“…uprising…”
When she was finally fully conscious, Sheriff Tatum told the deputy to prepare the paperwork for her release. The irony was not lost on her. Paper was to be the medium of her freedom, however temporary.
Another hour passed and she was up and pacing around the cell when Tatum and the deputy came in to release her. The Sheriff seemed slightly more confident, though there were still traces of fear in his eyes if she looked closely enough.
“Leah,” Tatum said, matter-of-factly, “this is all pretty simple. We need information from you, and we’re on a schedule. If you fail to help us, you’ll be condemning your friends to the death penalty. If you help us, you will save your friends, you might save your father too, and you’ll certainly save us all a lot of trouble. Lives are at stake, Leah. If you come through with some information we can use, then the Mayor has promised that all pressure will be brought to bear to try to bring about lesser sentences for your friends. It’s all up to you.”
“You can let me out or lock me up, Sheriff,” Leah said. “I’ll never help you.”
“I think you will.”
“Then you don’t know me.”
“I don’t have to know you, Leah. I know people, and I know how we humans usually want to keep our loved ones from dying. You’re not special in that respect, unless you are so callous that you’d send them to clean just to capture or maintain some feeling of rebellion or revolution. Do you think you’re special? Are you a hero? Are you going to get your friends killed so you can be some kind of martyr? Yeah, I think I know people, Leah. You’ll want to see your friends live, that’s what I think. And maybe you’ll even help them get released back into the silo to live their lives out in peace.”
Peace. She laughed. What is it good for?
****
She was in her apartment alone. There’d been a single note from her mother saying that she’d gone up-top to visit friends. That was it. Leah didn’t believe it for a minute. It was her mother’s handwriting, but she didn’t believe her mother would have gone without some further explanation. Especially with her daughter locked up in jail. Something fishy going on.
Leah wasn’t particularly close to her mother. They saw the world differently. Her mother was one of them. Her father and her mother barely even got along, and the two weeks her father had been in the down-deep had been the first time she hadn’t heard constant arguing in weeks. So… where’s Mom?
The first couple of days after her release passed like silo syrup. She didn’t go to work, because she wanted the rumors and the gossip about her arrest to die down a bit. She’d called in sick for those days, but she knew that the excuse wouldn’t hold up for long. Everyone knew that she wasn’t sick. She’d been arrested. That meant that she was a criminal. She was an enemy to them, an outcast in the silo. Maybe that was why her mother had taken off.
Leah wasn’t ashamed, though. However much she examined herself, she never developed the feeling that she’d done something wrong. It even surprised her a little bit that she didn’t feel ashamed, and, even though she was too disturbed by the whole situation to return to work, she still had a latent sense of satisfaction that she’d been doing what she thought was right.
****
Time, however, is often the enemy of courage and discipline. The feeling of strength and the desire to stand steadfast against oppression waned as the hours ticked by. Now, the sense of their being options began to bounce around in her brain. If she did nothing, she knew that every member of the paper guild would be sent out to clean. Ivan would die for her intransigence. He was the best friend she had in the whole silo ever since Alexander died. Maybe… maybe she even loved him. Did she? Why did that thought even come up? And now, if she did nothing, he would soon be dead. Was that fair? What if the whole silo erupted in violence? She’d feel a lot better if she were with her brothers and sisters in chains, she thought. But is that even true? Am I ready to die? When she was in the cell down on 70, she’d felt more than ready to die, but now, she wasn’t so sure.
Doubt. Uncertainty. Fear?
Her biggest area of confusion lay in the connection, or lack thereof, between whatever was going on down in Maintenance, and the papermaking guild. As far as she knew, she and her father were the only ones who provided a connection between the two enterprises. She didn’t know what her father was up to, and she was fairly sure that he was ignorant of her illegal activities. The authorities had two problems in the silo, and apparently they had determined that she was the missing link.
She was deep in thought when it happened. The knock on the door was barely recognizable. Her thoughts fled from her and she caught her breath and waited in trembling silence. After a few moments, she heard it again. She had to do something. Twisting the knob, she felt her heart race in her chest. She cracked the door open slightly and a hand began to push against the door. She thought about resisting but before the thought could produce action, a porter rushed through it and quickly slammed it shut behind himself.
“I have only a few seconds,” he said, as he flipped open his satchel and rifled through the contents. Deep in the bag, buried down in a corner, he found what he was looking for and pulled it out. His hands shook as he opened the small envelope. Inside, there were two notes.
“These are from someone up-top. You’ll know who when you read them. This one first,” he said as he handed her one of the notes.
She flipped it open and read the charcoal words and recognized the firm hand and the slant of the letters and immediately knew its author:
Do not help them, Leah. Stand firm. We’re glad to die. They can’t stop what’s coming, and helping them won’t do anything to keep us alive. We’re all dying. All of your friends here in chains give you a big hug, and beg you to stand strong!
The note was initialed by all of the five guild members who’d been arrested. When she finished reading it, the porter handed her the second note and nodded his head in farewell as he took a step to leave and reached for the door.
“Wait!” Leah said. “Let me give you some chits for the delivery.”
“No. I won’t take them. I didn’t do this for chits.”
“Well… what’s your name?”
“Morgan.”
“Thank you, Morgan.”
The porter smiled at her, and with that, he was gone.
Leah,
I would marry a picker. I was joking when I said I wouldn’t. Please forgive me. If this life weren’t about to be over for me, I’d marry you and we’d move into my apartment and be loving wingnuts together. You’re top-shelf with me, and I love you.
Ivan
Leah sat down, unsure of the trustworthiness of her legs for a moment. Tears ran down her face and onto the paper she clutched in her hands. After reading the second note from Ivan, she poured herself out, sobbing uncontrollably until she had no more tears to shed. After some time, she braced herself and read the note again.
…my apartment…
…wingnuts…
…top-shelf…
Before she could even think about the ramifications of the letter, or ask herself if Ivan really meant the part about wanting to marry her, she’d already slung open her door and was sprinting towards Ivan’s place. He lived on the same floor, and his apartment was tucked away down a long, dark hallway that led away from the 57th floor landing. Arriving at his apartment, she found that the doorway was crisscrossed with duct tape, a rude pronouncement by the authorities that the peaceful man who lived here was really a criminal—an enemy to the silo. On the tape someone had written “Sheriff’s Investigation” several times. She reached through the tape and twisted the knob and the door swung open into the room. Apparently Sheriff Tatum’s office was sufficiently convinced that the mere mention of a Sheriff’s investigation was good enough of a threat to keep out interlopers. They were wrong about that. She’d have busted open the door if it came to that.
Leah looked back down the hallway towards the landing and saw t
hat no one was watching, so she bent down and stepped through a gap in the tape. Slinking her way through the crisscrossed barrier, she made her way into the apartment and closed the door behind her.
She’d never been in Ivan’s apartment before. The tiny living area was Spartan. There was a small loveseat with a threadbare quilted blanket thrown over the back of it. There was a small dinette table with a single chair, and there was a metal bookshelf, identical to the one that the guild had used to press and hide paper. There was almost nothing in the room that betrayed the character of the apartment’s inhabitant. Almost nothing. On the bookshelves there were a few “approved” books, maybe ten or twelve of them. The books were held up by a set of bookends, probably made in a ceramics class. On each of the bookends was the imprint of a massive and towering tree, painted in brown and green to stand out against the black background of the ceramic base.
****
Leah worked quickly. She reached up beneath the overhanging lip of the top shelf and found the two wing nuts that she knew would be there. Her hands shook and she had to steady herself so that she could continue to twist the nuts to free the under-shelf from its mate. When the nuts were free from their bolts, the under-shelf was loose and she lowered it down and sat it on the love seat.
There on the shelf she saw a folded note written on homemade paper, a brass key, and four flattened sheets of paper that were covered—every millimeter of them—in tiny print.
She opened the folded note first:
If you’re reading this, then something has gone wrong. If you’re one of them, then it’s all over for us anyway, and I hope you feel good about destroying something that is beautiful. If you are one of us (hopefully you are one of us!), you’re reading this because I was able to get a note out to someone who hasn’t been arrested… yet. If there are documents here, PLEASE take them, and do all that you can do to get them into SAMIZDAT. If you truly are one us, the key will lead you to the information you need to know. Ivan.
Samizdat. There was that word again. She’d heard Sheriff Tatum say it when she was in her barely conscious state back in her jail cell.
She rubbed the key, turned it in her hands, and examined it closely. There were no marks or words or numbers that might indicate what it went to.
The tiny print on the handmade sheets of paper bent around the Bukovsky quote, and then continued around in a circle on to the top of the page. The words were miniscule—she could barely read them without a magnifying glass—and the author had written the lines in a single swirl, like a pinwheel or a spiral, starting on the very edge of the top of the page and then continuing clockwise until the words reached the middle of the page. In this way, an entire manuscript had been squeezed onto the front and backs of four sheets of paper. She tried to imagine doing this. She wondered how many words the author could write before he’d have to sharpen his charcoal and rest his hand.
Leah wanted to read the manuscript, but she felt an urgency that compelled her to set the pages aside for the moment. She needed to work on the mystery of the key. She looked at it again, rubbed its face, flipped it over in her hands and examined it again. She could not identify a single element of the key that indicated its use. It was different than the apartment keys she was used to, and it had no name or number stamped into it that might give her an indication of where to start looking for an answer.
As she looked closer, she noted that the tooth pattern on the key did remind her of an apartment key—at least it was the nearest thing she could think of to the one she had in her hand. She fished her own key out of her pocket and compared it to the key in her hand. Similar. Not identical, but similar. Maybe it goes to a safe house? Arghh! Where could it be?
She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. She took a deep breath and relaxed her shoulders and arms. She began breathing diaphragmatically and attempted to will her heart rate to decrease.
Who gave me the key? Ivan.
That’s when she realized that she needed to make this more personal. Ivan had given her a note telling her where to find the key. He expected her to know what the key went to, and he showed no doubt that she would figure it out because he didn’t mention it again in the note she’d just read. He expected her to just know! So it was personal. Where could it be?
Alexander.
“Could it be the key to Alexander’s old apartment?” She actually asked this question aloud to herself. Alexander had been dead for two years. Surely they’d assigned the living space to someone else by now. How could she find out? Alexander had lived on 60, three levels down, though he’d worked as a picker in the recycling unit for his whole life. She’d have to go down there to try the key in order to find out.
It took her only a few minutes to make it back to her apartment. She slipped the brass key into her pocket and then pulled on a woolen sweatshirt. She carefully rolled up the four page manuscript and put the roll up her left sleeve. She didn’t want to be carrying any bags or packages because doing that might catch the attention of a porter. She pulled on a cap and left her apartment, locking the door behind her. As she did, she wondered if she’d ever see her home again.
The walk down to 60 passed swiftly because Leah busied her mind by going through the events of the past several days in her head, and at some point she began to feel like she was starting to make sense of it all. She didn’t have it completely worked out yet, but she was… just.. just… on the verge of some breakthrough.
Whenever she would pass someone on the stairs, she’d look down and away, maybe peering over the railing towards the down-deep because she didn’t want anyone to recognize her or stop her to ask her questions. From here, you could see all the way down to 99, which was the unofficial start of the down-deep.
She didn’t know what time it was. Time was always a mystery in the silo unless you were the kind of person who paid attention to such things. Leah wasn’t that kind of person. She figured it was late, but didn’t know how late.
When she reached the landing on 60, she loitered for a moment, checking out the situation, seeing if she’d been followed, looking for inquiring eyes and to see if anyone was paying special attention to her. No one was, so she sprinted down the hallway that led to Alexander’s old apartment.
I don’t even know if someone is living here now! The thought was screaming in her head as she stuck the key in the lock, and she closed her eyes before she made the willful decision to try and turn the key. A gentle twist of the wrist and the key turned smoothly in the cylinder, and she heard the locking mechanism tick as the pins all cleared their obstructions, and the door responded to the pressure she applied to it by swinging open slowly to reveal a room not unlike Ivan’s living room. This room was also sparsely furnished, but there was a large desk pushed against one wall, and a heating vent, which was partway up the same wall, was opened. The louvered grill that had once covered the heating vent was lying on the desk. A rope was hanging from the heater vent—one end of it down inside the ducting and the other was tied to the leg of the desk. No human had escaped down the heating vent. The desk was heavy, but not heavy enough to hold the weight of a person. Something else then.
Leah closed the door and made a quick perusal of the living area. The small kitchen looked as if it were used often, and there were a few dirty cups and spoons in the sink. The tiny bedroom had been turned into another work area, and there was a desk and couple of metal shelves in that room, but nothing else of note for her to investigate. Apparently, someone or some group had commandeered the apartment and was using it as a work space.
She’d just started to examine the rope when it went taut. Stepping back a few steps, she could tell from the tension on the rope that something was now hanging on the other end. There were a few sharp metallic raps coming from the vent, then there was silence, and the rope hung still and stiff. For a few moments she just stared at it, uncertain what she should do.
After a minute or so had passed, she decided she’d check the rope, and when she p
ulled on it, she noted the resistance and that whatever was tied on the other end wasn’t too heavy, so she pulled the rope up slowly, trying her best not to make too much noise as she did.
When the object at the end of the rope cleared the mouth of the heating vent, she saw that there were several books tied to the rope. Homemade books. Books made with black-market paper. She untied the bundle and carefully placed the books on the desk.
The top book caught her attention. The title was written in large print… Lex Rex, and the author was someone named Samuel Rutherford. She had no idea who Samuel Rutherford was, but whoever had published this book had cared a great deal about the content, because the book was completely copied out in charcoal.
The second book looked like a book of poetry. The third and final book was the one that really shook her.
On Literary Freedom, by Alexander Sonjean
…her Alexander!
The book was thick and, like the other books, it had been built by hand. Someone had bound the book by first sewing it with heavy yarn. Then the spine had been dipped in a hard material, like glue or a very stiff wax. She flipped through the pages and she did not recognize the hand, but she recognized the spirit behind the words. Her heart jumped and she almost squealed with delight at the very thought that someone, somewhere, cared enough about Alexander’s words to put them into a book.
Leah had almost convinced herself to sit down and read the book right then, but her elation melted away when she saw, from the corner of her eye, the knob of the front door slowly twist, and then the door itself push open. Standing in the doorway was Joseph Kind, the man she was certain had ratted the paper guild out to the authorities.