I know that
Silo 49: Dark Till Dawn just came out less than a week ago, so I should be glued to the Amazon ticker seeing if it goes up in rank and if people like it. And yes, I am doing that, I confess. But I can't just sit here and watch the whole time. What to do, what to do.
Well, I got a couple of emails already asking about what happened with Greg and Lizbet. It just so happens that I wanted to know, too. While I was writing
Dark Till Dawn, I was also writing their story and I've just finished the first draft of it.
I'm calling it, "
Flying Season of the Mis-Recorded". If you've read
Dark Till Dawn then at least part of that title should sound familiar and be understandable. It's too different to put into the book and too short for a book of its own. It's about 18.6K words long as it stands now. Not quite a novella and not a short story but somewhere in the fuzzy area in between.
So, without further ado...here's the first chapter. Remember, it's a first draft! What do you think? Continue with it or ditch it?
Flying Season for the Mis-Recorded
One
Lizbeth shoved the last of
the trays into the freeze drying machine and slammed the door home with a
little extra force. The hinges needed to
be worked on but until it actually quit shutting reliably, it would remain on
the work list. There were always other
broken things moving past the not-quite-broken items on the lists. She hit the buttons that set it to work and
listened for the fans and compressor to kick on.
When the buzzing whine
seemed stable she turned to inspect her work area. Nothing on the floor, no forgotten trays of
cut vegetables, packing tables clear and clean. The vacuum sealer in the corner was cleaned
and ready for the next day, its stack of buckets and bags neatly arranged and
waiting. She gave a nod of satisfaction
then sniffed her hands and arms. Not too
bad today. She was lucky it was carrots
and not onions. No amount of scrubbing
would get that smell off and she didn't have a lot of time to waste tonight.
At the door she squared her
shoulders and made sure her face was without expression, the familiar flush of
anticipated embarrassment making a hot spot in her belly. She raised her chin just enough to seem
unbothered, but not so much as to seem proud, and opened the door.
Second shift was in full
swing in the vegetable processing room and a dozen pairs of eyes followed her
as she strode past. Knives and cutters
and scrapers all stilled and she could feel their eyes on her back like little
points of pain. She pushed through the
swinging doors and kept walking toward the door that led to the safety of the
compartments.
Like always, the pressure
eased at about ten paces away and she sucked in a deep breath of relief. One more day gone. Going to and leaving from work were the two
worst moments of her day and she counted each one completed without incident a
victory. There was no one in the hallway
leading to the single compartments so she pulled the kerchief from around her
head and let her hair fall free after being confined all day. Her hair actually hurt when she let it fall, a
sore tugging on her scalp. The tight
binds of her kerchief bent the hairs and the roots protested when the weight
came back. It happened at the end of every
work day and she’d grown to like the soreness.
It was the same kind of pleasant discomfort that came from stretching in
the morning after a deep sleep.
Her room was the last in the
hallway, with the further space of an empty room between her and the next occupied
compartment. Though it was never said
specifically, she knew no one wanted to even risk sharing a wall with her. Especially not while they slept. She even had her own bathroom so that nothing
of hers would touch anyone else, even obliquely. She didn't mind. She might as well have some benefit from being
nearly untouchable.
Inside her room, she stripped
the sweaty coveralls off and scrubbed her skin till it hurt. She sniffed her arms again and detected the
faint dirty sweetness of carrots but she didn't think it was too bad. It was almost nice. Tonight was a big night and she wanted to be
perfect.
The tunic she had finished sewing
hung from the front of her closet. It
was daring and of her own design. It
wouldn't just raise eyebrows, it would drop jaws. Dyed the darkest color she could find, it
looked purple in the light but black in dim light. Small bright blue spots were sewn around the
bottom of the hem in the back, yellow spots on the front. The bottom half was short enough that it
barely reached past her shorts and the top half wasn't much of a half at all. Two wide strips of cloth were anchored at the
front waistline of the skirt and crossed over her chest, crossed again in back
and were sewn onto the skirt at the sides.
Small orange ribbons kept
the crossed bits in place and held all her parts where they should be. She smiled and ran her hands down the supple
cloth. It would fly when she moved and
her feet tapped in anticipation of the music to come.
She changed into her dancing
shorts, a ribbon run through the hem at the bottom and tied around her thigh to
keep it snug no matter what she did. Today
the ribbons were appropriately red. She
slipped the dress on and smiled at her reflection. Perfect.
Pulling the coveralls over
the dress was tricky and she was left with a little bulge around her hips. It would tell anyone who looked carefully where
she was going and what she was up to. Then again, hundreds of other teen shadows
would be taking the stairs in the same state, so that didn’t matter much. She shoved her sandals into her satchel, added
a quick spray of scent and a smudge of charcoal around the rims of her
eyes. She was ready.
There was a shadow in the
butterfly garden as she passed. It
should have been empty and the door was cracked open so she peeked in. Marcus, the farmer who had sponsored her and
acted as her reluctant caster, was bent over the patch of parsley and looking
intently at something within.
"Something wrong,
Marcus?"
He started at the sound of
her voice and rose too quickly, stumbling backward. She reached out to catch him but he jerked his
arm back. She pulled away, expression
carefully neutral. Marcus may have
sponsored her and he may have been the only person who seemed comfortable
speaking with her alone, but he was no different than anyone else when it came
right down to it.
"I didn't mean to startle
you. I was just passing by and saw
someone in here," she explained, looking down at a butterfly on the ground
near her feet. It was wafting its wings
slowly and canted a little to the side. This
one wouldn't fly again.
"Ah, don't worry about
it, Lizbet. I'm an old man and startle
easily. I just came to see them." He waved a hand at the litter of dead and
dying butterflies on the plants and ground. "It's getting toward the end of flying
season."
She murmured an assent and
bent toward the canted butterfly. The larger
blue spots among the yellow and black meant this was a female. She laid a finger on the ground in front of it
and felt the tickle of its tiny legs as it crawled up her extended digit. She knew it was silly, but when she did this,
she imagined they felt relief to be off the cold floor. She carefully transferred the weakening
creature to the parsley and let her crawl off at her own pace. Only when it was safely away did she speak. "But flying season will come again for
them."
Over the years of her life,
Lizbet had become expert at looking at people without actually looking at them.
She saw Marcus stiffen a little, the
posture one that spoke of concern.
She had said it too
expressively, she thought. She rose
again, gripped her satchel in front of her and lifted her eyes for the barest
second to meet his. "They'll be
back. Everything that is of us—
everything good— is born again to the silo. Nothing is wasted. Not even souls." She gestured at the struggling butterfly and
said, “Not even their souls.”
They said nothing more for a
moment. Lizbet was conscious of each
moment passing her by. She really wanted
to go but Marcus wouldn't have been here just to see butterflies. He must want to say something to her. The farms were dark for the night and farmers
at home. If he was here it was for a
reason. She wondered who had complained
about her now.
"Listen, Marcus. I've been doing what I'm supposed to. Keeping to myself..."
He raised a hand to
interrupt her. "Oh, Lizbet. It's nothing like that. I..." He stopped and cleared his throat
uncomfortably. "I just wanted to
wish you a happy birthday. Since you're
off tomorrow and everything."
She flushed and tried not to
smile. "Oh, thank you. Thank you for remembering."
He shuffled his feet and
cleared his throat again. "Well,
it's a big one, isn't it?" He
pointed at her satchel and the red tag hanging from the strap. "You’re going for one last dance?"
Lizbet spun the matching tag
around her wrist and said, "One more and then I age out."
He laughed and said, "I
remember that day. Turning twenty felt
like the end of the world. Well, now
you'll have to settle down like the rest of us." He stopped abruptly, realizing what he had
said and how absurd it was. He reached
out a hand and came within a hair's breadth of her shoulder. His gaze fell for the briefest moment on the
ridged circle of scar tissue on her cheek, her own personal and permanent ‘O’
carved in flesh.
"You know what I mean,”
he added quietly.
They both knew there would
be no "settling down". There
would only be the unending solitude she had now except that it wouldn't be
broken once a fortnight inside the walls of 25 Drums, where all were the same
and all were welcome. It would just be
this ceaseless shoveling of food into and out of machines and a meal she picked
up to eat alone in her room. And dreams
of how it should be different, of course. Always the dreams.
"It will be okay,
Lizbet." He knew. He was saying goodbye.
"Yes," she said,
her tone as flat as ever. "It will be okay."
She looked down again. He was uncomfortable once more. He shuffled to the door of the enclosure, his
back bent with age and decades spent over a spade in the soil. "Have fun tonight. I'll see you," he said as he left the
enclosure.
When he was gone, Lizbet saw
that there were two more butterflies on the ground that wouldn't make it. After six years of shadowing inside the farms
she had come to know their motions well. She could tell which ones were resting and who
was finished with their duty to life and simply waiting to die.
It was precious time she was
using, but she let each crawl to her fingers to be returned to the parsley. They had no expressions—no communication—but
they seemed content there. Tomorrow
their little bodies would be plucked away but for now, they could be where it
was familiar and safe.
The screen door sign read,
"Close me!" in emphatic letters. They were such efficient farmers and
harvesters that these poor creatures had been made almost extinct within the
silo. Kept here, in their own enclosure
with their own plants to put their eggs on, their numbers were sound. But they were caged. They fluttered their wings and rested on the
screen like bright sparks of color. She
could almost feel their inborn desire to get beyond it.
She pulled the door closed
behind her and stopped. It was the end
of flying season. There would be more
than enough eggs laid by now to ensure another year. She looked around the darkened room and saw no
one, no profile among the plants and no sound of rustling leaves from an
evening stroll. The door opened again
without a squeak and she strode quickly away. The current of wind created by her swift
departure made for an easy path and wings fluttered in her wake.
