Chapter 11: What the Quiet Heard

Jude's POV

She shut the door on me at dawn, and the Space went dark.

I had not known it could get darker than the grey.

I sat down on the floor between the shelves and a hundred pounds of rice and listened to nothing.

Without her thoughts I had only mine.

Mine were not good company.

I remembered the Dome.

Nobody had told me I would remember it.

When I woke in the Space, I spent two days sure I was dead.

I was also sure the afterlife was a warehouse.

Then Annabel had said "Plus One," and I had said, "Call me that," because it was the first joke I had made in a long time.

I remembered the night radio.

For sixty-eight days I drove supplies in my van from the farms to the Dome.

Every night at nine I radioed in from the road.

A woman's voice always answered.

She read the roll call and the weather, and when I was late, she said, "Courier Nine, I'm still here."

I asked her name on the sixth night.

She said, "Night desk."

I asked again on the twentieth night, and she said, "Night desk, Courier Nine. Stay on the road."

I asked every night after that, and I never got it.

I learned it from the roster the night the gate closed.

Someone had written it on the whiteboard in black marker. M. Holt.

On Day 71 I came in off the road at midnight with a half-empty van.

The inner gate was shut, and a woman was pounding on it with both fists.

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