for them, he’d said. Their range was limited. Donald had thought about why this might be as he dug through Thurman’s files.
Charlotte flicked several switches, the neat clicks breaking the silence, and the control station whirred to life.
“The lift takes a while,” he told her. He didn’t say how he knew, but he thought back to that ride up all those years ago. He remembered his breath fogging the dome of his helmet as he rose to what he had hoped might be his death. Now he had a different hope. He thought of what Erskine had told him about wiping the Earth clean. He thought about Victor’s suicide note to Thurman. This project of theirs was about resetting life. And Donald, whether by madness or reason, had grown convinced that the effort was more precise than anyone had rights to imagine.
Charlotte adjusted her screen. She flicked a switch, and a light bloomed on the monitor. It was the glare of the steel door of the lift, lit up by the drone’s headlamp and viewed by its cameras.
“It’s been so long,” she said. Donald looked down and saw that her hands were trembling. She rubbed them together before returning them to the controls. Wiggling in her seat, she located the pedals with her feet, and then adjusted the brightness of the monitor so it wasn’t so blinding.
“Is there anything I can do?” Donald asked.
Charlotte laughed and shook her head. “No. Feels strange not to be filing a flight plan or anything. I usually have a target, you know?” She looked back at Donald and flashed a smile.
He squeezed her shoulder. It felt good to have her around. He thought of their parents and Helen and everyone else he’d let down. She was all he had left. “Your flight plan is to fly as far and as fast as you can,” he told her. His hope was that without a bomb, the drone would go farther. His hope was that the limited range wasn’t programmed somehow. There was a flashing light from the lift controls. Donald hurried over to check them.
“The door’s coming up,” Charlotte said. “I think we’ve got daylight.”
Donald hurried back over. He glanced out the door and down the hall, thinking he’d heard something.
“Engine check,” Charlotte said. “We’ve got ignition.”
She wiggled in her seat. The coveralls he’d stolen for her were too big, were bunched around her arms. Donald stood behind her and watched the monitor, which showed a view of swirling skies up a sloped ramp. He remembered that view. It became difficult to breathe, seeing that. The drone was pulled from the lift and arranged on the ramp. Charlotte hit another switch.
“Brakes on,” she said, her leg straightening. “Applying thrust.”
Her hand slid forward. The camera view dipped as the drone strained against its brakes.
“Been a long time since I’ve done this without a launcher,” she said nervously.
Donald was about to ask if that was a problem when she shifted her feet and the view on the screen lifted. The metal shaft he remembered climbing up vibrated and began to race by. The swirling clouds filled the viewscreen until that was all that existed. Charlotte said, “Liftoff,” and worked the yoke with her right hand. Donald found himself leaning to the side as the view banked and the ground came into view.
“Which way?” she asked.
“I don’t think it matters,” he said. “Just straight.” He leaned closer to watch the strange but familiar landscape slide by. There were the great divots he had helped create. There was another tower down in the middle of a depression. The remnants of the convention—the tents and fairgrounds and stages—were long gone, eaten by the tiny machines in the air. “Just a straight line,” he said, pointing. It was a theory, a crazy idea, but he needed to see before he dared say anything. There was the danger of making it not true by voicing his most cherished hope. The world seemed to sense these things from him. He had learned to guard his wishes, just to be safe. Thinking them was like shining a light out to sea, and Donald lived among reef and rock. Drawing good things toward him was unwise.
The pattern of depressions ended in the distance. Donald strained to see beyond when Charlotte let go of the throttle and reached for a bank of dials and indicators. “Uh … I think we have a problem.” She flipped a switch back and forth. “I’m losing oil pressure.”
“No.” Donald watched the screen as the clouds swirled and the land seemed to heave upward. It was too early. Unless he’d missed some step, some precaution, some way of turning off other, smaller, flying things. “Keep going,” he breathed, as much to the machine as to its pilot.
“She’s handling screwy,” Charlotte said. “Everything feels loose.”
Donald thought of all the drones in the hangar. They could launch another. But he suspected the results would be the same. He might be resistant to whatever was out there, but the machines weren’t. He thought of the cleaning suits, the way things were meant to break down at a certain time, a certain place. Invisible destroyers so precise that they could let loose their vengeance as soon as a cleaner hit a hill, reached a particular altitude, as soon as they dared to rise up. He reached for his cloth and coughed into it, and had a vague memory of them scrubbing the airlock after pulling him back inside.
“You’re at the edge,” he said, pointing to the last of the silos as its bowl disappeared beneath the drone’s camera. “Just a little further.”
But in truth, he had no idea how much further it might take. Maybe you could fly straight around the world and right back where you started, and that still wouldn’t be far enough. But he didn’t think so.
“I’m losing lift,” Charlotte said. Her hands were twin blurs. They went from the controls to switches and back again. Donald thought of the seals and gaskets. Maybe they could be replaced. Beefed up.
“Engine two is out,” she said. “Altitude oh-two-hundred.”
It looked like far less on the screen. They were beyond the last of the hills, now. There was a scar in the earth, a trench that may have been a river, black sticks like charred bones that stuck up in sharp points like pencil lead, all that remained of ancient trees, perhaps. Or the steel girders of a large security fence, eaten away by time.
“Go, go,” he whispered. Every second aloft was a new sight, a new vista. Here was a breath of freedom, a giant’s step, a leap of leagues. Here was escape from hell.
“Camera’s going. Altitude oh-one-fifty.”
There was a bright flash on the screen like the shock of dying electrics. A purplish cast followed from the frying sensors, then a wash of blue where once there was nothing but browns and grays.
“Altitude fifty feet. Gonna touch down hard.”
Donald blinked away tears as the drone plummeted and the earth rushed up to meet the machine. He blinked away tears at the sight on the monitor, nothing wrong with the camera at all.
“Blue—” he said.
It was an utterance of confirmation just before a vivid green landscape swallowed the dying drone, just as the monitor faded from color to black. Charlotte released the controls and cursed. She slapped the console with her palm. But as she turned and apologized to Donald, he was already wrapping his arms around her, squeezing her, kissing her cheek.
“Did you see it?” he asked, his voice a breathless whisper. “Did you see?”
“See what?” Charlotte pulled away, her face a hardened mask of disappointment. “Every gauge was toast there at the end. Blasted drone. Probably been sitting too long—”
“No, no,” Donald said. He pointed to the screen, which was now dark and lifeless. “You did it,” he said. “I saw it. There were blue skies and green grass out there, Charla! I saw it!”
Silo 17
•41•
Without wanting to, Solo became an expert in how things broke down. Day by day, he watched steel and
