The Silver Window - Ch1 Pt1

Meet Anne Lewinsky. She’s not too different from one of us. She’s about ten. She has long blond hair that her parents always put back in a braid. She has rich brown eyes the color of coffee grounds, and pale skin peppered with freckles. She likes the feel of the sun on her skin, and singing songs that nobody knows the words to.
There's no reason for you to love her, but there's no reason not to.
She’s a perfectly good little girl.
Unfortunately, she’s about to die.


Thirty days ago, a message went out over the loudspeakers in town square. The cloud that had been on the horizon a week ago had now covered the town. With each drop of rain that fell, another heart sank.
“Anne Lewinsky to Compound 3015”
Compound 3015 was known to the populace as ‘Marker’s Square’. It wasn’t outside, and the building was round, but that was what it was called anyway. It was a building for those who were to be placed in quarantine.
Now, quarantine would seem to be a word designated for a place to keep sick people away from the healthy.
This is not the case.
And yet, it is still called quarantine.
Every so often, a perfectly healthy person would suddenly stop leaving their home. They would sit in their room, refuse to meet with visitors, and the next day, a call would come over the loudspeaker.
They would be called to Compound 3015. Marker’s Square.

Anne Lewinsky, the perfectly good little girl, was the most recent to be called. She stood up, her bags packed, though nobody ever noticed her doing the packing, and began the walk to the Compound.
She left her home. She turned left, up the street, tall brick buildings closing out the wind but not the rain. She walked down the center of the street, despite the fact that she could have avoided some of the rain if she had kept to the cloth awnings of the houses to either side. Whenever she crossed an intersection, she was pushed sideways by a hard rush of air, but she corrected herself.
She was the only one outside. The walk was long and quiet, and she didn’t react to the wet that was seeping through her hand-made dress, or to the cold that bit at her toes through her thin shoes.
“Anne?” Someone was in the doorway of one of the houses. A woman. Her hair was long, stringy, the color of dark hay.
She was breaking the rules.
Anne ignored her, but it was hard. She wanted to cry. Maybe she was. Could she tell the difference between rain and tears?
“Anne, please, wait, it can’t be you!” Footsteps. Bare feet splashing in the puddles between cobbles. “Please. I can hide you. You don’t have to go to the square. You’re too young.”
Anne stared straight ahead, forcing her eyes to unfocus as the woman came around in front of her. She knew who it was, but she didn’t want to. She knew her mother’s friend was trying to save her, but it was impossible. She had been called.
There was no saving.
She waited.
“Please. Let me help you.”
“No. And you won’t be.” Anne said. She walked around the woman who had helped raise her, too young to be this sure, and yet knowing there was no other way.
The woman didn’t follow.

The next morning, Anne was gone.
Nobody really knew what happened inside Marker Square, but they did know that nobody ever came back. There didn’t seem to be any unifying factor, no reason, behind why certain people were chosen. Instead, it seemed entirely random. A toddler, freshly assigned to a family, an old man who had lived through the years in peace, a mother of three… a ten year old girl.
Anne's not dead yet. She has time. Not much, but time.
For now, a mother is without a daughter, and a woman shivers inside her house, refusing to change her clothes after kneeling in the falling rain.







Maria Lewinsky had never been able to have children. For years, she had asked the people in the 43rd compound for a child, but every time they had ignored her. She had seen other people get children. She had seen families through hard times of sickness and, as the children grew, watched them play in the Park Sector, but she had never received a child of her own.
While she had heard that once it was the task of a husband and wife to create children, that practice was now outlawed. Last names were a bygone. They meant nothing. Letters to put on papers, nothing more. Lewinsky had once belonged to a family. A wife married to a husband named Lewinsky. They had daughter with the last name Lewinsky, and then named Bellcroft. It had been a progression, a family line. Now, last names were like serial numbers. Designations given to people who hadn’t noticed it happening until babies were being assigned and marriages no longer held paperwork.
Maria wished they had known what it was like to have a true family. She wished she had been alive to know, but things had become the way they were now ten years before she had been born. Now, a mother named Lewinsky had lost a girl named Lewinsky, and Maria didn’t know if she was allowed to feel sorrow. Should she feel hope? Did she deserve to hope that her daughter was not dead?

Marker’s Square scared people because nobody knew what became of those who disappeared inside it. Maybe they weren’t dead. Maybe they were being chosen for something inside the quarantine. A special job, or a test. Nobody had been alive long enough to rule that out.
It was like a big, hungry god demanding sacrifices. They sort of treated it like one. That voice on the loudspeaker had become their prophet.
Now, Maria had lost her daughter to that god. Was she supposed to ask the Breeders for another child? Anne was young. Maybe she would see her again. She was old enough for Maria to recognize her. Maybe the younger ones had come back, and nobody knew it because they had changed too much to recognize.
These things Maria considered, sitting in her home, stunned with the realization that her daughter’s room was empty.
One thing hadn’t changed. She still had to go to work.

Maria stood up, letting herself fall into her morning routine as she cleaned her self up and dressed herself properly, then walked towards the closet in the front of her home. She put on her utilitarian boots, got her gloves, and headed out the door. She turned right, away from Marker's Square, forcing herself to let it loom over her from up the hill, and headed towards the wall at the south end of town. She matched her heavy footsteps to the red flash of a warding light at the top of the wall, once used to warn airplanes away from tall things in the night sky.
Maria - actually, everyone whose last name started with the letter L or M - was a sub-governmental worker at the border. Outside the border was dangerous, and not from some unseen threat.
Many died every day, miles above the surface of the earth, building a wall that tried its very hardest to keep out the silver machinations of the past war. They were a constant reminder of why they lived this way. Why every day came with the threat of another loved one sacrificed to the god of Marker’s Square. Why every night came with the hope of a gift from the 43rd compound.
Upon Reaching the foot of the wall, she began the climb up to the higher levels, and soon stood on top of the lower wall, which was an eight foot wide walkway that stretched around their home. After catching her breath, she watched the other workers as they hauled steel onto pulley systems before climbing like ants up to the higher levels. It felt like there was a note of extra panic today, though Maria was sure it could just be her own internal panic concerning her daughter, which she thought she had done a pretty good job of supressing, projected outward.

“Maria. Are you OK?” Luca Llewynn was a nice enough kid, another of her associates. He was about 14, but 11 was the age for job assignment. He had come up to her while she was having this thought, and she jumped a bit at the sound of his voice, jolting out of her own mind to turn to him.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just… can you give me the rundown?”
Luca nodded, pulling out a clipboard and waving her along the ground level of the wall. “19L43 set up, 11 sightings from the top, 3 attempts on the wall by mechs.” Maria nodded, but Luca continued “12 deaths last night, from the V’s. A router broke through, hit a transformer. The U group took over their segment until it’s repaired, and the V’s have taken over U group’s job.”
Maria let out a low breath through her teeth, “That’s too bad.” She sighed. “we can’t afford to lose that many on a night.”
“I know. It makes me worried though. Why do we bother to make this wall if they can just crash through?” Luca was looking nervously out over the bombed out plain that was once a city. While they had once been told that humans filled each of these crippled buildings and cracked roads, miles that once had been necessary now looked like an impossibly large area. There were so few humans left, compared to the amount that had to have filled the earth before the war.
“Because, the Router broke through. It was terrible. The 10 other mechs they saw last night didn’t.” She handed him her clipboard, pulling her strong body up the ladder. “You know that, Luca.”
“Yeah, I know…” Luca sighed, hanging the clipboard on a rack near the ladders and following her up. His own boots were older, a bit too large. They belonged to his brother, someone else lost to the Square. Maria almost saw the boy as her second chance, though she barely admitted it even to herself. Every time she saw him, she saw what her own daughter could have been, or could have seen. As the boy looked down at the clip board in his hands, she saw them shake. Though they could have left it at that, she felt the urge to comfort him a bit.
“Look, I know it’s scary, but the Cleaners will come through and take care of the body by sundown, and they’ll come out with some new procedure of how to deal with routers by next week. That’s how it works. You know that.” She walked across the second level, then started up the next ladder. The wall was massive, a network of steel towers and interconnecting walkways from level 10 onward. Below that, it was a solid wall that you really couldn't see out of. This was the first switchback in a series of 22, which would put them at the highest level of the steel towers. It was fairly safe, as long as you didn’t have a fear of heights or a problem with balance.
“Right, and you’re not phased at all?” Luca huffed. He wasn’t as used to the climb as she was.
“There’s phased and then there’s… I don’t know… being called.” Maria stopped short, swallowing.
“Yeah, except they don’t call you for things that actually make sense.” Luca sighed, but when Maria didn’t move, Luca stopped and looked at her. “Wait… Lewinsky. Anne was your girl.”
Maria cleared her throat. “Yes.” She said simply, continuing up the ladder. Level 19. She needed to think about the job at hand. She could fall apart later, when it wouldn't put her people in danger.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Luca joined her on the 19th level, and put out a hand to stop her before they got to the next ladder. “Sorry, hold on a sec.”
“You alright?”
“Yeah, just um… wow we’re high.” He looked over the railing, and Maria looked out over the countryside. Out at the edge of her vision, next to a square building so very different from the types of buildings they lived in, an 8 foot Jugger dug at something in the rubble.
So far, they had seen seven different types of mechs. The Jugger was one of the bigger ones. There was one bigger kind, but there had only been two sightings of the Manx. Manx were upwards of 15 feet tall, and they were the real reason the colonists were making these walls. They could climb.
Maria knew that if they ever did try to get in, the humans wouldn’t survive, but it gave the people something to do, and kept them from wanting to go out and expand.
“Yeah… we’re high…” Maria said, sighing and looking towards the next ladder. “Break’s over, let’s go.”
“Yeah, right. I’m good.” Luca waited until she was halfway up, his hand on the side of the ladder, and followed once she was.
“Maria… have you ever been out there?” Luca asked, once they were on their way to the next switchback. Level 21. Almost there.
Maria looked over her shoulder, considering a moment, then said, “Once. They put out a supply run, a few years ago, that I was part of.”
“They let you leave?” Maria didn’t like the fascinated tone in Luca’s voice.
“Yeah. They let me out. I’m OK with never going on another run again, though.”
“Why?”
“Because.” Maria considered leaving it at that, then decided she needed to put the fear in this kid. She didn’t want to lose another to ‘curiosity’. “You think Routers are bad now, imagine seeing one without the wall and your friends to protect you.”
She heard Luca suck in a breath. Good. That had gotten something out of him. She pushed a little harder, “It’s dirty, hard, painful, and a lot of people die. There’s a reason we live in here.”
“Oh.”
She could almost feel the curiosity warring with the new fear that had been placed in this kid’s mind. It would have to do. They would always wonder, she knew that, and the Center would always have someone to send out there, but maybe she could save one.
Even if she did have to lie.
She’d never been outside the walls. The people who actually were sent out there were sent out there to die.
Usually, they cleared the walls before they sent people out, at least on the side they sent them out of. They called it maintenance, and it happened every month, so it seemed believable, except for the fact that every day was maintenance. Maintenance was part of their job as builders of the wall. Why would they need to clear them out to do a different kind? Maria had gotten suspicious.
One night, when the south-east quadrant was cleared, Maria was at the top of the wall. Instead of leaving as she had been told, she stayed up there. She knew that if they found her she might be penalized, but she had to know.
She wasn’t caught.
It was nearly dawn when a line of 5 people had emerged from somewhere below her. She couldn’t see what had opened to let them out.
They looked excited. Maria didn’t know what to think as they moved towards the nearest set of ruins.
Maybe it was a supply run, she thought. They had backpacks, and she could see that maybe they were looking for things to bring back. They wouldn’t make it. She wanted to cry out, to warn them. From her position, she could see a flash of metal in the morning light.
A mech had found them.
It was hunting them.
The hunt didn’t last long. They had been sent without weapons. If they had, the weapons certainly didn’t work.
Behind her, she heard the loudspeaker Call someone. It wasn’t someone she knew, so she didn’t remember the name, but it was at the same moment that a single man with strange armor and a sled came running out of the wall.
He was almost like a mech himself, all shining and metal and running faster than any human could, but he definitely was a man in a suit.
When he got to the scene of the short, bloody fight, he started piling bodies onto the sled. Each one had a backpack, and maybe they had even found a few things before they had been killed.
Maria was too far away to see too many details, but she did notice that the mech was not far off, just standing there, watching the man. Then it wandered off, and the man started making his way back.
People shouldn't see things like that. It made them question. Happy moments seemed sour, tainted by questions and hypotheses. Sad moments seemed like conspiracies. There was no way to grieve when things like that gave you strange and interminable hope.
No way to let things go.
Maria would have gone on with her life. After her daughter left, it would have faded to the raw ache of an excised love, but because of that line of children, that strange man, the deaths, and the mech, Maria held out hope.
"Maria?"