How They Were Found Read Online Free Page A

across from me in his room, the captain makes me promise that I will leave the tower when we have finished, no matter what he tells me, and because this is already my intent, I agree.
    Three questions, he says. No more.
    I ask him if there are other receiving towers, and he says there are, but when I press him for details about who mans these towers, he refuses to give me a direct answer, offering only shrugging misdirections and half-truths that tell me nothing.
    Next, I ask him if others will come to take our place after we are all dead. He looks over my provisioned pack, my donned furs, then says, No. You are the last Maon. I am the last captain. Everyone here is so old now, and all of them have finally grown dim. What we did, no one else will have to do.
    The last question is even harder for him to answer, but I press him, begging for honesty, for confirmation, and finally he nods his head, his coal-black eyes saddened for the first time I can remember, but maybe, I realize, not for the first time ever.
    He tells me how, long ago, when we were both young and strong, we stood atop the receiving tower in the dark, watching the waves of debris tear endlessly through the atmosphere, their terrible truth still disguised as innocent meteorites.
    Already this was years after the war ended, after we’d each accepted we’d never go home, that there was no home to go to.
    Already this was after we'd started to forget, to go dim. Not all at once, not everyone, but enough of us, starting with Kerr.
    The dim demanded to know why they were being kept in the receiving tower, why they couldn’t travel to the shore to be relieved of their duties. They grew restless and angry, and before long there were enough of them that something had to be done.
    The captain says, Everything we did next was your decision.
    He says, Before there was Maon, there was the major, and for a second I see us atop the tower, grimly shaking hands. I hear myself say to him the name that was once his, the one I have claimed myself for so long, ever since I stepped down from this command.
    By my orders, he tells me, the captain took over my abandoned duties administrating the useless routines of the receiving tower, while I joined the men in the ranks so that I could better watch over the dim and keep them safe. A major no more, I held midnight meetings with those whose wits remained, explaining how, to protect our ailing friends, our brothers in arms, we would pretend the war was still being fought. To give them purpose, we would start manning the listening room again, searching for signals that did not—could not—exist, since there was no one left alive to send them.
    According to the captain, this is how we saved our men, how we kept them safe long enough for our beards to gray, for our bodies to grow stooped and fat.
    Still, the dim turned increasingly dangerous, first to themselves and then to the rest of us.
    We waited until they began threatening murder and mutiny, then the captain had them shot and stacked one by one in the courtyard, or else pushed them out across the ice to seek the meaningless shore, the phantom promise of the waiting transport ship, a ship that existed only in the stories I told the men. That existed only to give them purpose, to give them hope they might yet be saved.
    The captain says, At first, you chose who would stay and who I would force from the tower. You were still the major, even if no one remembered. You said it was my duty to give them someone to hate, if that was what it took to hold them together, to unite them in this new life they had no choice but to live.
    Later, after you dimmed too, I had to decide myself when it was time to use the pistol, or to drive a man out of the tower and onto the ice.
    I have done my best, he tells me, but I am not you.
    I have had to be cruel.
    I have had to become a monster.
    All these decisions, I have had to make alone.
    The captain stops speaking, turns his face toward the wall.