Tweed
Lauren Hill had a migraine from the fluorescent lights hanging above her head, yet she continued writing on the classroom whiteboard anyway. If she kept her mind on the words she was writing, she could forget the aching stress in her head and neck. She never liked fluorescents because the light was too white and not natural like the daylight she'd seen at the up-top on the class field trip. She promised herself she'd make the long trek twenty floors back up there someday to get a glimpse of daylight, even if it was through video monitor.
She turned and looked at her room full of fifth grade students. They were copying her notes from the board onto their own whiteboards. The days of lined paper were long gone. These students would never hold a pen or pencil. Their writing instruments would always be erasable markers which saddened Lauren because everything these children would write down could be erased one day. Their thoughts, dreams and even their written memories were temporary like everything else here in the Silo 35.
"These are your spelling words for the week," Lauren said to the class. "Memorize them for your quiz on Friday. And remember, I want clean handwriting for the quiz and no smudges. "
She heard a groan from the back of the room and it was her class clown Alexander Toft, a boy who rarely sat still without making a grunt or a comment. "Alexander, you don't like writing your spelling words?" she asked.
She watched him blush at the unexpected attention. "When can we go back to keyboards?"
"They require electricity which is in short supply," Lauren said. "IT has rationed power and we're doing our part by using our markers and boards."
Paige Meyers raised her hand and Lauren noticed the green ink on the side of the girl's hand. She was a lefty and struggled with smearing her words as she wrote them.
"Yes Paige?"
"When are you leaving for the up-top?" she asked.
"What, you're leaving us?" another student called from the back of the room.
Lauren noticed the commotion and whispers among her students. There were rumors from up-top that something had happened outside the silo and security was on high alert. Families that commuted daily up and down the stairwells had noticed more than one sheriff rushing to the upper floors. And some had noticed medical personnel carrying supplies upward. Everyone had assumed that somebody had either committed suicide, which happened often in the silo, or that somebody had tried to escape out into the barren landscape, which would also be suicide.
Lauren was the only person in the entire school that knew truth behind the rumors. A sheriff had come to her apartment two nights ago to ask her questions and to get her advice about foreign languages. While she taught English to these fifth graders, she was capable of teaching so much more that wasn't in the silo curriculum. Her father and taught her how to speak Spanish and French as his father had taught him. She could even speak in sign language which made her unique among all the elementary school teachers. It was a family tradition to learn and memorize other languages even though the only language spoken in the silo was English. That's how she became involved in the news from above.
"I'll be gone only for a few days," Lauren said. "Principal Martin will be my substitute teacher. She'll administer your quiz on Friday."
She watched their frowning faces and heard the groans when Alexander raised his hand.
"Will that girl go to school here?" Alexander asked.
"What girl?" Lauren asked.
"The girl who knocked on the silo hatch. My Dad said she's nine years old," Alexander said.
The room was silent. Alexander knew more details than Lauren because his father worked in IT and probably had inside knowledge. Depending on his father's security clearance, he was either an insider or he hacked his way to the information. This made more sense to Lauren now. This person who found her way to the silo, must speak a foreign language and the silo security was pulling together a team of people to find out what language she spoke. The sheriff had withheld this detail from Lauren and he certainly never mentioned the silo visitor was a young girl.
"When will you come back? What day?" Paige asked.
Lauren thought about her long journey to the up-top and what she might find if the rumor was true. If a nine year old girl had walked to silo 18 on her own, then there's no telling how long IT and Security would need her assistance. She felt a draft in the air and buttoned her tweed jacket.
"I'm not sure, Paige but I could be gone for quite a long time."
Lauren's climb up those twenty flights began at six the next morning. She'd received a late evening call from the sheriff's deputy, Judith Clark, who apologized for the late notice but insisted that Lauren be packed and ready to go by six. Judith instructed her to pack only bare essentials into a backpack for the Porter to carry to the up-top. Lauren was stuffing her pack one more time, trying to fit in her running shoes. She assumed they'd have a gym at the up-top, a place where she could run on a treadmill to burn off stress or maybe a quiet room for yoga. She was only twenty-five years old, not out of shape like many of the other teachers and educators at her school, but she planned to keep it that way. She decided she might as well wear the running shoes since the climb would take most of the morning.
She heard a knock and grabbed her pack and carried it to the door. It was heavy and she wondered if it might be too heavy for the trip up the silo. She opened the door and greeted a small, petite middle age woman in a uniform. She had a sheriff's hat and large black belt the hugged her hips with a gun on her left side.
"Lauren? I'm Deputy Clark," she said. "And this here is your Porter, Derek Green."
Derek stepped into view from the door frame and smiled with a nod. He wasn't even six feet tall but he was muscular, like a wrestler. His t-shirt was tight across his chest. He looked no older than twenty.
"Good morning! Is everyone ready for a workout?" he asked.
"I've got my running shoes," Lauren said, handing him her pack. "I apologize for how heavy this is."
Derek tossed it over his shoulder. "Whoa, we won't be running flights of stairs today," he said.
"Go ahead of us, Derek. We won't slow you down," Deputy Clark said.
Lauren watched Derek jog down the hallway with his rubber shoes squeaking along the way. Porters had special soles on their shoes to ensure they never slipped while carrying gear up and down the silo staircase. You could often hear them coming long before you ever saw them and Lauren took comfort in the fact that her personal belongings were safe in a Porter's hands.
"Ready?" Deputy Clark asked.
Lauren looked back into her efficiency apartment at her tattered couch and her stack of romance novels, relics passed down from generations of family members, stuffed into a small bookshelf. She had already left a note for her father on the refrigerator with instructions written in French. This was a game she played with him, leaving notes in foreign languages to challenge each other to remember how to read and speak in anything other than English. It was also how she engaged with her aging father who lived with Parkinson's disease. It was a way to keep his mind sharp. Her instructions were simple, to water her plants every other day. All the glow lights were set on timers and she hoped the rolling power outages wouldn't break the timers.
"I'm ready," she said, adjusting her backpack. "How long will this take to get to the up-top?"
"We'll beat some of the morning traffic," Deputy Clark said as she began walking. "And the higher we climb the fewer people we'll run into but by then our legs will be tired. So I'd say we can do it in two hours. The Porter will be there in one."
The silo was a different place in the early morning hours. There was no hum of activity or laughter that she'd often heard before school started each morning. The echoes in the silo were more haunting and lonely in the early hours. With each step, Lauren heard her own feet sliding across metal and Deputy Clark's wheezing as they climbed. Lauren thought about her young students and how they would act while she was away on this most unusual assignment. Would they miss her as much as she would miss them?
She thought about her student Alexander's comment in class. She assumed Deputy Clark might know but Lauren tried a more indirect approach. She asked her about the other events that had the silo citizens in a stir.
"How about the recent cleaning, huh?" she asked.
Deputy Clark gave a large sigh. "Yeah a man released from the silo to clean the sensors and he didn't finish the job. He spent most of his time staring at another body of his friend."
"He had a friend who went to the cleaning?" Lauren asked.
"Friend, yeah but more like a lover," Deputy Clark said. "Mick went to the cleaning five years ago and Ace was never the same. That's what I heard."
This was a detail Lauren hadn't heard since the incident happened nearly three months ago. All she knew was there a cleaning and then another cleaning and the second event was more dramatic than the first. The man named Ace and inscribed in his own blood onto his chest, "Help Us..." before he died. The IT department had recorded the event on camera and some people as the up-top had witnessed it live but everyone else on the mid-levels and lower levels had only learned about it through word of mouth.
To learn now that these men weren't only friends but lovers only made Lauren feel more pain for them both. This was like that Romeo and Juliet story book that her grandmother had passed onto her from her grandmother. It was about how true love rose above family lines and how one could not live without his or her lover.
"That's tragic," Lauren said. "I can't imagine—"
"You don't know the half of it," Deputy Clark said. "We got a body out there with a bloody message across its chest. It's a frightening reminder that this place can be a living hell. We're all trapped in here."
This was Lauren's opportunity to learn more about the most recent news from up-top. "But there's hope. Somebody from the outside has made into silo."
Deputy Clark climbed two more stairs and paused at the landing and turned to look down at Lauren. "Who told you that?"
Lauren felt cornered and she wasn't about to give away her student Alexander. "I, uh it's only a rumor. I assume you know about it."
"I have instructions from the Mayor and the Sheriff to escort you to the up-top but I'm not supposed to talk about why you're needed up there," Deputy Clark said. "Got it?"
Lauren climbed the rest of the steps to the landing as Porter came rushing by them. "Yes, I got it," she said.