman.”

“That’s not good.” She lifted the dented metal cover from one of the plates. There was an electrical board and a coil of wire beneath. Also, the small screwdriver she’d asked for.

“Your eggs are under the other one.”

She set the lid aside and grabbed her fork. “Did he recognize you?”

“I couldn’t tell. I kept my head down until he got off. But I knew him as well as I’ve known anyone in this place. It feels like yesterday that I borrowed tools from him, asked him to change a light for me. Who knows what it feels like for him. That might’ve been yesterday or a dozen years ago. Memory works weird in this place.”

Charlotte took a bite of eggs. Donny had put a touch too much salt on them. She imagined him up there with the shaker, his hand trembling. “Even if he did recognize you,” she said around a bite of food, “he might think you’re on another shift as yourself. How many people know you as Thurman?”

Donald shook his head. “Not many. But still, this could come crashing down on us at any moment. I’m going to bring some food up from the pantry, more dry goods. Also, I went in and changed the clearance for your badge so you can access the lifts. And I double-checked that no one else could get down here. I’d hate for you to get trapped if something happened to me.”

Charlotte moved her eggs around her plate. “I don’t like thinking about that,” she said.

“Another bit of a problem. The head of this silo is going off shift in a week, which will make things a little complicated. I’m relying on him to orient the next guy to my status. Things have been going a little too smoothly thus far—”

Charlotte laughed and took another bite of eggs. “Too smoothly,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d hate to see rough. What’s the latest on your favorite silo?”

“The IT head picked up today. Lukas.”

Charlotte thought her brother sounded disappointed. “And?” she asked. “Learn anything new?”