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Dore was six when she told Missus Park that she wanted to be her shadow.
“You want to work in recycling?” Missus Park said. “No one wants to work in recycling, kid. It’s where you come to work if you’re not good at anything else.”
“Hey, fuck you Hana!” one of the other workers shouted.
She replied with a rude gesture and turned her attention back to Dore.
“I don’t want to shadow garbage,” Dore said, nose wrinkling at the thought. “Your art. Art that stays.”
Missus Park repeated the words silently, then her mouth dropped open in understanding. “You mean tattoos.” Dore nodded. “Bad news, kid. Here in the down deep, tattooing is a hobby and you don’t shadow hobbies. Up top they have real artists who do all sorts of fussy shit. Flowers and what-the-fuck ever. Down here we don’t have time for that.”
“Why?”
“Because tattoos take a long time to heal, that’s why! Even small ones get infected real easy. We stick with simple shit because it’s quick and when it gets blown out or goes red or scars it doesn’t matter as much.”
“I think it matters,” Dore mumbled, kicking the floor.
“Well, shows what you know. Now go on and get out of here. Don’t you have other things to do?”
Dore went on and got out of there, but they both knew that kids down in mechanical didn’t really ever have much to distract them. Dore scavenged for small parts in recycling she could sell to some of the machinists in the higher floors. Tiny bits; screws and fasteners that got knocked off whatever fell down the garbage chute, generally overlooked by anyone taller than she was. And since she was tiny for her age, or so her mother said, most everyone was taller than her.
She took her latest haul up to Perry on 142 and made it home in time to help her mother with dinner.
Dore's interest in tattooing remained long past every other love of her childhood withered away in the dim overhead lights of the down deep. Down here, school started at age six and usually lasted eight years before you were sent off to shadow someone in mechanical. Dore didn’t make it near that long. Up top, they said, kids went to school for even longer. And they learned other things. Impractical things. Dore once asked if they learned about art, and the teacher merely shook their head and told her to focus on her maths.
One day, shortly after she turned thirteen, Dore discovered that a combination of soot, her mother’s moonshine, and a little bit of oil made ink.
“It’s gonna hurt,” she promised Gonch, one of her neighbours. He was a year older than her and already shadowing one of the mechanics working on the reactor. It made him stand out among their peers, consequently strutting around the place like he owned it.
She’d found a broken pen in recycling and made herself a hollow needle from its ink cartridge. Gonch looked at it warily.
“Uh, maybe I should go see Hana,” he said.
“Her hands shake,” Dore snapped. “Shut up.”
He shut up.
Dore carved lines into his skin, arched swirls that resembled the looping pattern she’d drawn on her own fingers. Gonch bled, of course, but she’d made sure to boil some water and soak a rag in it to catch whatever fell. She drew all over his arm, nonsense that felt right, until he finally flinched away and ruined one of the lines.
“Looks good,” he stammered, though he’d lost most of the colour in his face.
Dore nodded. “Keep it clean,” she said. She shoved his other arm. “Wear long sleeves when you’re working in the reactor.”
“It’s too hot,” he whined.
Nevertheless, he wore long sleeves, bearing through endless ribbing from the others, until the scabbing healed and he went back to sleeveless shirts better suited to the unrelenting heat.
Dore skipped out of school at fourteen and ended up shadowing in maintenance. She followed her mentor around with a dustpan and broom, sweeping up whatever fell out of his cart when he emptied the garbage receptacles around their level, thinking up new designs. People, her mother especially, always accused her of daydreaming. Spacing out. Dore didn’t care much. It wasn’t like she’d been shoved into a job that required all of her attention. Some days, it didn’t require any attention at all.
That was fine.
She dreamed in lines.
The some-hundredth tattoo she did, long out of her school days, was for someone else from mechanical. One of Gonch’s friends, who wanted a very specific design.
“It’s phi,” she said. Her diction reminded Dore of the people she’d met from up top—inspectors, mostly, who bandied around words like ‘compliance’ and ‘hazards’ but had soft hands without callouses, and neither dirt nor grease ground beneath their fingernails. She might have spoken like someone from the upper mids, but she had the same haunted cast to her eyes as some of the others who’d come down to the lower levels out of desperation, looking for somewhere to hide. “The golden ratio.”
Whatever it was, Dore liked the shape of it. A little twist, like a knot. Perfect in a way she couldn’t really describe. She ran it over with her pen three or four times to grind in the ink and make sure it stayed.
“You know,” she said afterwards, “Up top, they have special pens to do tattoos. They’re like needles, tapping in the ink.” Her mouth twitched and she began to shiver. “Tap, tap, tap.”
“Go there, then,” Dore murmured, finishing it off. She could already tell that the ink would expand past the cuts she’d scratched into the skin. That was all right. Nobody came to her because they wanted something perfect. They came because they wanted something permanent.
The woman smiled at her.
They rutted up, quick and dirty, against the wall of Dore’s borrowed studio—a janitorial closet she’d claimed from her mentor—the woman high on the look of her new ink and the slamming thrill of the accompanying pain, Dore happy to feed into it.
People in mechanical rarely had sanctioned relationships. Usually the overseers and experts, generally the people working on reactors. Dore always figured the people up top wanted the bare minimum of occupants in the lowest levels of the silo. Enough to keep the reactor running, but not much more. Or maybe they figured they ate all their babies.
Dore didn’t bother learning the woman’s name, but she heard it again on the lips of dozens of people she sent to Dore to get tattooed.
People learned to come to her first thing in the morning, or in the last lingering moments of the day. A few came to her time and time again, addicted to the way the ink stuck beneath their skin or the high of the pain as she scratched the pen into their flesh.
One of the deputies came to her and asked her to tattoo the Silo’s Crest on his chest, above his heart. Hoping it’d somehow be lucky or impress someone or some shit like that when he tried to get a promotion to the lower mids.
‘Tattooing is a hobby,’ Hana had said. That meant she only needed to do the tattoos she wanted; she’d known too many deputies who thought they were better than the rest of the people in the down deep to play into someone’s ambitions of transferring up by wearing their bullshit commitment permanently on their body.
She refused, then ended up spitting out the broken pieces of her front teeth when it turned out he was one of the pricks who didn’t consider ‘no’ to be a full sentence.
Gonch showed up at her door that night with a cold pack, covertly stolen from one of the medics up on 138. She held it up against her torn lips, trying not to sneer through the pain and aggravate the broken skin.
“They say a new deputy’s starting soon,” he said.
“Fuck if I care,” she muttered, “This one asks for another fucking crest, though, I’m going to lose more teeth.”
Gonch snorted and ruffled her hair. She swatted his hand away and told him to either go down on her or pass her the bottle of grease-soaked liquor he’d brought along as a painkiller. Gonch, a real swell guy, did both.
Dore was fifty-six years old, and Gonch had been replaced by Gray who’d been replaced by Knox, when Juliette Nichols showed up at her door.
“I want this,” she said, taking out one of the grease pens they used to track the reactor’s many service levels and drawing a complicated pattern of lines on Dore’s wall.
Dore studied it. “Looks like nonsense.” It didn’t, actually. When she followed it with her eyes, she felt the humming of the reactor around them, reverberating in the way no one except the people who lived down in the lower levels could appreciate. Silent music.
“Do it anyway,” Jules said. Barely sixteen and still nominally under Walk’s care, people had only just accepted her as a permanent fixture instead of some upper level princess looking for attention by running away from home. “If you can’t, there are people in the upper mids who will.”
Like hell those pretentious fucks were getting their hands on anyone from Dore’s level, even displaced little girls like this one. “Sit the fuck down,” Dore said.
Jules sat like a champ, completing the entire tattoo in one sitting. A single continuous line that stretched in whorls from her shoulder to her elbow. “I hear you’ve decided Walk’s tape isn’t good enough.”
“I want to try new things.” Jules turned cautious eyes her way. “Is that so bad?”
Dore considered baring her teeth and showing off her broken smile. Instead, she settled with, “More’n a few people with my ink on them been sent out to clean.” Taking her art with them into the dead world outside the silo and letting it rot into the earth along with them. Maybe, when they cracked open one of the countless suits littering the ground, all they’d find would be soot.
“I won’t be,” Jules promised.
Dore didn’t believe her. She sorta liked being wrong, though. It meant that the silo wasn’t the same, unchanging tube that it had been since her childhood. It still had a bit of unpredictability.
If anyone, she decided, would bring a bit of chaos to the silo, it’d be someone like Juliette Nichols.
“This is going to suck to heal,” Dore muttered out of the corner of her mouth when she looped the last line back around to rejoin the first.
“Fine by me,” Jules said. She craned her neck and twisted her shoulder to get the best look. “I’ll be back for more.”
Dore knew she would. “So long as your arm doesn’t fall off.”
She wiped away the last remains of the blood and set down her pen.