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"Porter!" soe of the sloping and bent steps He held the railing where it had been torn free It ar out, he studied the crowd fifty feet above hi the fire hose, trying to get it inside the busted door But there was no landing rail to snag the nozzle on any about a porter Mission didn’t knoas expected of hi wildly a dozen feet away Did they expect hi over and douse thatearth?

So out, spotted the ‘chief around his neck

"There he is!" a woered past him as he hurried down, one of those who had survived "The porter did it!" she yelled

•19•

Mission froze, uncoed with a descending mob The loosened treads beneath his feet shook He reached for the inner post and clung to it for a ure appeared at the hole in the earth Someone was alive inside level one-sixteen A man with his undershirt pulled up over his mouth stared across at Mission ide, horror-filled eyes

Mission turned and ran He stu for the return of the railing So much had been pulled away The stairs were unstable fro beyond that he was being chased It took a full turn of the staircase for the railing to reappear and for hi to realize that Cae, and noas dead He and others One glance at his blue ‘chief, and soht it’d been Mission who’d made the delivery It very nearly had been

Another crowd at landing one-seventeen Tear-streaked faces, a wo his face, all looking up or down beyond the rails They had seen the wreckage tumble past Mission hurried on Lower Dispatch was all that lay between hiht call haven He hurried there, hisfor a handhold that’d been wrenched away A violent scream approached from above and came much too fast

Mission startled and nearly fell as the wailing person fleard him He waited for someone to tackle him from behind, but the sound whizzed past beyond the rail Another person Falling, alive and screa toward the depths The loose steps and e hi the inner post for the outer rail where the curve of the steps was broader and sainst the steel bar Here, he could move faster He tried not to think of ould happen if he ca his eyes, the clang and cla at first that the haze in the air wasn’t from the ruin he had left behind The se direction, you

-Lao Tzu

•20•

Donald’s breakfast of powdered eggs and shredded potatoes had long grown cold He rarely touched the food brought down by Thur instead the bland stuff in the unlabeled silver cans he had discovered a the storeroom’s vacuum-sealed crates It wasn’t just the matter of trust--it was the rebelliousness of it all, the e coelatinous blob that he assumed had once been part of a peach and put it in hisHe pretended it tasted like a peach

Across the wide table, Anna fiddled with the dials on her radio and sipped loudly fro of cold coffee A nest of wires ran from a black box to her computer, and a soft hiss of static filled the room It was noise to Donald, but Anna squinted at a set of speakers and tilted her head like an ani to the indiscernible

"It’s too bad we can’t get a better station," Donald said e of o, he told himself, just for variety

"No station is the best station," she said, referring to her hope that the towers of Silo 40 and its neighbors would re to cut off unlikely survivors, but little of it o, supposedly, Silo 40 had hacked the systeue Head of IT No one else could be expected to possess the expertise and access required of such a feat By the time the camera feeds were cut, every fail-safe had already been severed Attempts to terminate the silo were made, but with no way to verify them It was apparent these attean to spread to other silos

Thur to protocol, one after the other Further fail-safes proved ineffective, and Erskine worried the hacking had progressed to the level of the nanos, that everything was in jeopardy After , Thurman had convinced the other two that Anna could help Her research at MIT had been in wireless hary; RFIDs; the ability to assume control of electronics via radio

She’d eventually been able to commandeer the collapse ht about it While she described the process, he had studied the wall schematic of a standard silo He had pictured the blasts that freed the layers of heavy concrete between the levels, sending the and everyone in-between Stacks of concrete fifty feet thick had been cut loose to turn entire societies into rubble These underground buildings had been designed froht down like any other--and reht that such a fail-safe was even needed seemed as sick as the solution was cruel

What now rehosts The silo Heads in the rest of the facilities hadn’t even been told of the calamity There would be no red Xs on their schematics to haunt their days The various Heads had little contact with each other as it was The greater worry was of panic spreading