Part I ~ The Dig
Silo 18
1
Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. Wires overhead swung gently in their harnesses. Pipes rattled. And from the generator room, staccato bangs filled the air, bounced off the walls, and brought to mind a time when unbalanced machines spun dangerously.
At the locus of the horrible racket, Juliette Nichols stood with her coveralls zipped down to her waist, the loose arms knotted around her hips, dust and sweat staining her undershirt with mud. She leaned her weight against the excavator, her sinewy arms shaking as the digger’s heavy metal piston slammed into the concrete wall of Silo 18 over and over.
The vibrations could be felt in her teeth. Every bone and joint in her body shuddered, and old wounds ached with reminders. Off to the side, the miners who normally manned the excavator watched unhappily. Juliette turned her head from the powdered concrete and saw the way they stood with their arms crossed over their wide chests, their jaws set in rigid frowns, angry perhaps for her appropriating their machine. Or maybe over the taboo of digging where digging was forbidden.
Juliette swallowed the grit and chalk accumulating in her mouth and concentrated on the crumbling wall. There was another possibility, one she couldn’t help but consider. Good mechanics and miners had died because of her. Brutal fighting had broken out when she’d refused to clean. How many of these men and women watching her dig had lost a loved one, a best friend, a family member? How many of them blamed her? She couldn’t possibly be the only one.
The excavator bucked and there was the clang of metal on metal. Juliette steered the punching jaws to the side as more bones of rebar appeared in the white flesh of concrete. She had already gouged out a veritable crater in the outer silo wall. A first row of rebar hung jagged overhead, the ends smooth like melted candles where she’d taken a blowtorch to them. Two more feet of concrete and another row of the iron rods had followed, the silo walls thicker than she’d imagined. With numb limbs and frayed nerves she guided the machine forward on its tracks, the wedge-shaped piston chewing at the stone between the rods. If she hadn’t seen the schematic for herself — if she didn’t know there were other silos out there — she would’ve given up already. It felt as though she were chewing through the very earth itself. Her arms shook, her hands a blur. This was the wall of the silo she was attacking, ramming it with a mind to pierce through the damn thing, to bore clear through to the outside.
The miners shifted uncomfortably. Juliette looked from them to where she was aiming as the hammer bit rang against more steel. She concentrated on the crease of white stone between the bars. With her boot, she kicked the drive lever, leaned into the machine, and the excavator trudged forward on rusted tracks one more inch. She should’ve taken another break a while ago. The chalk in her mouth was choking her; she was dying for water; her arms needed a rest; rubble crowded the base of the excavator and littered her feet. She kicked a few of the larger chunks out of the way and kept digging.
Her fear was that if she stopped one more time, she wouldn’t be able to convince them to let her continue. Mayor or not — a shift head or not — men she had thought fearless had already left the generator room with furrowed brows. They seemed terrified that she might puncture a sacred seal and let in a foul and murderous air. Juliette saw the way they looked at her, knowing she’d been on the outside, as though she were some kind of ghost. Many kept their distance as if she bore some disease.
Setting her teeth, foul-tasting grit crunching between them, she kicked the forward plate once more with her boot. The tracks on the excavator spun forward another inch. One more inch. Juliette cursed the machine and the pain in her wrists. Goddamn the fighting and her friends dead. Goddamn the thought of Solo and the kids all alone, a forever of rock away. And goddamn this mayor nonsense, people looking at her as though she suddenly ran all the shifts on every level, as though she knew what the hell she was doing, as though they had to obey her even as they feared her—
The excavator lurched forward more than an inch, and the pounding hammer bit screamed with a piercing whine. Juliette lost her grip with one hand, and the machine revved up as if fit to explode. The miners startled like fleas, several of them running toward her, shadows converging. Juliette hit the red kill switch, which was nearly invisible beneath a dusting of white powder. The excavator kicked and bucked as it wound down from a dangerous, runaway state.
“You’re through! You’re through!”
Raph pulled her back, his pale arms, strong from years of mining, wrapping around her numb limbs. Others shouted at her that she was done. Finished. The excavator had made a noise as if a connecting rod had shattered; there had been that dangerous whine of a mighty engine running without friction, without anything to resist. Juliette let go of the controls and sagged into Raph’s embrace. A desperation returned, the thought of her friends buried alive in that tomb of an empty silo and her unable to reach them.
“You’re through — get back!”
A hand that reeked of grease and toil clamped down over her mouth, protecting her from the air beyond. Juliette couldn’t breathe. Ahead of her, a black patch of empty space appeared, the cloud of concrete dissipating.
And there, between two bars of iron, stood a dark void. A void between prison bars that ran two layers deep and all around them, from Mechanical straight to the Up Top.
She was through. Through. She now had a glimpse of some other, some different, outside.
“The torch,” Juliette mumbled, prying Raph’s calloused hand from her mouth and hazarding a gulp of air. “Get me the cutting torch. And a flashlight.”
2
“Damn thing’s rusted to hell.”
“Those look like hydraulic lines.”
“Must be a thousand years old.”
Fitz muttered the last, the oilman’s words whistling through gaps left by missing teeth. The miners and mechanics who had kept their distance during the digging now crowded against Juliette’s back as she aimed her flashlight through a lingering veil of powdered rock and into the gloom beyond. Raph, as pale as the drifting dust, stood beside her, the two of them crammed into the conical crater chewed out of the five or six feet of concrete. The albino’s eyes were wide, his translucent cheeks bulging, his lips pursed together and bloodless.
“You can breathe, Raph,” Juliette told him. “It’s just another room.”
The pale miner let out his air with a relieved grunt and asked those behind to stop shoving. Juliette passed the flashlight to Fitz and turned from the hole she’d made. She wormed her way through the jostling crowd, her pulse racing from the glimpses of some machine on the other side of the wall. What she had seen was quickly confirmed by the murmuring of others: struts, bolts, hose, plate steel with chips of paint and streaks of rust — a wall of a mechanical beast that went up and to the sides as far as their feeble flashlight beams could penetrate.
A tin cup of water was pressed into her trembling hand. Juliette drank greedily. She was exhausted, but her mind raced. She couldn’t wait to get back to a radio and tell Solo. She couldn’t wait to tell Lukas. Here was a bit of buried hope.
“What now?” Dawson asked.
The new third-shift foreman, who had given her the water, studied her warily. Dawson was in his late thirties, but working nights had saddled him with extra years. He had the large knotted hands that came from busting knuckles and breaking fingers, some of it from working and some from fighting. Juliette returned the cup to him. Dawson glanced inside and stole the last swig.
“Now we make a bigger hole,” she told him. “We get in there and see if that thing’s salvageable.”
Movement on top of the humming main generator caught Juliette’s eye. She glanced up in time to spy Shirly frowning down at her. Shirly turned away.
Juliette squeezed Dawson’s arm. “It’ll take forever to expand this one hole,” she said. “What we need are dozens of smaller holes that we can connect. We need to tear out entire sections at a time. Bring up the other excavator. And turn the men loose with their picks, but keep the dust to a minimum if you can help it.”
The third-shift foreman nodded and rapped his fingers against the empty cup. “No blasting?” he asked.
“No blasting,” she said. “I don’t want to damage whatever’s over there.”
He nodded, and she left him to manage the dig. She approached the generator. Shirly had her coveralls stripped down to her waist as well, sleeves cinched together, her undershirt wet with the dark inverted triangle of hard work. With a rag in each hand, she worked across the top of the generator, wiping away both old grease and the new film of powder kicked up by the day’s digging.
Juliette untied the sleeves of her coveralls and shrugged her arms inside, covering her scars. She climbed up the side of the generator, knowing where she could grab, which parts were hot and which were merely warm. “You need some help?” she asked, reaching the top, enjoying the heat and thrum of the machine in her sore muscles.
Shirly wiped her face with the hem of her undershirt. She shook her head. “I’m good,” she said.
“Sorry about the debris.” Juliette raised her voice over the hum of the massive pistons firing up and down. There was a day not too long ago when her teeth would’ve been knocked loose to stand on top of the machine, back when it was unbalanced six ways to hell.
Shirly turned and tossed the muddy white rags down to her shadow, Kali, who dunked them into a bucket of grimy water. It was strange to see the new head of Mechanical toiling away at something so mundane as cleaning the genset. Juliette tried to picture Knox up there doing the same. And then it hit her for the hundredth time that she was mayor, and look how she spent her time, hammering through walls and cutting rebar. Kali tossed the rags back up, and Shirly caught them with wet slaps and sprays of suds. Her old friend’s silence as she bent back to her work said plenty.
Juliette turned and surveyed the digging party she’d assembled as they cleared debris and worked to expand the hole. Shirly hadn’t been happy about the loss of manpower, much less the taboo of breaking the silo’s seal. The call for workers had come at a time when their ranks were already thinned by the outbreak of violence. And whether or not Shirly blamed Juliette for her husband’s death was irrelevant. Juliette blamed herself, and so the tension stood between them like a cake of grease.
It wasn’t long before the hammering on the wall resumed. Juliette spotted Bobby at the excavator’s controls, his great muscled arms a blur as he guided the wheeled jackhammer. The sight of some strange machine — some artifact buried beyond the walls — had thrown sparks into reluctant bodies. Fear and doubt had morphed into determination. A porter arrived with food, and Juliette watched the young man with his bare arms and legs study the work intently. The porter left his load of fruit and hot lunches behind and took with him his gossip.
Juliette stood on the humming generator and allayed her doubts. They were doing the right thing, she told herself. She had seen with her own eyes how vast the world, had stood on a summit and surveyed the land. All she had to do now was show others what was out there. And then they would lean into this work rather than fear it.
3
A hole was made big enough to squeeze through, and Juliette took the honors. A flashlight in hand, she crawled over a pile of rubble and between bent fingers of iron rod. The air beyond the generator room was cool like the deep mines. She coughed into her fist, the dust from the digging tickling her throat and nose. She hopped down to the floor beyond the gaping hole.
“Careful,” she told the others behind her. “The ground’s not even.”
Some of the unevenness was from the chunks of concrete that’d fallen inside — the rest was just how the floor stood. It appeared as though it’d been gouged out by the claws of a giant.
Shining the light from her boots to the dim ceiling high above, she surveyed the hulking wall of machinery before her. It dwarfed the main generator. It dwarfed the oil pumps. A colossus of such proportions was never meant to be built, much less repaired. Her stomach sank. Her hopes of restoring this buried machine diminished.
Raph joined her in the cool and dark, a clatter of rubble trailing him. The albino had a condition that skipped generations. His eyebrows and lashes were gossamer things, nearly invisible. His flesh was as pale as pig’s milk. But when he was in the mines, the shadows that darkened the others like soot lent him a healthful complexion. Juliette could see why he had left the farms as a boy to work in the dark.
Raph whistled as he played his flashlight across the machine. A moment later, his whistle echoed back, a bird in the far shadows, mocking him.
“It’s a thing of the gods,” he wondered aloud.
Juliette didn’t answer. She never took Raph as one to listen to the tales of priests. Still, there was no doubting the awe it inspired. She had seen Solo’s books and suspected that the same ancient peoples who had built this machine had built the crumbling but soaring towers beyond the hills. The fact that they had built the silo itself made her feel small. She reached out and ran her hand across metal that hadn’t been touched nor glimpsed for centuries, and she marveled at what the ancients had been capable of. Maybe the priests weren’t that far off after all…
“Ye gods,” Dawson grumbled, crowding noisily beside them. “What’re we to do with this?”
“Yeah, Jules,” Raph whispered, respecting the deep shadows and the deeper time. “How’re we supposed to dig this thing outta here?”
“We’re not,” she told them. She scooted sideways between the wall of concrete and the tower of machinery. “This thing is meant to dig its own way out.”
“You’re assuming we can get it running,” Dawson said.
Workers in the generator room crowded the hole and blocked the light spilling in. Juliette steered her flashlight around the narrow gap that stood between the outer silo wall and the tall machine, looking for some way around. She worked to one side, into the darkness, and scrambled up the gently sloping floor.
“We’ll get it running,” she assured Dawson. “We just gotta figure out how it’s supposed to work.”
“Careful,” Raph warned as a rock kicked loose by her boots tumbled toward him. She was already higher up than their heads. The room, she saw, didn’t have a corner or a far wall. It just curled up and all the way around.
“It’s a big circle,” she called out, her voice echoing between rock and metal. “I don’t think this is the business end.”
“There’s a door over here,” Dawson announced.
Juliette slid down the slope to join him and Raph. Another flashlight clicked on from the gawkers in the generator room. Its beam joined hers in illuminating a door with pins for hinges. Dawson wrestled with a handle on the back of the machine. He grunted with effort, and then metal cried out as it reluctantly gave way to muscle.
••••
The machine yawned wide once they were through the door. Nothing prepared Juliette for this. Thinking back to the schematics she’d seen in Solo’s underground hovel, she now realized that the diggers had been drawn to scale. The little worms jutting off the low floors of Mechanical were a level high and twice that in length. Massive cylinders of steel, this one sat snug in a circular cave, almost as if it had buried itself. Juliette told her people to be careful as they made their way through the interior. A dozen workers joined her, their voices mingling and echoing in the maze-like guts of the machine, taboo dispelled by curiosity and wonder, the digging forgotten for now.
“This here’s for moving the tailings,” someone said. Beams of light played on metal chutes of interlocking plates. There were wheels and gears beneath the plates and more plates on the other side that overlapped like the scales on a snake. Juliette saw immediately how the entire chute moved, the plates hinging at the end and wrapping around to the beginning again. The rock and debris could ride on the top as it was pushed along. Low walls of inch-thick plate were meant to keep the rock from tumbling off. The rock chewed up by the digger would pass through here and out the back, where men would have to wrestle it with barrows.
“It’s rusted all to hell,” someone muttered.
“Not as bad as it should be,” Juliette said. The machine had been there for hundreds of years, at least. She expected it to be a ball of rust and nothing more, but the steel was shiny in places. “I think the room was airtight,” she wondered aloud, remembering a breeze on her neck and the sucking of dust as she pierced through the wall for the first time.
“This is all hydraulic,” Bobby said. There was disappointment in his voice, as though he were learning that the gods cleaned their asses with water too. Juliette was more hopeful. She saw something that could be fixed, so long as the power source was intact. They could get this running. It was made to be simple, as if the gods knew that whoever discovered it would be less sophisticated, less capable. There were treads just like on the excavator but running the length of the mighty machine, axles caked in grease. More treads on the sides and ceiling that must push against the earth as well. What she didn’t understand was how the digging commenced. Past the moving chutes and all the implements for pushing crushed rock and tailings out the back of the machine, they came to a wall of steel that slid up past the girders and walkways into the darkness above.
“That don’t make a lick of sense,” Raph said, reaching the far wall. “Look at these wheels. Which way does this thing run?”
“Those aren’t wheels,” Juliette said. She pointed with her light. “This whole front piece spins. Here’s the pivot.” She pointed to a central axle as big around as two men. “And those round discs there must protrude through to the other side and do the cutting.”
Bobby blew out a disbelieving breath. “Through solid stone?”
Juliette tried to turn one of the discs. It barely moved. A barrel of grease would be needed.
“I think she’s right,” Raph said. He had the lid raised on a box the size of a double bunk and aimed his flashlight inside. “This here’s a gearbox. Looks like a transmission.”
Juliette joined him. Helical gears the size of a man’s waist lay embedded in dried grease. The gears matched up with teeth that would spin the wall. The transmission box was as large and stout as that of the main generator. Larger.
“Bad news,” Bobby said. “Check where that shaft leads.”
Three beams of light converged and followed the driveshaft back to where it ended in empty space. The interior cavern of that hulking machine, all that emptiness in which they stood, was a void where the heart of the beast should lie.
“She ain’t going nowhere,” Raph muttered.
Juliette marched back to the rear of the machine. Beefy struts built for holding a power plant sat bare. She and the other mechanics had been milling about where an engine should sit. And now that she knew what to look for, she spotted the mounts. There were six of them: threaded posts eight inches across and caked in ancient, hardened grease. The matching nut for each post hung from hooks beneath the struts. The gods were communicating with her. Talking to her. The ancients had left a message, written in the language of people who knew machines. They were speaking to her across vast stretches of time, saying: This goes here. Follow these steps.
Fitz, the oilman, knelt beside Juliette and rested a hand on her arm. “I am sorry for your friends,” he said, meaning Solo and the kids, but Juliette thought he sounded happy for everyone else. Glancing at the rear of the metal cave, she saw more miners and mechanics peering inside, hesitant to join them. Everyone would be happy for this endeavor to end right there, for her to dig no further. But Juliette was feeling more than an urge; she was beginning to feel a purpose. This machine hadn’t been hidden from them. It had been safely stowed. Protected. Packed away. Slathered in grease and shielded from the air for a reason beyond her knowing.
“Do we seal it back up?” Dawson asked. Even the grizzled old mechanic seemed eager to dig no further.
“It’s waiting for something,” Juliette said. She pulled one of the large nuts off its hook and rested it on top of the grease-encased post. The size of the mount was familiar. She thought of the work she’d performed a lifetime ago of aligning the main generator. “She’s meant to be opened,” she said. “This belly of hers is meant to be opened. Check the back of the machine where we came through. It should come apart so the tailings can get out, but also to let something in. The motor isn’t missing at all.”
Raph stayed by her side, the beam of his flashlight on her chest so he could study her face.
“I know why they put this here,” she told him, while the others left to survey the back of the machine. “I know why they put this next to the generator room.”
4
Shirly and Kali were still cleaning the main generator when Juliette emerged from the belly of the digger. Bobby showed the others how the back of the digger opened up, which bolts to remove and how the plates came away. Juliette had them measure the space between the posts and then the mounts of the backup generator to verify what she already knew. The machine they’d uncovered was a living schematic. It really was a message from older times. One discovery was leading to a cascade of others.
Juliette watched Kali wring mud from a cloth before dipping it into a second bucket of slightly less filthy water, and a truth occurred to her: An engine would rot if left for a thousand years. It would only hum if used, if a team of people devoted their lives to the care of it. Steam rose from a hot and soapy manifold as Shirly wiped down the humming main generator, and Juliette saw how they’d been working toward this moment for years. As much as her old friend — and now the Chief of Mechanical — hated this project of hers, Shirly had been assisting all this time. The smaller generator on the other side of the main power plant had another, greater, purpose.
“The mounts look right,” Raph told her, a measuring line in his hand. “You think they used that machine to bring the generator here?”
Shirly tossed down a muddy rag, and a cleaner one was tossed up. Worker and shadow had a rhythm like the humming of pistons.
“I think the spare generator is meant to help that digger leave,” she told Raph. What she didn’t understand was why anyone would send off their backup power source, even for a short time. It would put the entire silo at the whim of a breakdown. They may as well have found a motor crumbling into a solid ball of rust on the other side of the wall. It was difficult to imagine anyone agreeing with the plans coalescing in her mind.
A rag arced through the air and splashed into a bucket of brown water. Kali didn’t throw another up. She was staring toward the entrance of the generator room. Juliette followed the shadow’s gaze and felt a flush of heat. There, among the black and soiled men and women of Mechanical, an unblemished young man in brilliant silver stood, asking someone for directions. A man pointed, and Lukas Kyle, head of IT, her lover, started off in Juliette’s direction.
“Get the backup generator serviced,” Juliette told Raph, who visibly stiffened. He seemed to know where this was going. “We need to put her in just long enough to see what that digger does. We’ve been meaning to unhook and clean out the exhaust manifolds anyway.”
Raph nodded, his jaws clenching and unclenching. Juliette slapped his back and didn’t dare glance up at Shirly as she strode off to meet Lukas.
“What’re you doing down here?” she asked him. She had spoken to Lukas the day before, and he had neglected to mention the visit. His aim was to corner her.
Lukas pulled up short and frowned — and Juliette felt awful for the tone. There was no embrace, no welcoming handshake. She was too wound up from the day’s discoveries, too tense.
“I should ask the same thing,” he said. His gaze strayed to the crater carved out of the far wall. “While you’re digging holes down here, the head of IT is doing the mayor’s work.”
“Then nothing’s changed,” Juliette said, laughing, trying to lighten the mood. But Lukas didn’t smile. She rested her hand on his arm and guided him away from the generator and out into the hall. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I was just surprised to see you. You should’ve told me you were coming. And listen… I’m glad to see you. If you need me to come up and sign some things, I’m happy to. If you need me to give a speech or kiss a baby, I’ll do that. But I told you last week that I was going to find some way to get my friends out. And since you vetoed my walking back over the hills—”
Lukas’s eyes widened at the flippant heresy. He glanced around the hall to see if others were around. “Jules, you’re worrying about a handful of people while the rest of the silo grows uneasy. There are murmurs of dissent all through the Up Top. There are echoes of the last uprising you stirred, only now they’re aimed at us.”
Juliette felt her skin warm. Her hand fell from Lukas’s arm. “I wanted no part of that fight. I wasn’t even here for it.”
“But you’re here for this one.” His eyes were sad, not angry, and Juliette realized the days were as long for him in the Up Top as they were for her down in Mechanical. They’d spent less time talking in the past week than they had while she’d been in Silo 17. They were nearer to one another and in danger of growing apart.
“What would you have me do?” she asked.
“To start with, don’t dig. Please. Billings has fielded a dozen complaints from neighbors speculating about what will happen. Some of them are saying that the outside will come to us. A priest from the Mids is holding two Sundays a week now to warn of the dangers, of this vision of his where the dust fills the silo to the brim and thousands die—”
“Priests—” Juliette spat.
“Yes, priests, with people marching from the Top and the Deep both to attend his Sundays. When he finds it necessary to hold three of them a week, we’ll have a mob.”
Juliette ran her fingers through her hair, rock and rubble tumbling out. She looked at the cloud of fine dust guiltily. “What do people think happened to me outside the silo? My cleaning? What are they saying?”
“Some can scarcely believe it,” Lukas said. “It has the makings of legend. Oh, in IT we know what happened, but some wonder if you were sent to clean at all. I heard one rumor that it was an election stunt.”
Juliette cursed under her breath. “And news of the other silos?”
“I’ve been telling others for years that the stars are suns like our own. Some things are too big to comprehend. And I don’t think rescuing your friends will change that. You could march your radio friend up to the bazaar and say he came from another silo, and people would just as likely believe you.”
“Walker?” Juliette shook her head, but she knew he was right. “I’m not after my friends to prove what happened to me, Luke. This isn’t about me. They’re living with the dead over there. With ghosts.”
“Don’t we as well? Don’t we dine on our dead? I’m begging you, Jules. Hundreds will die for you to save a few. Maybe they’re better off over there.”
She took a deep breath and held it a pause, tried her best not to feel angry. “They’re not, Lukas. The man I aim to save is half mad from living on his own all these years. The kids over there are having kids of their own. They need our doctors and they need our help. Besides… I promised them.”
He rewarded her pleas with sad eyes. It was no use. How do you make a man care for those he’s never met? Juliette expected the impossible of him, and she was just as much to blame. Did she truly care for the people being poisoned twice on Sundays? Or any of the strangers she had been elected to lead but had never met?
“I didn’t want this job,” she told Lukas. It was hard to keep the blame out of her voice. Others had wanted her to be mayor, not her. Though not as many as before, it seemed.
“I didn’t know what I was shadowing for either,” Lukas countered. He started to say something else, but held his tongue as a group of miners exited the generator room, a cloud of dust kicked up from their boots.
“Were you going to say something?” she asked.
“I was going to ask that you dig in secret if you have to dig at all. Or leave these men to it and come—”
He bit off the thought.
“If you were about to say home, this is my home. And are we really no better than the last of them who were in charge? Lying to our people? Conspiring?”
“I fear we are worse,” he said. “All they did was keep us alive.”
Juliette laughed at that. “Us? They elected to send you and me to die.”
Lukas let out his breath. “I meant everyone else. They worked to keep everyone else alive.” But he couldn’t help it: he cracked a smile while Juliette continued to laugh. She smeared the tears on her cheeks into mud.
“Give me a few days down here,” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a concession. “Let me see if we even have the means to dig. Then I’ll come kiss your babies and bury your dead — though not in that order, of course.”
Lukas frowned at her morbidness. “And you’ll tamp down the heresies?”
She nodded. “If we dig, we’ll do it quietly.” To herself, she wondered if such a machine as she’d uncovered could dig any way but with a growl. “I was thinking of going on a slight power holiday, anyway. I don’t want the main generator on a full load for a while. Just in case.”
Lukas nodded, and Juliette realized how easy and necessary the lies felt. She considered telling him right then of another idea of hers, one she’d been considering for weeks, all the way back when she was in the doctor’s office recovering from her burns. There was something she needed to do up top, but she could see that he was in no mood to be angered further. And so she told him the only part of her plan that she thought he’d enjoy.
“Once things are underway down here, I plan to come up and stay for a while,” she said, taking his hand. “Come home for a while.”
Lukas smiled.
“But listen here,” she told him, feeling the urge to warn. “I’ve seen the world out there, Luke. I stay up at night listening to Walk’s radio. There are a lot of people just like us out there, living in fear, living apart, kept ignorant. I mean to do more than save my friends. I hope you know this. I mean to get to the bottom of what’s out there beyond these walls.”
The knot in Lukas’s throat bobbed up and down. His smile vanished. “You aim too far,” he said meekly.
Juliette smiled and squeezed her lover’s hand. “Says the man who watches the stars.”
1
Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. Wires overhead swung gently in their harnesses. Pipes rattled. And from the generator room, staccato bangs filled the air, bounced off the walls, and brought to mind a time when unbalanced machines spun dangerously.
At the locus of the horrible racket, Juliette Nichols stood with her coveralls zipped down to her waist, the loose arms knotted around her hips, dust and sweat staining her undershirt with mud. She leaned her weight against the excavator, her sinewy arms shaking as the digger’s heavy metal piston slammed into the concrete wall of Silo 18 over and over.
The vibrations could be felt in her teeth. Every bone and joint in her body shuddered, and old wounds ached with reminders. Off to the side, the miners who normally manned the excavator watched unhappily. Juliette turned her head from the powdered concrete and saw the way they stood with their arms crossed over their wide chests, their jaws set in rigid frowns, angry perhaps for her appropriating their machine. Or maybe over the taboo of digging where digging was forbidden.
Juliette swallowed the grit and chalk accumulating in her mouth and concentrated on the crumbling wall. There was another possibility, one she couldn’t help but consider. Good mechanics and miners had died because of her. Brutal fighting had broken out when she’d refused to clean. How many of these men and women watching her dig had lost a loved one, a best friend, a family member? How many of them blamed her? She couldn’t possibly be the only one.
The excavator bucked and there was the clang of metal on metal. Juliette steered the punching jaws to the side as more bones of rebar appeared in the white flesh of concrete. She had already gouged out a veritable crater in the outer silo wall. A first row of rebar hung jagged overhead, the ends smooth like melted candles where she’d taken a blowtorch to them. Two more feet of concrete and another row of the iron rods had followed, the silo walls thicker than she’d imagined. With numb limbs and frayed nerves she guided the machine forward on its tracks, the wedge-shaped piston chewing at the stone between the rods. If she hadn’t seen the schematic for herself — if she didn’t know there were other silos out there — she would’ve given up already. It felt as though she were chewing through the very earth itself. Her arms shook, her hands a blur. This was the wall of the silo she was attacking, ramming it with a mind to pierce through the damn thing, to bore clear through to the outside.
The miners shifted uncomfortably. Juliette looked from them to where she was aiming as the hammer bit rang against more steel. She concentrated on the crease of white stone between the bars. With her boot, she kicked the drive lever, leaned into the machine, and the excavator trudged forward on rusted tracks one more inch. She should’ve taken another break a while ago. The chalk in her mouth was choking her; she was dying for water; her arms needed a rest; rubble crowded the base of the excavator and littered her feet. She kicked a few of the larger chunks out of the way and kept digging.
Her fear was that if she stopped one more time, she wouldn’t be able to convince them to let her continue. Mayor or not — a shift head or not — men she had thought fearless had already left the generator room with furrowed brows. They seemed terrified that she might puncture a sacred seal and let in a foul and murderous air. Juliette saw the way they looked at her, knowing she’d been on the outside, as though she were some kind of ghost. Many kept their distance as if she bore some disease.
Setting her teeth, foul-tasting grit crunching between them, she kicked the forward plate once more with her boot. The tracks on the excavator spun forward another inch. One more inch. Juliette cursed the machine and the pain in her wrists. Goddamn the fighting and her friends dead. Goddamn the thought of Solo and the kids all alone, a forever of rock away. And goddamn this mayor nonsense, people looking at her as though she suddenly ran all the shifts on every level, as though she knew what the hell she was doing, as though they had to obey her even as they feared her—
The excavator lurched forward more than an inch, and the pounding hammer bit screamed with a piercing whine. Juliette lost her grip with one hand, and the machine revved up as if fit to explode. The miners startled like fleas, several of them running toward her, shadows converging. Juliette hit the red kill switch, which was nearly invisible beneath a dusting of white powder. The excavator kicked and bucked as it wound down from a dangerous, runaway state.
“You’re through! You’re through!”
Raph pulled her back, his pale arms, strong from years of mining, wrapping around her numb limbs. Others shouted at her that she was done. Finished. The excavator had made a noise as if a connecting rod had shattered; there had been that dangerous whine of a mighty engine running without friction, without anything to resist. Juliette let go of the controls and sagged into Raph’s embrace. A desperation returned, the thought of her friends buried alive in that tomb of an empty silo and her unable to reach them.
“You’re through — get back!”
A hand that reeked of grease and toil clamped down over her mouth, protecting her from the air beyond. Juliette couldn’t breathe. Ahead of her, a black patch of empty space appeared, the cloud of concrete dissipating.
And there, between two bars of iron, stood a dark void. A void between prison bars that ran two layers deep and all around them, from Mechanical straight to the Up Top.
She was through. Through. She now had a glimpse of some other, some different, outside.
“The torch,” Juliette mumbled, prying Raph’s calloused hand from her mouth and hazarding a gulp of air. “Get me the cutting torch. And a flashlight.”
2
“Damn thing’s rusted to hell.”
“Those look like hydraulic lines.”
“Must be a thousand years old.”
Fitz muttered the last, the oilman’s words whistling through gaps left by missing teeth. The miners and mechanics who had kept their distance during the digging now crowded against Juliette’s back as she aimed her flashlight through a lingering veil of powdered rock and into the gloom beyond. Raph, as pale as the drifting dust, stood beside her, the two of them crammed into the conical crater chewed out of the five or six feet of concrete. The albino’s eyes were wide, his translucent cheeks bulging, his lips pursed together and bloodless.
“You can breathe, Raph,” Juliette told him. “It’s just another room.”
The pale miner let out his air with a relieved grunt and asked those behind to stop shoving. Juliette passed the flashlight to Fitz and turned from the hole she’d made. She wormed her way through the jostling crowd, her pulse racing from the glimpses of some machine on the other side of the wall. What she had seen was quickly confirmed by the murmuring of others: struts, bolts, hose, plate steel with chips of paint and streaks of rust — a wall of a mechanical beast that went up and to the sides as far as their feeble flashlight beams could penetrate.
A tin cup of water was pressed into her trembling hand. Juliette drank greedily. She was exhausted, but her mind raced. She couldn’t wait to get back to a radio and tell Solo. She couldn’t wait to tell Lukas. Here was a bit of buried hope.
“What now?” Dawson asked.
The new third-shift foreman, who had given her the water, studied her warily. Dawson was in his late thirties, but working nights had saddled him with extra years. He had the large knotted hands that came from busting knuckles and breaking fingers, some of it from working and some from fighting. Juliette returned the cup to him. Dawson glanced inside and stole the last swig.
“Now we make a bigger hole,” she told him. “We get in there and see if that thing’s salvageable.”
Movement on top of the humming main generator caught Juliette’s eye. She glanced up in time to spy Shirly frowning down at her. Shirly turned away.
Juliette squeezed Dawson’s arm. “It’ll take forever to expand this one hole,” she said. “What we need are dozens of smaller holes that we can connect. We need to tear out entire sections at a time. Bring up the other excavator. And turn the men loose with their picks, but keep the dust to a minimum if you can help it.”
The third-shift foreman nodded and rapped his fingers against the empty cup. “No blasting?” he asked.
“No blasting,” she said. “I don’t want to damage whatever’s over there.”
He nodded, and she left him to manage the dig. She approached the generator. Shirly had her coveralls stripped down to her waist as well, sleeves cinched together, her undershirt wet with the dark inverted triangle of hard work. With a rag in each hand, she worked across the top of the generator, wiping away both old grease and the new film of powder kicked up by the day’s digging.
Juliette untied the sleeves of her coveralls and shrugged her arms inside, covering her scars. She climbed up the side of the generator, knowing where she could grab, which parts were hot and which were merely warm. “You need some help?” she asked, reaching the top, enjoying the heat and thrum of the machine in her sore muscles.
Shirly wiped her face with the hem of her undershirt. She shook her head. “I’m good,” she said.
“Sorry about the debris.” Juliette raised her voice over the hum of the massive pistons firing up and down. There was a day not too long ago when her teeth would’ve been knocked loose to stand on top of the machine, back when it was unbalanced six ways to hell.
Shirly turned and tossed the muddy white rags down to her shadow, Kali, who dunked them into a bucket of grimy water. It was strange to see the new head of Mechanical toiling away at something so mundane as cleaning the genset. Juliette tried to picture Knox up there doing the same. And then it hit her for the hundredth time that she was mayor, and look how she spent her time, hammering through walls and cutting rebar. Kali tossed the rags back up, and Shirly caught them with wet slaps and sprays of suds. Her old friend’s silence as she bent back to her work said plenty.
Juliette turned and surveyed the digging party she’d assembled as they cleared debris and worked to expand the hole. Shirly hadn’t been happy about the loss of manpower, much less the taboo of breaking the silo’s seal. The call for workers had come at a time when their ranks were already thinned by the outbreak of violence. And whether or not Shirly blamed Juliette for her husband’s death was irrelevant. Juliette blamed herself, and so the tension stood between them like a cake of grease.
It wasn’t long before the hammering on the wall resumed. Juliette spotted Bobby at the excavator’s controls, his great muscled arms a blur as he guided the wheeled jackhammer. The sight of some strange machine — some artifact buried beyond the walls — had thrown sparks into reluctant bodies. Fear and doubt had morphed into determination. A porter arrived with food, and Juliette watched the young man with his bare arms and legs study the work intently. The porter left his load of fruit and hot lunches behind and took with him his gossip.
Juliette stood on the humming generator and allayed her doubts. They were doing the right thing, she told herself. She had seen with her own eyes how vast the world, had stood on a summit and surveyed the land. All she had to do now was show others what was out there. And then they would lean into this work rather than fear it.
3
A hole was made big enough to squeeze through, and Juliette took the honors. A flashlight in hand, she crawled over a pile of rubble and between bent fingers of iron rod. The air beyond the generator room was cool like the deep mines. She coughed into her fist, the dust from the digging tickling her throat and nose. She hopped down to the floor beyond the gaping hole.
“Careful,” she told the others behind her. “The ground’s not even.”
Some of the unevenness was from the chunks of concrete that’d fallen inside — the rest was just how the floor stood. It appeared as though it’d been gouged out by the claws of a giant.
Shining the light from her boots to the dim ceiling high above, she surveyed the hulking wall of machinery before her. It dwarfed the main generator. It dwarfed the oil pumps. A colossus of such proportions was never meant to be built, much less repaired. Her stomach sank. Her hopes of restoring this buried machine diminished.
Raph joined her in the cool and dark, a clatter of rubble trailing him. The albino had a condition that skipped generations. His eyebrows and lashes were gossamer things, nearly invisible. His flesh was as pale as pig’s milk. But when he was in the mines, the shadows that darkened the others like soot lent him a healthful complexion. Juliette could see why he had left the farms as a boy to work in the dark.
Raph whistled as he played his flashlight across the machine. A moment later, his whistle echoed back, a bird in the far shadows, mocking him.
“It’s a thing of the gods,” he wondered aloud.
Juliette didn’t answer. She never took Raph as one to listen to the tales of priests. Still, there was no doubting the awe it inspired. She had seen Solo’s books and suspected that the same ancient peoples who had built this machine had built the crumbling but soaring towers beyond the hills. The fact that they had built the silo itself made her feel small. She reached out and ran her hand across metal that hadn’t been touched nor glimpsed for centuries, and she marveled at what the ancients had been capable of. Maybe the priests weren’t that far off after all…
“Ye gods,” Dawson grumbled, crowding noisily beside them. “What’re we to do with this?”
“Yeah, Jules,” Raph whispered, respecting the deep shadows and the deeper time. “How’re we supposed to dig this thing outta here?”
“We’re not,” she told them. She scooted sideways between the wall of concrete and the tower of machinery. “This thing is meant to dig its own way out.”
“You’re assuming we can get it running,” Dawson said.
Workers in the generator room crowded the hole and blocked the light spilling in. Juliette steered her flashlight around the narrow gap that stood between the outer silo wall and the tall machine, looking for some way around. She worked to one side, into the darkness, and scrambled up the gently sloping floor.
“We’ll get it running,” she assured Dawson. “We just gotta figure out how it’s supposed to work.”
“Careful,” Raph warned as a rock kicked loose by her boots tumbled toward him. She was already higher up than their heads. The room, she saw, didn’t have a corner or a far wall. It just curled up and all the way around.
“It’s a big circle,” she called out, her voice echoing between rock and metal. “I don’t think this is the business end.”
“There’s a door over here,” Dawson announced.
Juliette slid down the slope to join him and Raph. Another flashlight clicked on from the gawkers in the generator room. Its beam joined hers in illuminating a door with pins for hinges. Dawson wrestled with a handle on the back of the machine. He grunted with effort, and then metal cried out as it reluctantly gave way to muscle.
The machine yawned wide once they were through the door. Nothing prepared Juliette for this. Thinking back to the schematics she’d seen in Solo’s underground hovel, she now realized that the diggers had been drawn to scale. The little worms jutting off the low floors of Mechanical were a level high and twice that in length. Massive cylinders of steel, this one sat snug in a circular cave, almost as if it had buried itself. Juliette told her people to be careful as they made their way through the interior. A dozen workers joined her, their voices mingling and echoing in the maze-like guts of the machine, taboo dispelled by curiosity and wonder, the digging forgotten for now.
“This here’s for moving the tailings,” someone said. Beams of light played on metal chutes of interlocking plates. There were wheels and gears beneath the plates and more plates on the other side that overlapped like the scales on a snake. Juliette saw immediately how the entire chute moved, the plates hinging at the end and wrapping around to the beginning again. The rock and debris could ride on the top as it was pushed along. Low walls of inch-thick plate were meant to keep the rock from tumbling off. The rock chewed up by the digger would pass through here and out the back, where men would have to wrestle it with barrows.
“It’s rusted all to hell,” someone muttered.
“Not as bad as it should be,” Juliette said. The machine had been there for hundreds of years, at least. She expected it to be a ball of rust and nothing more, but the steel was shiny in places. “I think the room was airtight,” she wondered aloud, remembering a breeze on her neck and the sucking of dust as she pierced through the wall for the first time.
“This is all hydraulic,” Bobby said. There was disappointment in his voice, as though he were learning that the gods cleaned their asses with water too. Juliette was more hopeful. She saw something that could be fixed, so long as the power source was intact. They could get this running. It was made to be simple, as if the gods knew that whoever discovered it would be less sophisticated, less capable. There were treads just like on the excavator but running the length of the mighty machine, axles caked in grease. More treads on the sides and ceiling that must push against the earth as well. What she didn’t understand was how the digging commenced. Past the moving chutes and all the implements for pushing crushed rock and tailings out the back of the machine, they came to a wall of steel that slid up past the girders and walkways into the darkness above.
“That don’t make a lick of sense,” Raph said, reaching the far wall. “Look at these wheels. Which way does this thing run?”
“Those aren’t wheels,” Juliette said. She pointed with her light. “This whole front piece spins. Here’s the pivot.” She pointed to a central axle as big around as two men. “And those round discs there must protrude through to the other side and do the cutting.”
Bobby blew out a disbelieving breath. “Through solid stone?”
Juliette tried to turn one of the discs. It barely moved. A barrel of grease would be needed.
“I think she’s right,” Raph said. He had the lid raised on a box the size of a double bunk and aimed his flashlight inside. “This here’s a gearbox. Looks like a transmission.”
Juliette joined him. Helical gears the size of a man’s waist lay embedded in dried grease. The gears matched up with teeth that would spin the wall. The transmission box was as large and stout as that of the main generator. Larger.
“Bad news,” Bobby said. “Check where that shaft leads.”
Three beams of light converged and followed the driveshaft back to where it ended in empty space. The interior cavern of that hulking machine, all that emptiness in which they stood, was a void where the heart of the beast should lie.
“She ain’t going nowhere,” Raph muttered.
Juliette marched back to the rear of the machine. Beefy struts built for holding a power plant sat bare. She and the other mechanics had been milling about where an engine should sit. And now that she knew what to look for, she spotted the mounts. There were six of them: threaded posts eight inches across and caked in ancient, hardened grease. The matching nut for each post hung from hooks beneath the struts. The gods were communicating with her. Talking to her. The ancients had left a message, written in the language of people who knew machines. They were speaking to her across vast stretches of time, saying: This goes here. Follow these steps.
Fitz, the oilman, knelt beside Juliette and rested a hand on her arm. “I am sorry for your friends,” he said, meaning Solo and the kids, but Juliette thought he sounded happy for everyone else. Glancing at the rear of the metal cave, she saw more miners and mechanics peering inside, hesitant to join them. Everyone would be happy for this endeavor to end right there, for her to dig no further. But Juliette was feeling more than an urge; she was beginning to feel a purpose. This machine hadn’t been hidden from them. It had been safely stowed. Protected. Packed away. Slathered in grease and shielded from the air for a reason beyond her knowing.
“Do we seal it back up?” Dawson asked. Even the grizzled old mechanic seemed eager to dig no further.
“It’s waiting for something,” Juliette said. She pulled one of the large nuts off its hook and rested it on top of the grease-encased post. The size of the mount was familiar. She thought of the work she’d performed a lifetime ago of aligning the main generator. “She’s meant to be opened,” she said. “This belly of hers is meant to be opened. Check the back of the machine where we came through. It should come apart so the tailings can get out, but also to let something in. The motor isn’t missing at all.”
Raph stayed by her side, the beam of his flashlight on her chest so he could study her face.
“I know why they put this here,” she told him, while the others left to survey the back of the machine. “I know why they put this next to the generator room.”
4
Shirly and Kali were still cleaning the main generator when Juliette emerged from the belly of the digger. Bobby showed the others how the back of the digger opened up, which bolts to remove and how the plates came away. Juliette had them measure the space between the posts and then the mounts of the backup generator to verify what she already knew. The machine they’d uncovered was a living schematic. It really was a message from older times. One discovery was leading to a cascade of others.
Juliette watched Kali wring mud from a cloth before dipping it into a second bucket of slightly less filthy water, and a truth occurred to her: An engine would rot if left for a thousand years. It would only hum if used, if a team of people devoted their lives to the care of it. Steam rose from a hot and soapy manifold as Shirly wiped down the humming main generator, and Juliette saw how they’d been working toward this moment for years. As much as her old friend — and now the Chief of Mechanical — hated this project of hers, Shirly had been assisting all this time. The smaller generator on the other side of the main power plant had another, greater, purpose.
“The mounts look right,” Raph told her, a measuring line in his hand. “You think they used that machine to bring the generator here?”
Shirly tossed down a muddy rag, and a cleaner one was tossed up. Worker and shadow had a rhythm like the humming of pistons.
“I think the spare generator is meant to help that digger leave,” she told Raph. What she didn’t understand was why anyone would send off their backup power source, even for a short time. It would put the entire silo at the whim of a breakdown. They may as well have found a motor crumbling into a solid ball of rust on the other side of the wall. It was difficult to imagine anyone agreeing with the plans coalescing in her mind.
A rag arced through the air and splashed into a bucket of brown water. Kali didn’t throw another up. She was staring toward the entrance of the generator room. Juliette followed the shadow’s gaze and felt a flush of heat. There, among the black and soiled men and women of Mechanical, an unblemished young man in brilliant silver stood, asking someone for directions. A man pointed, and Lukas Kyle, head of IT, her lover, started off in Juliette’s direction.
“Get the backup generator serviced,” Juliette told Raph, who visibly stiffened. He seemed to know where this was going. “We need to put her in just long enough to see what that digger does. We’ve been meaning to unhook and clean out the exhaust manifolds anyway.”
Raph nodded, his jaws clenching and unclenching. Juliette slapped his back and didn’t dare glance up at Shirly as she strode off to meet Lukas.
“What’re you doing down here?” she asked him. She had spoken to Lukas the day before, and he had neglected to mention the visit. His aim was to corner her.
Lukas pulled up short and frowned — and Juliette felt awful for the tone. There was no embrace, no welcoming handshake. She was too wound up from the day’s discoveries, too tense.
“I should ask the same thing,” he said. His gaze strayed to the crater carved out of the far wall. “While you’re digging holes down here, the head of IT is doing the mayor’s work.”
“Then nothing’s changed,” Juliette said, laughing, trying to lighten the mood. But Lukas didn’t smile. She rested her hand on his arm and guided him away from the generator and out into the hall. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I was just surprised to see you. You should’ve told me you were coming. And listen… I’m glad to see you. If you need me to come up and sign some things, I’m happy to. If you need me to give a speech or kiss a baby, I’ll do that. But I told you last week that I was going to find some way to get my friends out. And since you vetoed my walking back over the hills—”
Lukas’s eyes widened at the flippant heresy. He glanced around the hall to see if others were around. “Jules, you’re worrying about a handful of people while the rest of the silo grows uneasy. There are murmurs of dissent all through the Up Top. There are echoes of the last uprising you stirred, only now they’re aimed at us.”
Juliette felt her skin warm. Her hand fell from Lukas’s arm. “I wanted no part of that fight. I wasn’t even here for it.”
“But you’re here for this one.” His eyes were sad, not angry, and Juliette realized the days were as long for him in the Up Top as they were for her down in Mechanical. They’d spent less time talking in the past week than they had while she’d been in Silo 17. They were nearer to one another and in danger of growing apart.
“What would you have me do?” she asked.
“To start with, don’t dig. Please. Billings has fielded a dozen complaints from neighbors speculating about what will happen. Some of them are saying that the outside will come to us. A priest from the Mids is holding two Sundays a week now to warn of the dangers, of this vision of his where the dust fills the silo to the brim and thousands die—”
“Priests—” Juliette spat.
“Yes, priests, with people marching from the Top and the Deep both to attend his Sundays. When he finds it necessary to hold three of them a week, we’ll have a mob.”
Juliette ran her fingers through her hair, rock and rubble tumbling out. She looked at the cloud of fine dust guiltily. “What do people think happened to me outside the silo? My cleaning? What are they saying?”
“Some can scarcely believe it,” Lukas said. “It has the makings of legend. Oh, in IT we know what happened, but some wonder if you were sent to clean at all. I heard one rumor that it was an election stunt.”
Juliette cursed under her breath. “And news of the other silos?”
“I’ve been telling others for years that the stars are suns like our own. Some things are too big to comprehend. And I don’t think rescuing your friends will change that. You could march your radio friend up to the bazaar and say he came from another silo, and people would just as likely believe you.”
“Walker?” Juliette shook her head, but she knew he was right. “I’m not after my friends to prove what happened to me, Luke. This isn’t about me. They’re living with the dead over there. With ghosts.”
“Don’t we as well? Don’t we dine on our dead? I’m begging you, Jules. Hundreds will die for you to save a few. Maybe they’re better off over there.”
She took a deep breath and held it a pause, tried her best not to feel angry. “They’re not, Lukas. The man I aim to save is half mad from living on his own all these years. The kids over there are having kids of their own. They need our doctors and they need our help. Besides… I promised them.”
He rewarded her pleas with sad eyes. It was no use. How do you make a man care for those he’s never met? Juliette expected the impossible of him, and she was just as much to blame. Did she truly care for the people being poisoned twice on Sundays? Or any of the strangers she had been elected to lead but had never met?
“I didn’t want this job,” she told Lukas. It was hard to keep the blame out of her voice. Others had wanted her to be mayor, not her. Though not as many as before, it seemed.
“I didn’t know what I was shadowing for either,” Lukas countered. He started to say something else, but held his tongue as a group of miners exited the generator room, a cloud of dust kicked up from their boots.
“Were you going to say something?” she asked.
“I was going to ask that you dig in secret if you have to dig at all. Or leave these men to it and come—”
He bit off the thought.
“If you were about to say home, this is my home. And are we really no better than the last of them who were in charge? Lying to our people? Conspiring?”
“I fear we are worse,” he said. “All they did was keep us alive.”
Juliette laughed at that. “Us? They elected to send you and me to die.”
Lukas let out his breath. “I meant everyone else. They worked to keep everyone else alive.” But he couldn’t help it: he cracked a smile while Juliette continued to laugh. She smeared the tears on her cheeks into mud.
“Give me a few days down here,” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a concession. “Let me see if we even have the means to dig. Then I’ll come kiss your babies and bury your dead — though not in that order, of course.”
Lukas frowned at her morbidness. “And you’ll tamp down the heresies?”
She nodded. “If we dig, we’ll do it quietly.” To herself, she wondered if such a machine as she’d uncovered could dig any way but with a growl. “I was thinking of going on a slight power holiday, anyway. I don’t want the main generator on a full load for a while. Just in case.”
Lukas nodded, and Juliette realized how easy and necessary the lies felt. She considered telling him right then of another idea of hers, one she’d been considering for weeks, all the way back when she was in the doctor’s office recovering from her burns. There was something she needed to do up top, but she could see that he was in no mood to be angered further. And so she told him the only part of her plan that she thought he’d enjoy.
“Once things are underway down here, I plan to come up and stay for a while,” she said, taking his hand. “Come home for a while.”
Lukas smiled.
“But listen here,” she told him, feeling the urge to warn. “I’ve seen the world out there, Luke. I stay up at night listening to Walk’s radio. There are a lot of people just like us out there, living in fear, living apart, kept ignorant. I mean to do more than save my friends. I hope you know this. I mean to get to the bottom of what’s out there beyond these walls.”
The knot in Lukas’s throat bobbed up and down. His smile vanished. “You aim too far,” he said meekly.
Juliette smiled and squeezed her lover’s hand. “Says the man who watches the stars.”
Silo 17
5
“Solo! Mr. Solo!”
The faint voice of a young child worked its way into the deepest of the grow pits. It reached all the way to the cool plots of soil where lights no longer burned and things no longer grew. There, Jimmy Parker sat alone atop the lifeless soil and near to the memory of an old friend.
His hands idly picked clumps of clay and crushed them into powder. If he imagined really hard, he could feel the pinprick of claws through his coveralls. He could hear Shadow’s little belly rattling like a water pump. It got harder and harder to imagine as the young voice calling his name grew nearer. The glow of a flashlight cut through the last tangle of plants that the young ones called the Wilds.
“There you are!”
Little Elise made a heap of noise that belied her small size. She stomped over to him in her too-big boots. Jimmy watched her approach and remembered wishing long ago that Shadow could talk. He’d had countless dreams wherein Shadow was a boy with black fur and a rumbly voice. But Jimmy no longer had such dreams. Nowadays, he was thankful for the speechless years with his old friend.
Elise squirmed through the rails of the fence and hugged Jimmy’s arm. The flashlight nearly blinded him as she clutched it against his chest, pointing it up.
“It’s time to go,” Elise said, tugging at him. “It’s time, Mr. Solo.”
He blinked against the harsh light and knew that she was right. The youngest among them, and little Elise settled more arguments than she started. Jimmy crushed another clump of clay in his hand, sprinkled the soil across the ground, and wiped his palm on his thigh. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew they couldn’t stay. He reminded himself that it would be temporary. Juliette said so. She said he could come back here and live with all the others who came over. There would be no lottery for a while. There would be lots of people. They would make his old silo whole again.
Jimmy shivered at the thought of so many people. Elise tugged his arm. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” she said.
And Jimmy realized what he was scared of. It wasn’t the leaving one day, which was still some time off. It wasn’t him setting up home in the Deep, which was nearly pumped dry and no longer frightened him. It was the idea of what he might return to. His home had only grown safer as it had emptied; he had been attacked when it had started filling up again. Part of him just wanted to be left alone, to be Solo.
On his feet, he allowed Elise to lead him back to the landing. She tugged on his calloused hand and pulled him forward with spirit. Outside, she gathered her things by the steps. Rickson and the others could be heard below, their voices echoing up the shaft of quiet concrete. One of the emergency lights was out on that level, leaving a black patch amid the dull green. Elise adjusted the shoulder satchel that held her memory book and cinched the top of her backpack. Food and water, a change of clothes, batteries, a faded doll, her hairbrush — practically everything she owned. Jimmy held the shoulder strap so she could work her arm through, then picked up his own load. The voices of the others faded. The stairwell faintly shook and rang with their footsteps as they headed down, which seemed a fairly odd direction to go in order to get out.
“How long before Jewel comes for us?” Elise asked. She took Jimmy’s hand, and they spiraled down side by side.
“Not long,” Jimmy said, which was his answer for I-don’t-know. “She’s trying. It’s a long way to go. You know how it took a long time for the water to go down and vanish?”
Elise bobbed her head. “I counted the steps,” she said.
“Yes, you did. Well, now they have to tunnel their way through solid rock to get to us. That won’t be easy.”
“Hannah says there’ll be dozens and dozens of people after Jewel comes.”
Jimmy swallowed. “Hundreds,” he said hoarsely. “Thousands, even.”
Elise squeezed his hand. Another dozen steps went by, both of them quietly counting. It was difficult for either of them to count so high.
“Rickson says they aren’t coming to rescue us, but that they want our silo.”
“Yes, well, he sees the bad in people,” Jimmy said. “Just like you see the good in them.”
Elise looked up at Jimmy. Both of them had lost their count. He wondered if she could imagine what thousands of people would be like. He could barely remember himself.
“I wish he could see the good in people like me,” she said.
Jimmy stopped before they got to the next landing. Elise clutched his hand and her swinging satchel and stopped with him. He knelt to be closer to her. When Elise pouted, he could see the gap left by her missing tooth.
“There’s a bit of good in all people,” Jimmy said. He squeezed Elise’s shoulder, could feel a lump forming in his throat. “But there’s bad as well. Rickson is probably more right than wrong at times.”
He hated to say it. Jimmy hated to fill Elise’s head with such things. But he loved her as though she were his own. And he wanted to give her the great steel doors she would need if the silo were to grow full again. It was why he allowed her to cut up the books inside the tin cans and take the pages she liked. It was why he helped her choose which ones were important. The ones he chose were the ones for helping her survive.
“You’ll need to start seeing the world with Rickson’s eyes,” Jimmy said, hating himself for it. He stood and pulled her down the steps this time, no longer counting. He wiped his eyes before Elise noticed him crying, before she asked him one of her easy questions with no easy answers at all.
6
It was difficult to leave the bright lights and comfort of his old home behind, but Jimmy had agreed to move down to the lower farms. The kids were comfortable there. They quickly resumed their work among the grow plots. And it was closer to the last of the dwindling floods.
Jimmy descended slick steps spotted with fresh rust and listened to the plopping tune of water hitting puddle and steel. Many of the green emergency lights had been drowned by the floods. Even those that worked held murky bubbles of trapped water. Jimmy thought about the fish that used to swim in what now was open air. A few had been found swimming around as the water retreated, even though he’d long ago thought he’d caught them all. Trapped in shallowing pools, they had proved too easy to catch. He had taught Elise how, but she had trouble getting them off the hook. She was forever dropping the slimy creatures back into the water. Jimmy jokingly accused her of doing it on purpose, and Elise admitted she liked catching them more than eating them. He had let her catch the last few fish over and over until he felt too sorry for the poor things to allow it to go on. Rickson and Hannah and the twins had been happy to put these desperate survivors out of their misery and into their bellies.
Jimmy glanced up beyond the rail overhead, picturing his bobber out there in the middle of the air. He imagined Shadow peering down and batting his paw at him, as if Jimmy were now the fish, trapped underwater. He tried to blow bubbles, but nothing came out, just the tickle of his whiskers against his nose.
Further down, a puddle gathered where the stairs bottomed out. The floor was flat here, wasn’t sloped to drain. The floods were never meant to get so high. Jimmy flicked on his torch, and the beam cut through the dismal darkness deep inside Mechanical. An electrical wire snaked through the open passageway and draped across a security station. A tangle of hose traced along beside it before doubling back on itself. The cable and the hose knew the way to the pumps; they had been left behind by Juliette.
Jimmy followed their trail. His first time to the bottom of the stairs, he had found the plastic dome of her helmet. It was among a raft of trash and debris and sludge, all the foulness left over once the water was gone. He had tried to clean it up as much as he could, had found his small metal washers — the ones that anchored his old paper parachutes — like silver coins among the detritus. Much of the garbage from the floods remained. The only thing he had saved from it all was the plastic dome of her helmet.
The wire and hose turned down a flight of square steps. Jimmy followed them, careful not to trip. Water fell occasionally from the pipes and wires overhead and smacked him on the shoulder and head. The drops twinkled in the beam of his flashlight. Everything else was dark. He tried to imagine being down there when the place was full of water — and couldn’t. It was scary enough while dry.
A smack of water right on the crown of his head, and then a tickle as the rivulet raced into his beard. “Mostly dry, I meant,” Jimmy said, talking to the ceiling. He reached the bottom of the steps. It was only the wire now guiding him along, and tricky to see. He splashed through a thin film of water as he headed down the hall. Juliette said it was important to be there when the pump got done. Someone would have to be around to turn it on and off. Water would continue seeping in, and so the pump needed to do its job, but it was bad for the thing to run dry. Something called an “impeller” would burn, she had told him.
Jimmy found the pump. It was rattling unhappily. A large pipe bent over the lip of a well — Juliette had told him to be careful not to fall in — and there was a sucking, gurgling sound from its depths. Jimmy aimed the flashlight down and saw that the shaft was nearly empty. Just a foot or so of water thrown into turbulence by the fruitless pull of the great pipe.
He pulled his cutters out of his breast pocket and fished the wire out of the thin layer of water. The pump growled angrily, metal clanging on metal, the smell of hot electrics in the air, steam rising from the cylindrical housing that provided the power. Teasing apart the two joined wires, Jimmy severed one of them with his cutters. The pump continued to run for a breath but slowly wound itself down. Juliette had told him what to do. He stripped the cut wire back and twisted the ends. When the basin filled again, Jimmy would have to short out the starter switch by hand, just as she had done all those weeks ago. He and the kids could take turns. They would live above the levels ruined by the floods, tend the Wilds, and keep the silo dry until Juliette came for them.
5
“Solo! Mr. Solo!”
The faint voice of a young child worked its way into the deepest of the grow pits. It reached all the way to the cool plots of soil where lights no longer burned and things no longer grew. There, Jimmy Parker sat alone atop the lifeless soil and near to the memory of an old friend.
His hands idly picked clumps of clay and crushed them into powder. If he imagined really hard, he could feel the pinprick of claws through his coveralls. He could hear Shadow’s little belly rattling like a water pump. It got harder and harder to imagine as the young voice calling his name grew nearer. The glow of a flashlight cut through the last tangle of plants that the young ones called the Wilds.
“There you are!”
Little Elise made a heap of noise that belied her small size. She stomped over to him in her too-big boots. Jimmy watched her approach and remembered wishing long ago that Shadow could talk. He’d had countless dreams wherein Shadow was a boy with black fur and a rumbly voice. But Jimmy no longer had such dreams. Nowadays, he was thankful for the speechless years with his old friend.
Elise squirmed through the rails of the fence and hugged Jimmy’s arm. The flashlight nearly blinded him as she clutched it against his chest, pointing it up.
“It’s time to go,” Elise said, tugging at him. “It’s time, Mr. Solo.”
He blinked against the harsh light and knew that she was right. The youngest among them, and little Elise settled more arguments than she started. Jimmy crushed another clump of clay in his hand, sprinkled the soil across the ground, and wiped his palm on his thigh. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew they couldn’t stay. He reminded himself that it would be temporary. Juliette said so. She said he could come back here and live with all the others who came over. There would be no lottery for a while. There would be lots of people. They would make his old silo whole again.
Jimmy shivered at the thought of so many people. Elise tugged his arm. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” she said.
And Jimmy realized what he was scared of. It wasn’t the leaving one day, which was still some time off. It wasn’t him setting up home in the Deep, which was nearly pumped dry and no longer frightened him. It was the idea of what he might return to. His home had only grown safer as it had emptied; he had been attacked when it had started filling up again. Part of him just wanted to be left alone, to be Solo.
On his feet, he allowed Elise to lead him back to the landing. She tugged on his calloused hand and pulled him forward with spirit. Outside, she gathered her things by the steps. Rickson and the others could be heard below, their voices echoing up the shaft of quiet concrete. One of the emergency lights was out on that level, leaving a black patch amid the dull green. Elise adjusted the shoulder satchel that held her memory book and cinched the top of her backpack. Food and water, a change of clothes, batteries, a faded doll, her hairbrush — practically everything she owned. Jimmy held the shoulder strap so she could work her arm through, then picked up his own load. The voices of the others faded. The stairwell faintly shook and rang with their footsteps as they headed down, which seemed a fairly odd direction to go in order to get out.
“How long before Jewel comes for us?” Elise asked. She took Jimmy’s hand, and they spiraled down side by side.
“Not long,” Jimmy said, which was his answer for I-don’t-know. “She’s trying. It’s a long way to go. You know how it took a long time for the water to go down and vanish?”
Elise bobbed her head. “I counted the steps,” she said.
“Yes, you did. Well, now they have to tunnel their way through solid rock to get to us. That won’t be easy.”
“Hannah says there’ll be dozens and dozens of people after Jewel comes.”
Jimmy swallowed. “Hundreds,” he said hoarsely. “Thousands, even.”
Elise squeezed his hand. Another dozen steps went by, both of them quietly counting. It was difficult for either of them to count so high.
“Rickson says they aren’t coming to rescue us, but that they want our silo.”
“Yes, well, he sees the bad in people,” Jimmy said. “Just like you see the good in them.”
Elise looked up at Jimmy. Both of them had lost their count. He wondered if she could imagine what thousands of people would be like. He could barely remember himself.
“I wish he could see the good in people like me,” she said.
Jimmy stopped before they got to the next landing. Elise clutched his hand and her swinging satchel and stopped with him. He knelt to be closer to her. When Elise pouted, he could see the gap left by her missing tooth.
“There’s a bit of good in all people,” Jimmy said. He squeezed Elise’s shoulder, could feel a lump forming in his throat. “But there’s bad as well. Rickson is probably more right than wrong at times.”
He hated to say it. Jimmy hated to fill Elise’s head with such things. But he loved her as though she were his own. And he wanted to give her the great steel doors she would need if the silo were to grow full again. It was why he allowed her to cut up the books inside the tin cans and take the pages she liked. It was why he helped her choose which ones were important. The ones he chose were the ones for helping her survive.
“You’ll need to start seeing the world with Rickson’s eyes,” Jimmy said, hating himself for it. He stood and pulled her down the steps this time, no longer counting. He wiped his eyes before Elise noticed him crying, before she asked him one of her easy questions with no easy answers at all.
6
It was difficult to leave the bright lights and comfort of his old home behind, but Jimmy had agreed to move down to the lower farms. The kids were comfortable there. They quickly resumed their work among the grow plots. And it was closer to the last of the dwindling floods.
Jimmy descended slick steps spotted with fresh rust and listened to the plopping tune of water hitting puddle and steel. Many of the green emergency lights had been drowned by the floods. Even those that worked held murky bubbles of trapped water. Jimmy thought about the fish that used to swim in what now was open air. A few had been found swimming around as the water retreated, even though he’d long ago thought he’d caught them all. Trapped in shallowing pools, they had proved too easy to catch. He had taught Elise how, but she had trouble getting them off the hook. She was forever dropping the slimy creatures back into the water. Jimmy jokingly accused her of doing it on purpose, and Elise admitted she liked catching them more than eating them. He had let her catch the last few fish over and over until he felt too sorry for the poor things to allow it to go on. Rickson and Hannah and the twins had been happy to put these desperate survivors out of their misery and into their bellies.
Jimmy glanced up beyond the rail overhead, picturing his bobber out there in the middle of the air. He imagined Shadow peering down and batting his paw at him, as if Jimmy were now the fish, trapped underwater. He tried to blow bubbles, but nothing came out, just the tickle of his whiskers against his nose.
Further down, a puddle gathered where the stairs bottomed out. The floor was flat here, wasn’t sloped to drain. The floods were never meant to get so high. Jimmy flicked on his torch, and the beam cut through the dismal darkness deep inside Mechanical. An electrical wire snaked through the open passageway and draped across a security station. A tangle of hose traced along beside it before doubling back on itself. The cable and the hose knew the way to the pumps; they had been left behind by Juliette.
Jimmy followed their trail. His first time to the bottom of the stairs, he had found the plastic dome of her helmet. It was among a raft of trash and debris and sludge, all the foulness left over once the water was gone. He had tried to clean it up as much as he could, had found his small metal washers — the ones that anchored his old paper parachutes — like silver coins among the detritus. Much of the garbage from the floods remained. The only thing he had saved from it all was the plastic dome of her helmet.
The wire and hose turned down a flight of square steps. Jimmy followed them, careful not to trip. Water fell occasionally from the pipes and wires overhead and smacked him on the shoulder and head. The drops twinkled in the beam of his flashlight. Everything else was dark. He tried to imagine being down there when the place was full of water — and couldn’t. It was scary enough while dry.
A smack of water right on the crown of his head, and then a tickle as the rivulet raced into his beard. “Mostly dry, I meant,” Jimmy said, talking to the ceiling. He reached the bottom of the steps. It was only the wire now guiding him along, and tricky to see. He splashed through a thin film of water as he headed down the hall. Juliette said it was important to be there when the pump got done. Someone would have to be around to turn it on and off. Water would continue seeping in, and so the pump needed to do its job, but it was bad for the thing to run dry. Something called an “impeller” would burn, she had told him.
Jimmy found the pump. It was rattling unhappily. A large pipe bent over the lip of a well — Juliette had told him to be careful not to fall in — and there was a sucking, gurgling sound from its depths. Jimmy aimed the flashlight down and saw that the shaft was nearly empty. Just a foot or so of water thrown into turbulence by the fruitless pull of the great pipe.
He pulled his cutters out of his breast pocket and fished the wire out of the thin layer of water. The pump growled angrily, metal clanging on metal, the smell of hot electrics in the air, steam rising from the cylindrical housing that provided the power. Teasing apart the two joined wires, Jimmy severed one of them with his cutters. The pump continued to run for a breath but slowly wound itself down. Juliette had told him what to do. He stripped the cut wire back and twisted the ends. When the basin filled again, Jimmy would have to short out the starter switch by hand, just as she had done all those weeks ago. He and the kids could take turns. They would live above the levels ruined by the floods, tend the Wilds, and keep the silo dry until Juliette came for them.
Silo 18
7
The argument with Shirly about the generator went badly. Juliette got her way, but she didn’t emerge feeling victorious. She watched her old friend stomp off and tried to imagine being in her place. It had only been a couple of months since her husband, Marck, had died. Juliette had been a wreck for a solid year after losing George. And now some mayor was telling the head of Mechanical that they were taking the backup generator. Stealing it. Leaving the silo at the whim of a mechanical failure. One tooth snaps off one gear, and all the levels descend into darkness, all the pumps fall quiet, until it can be fixed.
Juliette didn’t need to hear Shirly argue the points. She could well enough name them herself. Now she stood alone in a dim hallway, her friend’s footsteps fading to silence, wondering what in the world she was doing. Even those around her were losing their trust. And why? For a promise? Or was she just being stubborn?
She scratched her arm, one of the scars beneath her coveralls itching, and remembered speaking with her father after almost twenty years of hardheaded avoidance. Neither of them had admitted how dumb they’d been, but it hung in the room like a family quilt. Here was their failing, the source of their drive to accomplish much in life and also the cause of the damage they so often left behind — this injurious pride.
Juliette turned and let herself back into the generator room. A clanging racket along the far wall reminded her of more… unbalanced days. The sound of digging was not unlike the warped generator of her past: young and hot and dangerous.
Work was already underway on the backup generator. Dawson and his team had the exhaust coupling separated. Raph worked one of the large nuts on the forward mount with a massive wrench, separating the generator from its ancient mooring. Juliette realized she was really doing this. Shirly had every right to be pissed off.
She crossed the room and stepped through one of the holes in the wall, ducked her head under the rebar, and found Bobby at the rear of the great digger, scratching his beard. Bobby was a boulder of a man. He wore his hair long and in the tight braids miners enjoyed, and his charcoal skin hid the efforts of dark digging. He was in every way his friend Raph’s antithesis. Hyla, his daughter and also his shadow, stood quietly at his elbow.
“How goes it?” Juliette asked.
“How goes it? Or how goes this machine?” Bobby turned and studied her a moment. “I’ll tell you how this rusted bucket goes. She’s not one for turning, not like you need. She’s aimed straight as a rod. Not meant to be guided at all.”
Juliette greeted Hyla and sized up the progress on the digger. The machine was cleaning up well, was in remarkable shape. She placed a hand on Bobby’s arm. “She’ll steer,” she assured him. “We’ll place iron wedges along the wall here on the right-hand side.” She pointed to the place. Overhead floodlights from the mines illuminated the dark rock. “When the back end presses on these wedges, it’ll force the front to the side.” With one hand representing the digger, she pushed on her wrist with the other, cocking her hand to show how it would maneuver.
Bobby reluctantly grumbled his agreement. “It’ll be slow going, but that might work.” He unfolded a sheet of fine paper, a schematic of all the silos, and studied the path Juliette had drawn. She had stolen the layout from Lukas’s hidden office, and her proposed dig traced an arc from Silo 18 to Silo 17, generator room to generator room. “We’ll have to wedge it downward as well,” Bobby told her. “She’s on an incline like she’s itchin’ to go up.”
“That’s fine. What’s the word on the bracing?”
Hyla studied the two adults and twisted a charcoal in one hand, held her slate in the other. Bobby glanced up at the ceiling and frowned.
“Erik’s not so keen on lending what he’s got. He says he can spare girders enough for a thousand yards. I told him you’d be wanting five or ten times that.”
“We’ll have to pull some out of the mines, then.” Juliette nodded to Hyla and her slate, suggesting she write that down.
“You mean to start wars down here, do you?” Bobby tugged on his beard, clearly agitated. Hyla stopped scratching on the slate and looked from one of her superiors to the other, not sure what to do.
“I’ll talk to Erik,” she told Bobby. “When I promise him the pile of steel girders we’ll find in the other silo, he’ll cave.”
Bobby lifted an eyebrow. “Bad choice of words.”
He laughed nervously while Juliette gestured to his daughter. “We’ll need thirty-six beams and seventy-two risers,” she said.
Hyla glanced guiltily at Bobby before jotting this down.
“If this thing moves, it’s gonna make a lot of dirt,” Bobby said. “Hauling the tailings from here to the crusher down in the mines is gonna make a mess and take as many men as the digging.”
The thought of the crushing room where tailings were ground to powder and vented to the exhaust manifold stirred painful memories. Juliette aimed her flashlight at Bobby’s feet, trying not to think of the past. “We won’t be expelling the tailings,” she told him. “Shaft six is almost directly below us. If we dig straight down, we hit it.”
“You mean to fill number six?” Bobby asked, incredulous.
“Six is nearly tapped out anyway. And we double our ore the moment we reach this other silo.”
“Erik’s gonna blow a gasket. You aren’t forgettin’ anybody, are you?”
Juliette studied her old friend. “Forgetting anybody?”
“Anyone you’re neglecting to piss off.”
Juliette ignored the jab and turned to Hyla. “Make a note to Courtnee. I want the backup generator fully serviced before it’s brought in. There won’t be room to pull the heads and check the seals once it’s fitted in here. The ceiling will be too low.”
Bobby followed as Juliette continued her inspection of the digger. “You’ll be here to look after that, won’t you?” he asked. “You’ll be here to couple the genset to this monster, right?”
She shook her head. “Afraid not. Dawson will be in charge of that. Lukas is right, I need to go up and make the rounds—”
“Bullshit,” Bobby said. “What’s this about, Jules? I’ve never seen you leave a project in half like this, not even if it meant working three shifts.”
Juliette turned and gave Hyla that look that all children and shadows know to mean their ears aren’t welcome. Hyla stayed back while the two old friends continued on.
“My being down here is causing unrest,” Juliette told Bobby, her voice quiet and swallowed by the vastness of the machine around them. “Lukas did the right thing to come get me.” She shot the old miner a cold look. “And I’ll beat you senseless if that gets back to him.”
He laughed and showed his palms. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m married.”
Juliette nodded. “It’s best you all dig while I’m elsewhere. If I’m to be a distraction, then let me be a distraction.” They reached the end of a void that the backup generator would soon fill. It was so clever, this arrangement, keeping the delicate engine out where it would be used and serviced. The rest of the digger was just steel and grinding teeth, gears packed tight with grease.
“These friends of yours,” Bobby said. “They’re worth all this?”
“They are.” Juliette studied her old friend. “But this isn’t just for them. This is for us too.”
Bobby chewed on his beard. “I don’t follow,” he said after a pause.
“We need to prove this works,” she said. “This is only the beginning.”
Bobby narrowed his eyes at her. “Well, if it ain’t the beginning of one thing,” he said, “I would hazard to say it spells the end of another.”
8
Juliette paused outside Walker’s workshop and knocked before entering. She had heard tell of him being out and about during the uprising, but this was a cog whose teeth refused to align with anything in her head. As far as she was concerned, it was mere legend, a thing to be disbelieved because it hadn’t been seen with her own eyes — similar, she reckoned, to how her jaunt between silos didn’t compute for most people. A rumor. A myth. Who was this woman mechanic who claimed to have seen another land? Stories such as these were dismissed — unless legend took seed and sprouted religion.
“Jules!” Walker peered up from his desk, one of his eyes the size of a tomato through his magnifiers. He pulled the lens away, and his eye shrank back to normal. “Good, good. So glad you’re here.” He waved her over. There was the smell of burning hair in the room, as if the old man had been leaning over his soldering work while careless of his long gray locks.
“I just came to transmit something to Solo,” she said. “And to let you know I’ll be away for a few days.”
“Oh?” Walker frowned. He slotted a few small tools into his leather apron and pressed his soldering iron into a wet sponge. The hiss reminded Juliette of a ill-tempered cat who used to live in the pump room, fussing at her from the darkness. “That Lukas fellow pulling you away?” Walker asked.
Juliette was reminded that Walker was no friend to open spaces, but he was a friend to porters. And they were friendly with his coin.
“That’s part of it,” she admitted. She pulled out a stool and sank against it, studied her hands, which were scraped and stained with grease. “The other part is that this digging business is going to take a while, and you know how I get when I sit still. I’ve got another project I’ve been thinking on. It’s going to be even less popular than this one here.”
Walker studied her for a moment, glanced up at the ceiling, and then his eyes widened. Somehow, he knew precisely what she was planning. “You’re like a bowl of Courtnee’s chili,” he whispered. “Making trouble at both ends.”
Juliette laughed, but also felt a twinge of disappointment that she was so transparent. So predictable.
“I haven’t told Lukas yet,” she warned him. “Or Peter.”
Walker scrunched up his face at the second name.
“Billings,” she said. “The new sheriff.”
“That’s right.” He unplugged his soldering iron and dabbed it against the sponge again. “I forget that ain’t your job no more.”
It hardly ever was, she wanted to say.
“I just want to tell Solo that we’re nearly underway with the digging. I need to make sure the floods are under control over there.” She gestured to his radio, which could do far more than broadcast up and down a single silo. Like the radio in the room beneath IT’s servers, this unit he had built was capable of broadcasting to other silos.
“Sure thing. Shame you aren’t leaving in a day or two. I’m almost done with the portable.” He showed her a plastic box a little larger than the old radios she and the deputies used to wear on their hips. It still had wires hanging loose and a large external battery attached. “Once I get done with it, you’ll be able to switch channels with a dial. It piggybacks the repeaters up and down both silos.”
She picked the unit up gingerly, no clue what he was talking about. Walker pointed to a dial with thirty-two numbered positions around it. This she understood.
“Just got to get the old rechargeables to play nice in there. Working on the voltage regulation next.”
“You are amazing,” Juliette whispered.
Walker beamed. “Amazing are the people who made this the first time. I can’t get over what they were able to do hundreds of years ago. People weren’t as dumb back then as you’d like to believe.”
Juliette wanted to tell him about the books she’d seen, how the people back then seemed as if they were from the future, not the past.
Walker wiped his hands on an old rag. “I warned Bobby and the others, and I think you should know too. The radios won’t work so well the deeper they dig, not until they get to the other side.”
Juliette nodded. “So I heard. Courtnee said they’ll use runners just like in the mines. I put her in charge of the dig. She’s thought of just about everything.”
Walker frowned. “I heard she wanted to rig this side to blow as well, in case they hit a pocket of bad air.”
“That was Shirly’s idea. She’s just trying to come up with reasons not to dig. But you know Courtnee, once she sets her mind to something, it gets done.”
Walker scratched his beard. “As long as she don’t forget to feed me, we’ll be fine.”
Juliette laughed. “I’m sure she won’t.”
“Well, I wish you luck on your rounds.”
“Thanks,” she said. She pointed to the large radio set on his workbench. “Can you patch me through to Solo?”
“Sure, sure. Seventeen. Forgot you didn’t come down here to chat with me. Let’s call your friend.” He shook his head. “Have to tell you, from talking to him, he’s one odd fellow.”
Juliette smiled and studied her old friend. She waited to see if he was joking — decided he was being perfectly serious — and laughed.
“What?” Walker asked. He powered the radio on and handed her the receiver. “What did I say?”
••••
Solo’s update was a mixed bag. Mechanical was dry, which was good, but it hadn’t taken as long as she’d thought for the flood to pump out. It might be weeks or months to get over there and see what they could salvage, and the rust would set in immediately. Juliette pushed these distant problems out of her mind and concentrated on the things she could lay a wrench on.
Everything she needed for her trip up fit in a small shoulder bag: her good silver coveralls, which she’d barely worn; socks and underwear, both still wet from washing them in the sink; her work canteen, dented and grease-stained; and a ratchet and driver set. In her pockets she carried her multi-tool and twenty chits, even though hardly anyone took payment from her since she turned mayor. The only thing she felt she was missing was a decent radio, but Walker had scrapped two of the functioning units to try and build a new one, and it wasn’t ready yet.
With her meager belongings and a feeling like she was abandoning her friends, she left Mechanical behind. The distant clatter from the digging followed her through the hallways and out into the stairwell. Passing through security was like crossing some mental threshold. It reminded her of leaving that airlock all those weeks ago. Like a stopper valve, some things seemed to allow passage in only one direction. She feared how long it might be before she returned. The thought made it difficult to breathe.
She slowly gained height and began passing others on the stairwell, and Juliette could feel them watching her. The glares of people she had once known reminded her of the wind that had buffeted her on the hillside. Their distrustful glances came in gusts — just as quickly, they looked away.
Before long, she saw what Lukas had spoken of. Whatever goodwill her return had wrought — whatever wonder people held for her as someone who had refused to clean and managed to survive the great outside — was crumbling as sure as the concrete being hammered below. Where her return from the outside had brought hope, her plans to tunnel beyond the silo had engendered something else. She could see it in the averted gaze of a shopkeep, in the protective arm a mother wrapped around her child, in the whispers that came and just as suddenly went. Juliette was causing the opposite of hope. She was spreading fear.
A handful of people did acknowledge her with a nod and a “Mayor” as she passed them on the stairwell. A young porter she knew stopped and shook her hand, seemed genuinely thrilled to see her. But when she paused at the lower farms on one-twenty-six for food, and when she sought a bathroom three levels further up, she felt as welcomed as a greaser in the Up Top. And yet she was still among her own. She was their mayor, however unloved.
These interactions gave her second thoughts about seeing Hank, the deputy of the Down Deep. Hank had fought in the uprising and had seen good men and women on both sides give up their lives. As Juliette entered the deputy station on one-twenty, she wondered if stopping was a mistake, if she should just press on. But that was her young self afraid of seeing her father, her young self who buried her head in projects in order to avoid the world. She could no longer be that person. She had a responsibility to the silo and its people. Seeing Hank was the right thing to do. She scratched a scar on the back of her hand and bravely strode into his deputy station. She reminded herself that she was the mayor, not a prisoner being sent to clean.
Hank glanced up from his desk as she entered. The deputy’s eyes widened as he recognized her — they had not spoken nor seen each other since she got back. He rose from his chair and took two steps toward her, then stopped, and Juliette saw the same mix of nerves and excitement that she felt and realized she shouldn’t have been afraid of coming, that she shouldn’t have avoided him until now. Hank reached out his hand timidly, as if worried she might refuse to shake it. He seemed ready to pull it back if it offended. Whatever heartache she had brought him, he still seemed pained at having followed orders and sent her to clean.
Juliette took the deputy’s hand and pulled him into an embrace.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice giving out on him.
“Stop that,” Juliette said. She let go of the lawman and took a step back, studied his shoulder. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. How’s your arm?”
He shrugged his shoulder in a circle. “Still attached,” he said. “And if you ever dare apologize to me, I’ll have you arrested.”
“Truce, then,” she offered.
Hank smiled. “Truce,” he said. “But I do want to say—”
“You were doing your job. And I was doing the best I could. Now leave it.”
He nodded and studied his boots.
“How are things around here? Lukas said there’s been grumbling about my work below.”
“There’s been some acting up. Nothing too serious. I think most people are busy enough patching things up. But yeah, I’ve heard some talk. You know how many requests we get for transfer out of here and up to the Mids or the Top. Well, I’ve been getting ten times the normal. Folks don’t want to be near what you’ve got going on, I’m afraid.”
Juliette chewed her lip.
“Part of the problem is lack of direction,” Hank said. “Don’t want to shoulder you with this, but me and the boys down here don’t have a clear idea which way is up right now. We aren’t getting dispatches from Security like we used to. And your office…”
“Has been quiet,” Juliette offered.
Hank scratched the back of his head. “That’s right. Not that you’ve been exactly quiet yourself. We can sometimes hear the racket you’re making out on the landing.”
“That’s why I’m visiting,” she told him. “I want you to know that your concerns are my concerns. I’m heading up to my office for a week or two. I’ll stop by the other deputy stations as well. Things are going to improve around here in a lot of ways.”
Hank frowned. “You know I trust you and all, but when you tell people around here that things are going to improve, all they hear is that things are going to change. And for those who are breathing and count that as a blessing, they take that to mean one thing and one thing only.”
Juliette thought of all she had planned, in the Up Top as well as the Down Deep. “As long as good men like you trust me, we’ll be fine,” she said. “Now, I’ve got a favor to ask.”
“You need a place to stay the night,” Hank guessed. He waved at the jail cell. “I saved your room for you. I can turn down the cot—”
Juliette laughed. She was happy that they could already joke about what had moments ago been a discomfort. “No,” she said. “Thanks, though. I’m supposed to be up at the mids farms by lights out. I have to plant the first crop in a new patch of soil being turned over.” She waved her hand in the air. “It’s one of those things.”
Hank smiled and nodded.
“What I wanted to ask is that you keep an eye on the stairwell for me. Lukas mentioned there were grumbles up above. I’m going up to soothe them, but I want you to be on the alert if things go sour. We’re short-staffed below, and people are on edge.”
“You expecting trouble?” Hank asked.
Juliette considered the question. “I am,” she said. “If you need to take a shadow or two, I’ll budget it.”
He frowned. “I normally like having chits thrown my way,” he said. “So why does this make me feel uncomfortable?”
“Same reason I’m happy to pay,” Juliette said. “We both know you’re getting the busted end of the deal.”
9
Leaving the deputy’s office, Juliette climbed through levels that had seen much of the fighting, and she noticed once more the silo’s wounds of war. She rose through ever-worsening reminders of the battles that had been waged in her absence, saw the marks left behind from the fighting, the jagged streaks of bright silver through old paint, the black burns and pockmarks in concrete, the rebar poking through like fractured bone through skin.
She had devoted most of her life to holding that silo together, to keeping it running. This was a kindness repaid by the silo as it filled her lungs with air, gave rise to the crops, and claimed the dead. They were responsible for one another. Without people, this silo would become as Solo’s had: rusted and fairly drowned. Without the silo, she would be a skull on a hill, looking blankly to the cloud-filled skies. They needed each other.
Her hand slid up the rail, rough with new welds, her own hand a mess of scars. For much of her life, they had kept each other going, she and the silo. Right up until they’d damn near killed each other. And now the minor hurts in Mechanical she had hoped to repair one day — squealing pumps, spitting pipes, leaks from the exhaust — all paled before the far worse wreckage her leaving had caused. In much the same way that the occasional scars — reminders of youthful missteps — were now lost beneath disfigured flesh, it seemed that one large mistake could bury all the minor ones.
She took the steps one at a time and reached that place where a bomb had ripped a gap in the stairs. A patchwork of metal stretched across the ruin, a web of bar and rail scavenged from landings that now stood narrower than before. Names of those lost in the blast were written here and there in charcoal. Juliette treaded carefully across the mangled metal. Higher up, she saw that the doors to Supply had been replaced. Here, the fighting had been especially bad. The cost these people in yellow had paid for siding with hers in blue.
A Sunday was letting out as Juliette approached the church on ninety-nine. Floods of people spiraled down toward the quiet bazaar she had just passed. Their mouths were pressed tight from hours of serious talk, their joints as stiff as their pressed coveralls. Juliette filed past them and took note of the hostile glances.
The crowds thinned by the time she reached the landing. The small temple was wedged in among the old hydroponic farms and worker flats that used to serve the Deep. It was before her time, but Knox once explained how the temple had sprouted on ninety-nine. It was when his own dad was a boy and protests had arisen over music and plays performed during Sundays. Security had sat back while the protestors swelled into an encampment outside the bazaar. People slept on the treads and choked the stairway until no one could pass. The farm one level up was ravaged in supplying food to these masses. Eventually, they took over much of the hydroponics level. The temple on twenty-eight set up a satellite office, and now that satellite on ninety-nine was bigger than the temple that had sprouted it.
Father Wendel was on the landing as Juliette rounded the last turn. He stood by the door, shaking hands and speaking briefly with each member of his congregation as they left the Sunday service. His white robes fairly emitted a light of their own. They shone much like his bald head, which glistened from the effort of preaching to the crowds. Between head and robes, Wendel seemed to sparkle. Especially to Juliette, who had just left a land of smudge and grease. She felt dirty just seeing such unblemished cloth.
“Thank you, Father,” a woman said, bowing slightly, shaking his hand, a child balanced on her hip. The little one’s head lolled against her shoulder in perfect slumber. Wendel rested a hand on the child’s head and said a few words. The woman thanked him again, moved on, and Wendel shook the next man’s hand.
Juliette made herself invisible against the rail while the last handful of churchgoers filed past. She watched a man pause and press a few clinking chits into Father Wendel’s open palm. “Thank you, Father,” he said, this farewell a chant of sorts. Juliette could smell what she thought was goats on the old man as he filed past and wound his way up, probably back to the pens. He was the last one to leave. Father Wendel turned and smiled at Juliette to let her know he’d been aware of her presence.
“Mayor,” he said, spreading his hands. “You honor us. Did you come for the elevens?”
Juliette checked the small watch she wore around her wrist. “This wasn’t the elevens?” she asked. She was making good time up the levels.
“It was the tens. We added another Sunday. The toppers come down for late service.”
Juliette wondered why those who lived up top would travel so far. She had timed her walk to miss the services entirely, which was probably a mistake. It would be smart for her to hear what was being said that so many found alluring.
“I’m afraid I can only stop for a quick visit,” she said. “I’ll catch a Sunday on my way back down?”
Wendel frowned. “And when might that be? I heard you were returning to the work God and his people chose you for.”
“A few weeks, probably. Long enough to get caught up.”
An acolyte emerged on the landing with an ornate wooden bowl. He showed Wendel its contents, and Juliette heard the chits shift against one another. The boy wore a brown cloak, and when he bowed to Wendel, she saw the center of his scalp had been shaved. When he turned to leave, Wendel grabbed the acolyte’s arm.
“Pay your respects to your mayor,” he said.
“Ma’am.” The acolyte bowed. His face showed no expression. Dark eyes under full and dark brows, his lips colorless. Juliette sensed that this young man spent little time outside of the church.
“You don’t have to ma’am me,” she told him politely. “Juliette.” She extended a hand.
“Remmy,” the boy said. A hand emerged from his cloak. Juliette accepted it.
“See to the pews,” Wendel said. “We have another service yet.”
Remmy bowed to both of them and shuffled away. Juliette felt pity for the boy, but she wasn’t sure why. Wendel peered across the landing and seemed to listen for approaching traffic. Holding the door, he waved Juliette inside. “Come,” he said. “Top up your canteen. I’ll bless your journey.”
Juliette shook her canteen, which sloshed nearly empty. “Thank you,” she said. She followed him inside.
Wendel led her past the reception hall and waved her into the lower chapel, where she’d attended a few Sundays years prior. Remmy busied himself among the rows of benches and chairs, replacing pillows and laying out announcements handwritten on narrow strips of cheap paper. She caught him watching her as he worked.
“The gods miss you,” Father Wendel said, letting her know that he was aware how long it’d been since she’d attended a Sunday. The chapel had expanded since she last remembered it. There was the heady and expensive smell of sawdust, of newly shaped wood made from claimed doors and other ancient timbers. She rested her hand on a pew that must’ve been worth a fortune.
“Well, the gods know where to find me,” she answered, taking her hand off the pew. She smiled as she said this, meant it lightly, but saw a flash of disappointment on the father’s face.
“I sometimes wonder if you aren’t hiding from them as best you can,” he said. Father Wendel nodded toward the stained glass behind the altar. The lights behind the glass were full-bright, shards of color thrown against the floor and ceiling. “I read your announcements for every birth and every death up there in my pulpit, and I see in them that you give credit in all things to the gods.”
Juliette wanted to say that she didn’t even write those announcements. They were written for her.
“But I sometimes wonder if you even believe in the gods, the way you take their rules so lightly.”
“I believe in the gods,” Juliette said, her temper stoked by this accusation. “I believe in the gods who created this silo. I do. And all the other silos—”
Wendel flinched. “Blasphemy,” he whispered, his eyes wide as if her words could kill. He threw a look at Remmy, who bowed and moved toward the hall.
“Yes, blasphemy,” Juliette said. “But I believe the gods made the towers beyond the hills and that they left us a way to discover, a way out of here. We have uncovered a tool in the depths of this silo, Father Wendel. A digging machine that could take us to new places. I know you disapprove, but I believe the gods gave us this tool, and I mean to use it.”
“This digger of yours is the devil’s work, and it lies in the devil’s deep,” Wendel said. The kindness had left his face. He patted his forehead with a square of fine cloth. “There are no gods like those you speak of, only demons.”
This was his sermon, Juliette saw. She was getting his elevens. The people came far to hear this.
She took a step closer. Her skin was warm with anger. “There may be demons among my gods,” she agreed, speaking his tongue. “The gods I believe in… the gods I worship were the men and women who built this place and more like it. They built this place to protect us from the world they destroyed. They were gods and demons, both. But they left us space for redemption. They meant us to be free, Father, and they gave us the means.” She pointed to her temple. “They gave me the means right here. And they left us a digger. They did. There is nothing blasphemous about using it. And I’ve seen the other silos that you continue to doubt. I’ve been there.”
Wendel took another step back. He rubbed the cross hanging around his neck, and Juliette caught Remmy peeking around the edge of the door, his dark brows casting shadows over his dark eyes.
“We should use all the tools the gods gave us,” Juliette said. “Except for the one you wield, this power to make others fear.”
“Me?” Father Wendel pressed one palm to his chest. With his other hand, he pointed at her. “You are the one spreading fear.” He swept his hand at the pews and beyond to the tight rows of mismatched chairs, crates, and buckets at the back of the room. “They crowd in here three Sundays a day to wring their hands over the devil’s work you do. Children can’t sleep at night for fear that you’ll kill us all.”
Juliette opened her mouth, but the words would not come. She thought of the looks on the stairwell, thought of that mother pulling her child close, people she knew who no longer said hello. “I could show you books,” she said softly, thinking of the shelves that held the Legacy. “I could show you books, and then you’d see.”
“There’s only one book worth knowing,” Wendel said. His eyes darted to the large, ornate tome with its gilded edges that sat on a podium by the pulpit, that sat under a cage of bent steel. Juliette remembered lessons from that book. She’d seen its pages with those occasional and cryptic sentences peeking out amid bars of censored black. She also noticed the way the podium was welded to the steel decking, and not expertly. Fat puckers of paranoid welds. The same gods expected to keep men and women safe couldn’t be trusted to look after one book.
“I should leave you to get ready for your elevens,” she said, feeling sorry for her outburst.
Wendel uncrossed his arms. She could sense that they had both gone too far and that both knew it. She had hoped to allay doubts and had only worsened them.
“I wish you’d stay,” Wendel told her. “At least fill your canteen.”
She reached behind her back and unclipped the canteen. Remmy returned with a swish of his heavy brown cloaks, the shaved circle on his head glimmering with perspiration. “I will, Father,” Juliette said. “Thank you.”
Wendel nodded. He waved to Remmy and said nothing else to her as his acolyte drew water from the chapel fountain. Not a word. His earlier promise to bless her journey had gone forgotten.
10
Juliette participated in a ceremonial planting at the mids farm, had a late lunch, and continued her laconic pace up the silo. By the time she reached the thirties, the lights were beginning to dim, and she found herself looking forward to a familiar bed.
Lukas was waiting for her on the landing. He smiled a greeting and insisted on taking her shoulder bag, however light.
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” she said. But in truth, she found it sweet.
“I just got here,” he insisted. “A porter told me you were getting close.”
Juliette remembered the young girl in light blue coveralls who’d overtaken her in the forties. It was easy to forget that Lukas had eyes and ears everywhere. He held the door open, and Juliette entered a level packed with conflicting memories and feelings. Here was where Knox had died. Here was where Mayor Jahns had been poisoned. Here was where she had been doomed to clean and where doctors had patched her back up.
She glanced toward the conference room and remembered being told that she was mayor. That was where she had suggested to Peter and Lukas that they tell everyone the truth: that they were not alone in the world. She still thought it a good idea, despite their protestations. But maybe it was better to show people rather than tell them. She imagined families taking a grand journey to the Down Deep the way they used to hike up to gaze at the wallscreen. They would travel to her world, thousands of people who had never been, who had no idea what the machines that kept them alive looked like. They would travel down to Mechanical so that they could then pass through a tunnel and see this other silo. On the way, they might marvel at the main generator that now hummed, perfectly balanced. They could marvel at the hole in the ground her friends had made. And then they could contemplate the thrill of filling an empty world so very much like their own, remaking it how they saw fit.
The security gate beeped as Lukas scanned his pass, and Juliette returned from her daydreams. The guard behind the gate waved at her, and Juliette waved back. Beyond him, the halls of IT sat quiet and empty. Most of the workers had gone home for the night. With no one there, Juliette was reminded of Silo 17. She imagined Solo walking around the corner, half a loaf of bread in his hand, crumbs caught in his beard, a happy grin on his face as he spotted her. That hall looked just like this hall, except for the busted light that dangled from its wires in Silo 17.
These two sets of memories jumbled in her head as she followed Lukas back to his private residence. Two worlds with the same layout, two lives lived, one here and one there. The weeks spent with Solo felt like an entire lifetime, such was the bond that formed between two people under strain. Elise might dart out of that office where the kids had set up their home and cling to Juliette’s leg. The twins would be arguing over found spoils around the bend. Rickson and Hannah would be stealing a kiss in the dark and whispering of another child.
“—but only if you agree.”
Juliette turned to Lukas. “What? Oh, yes. That’s fine.”
“You didn’t hear a word of that, did you?” They reached his door, and he scanned his badge. “It’s like you’re off in another world sometimes.”
Juliette heard concern in his voice, not anger. She took her bag from him and stepped inside. Lukas turned on the lights and threw his ID on the dresser by the bed. “You feeling okay?” he asked.
“Just tired from the climb.” Juliette sat on the edge of the bed and untied her laces. She worked her boots off and left them in their usual place. Lukas’s apartment was like a second home, familiar and cozy. Her own apartment on level six was a foreign land. She had seen it twice but had never spent a night there. To do so would be to fully accept her role as mayor.
“I was thinking about having a late dinner delivered.” Lukas rummaged in his closet and brought out the soft cloth robe that Juliette loved to pull on after a hot shower. He hung it from the hook on the bathroom door. “Do you want me to run you a bath?”
Juliette took a heavy breath. “I reek, don’t I?” She sniffed the back of her hand and tried to nose the grease. There was the acidic hint of her cutting torch, the spice of exhaust fumes from the digger — a perfume as tattooed on her flesh as the markings oilmen cut and inked into their arms. All this, despite the fact that she had showered before she left Mechanical.
“No—” Lukas appeared hurt. “I just thought you’d enjoy a bath.”
“In the morning, maybe. And I might skip dinner. I’ve been snacking all day.” She smoothed the sheets beside her. Lukas smiled and sat down next to her on the bed. His face bore an expectant grin, that glow in his eyes she saw after they made love — but the look dissipated with her next words: “We need to talk.”
His face fell. His shoulders sagged. “We’re not going to register, are we?”
Juliette seized his hand. “No, that’s not it. Of course we are. Of course.” She pressed his hand to her chest, remembering a love that she’d kept hidden from the Pact once before and how that had wrenched her in half. She would never make that mistake again. “It’s about the digging,” she said.
Lukas took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then laughed. “Only that,” he said, smiling. “Amazing that your digging could come as the lesser of two harms.”
“I have something else I want to do that you aren’t going to like.”
He raised an eyebrow. “If this is about trying to spread news of the other silos, about telling people what’s out there, you know where Peter and I stand on that. I don’t think those words are safe. People won’t believe you, and those who do will want to cause trouble.”
Juliette thought of Father Wendel and how people could believe amazing things crafted from mere words, how beliefs could form from books. But perhaps they had to want to believe those things. And maybe Lukas was right that not everyone would want to believe the truth.
“I’m not going to tell them anything,” she told Lukas. “I want to show them. There’s something I want to do up top, but it requires help from you and your department. I’m going to need some of your men.”
Lukas frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that.” He rubbed her arm. “Why don’t we discuss it tomorrow? I just want to enjoy having you here with me tonight. One night where we aren’t working. I can pretend I’m just a server tech and you can be… not the mayor.”
Juliette squeezed his hand. “You’re right. Of course. And maybe I should jump in the shower real quick—”
“No, stay.” He kissed her neck. “You smell like you. Shower in the morning.”
She relented. Lukas kissed her neck again, but when he moved to unzip her coveralls, she asked him to douse the lights. For once, he didn’t complain as he often did about not being able to see her. Instead, he left the bathroom light on and shut the door most of the way, leaving the barest of glows. As much as she loved being naked with him, she didn’t like to be seen. The patchwork of scars made her look like the slices of mineshaft that cut through granite: a web of white rock standing out from the rest.
But as unattractive as they were to the eyes, they were sensitive to the touch. Each scar was like a nerve ending rising from her own Deep. When Lukas traced them with his fingers — like an electrician following a diagram of wires — wherever he touched was a wrench across two battery terminals. Electricity fluttered through her body as they held each other in the darkness and he explored her with his hands. Juliette could feel her skin grow warm. This would not be a night where they fell fast asleep. Her designs and dangerous plans began to fade under the gentle pressure of his soft touch. This would be a night for travelling back to her youth, of feeling rather than thinking, back to simpler times—
“That’s strange,” Lukas said, stopping what he was doing.
Juliette didn’t ask what was strange, hoping he’d forget it. She was too proud to tell him to keep touching her like that.
“My favorite little scar is gone,” he said, rubbing a spot on her arm.
Juliette’s temperature soared. She was back in the airlock, such was the heat. It was one thing to silently touch her wounds, another to name them. She pulled her arm away and rolled over, thinking this would be a night for sleep after all.
“No, here, let me see,” he begged.
“You’re being cruel,” Juliette told him.
Lukas rubbed her back. “I’m not, I swear. May I please see your arm?”
Juliette sat up in the bed and pulled the sheets over her knees. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t like you mentioning them,” she said. “And you shouldn’t have a favorite.” She nodded toward the bathroom, where a faint glow of light leaked out from the cracked door. “Can we please shut that or turn out the light?”
“Jules, I swear to you, I love you just the way you are. I’ve never seen you any other way.”
She took that to mean that he’d never seen her naked before her wounds, not that he’d always found her beautiful. Getting out of bed, she moved to douse the bathroom light herself. She dragged the sheet behind her, leaving Lukas alone and naked on the bed.
“It was on the crook of your right arm,” Lukas said. “Three of them crossed and made a little star. I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”
Juliette doused the light and stood alone in the darkness. She could still feel Lukas gazing at her. She could feel people gawking at the scars even when she was fully clothed. She thought of George seeing her like that — and a lump rose in her throat.
Lukas appeared next to her in the pitch black, his arm around her, a kiss lighting on her shoulder. “Come back to bed,” he said. “I’m sorry. We can leave the light out.”
Juliette hesitated. “I don’t like you knowing them so well,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of your star charts.”
“I know,” he said. “I can’t help it. They’re a part of you, the only you I’ve ever known. Maybe we should have your father take a look—?”
She pulled away from him, only to click the light back on. She studied the crook of her arm in the mirror, first her right arm and then her left, thinking he must be wrong.
“Are you sure it was there?” she asked, studying the web of scars for some bare patch, some piece of open sky.
Lukas took her tenderly by the wrist and elbow, lifted her arm to his mouth, and kissed it.
“Right there,” he said. “I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”
Juliette wiped a tear from her eye and laughed in that mix of gasp and sigh that comes from a sad burst of emotion. Locating a particularly offensive knot of flesh, a welt that ran right around her forearm, she showed it to Lukas, forgiving him if not believing him.
“Do this one next,” she said.
7
The argument with Shirly about the generator went badly. Juliette got her way, but she didn’t emerge feeling victorious. She watched her old friend stomp off and tried to imagine being in her place. It had only been a couple of months since her husband, Marck, had died. Juliette had been a wreck for a solid year after losing George. And now some mayor was telling the head of Mechanical that they were taking the backup generator. Stealing it. Leaving the silo at the whim of a mechanical failure. One tooth snaps off one gear, and all the levels descend into darkness, all the pumps fall quiet, until it can be fixed.
Juliette didn’t need to hear Shirly argue the points. She could well enough name them herself. Now she stood alone in a dim hallway, her friend’s footsteps fading to silence, wondering what in the world she was doing. Even those around her were losing their trust. And why? For a promise? Or was she just being stubborn?
She scratched her arm, one of the scars beneath her coveralls itching, and remembered speaking with her father after almost twenty years of hardheaded avoidance. Neither of them had admitted how dumb they’d been, but it hung in the room like a family quilt. Here was their failing, the source of their drive to accomplish much in life and also the cause of the damage they so often left behind — this injurious pride.
Juliette turned and let herself back into the generator room. A clanging racket along the far wall reminded her of more… unbalanced days. The sound of digging was not unlike the warped generator of her past: young and hot and dangerous.
Work was already underway on the backup generator. Dawson and his team had the exhaust coupling separated. Raph worked one of the large nuts on the forward mount with a massive wrench, separating the generator from its ancient mooring. Juliette realized she was really doing this. Shirly had every right to be pissed off.
She crossed the room and stepped through one of the holes in the wall, ducked her head under the rebar, and found Bobby at the rear of the great digger, scratching his beard. Bobby was a boulder of a man. He wore his hair long and in the tight braids miners enjoyed, and his charcoal skin hid the efforts of dark digging. He was in every way his friend Raph’s antithesis. Hyla, his daughter and also his shadow, stood quietly at his elbow.
“How goes it?” Juliette asked.
“How goes it? Or how goes this machine?” Bobby turned and studied her a moment. “I’ll tell you how this rusted bucket goes. She’s not one for turning, not like you need. She’s aimed straight as a rod. Not meant to be guided at all.”
Juliette greeted Hyla and sized up the progress on the digger. The machine was cleaning up well, was in remarkable shape. She placed a hand on Bobby’s arm. “She’ll steer,” she assured him. “We’ll place iron wedges along the wall here on the right-hand side.” She pointed to the place. Overhead floodlights from the mines illuminated the dark rock. “When the back end presses on these wedges, it’ll force the front to the side.” With one hand representing the digger, she pushed on her wrist with the other, cocking her hand to show how it would maneuver.
Bobby reluctantly grumbled his agreement. “It’ll be slow going, but that might work.” He unfolded a sheet of fine paper, a schematic of all the silos, and studied the path Juliette had drawn. She had stolen the layout from Lukas’s hidden office, and her proposed dig traced an arc from Silo 18 to Silo 17, generator room to generator room. “We’ll have to wedge it downward as well,” Bobby told her. “She’s on an incline like she’s itchin’ to go up.”
“That’s fine. What’s the word on the bracing?”
Hyla studied the two adults and twisted a charcoal in one hand, held her slate in the other. Bobby glanced up at the ceiling and frowned.
“Erik’s not so keen on lending what he’s got. He says he can spare girders enough for a thousand yards. I told him you’d be wanting five or ten times that.”
“We’ll have to pull some out of the mines, then.” Juliette nodded to Hyla and her slate, suggesting she write that down.
“You mean to start wars down here, do you?” Bobby tugged on his beard, clearly agitated. Hyla stopped scratching on the slate and looked from one of her superiors to the other, not sure what to do.
“I’ll talk to Erik,” she told Bobby. “When I promise him the pile of steel girders we’ll find in the other silo, he’ll cave.”
Bobby lifted an eyebrow. “Bad choice of words.”
He laughed nervously while Juliette gestured to his daughter. “We’ll need thirty-six beams and seventy-two risers,” she said.
Hyla glanced guiltily at Bobby before jotting this down.
“If this thing moves, it’s gonna make a lot of dirt,” Bobby said. “Hauling the tailings from here to the crusher down in the mines is gonna make a mess and take as many men as the digging.”
The thought of the crushing room where tailings were ground to powder and vented to the exhaust manifold stirred painful memories. Juliette aimed her flashlight at Bobby’s feet, trying not to think of the past. “We won’t be expelling the tailings,” she told him. “Shaft six is almost directly below us. If we dig straight down, we hit it.”
“You mean to fill number six?” Bobby asked, incredulous.
“Six is nearly tapped out anyway. And we double our ore the moment we reach this other silo.”
“Erik’s gonna blow a gasket. You aren’t forgettin’ anybody, are you?”
Juliette studied her old friend. “Forgetting anybody?”
“Anyone you’re neglecting to piss off.”
Juliette ignored the jab and turned to Hyla. “Make a note to Courtnee. I want the backup generator fully serviced before it’s brought in. There won’t be room to pull the heads and check the seals once it’s fitted in here. The ceiling will be too low.”
Bobby followed as Juliette continued her inspection of the digger. “You’ll be here to look after that, won’t you?” he asked. “You’ll be here to couple the genset to this monster, right?”
She shook her head. “Afraid not. Dawson will be in charge of that. Lukas is right, I need to go up and make the rounds—”
“Bullshit,” Bobby said. “What’s this about, Jules? I’ve never seen you leave a project in half like this, not even if it meant working three shifts.”
Juliette turned and gave Hyla that look that all children and shadows know to mean their ears aren’t welcome. Hyla stayed back while the two old friends continued on.
“My being down here is causing unrest,” Juliette told Bobby, her voice quiet and swallowed by the vastness of the machine around them. “Lukas did the right thing to come get me.” She shot the old miner a cold look. “And I’ll beat you senseless if that gets back to him.”
He laughed and showed his palms. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m married.”
Juliette nodded. “It’s best you all dig while I’m elsewhere. If I’m to be a distraction, then let me be a distraction.” They reached the end of a void that the backup generator would soon fill. It was so clever, this arrangement, keeping the delicate engine out where it would be used and serviced. The rest of the digger was just steel and grinding teeth, gears packed tight with grease.
“These friends of yours,” Bobby said. “They’re worth all this?”
“They are.” Juliette studied her old friend. “But this isn’t just for them. This is for us too.”
Bobby chewed on his beard. “I don’t follow,” he said after a pause.
“We need to prove this works,” she said. “This is only the beginning.”
Bobby narrowed his eyes at her. “Well, if it ain’t the beginning of one thing,” he said, “I would hazard to say it spells the end of another.”
8
Juliette paused outside Walker’s workshop and knocked before entering. She had heard tell of him being out and about during the uprising, but this was a cog whose teeth refused to align with anything in her head. As far as she was concerned, it was mere legend, a thing to be disbelieved because it hadn’t been seen with her own eyes — similar, she reckoned, to how her jaunt between silos didn’t compute for most people. A rumor. A myth. Who was this woman mechanic who claimed to have seen another land? Stories such as these were dismissed — unless legend took seed and sprouted religion.
“Jules!” Walker peered up from his desk, one of his eyes the size of a tomato through his magnifiers. He pulled the lens away, and his eye shrank back to normal. “Good, good. So glad you’re here.” He waved her over. There was the smell of burning hair in the room, as if the old man had been leaning over his soldering work while careless of his long gray locks.
“I just came to transmit something to Solo,” she said. “And to let you know I’ll be away for a few days.”
“Oh?” Walker frowned. He slotted a few small tools into his leather apron and pressed his soldering iron into a wet sponge. The hiss reminded Juliette of a ill-tempered cat who used to live in the pump room, fussing at her from the darkness. “That Lukas fellow pulling you away?” Walker asked.
Juliette was reminded that Walker was no friend to open spaces, but he was a friend to porters. And they were friendly with his coin.
“That’s part of it,” she admitted. She pulled out a stool and sank against it, studied her hands, which were scraped and stained with grease. “The other part is that this digging business is going to take a while, and you know how I get when I sit still. I’ve got another project I’ve been thinking on. It’s going to be even less popular than this one here.”
Walker studied her for a moment, glanced up at the ceiling, and then his eyes widened. Somehow, he knew precisely what she was planning. “You’re like a bowl of Courtnee’s chili,” he whispered. “Making trouble at both ends.”
Juliette laughed, but also felt a twinge of disappointment that she was so transparent. So predictable.
“I haven’t told Lukas yet,” she warned him. “Or Peter.”
Walker scrunched up his face at the second name.
“Billings,” she said. “The new sheriff.”
“That’s right.” He unplugged his soldering iron and dabbed it against the sponge again. “I forget that ain’t your job no more.”
It hardly ever was, she wanted to say.
“I just want to tell Solo that we’re nearly underway with the digging. I need to make sure the floods are under control over there.” She gestured to his radio, which could do far more than broadcast up and down a single silo. Like the radio in the room beneath IT’s servers, this unit he had built was capable of broadcasting to other silos.
“Sure thing. Shame you aren’t leaving in a day or two. I’m almost done with the portable.” He showed her a plastic box a little larger than the old radios she and the deputies used to wear on their hips. It still had wires hanging loose and a large external battery attached. “Once I get done with it, you’ll be able to switch channels with a dial. It piggybacks the repeaters up and down both silos.”
She picked the unit up gingerly, no clue what he was talking about. Walker pointed to a dial with thirty-two numbered positions around it. This she understood.
“Just got to get the old rechargeables to play nice in there. Working on the voltage regulation next.”
“You are amazing,” Juliette whispered.
Walker beamed. “Amazing are the people who made this the first time. I can’t get over what they were able to do hundreds of years ago. People weren’t as dumb back then as you’d like to believe.”
Juliette wanted to tell him about the books she’d seen, how the people back then seemed as if they were from the future, not the past.
Walker wiped his hands on an old rag. “I warned Bobby and the others, and I think you should know too. The radios won’t work so well the deeper they dig, not until they get to the other side.”
Juliette nodded. “So I heard. Courtnee said they’ll use runners just like in the mines. I put her in charge of the dig. She’s thought of just about everything.”
Walker frowned. “I heard she wanted to rig this side to blow as well, in case they hit a pocket of bad air.”
“That was Shirly’s idea. She’s just trying to come up with reasons not to dig. But you know Courtnee, once she sets her mind to something, it gets done.”
Walker scratched his beard. “As long as she don’t forget to feed me, we’ll be fine.”
Juliette laughed. “I’m sure she won’t.”
“Well, I wish you luck on your rounds.”
“Thanks,” she said. She pointed to the large radio set on his workbench. “Can you patch me through to Solo?”
“Sure, sure. Seventeen. Forgot you didn’t come down here to chat with me. Let’s call your friend.” He shook his head. “Have to tell you, from talking to him, he’s one odd fellow.”
Juliette smiled and studied her old friend. She waited to see if he was joking — decided he was being perfectly serious — and laughed.
“What?” Walker asked. He powered the radio on and handed her the receiver. “What did I say?”
Solo’s update was a mixed bag. Mechanical was dry, which was good, but it hadn’t taken as long as she’d thought for the flood to pump out. It might be weeks or months to get over there and see what they could salvage, and the rust would set in immediately. Juliette pushed these distant problems out of her mind and concentrated on the things she could lay a wrench on.
Everything she needed for her trip up fit in a small shoulder bag: her good silver coveralls, which she’d barely worn; socks and underwear, both still wet from washing them in the sink; her work canteen, dented and grease-stained; and a ratchet and driver set. In her pockets she carried her multi-tool and twenty chits, even though hardly anyone took payment from her since she turned mayor. The only thing she felt she was missing was a decent radio, but Walker had scrapped two of the functioning units to try and build a new one, and it wasn’t ready yet.
With her meager belongings and a feeling like she was abandoning her friends, she left Mechanical behind. The distant clatter from the digging followed her through the hallways and out into the stairwell. Passing through security was like crossing some mental threshold. It reminded her of leaving that airlock all those weeks ago. Like a stopper valve, some things seemed to allow passage in only one direction. She feared how long it might be before she returned. The thought made it difficult to breathe.
She slowly gained height and began passing others on the stairwell, and Juliette could feel them watching her. The glares of people she had once known reminded her of the wind that had buffeted her on the hillside. Their distrustful glances came in gusts — just as quickly, they looked away.
Before long, she saw what Lukas had spoken of. Whatever goodwill her return had wrought — whatever wonder people held for her as someone who had refused to clean and managed to survive the great outside — was crumbling as sure as the concrete being hammered below. Where her return from the outside had brought hope, her plans to tunnel beyond the silo had engendered something else. She could see it in the averted gaze of a shopkeep, in the protective arm a mother wrapped around her child, in the whispers that came and just as suddenly went. Juliette was causing the opposite of hope. She was spreading fear.
A handful of people did acknowledge her with a nod and a “Mayor” as she passed them on the stairwell. A young porter she knew stopped and shook her hand, seemed genuinely thrilled to see her. But when she paused at the lower farms on one-twenty-six for food, and when she sought a bathroom three levels further up, she felt as welcomed as a greaser in the Up Top. And yet she was still among her own. She was their mayor, however unloved.
These interactions gave her second thoughts about seeing Hank, the deputy of the Down Deep. Hank had fought in the uprising and had seen good men and women on both sides give up their lives. As Juliette entered the deputy station on one-twenty, she wondered if stopping was a mistake, if she should just press on. But that was her young self afraid of seeing her father, her young self who buried her head in projects in order to avoid the world. She could no longer be that person. She had a responsibility to the silo and its people. Seeing Hank was the right thing to do. She scratched a scar on the back of her hand and bravely strode into his deputy station. She reminded herself that she was the mayor, not a prisoner being sent to clean.
Hank glanced up from his desk as she entered. The deputy’s eyes widened as he recognized her — they had not spoken nor seen each other since she got back. He rose from his chair and took two steps toward her, then stopped, and Juliette saw the same mix of nerves and excitement that she felt and realized she shouldn’t have been afraid of coming, that she shouldn’t have avoided him until now. Hank reached out his hand timidly, as if worried she might refuse to shake it. He seemed ready to pull it back if it offended. Whatever heartache she had brought him, he still seemed pained at having followed orders and sent her to clean.
Juliette took the deputy’s hand and pulled him into an embrace.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice giving out on him.
“Stop that,” Juliette said. She let go of the lawman and took a step back, studied his shoulder. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. How’s your arm?”
He shrugged his shoulder in a circle. “Still attached,” he said. “And if you ever dare apologize to me, I’ll have you arrested.”
“Truce, then,” she offered.
Hank smiled. “Truce,” he said. “But I do want to say—”
“You were doing your job. And I was doing the best I could. Now leave it.”
He nodded and studied his boots.
“How are things around here? Lukas said there’s been grumbling about my work below.”
“There’s been some acting up. Nothing too serious. I think most people are busy enough patching things up. But yeah, I’ve heard some talk. You know how many requests we get for transfer out of here and up to the Mids or the Top. Well, I’ve been getting ten times the normal. Folks don’t want to be near what you’ve got going on, I’m afraid.”
Juliette chewed her lip.
“Part of the problem is lack of direction,” Hank said. “Don’t want to shoulder you with this, but me and the boys down here don’t have a clear idea which way is up right now. We aren’t getting dispatches from Security like we used to. And your office…”
“Has been quiet,” Juliette offered.
Hank scratched the back of his head. “That’s right. Not that you’ve been exactly quiet yourself. We can sometimes hear the racket you’re making out on the landing.”
“That’s why I’m visiting,” she told him. “I want you to know that your concerns are my concerns. I’m heading up to my office for a week or two. I’ll stop by the other deputy stations as well. Things are going to improve around here in a lot of ways.”
Hank frowned. “You know I trust you and all, but when you tell people around here that things are going to improve, all they hear is that things are going to change. And for those who are breathing and count that as a blessing, they take that to mean one thing and one thing only.”
Juliette thought of all she had planned, in the Up Top as well as the Down Deep. “As long as good men like you trust me, we’ll be fine,” she said. “Now, I’ve got a favor to ask.”
“You need a place to stay the night,” Hank guessed. He waved at the jail cell. “I saved your room for you. I can turn down the cot—”
Juliette laughed. She was happy that they could already joke about what had moments ago been a discomfort. “No,” she said. “Thanks, though. I’m supposed to be up at the mids farms by lights out. I have to plant the first crop in a new patch of soil being turned over.” She waved her hand in the air. “It’s one of those things.”
Hank smiled and nodded.
“What I wanted to ask is that you keep an eye on the stairwell for me. Lukas mentioned there were grumbles up above. I’m going up to soothe them, but I want you to be on the alert if things go sour. We’re short-staffed below, and people are on edge.”
“You expecting trouble?” Hank asked.
Juliette considered the question. “I am,” she said. “If you need to take a shadow or two, I’ll budget it.”
He frowned. “I normally like having chits thrown my way,” he said. “So why does this make me feel uncomfortable?”
“Same reason I’m happy to pay,” Juliette said. “We both know you’re getting the busted end of the deal.”
9
Leaving the deputy’s office, Juliette climbed through levels that had seen much of the fighting, and she noticed once more the silo’s wounds of war. She rose through ever-worsening reminders of the battles that had been waged in her absence, saw the marks left behind from the fighting, the jagged streaks of bright silver through old paint, the black burns and pockmarks in concrete, the rebar poking through like fractured bone through skin.
She had devoted most of her life to holding that silo together, to keeping it running. This was a kindness repaid by the silo as it filled her lungs with air, gave rise to the crops, and claimed the dead. They were responsible for one another. Without people, this silo would become as Solo’s had: rusted and fairly drowned. Without the silo, she would be a skull on a hill, looking blankly to the cloud-filled skies. They needed each other.
Her hand slid up the rail, rough with new welds, her own hand a mess of scars. For much of her life, they had kept each other going, she and the silo. Right up until they’d damn near killed each other. And now the minor hurts in Mechanical she had hoped to repair one day — squealing pumps, spitting pipes, leaks from the exhaust — all paled before the far worse wreckage her leaving had caused. In much the same way that the occasional scars — reminders of youthful missteps — were now lost beneath disfigured flesh, it seemed that one large mistake could bury all the minor ones.
She took the steps one at a time and reached that place where a bomb had ripped a gap in the stairs. A patchwork of metal stretched across the ruin, a web of bar and rail scavenged from landings that now stood narrower than before. Names of those lost in the blast were written here and there in charcoal. Juliette treaded carefully across the mangled metal. Higher up, she saw that the doors to Supply had been replaced. Here, the fighting had been especially bad. The cost these people in yellow had paid for siding with hers in blue.
A Sunday was letting out as Juliette approached the church on ninety-nine. Floods of people spiraled down toward the quiet bazaar she had just passed. Their mouths were pressed tight from hours of serious talk, their joints as stiff as their pressed coveralls. Juliette filed past them and took note of the hostile glances.
The crowds thinned by the time she reached the landing. The small temple was wedged in among the old hydroponic farms and worker flats that used to serve the Deep. It was before her time, but Knox once explained how the temple had sprouted on ninety-nine. It was when his own dad was a boy and protests had arisen over music and plays performed during Sundays. Security had sat back while the protestors swelled into an encampment outside the bazaar. People slept on the treads and choked the stairway until no one could pass. The farm one level up was ravaged in supplying food to these masses. Eventually, they took over much of the hydroponics level. The temple on twenty-eight set up a satellite office, and now that satellite on ninety-nine was bigger than the temple that had sprouted it.
Father Wendel was on the landing as Juliette rounded the last turn. He stood by the door, shaking hands and speaking briefly with each member of his congregation as they left the Sunday service. His white robes fairly emitted a light of their own. They shone much like his bald head, which glistened from the effort of preaching to the crowds. Between head and robes, Wendel seemed to sparkle. Especially to Juliette, who had just left a land of smudge and grease. She felt dirty just seeing such unblemished cloth.
“Thank you, Father,” a woman said, bowing slightly, shaking his hand, a child balanced on her hip. The little one’s head lolled against her shoulder in perfect slumber. Wendel rested a hand on the child’s head and said a few words. The woman thanked him again, moved on, and Wendel shook the next man’s hand.
Juliette made herself invisible against the rail while the last handful of churchgoers filed past. She watched a man pause and press a few clinking chits into Father Wendel’s open palm. “Thank you, Father,” he said, this farewell a chant of sorts. Juliette could smell what she thought was goats on the old man as he filed past and wound his way up, probably back to the pens. He was the last one to leave. Father Wendel turned and smiled at Juliette to let her know he’d been aware of her presence.
“Mayor,” he said, spreading his hands. “You honor us. Did you come for the elevens?”
Juliette checked the small watch she wore around her wrist. “This wasn’t the elevens?” she asked. She was making good time up the levels.
“It was the tens. We added another Sunday. The toppers come down for late service.”
Juliette wondered why those who lived up top would travel so far. She had timed her walk to miss the services entirely, which was probably a mistake. It would be smart for her to hear what was being said that so many found alluring.
“I’m afraid I can only stop for a quick visit,” she said. “I’ll catch a Sunday on my way back down?”
Wendel frowned. “And when might that be? I heard you were returning to the work God and his people chose you for.”
“A few weeks, probably. Long enough to get caught up.”
An acolyte emerged on the landing with an ornate wooden bowl. He showed Wendel its contents, and Juliette heard the chits shift against one another. The boy wore a brown cloak, and when he bowed to Wendel, she saw the center of his scalp had been shaved. When he turned to leave, Wendel grabbed the acolyte’s arm.
“Pay your respects to your mayor,” he said.
“Ma’am.” The acolyte bowed. His face showed no expression. Dark eyes under full and dark brows, his lips colorless. Juliette sensed that this young man spent little time outside of the church.
“You don’t have to ma’am me,” she told him politely. “Juliette.” She extended a hand.
“Remmy,” the boy said. A hand emerged from his cloak. Juliette accepted it.
“See to the pews,” Wendel said. “We have another service yet.”
Remmy bowed to both of them and shuffled away. Juliette felt pity for the boy, but she wasn’t sure why. Wendel peered across the landing and seemed to listen for approaching traffic. Holding the door, he waved Juliette inside. “Come,” he said. “Top up your canteen. I’ll bless your journey.”
Juliette shook her canteen, which sloshed nearly empty. “Thank you,” she said. She followed him inside.
Wendel led her past the reception hall and waved her into the lower chapel, where she’d attended a few Sundays years prior. Remmy busied himself among the rows of benches and chairs, replacing pillows and laying out announcements handwritten on narrow strips of cheap paper. She caught him watching her as he worked.
“The gods miss you,” Father Wendel said, letting her know that he was aware how long it’d been since she’d attended a Sunday. The chapel had expanded since she last remembered it. There was the heady and expensive smell of sawdust, of newly shaped wood made from claimed doors and other ancient timbers. She rested her hand on a pew that must’ve been worth a fortune.
“Well, the gods know where to find me,” she answered, taking her hand off the pew. She smiled as she said this, meant it lightly, but saw a flash of disappointment on the father’s face.
“I sometimes wonder if you aren’t hiding from them as best you can,” he said. Father Wendel nodded toward the stained glass behind the altar. The lights behind the glass were full-bright, shards of color thrown against the floor and ceiling. “I read your announcements for every birth and every death up there in my pulpit, and I see in them that you give credit in all things to the gods.”
Juliette wanted to say that she didn’t even write those announcements. They were written for her.
“But I sometimes wonder if you even believe in the gods, the way you take their rules so lightly.”
“I believe in the gods,” Juliette said, her temper stoked by this accusation. “I believe in the gods who created this silo. I do. And all the other silos—”
Wendel flinched. “Blasphemy,” he whispered, his eyes wide as if her words could kill. He threw a look at Remmy, who bowed and moved toward the hall.
“Yes, blasphemy,” Juliette said. “But I believe the gods made the towers beyond the hills and that they left us a way to discover, a way out of here. We have uncovered a tool in the depths of this silo, Father Wendel. A digging machine that could take us to new places. I know you disapprove, but I believe the gods gave us this tool, and I mean to use it.”
“This digger of yours is the devil’s work, and it lies in the devil’s deep,” Wendel said. The kindness had left his face. He patted his forehead with a square of fine cloth. “There are no gods like those you speak of, only demons.”
This was his sermon, Juliette saw. She was getting his elevens. The people came far to hear this.
She took a step closer. Her skin was warm with anger. “There may be demons among my gods,” she agreed, speaking his tongue. “The gods I believe in… the gods I worship were the men and women who built this place and more like it. They built this place to protect us from the world they destroyed. They were gods and demons, both. But they left us space for redemption. They meant us to be free, Father, and they gave us the means.” She pointed to her temple. “They gave me the means right here. And they left us a digger. They did. There is nothing blasphemous about using it. And I’ve seen the other silos that you continue to doubt. I’ve been there.”
Wendel took another step back. He rubbed the cross hanging around his neck, and Juliette caught Remmy peeking around the edge of the door, his dark brows casting shadows over his dark eyes.
“We should use all the tools the gods gave us,” Juliette said. “Except for the one you wield, this power to make others fear.”
“Me?” Father Wendel pressed one palm to his chest. With his other hand, he pointed at her. “You are the one spreading fear.” He swept his hand at the pews and beyond to the tight rows of mismatched chairs, crates, and buckets at the back of the room. “They crowd in here three Sundays a day to wring their hands over the devil’s work you do. Children can’t sleep at night for fear that you’ll kill us all.”
Juliette opened her mouth, but the words would not come. She thought of the looks on the stairwell, thought of that mother pulling her child close, people she knew who no longer said hello. “I could show you books,” she said softly, thinking of the shelves that held the Legacy. “I could show you books, and then you’d see.”
“There’s only one book worth knowing,” Wendel said. His eyes darted to the large, ornate tome with its gilded edges that sat on a podium by the pulpit, that sat under a cage of bent steel. Juliette remembered lessons from that book. She’d seen its pages with those occasional and cryptic sentences peeking out amid bars of censored black. She also noticed the way the podium was welded to the steel decking, and not expertly. Fat puckers of paranoid welds. The same gods expected to keep men and women safe couldn’t be trusted to look after one book.
“I should leave you to get ready for your elevens,” she said, feeling sorry for her outburst.
Wendel uncrossed his arms. She could sense that they had both gone too far and that both knew it. She had hoped to allay doubts and had only worsened them.
“I wish you’d stay,” Wendel told her. “At least fill your canteen.”
She reached behind her back and unclipped the canteen. Remmy returned with a swish of his heavy brown cloaks, the shaved circle on his head glimmering with perspiration. “I will, Father,” Juliette said. “Thank you.”
Wendel nodded. He waved to Remmy and said nothing else to her as his acolyte drew water from the chapel fountain. Not a word. His earlier promise to bless her journey had gone forgotten.
10
Juliette participated in a ceremonial planting at the mids farm, had a late lunch, and continued her laconic pace up the silo. By the time she reached the thirties, the lights were beginning to dim, and she found herself looking forward to a familiar bed.
Lukas was waiting for her on the landing. He smiled a greeting and insisted on taking her shoulder bag, however light.
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” she said. But in truth, she found it sweet.
“I just got here,” he insisted. “A porter told me you were getting close.”
Juliette remembered the young girl in light blue coveralls who’d overtaken her in the forties. It was easy to forget that Lukas had eyes and ears everywhere. He held the door open, and Juliette entered a level packed with conflicting memories and feelings. Here was where Knox had died. Here was where Mayor Jahns had been poisoned. Here was where she had been doomed to clean and where doctors had patched her back up.
She glanced toward the conference room and remembered being told that she was mayor. That was where she had suggested to Peter and Lukas that they tell everyone the truth: that they were not alone in the world. She still thought it a good idea, despite their protestations. But maybe it was better to show people rather than tell them. She imagined families taking a grand journey to the Down Deep the way they used to hike up to gaze at the wallscreen. They would travel to her world, thousands of people who had never been, who had no idea what the machines that kept them alive looked like. They would travel down to Mechanical so that they could then pass through a tunnel and see this other silo. On the way, they might marvel at the main generator that now hummed, perfectly balanced. They could marvel at the hole in the ground her friends had made. And then they could contemplate the thrill of filling an empty world so very much like their own, remaking it how they saw fit.
The security gate beeped as Lukas scanned his pass, and Juliette returned from her daydreams. The guard behind the gate waved at her, and Juliette waved back. Beyond him, the halls of IT sat quiet and empty. Most of the workers had gone home for the night. With no one there, Juliette was reminded of Silo 17. She imagined Solo walking around the corner, half a loaf of bread in his hand, crumbs caught in his beard, a happy grin on his face as he spotted her. That hall looked just like this hall, except for the busted light that dangled from its wires in Silo 17.
These two sets of memories jumbled in her head as she followed Lukas back to his private residence. Two worlds with the same layout, two lives lived, one here and one there. The weeks spent with Solo felt like an entire lifetime, such was the bond that formed between two people under strain. Elise might dart out of that office where the kids had set up their home and cling to Juliette’s leg. The twins would be arguing over found spoils around the bend. Rickson and Hannah would be stealing a kiss in the dark and whispering of another child.
“—but only if you agree.”
Juliette turned to Lukas. “What? Oh, yes. That’s fine.”
“You didn’t hear a word of that, did you?” They reached his door, and he scanned his badge. “It’s like you’re off in another world sometimes.”
Juliette heard concern in his voice, not anger. She took her bag from him and stepped inside. Lukas turned on the lights and threw his ID on the dresser by the bed. “You feeling okay?” he asked.
“Just tired from the climb.” Juliette sat on the edge of the bed and untied her laces. She worked her boots off and left them in their usual place. Lukas’s apartment was like a second home, familiar and cozy. Her own apartment on level six was a foreign land. She had seen it twice but had never spent a night there. To do so would be to fully accept her role as mayor.
“I was thinking about having a late dinner delivered.” Lukas rummaged in his closet and brought out the soft cloth robe that Juliette loved to pull on after a hot shower. He hung it from the hook on the bathroom door. “Do you want me to run you a bath?”
Juliette took a heavy breath. “I reek, don’t I?” She sniffed the back of her hand and tried to nose the grease. There was the acidic hint of her cutting torch, the spice of exhaust fumes from the digger — a perfume as tattooed on her flesh as the markings oilmen cut and inked into their arms. All this, despite the fact that she had showered before she left Mechanical.
“No—” Lukas appeared hurt. “I just thought you’d enjoy a bath.”
“In the morning, maybe. And I might skip dinner. I’ve been snacking all day.” She smoothed the sheets beside her. Lukas smiled and sat down next to her on the bed. His face bore an expectant grin, that glow in his eyes she saw after they made love — but the look dissipated with her next words: “We need to talk.”
His face fell. His shoulders sagged. “We’re not going to register, are we?”
Juliette seized his hand. “No, that’s not it. Of course we are. Of course.” She pressed his hand to her chest, remembering a love that she’d kept hidden from the Pact once before and how that had wrenched her in half. She would never make that mistake again. “It’s about the digging,” she said.
Lukas took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then laughed. “Only that,” he said, smiling. “Amazing that your digging could come as the lesser of two harms.”
“I have something else I want to do that you aren’t going to like.”
He raised an eyebrow. “If this is about trying to spread news of the other silos, about telling people what’s out there, you know where Peter and I stand on that. I don’t think those words are safe. People won’t believe you, and those who do will want to cause trouble.”
Juliette thought of Father Wendel and how people could believe amazing things crafted from mere words, how beliefs could form from books. But perhaps they had to want to believe those things. And maybe Lukas was right that not everyone would want to believe the truth.
“I’m not going to tell them anything,” she told Lukas. “I want to show them. There’s something I want to do up top, but it requires help from you and your department. I’m going to need some of your men.”
Lukas frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that.” He rubbed her arm. “Why don’t we discuss it tomorrow? I just want to enjoy having you here with me tonight. One night where we aren’t working. I can pretend I’m just a server tech and you can be… not the mayor.”
Juliette squeezed his hand. “You’re right. Of course. And maybe I should jump in the shower real quick—”
“No, stay.” He kissed her neck. “You smell like you. Shower in the morning.”
She relented. Lukas kissed her neck again, but when he moved to unzip her coveralls, she asked him to douse the lights. For once, he didn’t complain as he often did about not being able to see her. Instead, he left the bathroom light on and shut the door most of the way, leaving the barest of glows. As much as she loved being naked with him, she didn’t like to be seen. The patchwork of scars made her look like the slices of mineshaft that cut through granite: a web of white rock standing out from the rest.
But as unattractive as they were to the eyes, they were sensitive to the touch. Each scar was like a nerve ending rising from her own Deep. When Lukas traced them with his fingers — like an electrician following a diagram of wires — wherever he touched was a wrench across two battery terminals. Electricity fluttered through her body as they held each other in the darkness and he explored her with his hands. Juliette could feel her skin grow warm. This would not be a night where they fell fast asleep. Her designs and dangerous plans began to fade under the gentle pressure of his soft touch. This would be a night for travelling back to her youth, of feeling rather than thinking, back to simpler times—
“That’s strange,” Lukas said, stopping what he was doing.
Juliette didn’t ask what was strange, hoping he’d forget it. She was too proud to tell him to keep touching her like that.
“My favorite little scar is gone,” he said, rubbing a spot on her arm.
Juliette’s temperature soared. She was back in the airlock, such was the heat. It was one thing to silently touch her wounds, another to name them. She pulled her arm away and rolled over, thinking this would be a night for sleep after all.
“No, here, let me see,” he begged.
“You’re being cruel,” Juliette told him.
Lukas rubbed her back. “I’m not, I swear. May I please see your arm?”
Juliette sat up in the bed and pulled the sheets over her knees. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t like you mentioning them,” she said. “And you shouldn’t have a favorite.” She nodded toward the bathroom, where a faint glow of light leaked out from the cracked door. “Can we please shut that or turn out the light?”
“Jules, I swear to you, I love you just the way you are. I’ve never seen you any other way.”
She took that to mean that he’d never seen her naked before her wounds, not that he’d always found her beautiful. Getting out of bed, she moved to douse the bathroom light herself. She dragged the sheet behind her, leaving Lukas alone and naked on the bed.
“It was on the crook of your right arm,” Lukas said. “Three of them crossed and made a little star. I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”
Juliette doused the light and stood alone in the darkness. She could still feel Lukas gazing at her. She could feel people gawking at the scars even when she was fully clothed. She thought of George seeing her like that — and a lump rose in her throat.
Lukas appeared next to her in the pitch black, his arm around her, a kiss lighting on her shoulder. “Come back to bed,” he said. “I’m sorry. We can leave the light out.”
Juliette hesitated. “I don’t like you knowing them so well,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of your star charts.”
“I know,” he said. “I can’t help it. They’re a part of you, the only you I’ve ever known. Maybe we should have your father take a look—?”
She pulled away from him, only to click the light back on. She studied the crook of her arm in the mirror, first her right arm and then her left, thinking he must be wrong.
“Are you sure it was there?” she asked, studying the web of scars for some bare patch, some piece of open sky.
Lukas took her tenderly by the wrist and elbow, lifted her arm to his mouth, and kissed it.
“Right there,” he said. “I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”
Juliette wiped a tear from her eye and laughed in that mix of gasp and sigh that comes from a sad burst of emotion. Locating a particularly offensive knot of flesh, a welt that ran right around her forearm, she showed it to Lukas, forgiving him if not believing him.
“Do this one next,” she said.
Silo 1
11
The silicon-carbon batteries the drones ran on were the size of toaster ovens. Charlotte judged each one to weigh between thirty and forty pounds. They had been pulled from two of the drones and wrapped in webbing taken from one of the supply crates. Charlotte gripped one battery in each hand and took lunging squats in a slow lap around the warehouse, her thighs screaming and quivering, her arms numb.
A trail of sweat marked her progress, but she had a long way to go. How had she let herself get so out of shape? All the running and exercise during basic, just to sit at a console and fly a drone, to sit on her butt and play war games, to sit in a cafeteria and eat slop, to sit and read.
She’d gotten overweight, is what. And it hadn’t bothered her until she’d woken up in this nightmare. She’d never felt the urge to get up and move around until someone had frozen her stiff for a few hundred years. Now she wanted the body back that she remembered. Legs that worked. Arms that weren’t sore just from brushing her teeth. Maybe it was silly of her, thinking she could go back, be who she once was, return to a world she remembered. Or maybe she was being impatient with her recovery. These things took time.
She made it back around to the drones, a full lap. That she could complete a circuit of the room meant progress. It’d been a few weeks since her brother had woken her, and the routine of eating, exercising, and working on the drones was beginning to seem normal. The insane world she had been woken up to was starting to feel real. And that terrified her.
She lowered the batteries to the ground and took a series of deep breaths. Held them. The routine of military life had been similar. It had prepared her for this, was all that kept her from going crazy. Being cooped up was not new. Living in the middle of a desert wasteland where it wasn’t safe to go out was not new. Being surrounded by men she ought to fear was not new. Stationed in Iraq during the Second Iranian War, Charlotte had grown accustomed to these things, to not leaving base, to not wanting to leave her bunk or a bathroom stall. She was used to this struggle to keep sane. It was mental as much as physical exercise that was required.
She showered in one of the stalls down from drone control, toweled off, sniffed each of her three sets of coveralls, and decided it was time to prod Donny into doing laundry again. She pulled on the least offensive of the three, hung the towel to dry from the foot of an upper bunk, and then made up her bed Air Force crisp. Donald had once lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse, but Charlotte had almost grown comfortable in the barracks with its ghosts. It felt like home.
Down the hall from the barracks stood a room of pilot stations. Most were covered in plastic sheets. There was a flat desk along the same wall that bore a mosaic of large monitors. It was here that the radio set was being pieced together. Her brother had gathered a jumble of spare parts one at a time from the lower storerooms. It might be decades or even centuries before anyone noticed they were gone.
Charlotte flicked on the light bulb she’d rigged over the table and powered up the set. She could already get quite a few stations. She tuned the knob until she heard static and left it there, waiting on voices. Until then, she pretended it was the sea rolling up onto a beach. Sometimes it was rain on a canopy of fat leaves. Or a crowd of people quietly talking in a dark theater. She pawed through the bin of parts Donald had amassed and looked for a better set of speakers, still needed a microphone or some way to transmit. She wished she was more mechanically inclined. All she knew how to do was plug things together. It was like assembling a rifle or a computer — she just joined anything that would mate and flicked on the power. It had only resulted in smoke the one time. What it mostly took was patience, which she didn’t have a lot of. Or time, which she was drowning in.
Footsteps down the hall signaled breakfast. Charlotte turned down the volume and cleared room on the desk as Donny entered, a tray in his hands.
“Morning,” she said, getting up to take the tray from him. Her legs felt wobbly from the workout. As her brother stepped into the spill of light from the dangling bulb, she noted his frown. “Everything okay?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We might have a problem.”
Charlotte set the tray down. “What is it?”
“I ran into a guy I knew from my first shift. Was stuck on the lift with him. A handyman.”
“That’s not good.” She lifted the dented metal cover from one of the plates. There was an electrical board and a coil of wire beneath. Also, the small screwdriver she’d asked for.
“Your eggs are under the other one.”
She set the lid aside and grabbed her fork. “Did he recognize you?”
“I couldn’t tell. I kept my head down until he got off. But I knew him as well as I’ve known anyone in this place. It feels like yesterday that I borrowed tools from him, asked him to change a light for me. Who knows what it feels like for him. That might’ve been yesterday or a dozen years ago. Memory works weird in this place.”
Charlotte took a bite of eggs. Donny had put a touch too much salt on them. She imagined him up there with the shaker, his hand trembling. “Even if he did recognize you,” she said around a bite of food, “he might think you’re on another shift as yourself. How many people know you as Thurman?”
Donald shook his head. “Not many. But still, this could come crashing down on us at any moment. I’m going to bring some food up from the pantry, more dry goods. Also, I went in and changed the clearance for your badge so you can access the lifts. And I double-checked that no one else could get down here. I’d hate for you to get trapped if something happened to me.”
Charlotte moved her eggs around her plate. “I don’t like thinking about that,” she said.
“Another bit of a problem. The head of this silo is going off shift in a week, which will make things a little complicated. I’m relying on him to orient the next guy to my status. Things have been going a little too smoothly thus far—”
Charlotte laughed and took another bite of eggs. “Too smoothly,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d hate to see rough. What’s the latest on your favorite silo?”
“The IT head picked up today. Lukas.”
Charlotte thought her brother sounded disappointed. “And?” she asked. “Learn anything new?”
“He managed to crack another server. It’s more of the same data, everything about its residents, every job they’ve had, who they’re related to, from birth to death. I don’t understand how those machines go from that information to this ranked list. It seems like a bunch of noise, like there has to be something else.”
He produced a sheet of folded paper, a new printout of the rankings of the silos. Charlotte cleared a space on the workbench, and he smoothed the report.
“See? The order has changed again. But what determines that?”
She studied the report while she ate, and Donald grabbed one of his folders of notes. He spent a lot of time working in the conference room where he could spread things out and pace back and forth, but Charlotte preferred it when he sat at that drone station. He would sit there for hours sometimes, going through his notes while Charlotte worked on the radio, the two of them listening for chatter among the static.
“Silo six is back on top again,” she muttered. It was like reading the side of a cereal box while she ate, all those numbers that made little sense. One column was labeled Facility, which Donald said was what they used to call the silos. Beside each silo was a percentage like a massive dose of daily vitamins: 99.992%, 99.989%, 99.987%, 99.984%. The last silo with a percentage read 99.974%. Every silo below this was marked off or had N/A listed. Silos 40, 12, 17, and a handful of others were included in that latter category.
“You still think the one on top is the only one that gets to survive?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Have you told these people you’re talking to? Because they’re way down the list.”
He just looked at her and frowned.
“You haven’t. You’re just using them to help you figure all this out.”
“I’m not using them. Hell, I saved that silo. I save it every day that I don’t report what’s going on over there.”
“Okay,” Charlotte said. She returned to her eggs.
“Besides, they probably figure they’re using me. Hell, I think they get more out of our talks than I do. Lukas, the one who heads up their IT, he peppers me with all these questions about the way the world used to be—”
“And the mayor?” Charlotte turned and studied her brother closely. “What does she get out of it?”
“Juliette?” Donald thumbed through a folder. “She enjoys threatening me.”
Charlotte laughed. “I would love to hear that.”
“If you get that radio sorted, you might.”
“And then you’ll spend more time working down here? It would be good, you know. Lessen the risk of being recognized.” She scraped her plate with her fork, not willing to admit the real reason she wanted him down there more was how empty the place felt when he was gone.
“Absolutely.” Her brother rubbed his face, and Charlotte saw how tired he was. Her gaze fell back to the numbers while she ate.
“It makes it seem arbitrary, doesn’t it?” she wondered aloud. “If these numbers mean what you think they mean. They’re functionally equivalent.”
“I doubt the people who planned all this look at it that way. All they need is one of them. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s like a bunch of spares in a box. You pluck one out, and all you care about is if it’ll work. That’s it. They just want to see everything is one hundred percent all the way down.”
Charlotte couldn’t believe that’s what they had in mind. But Donny had shown her the Pact and enough of his notes to convince her. All the silos but one would be exterminated. Their own included.
“How long before the next drone is ready?” he asked.
Charlotte took a sip of juice. “Another day or two. Maybe three. I’m really going light with this one. Not even sure if it’ll fly.” The last two hadn’t made it as far as the first. She was getting desperate.
“Okay.” He rubbed his face again, his palms muffling his voice. “We’re gonna have to decide before too long what we’re gonna do. If we do nothing, this nightmare plays out for another two hundred years, and you and I won’t last that long.” He started to laugh, but it turned into a cough. Donald fished into his coveralls for his handkerchief, and Charlotte looked away. She studied the dark monitors while he had one of his fits.
She didn’t want to admit this to him, but her inclination was to let it play out. It seemed as if a bunch of precision machines were in control of humanity’s fate, and she tended to trust computers a lot more than her brother did. She had spent years flying drones that could fly themselves, that could make decisions on which targets to hit, could guide missiles to precise locations. She often felt less like a pilot and more like a jockey, a person on a beast that could race along on its own, that only needed someone there to occasionally take the reins or shout encouragement.
She glanced over the numbers on the report again. Hundredths of a percentage point would decide who lived and who died. And most would die. She and her brother would either be asleep or long dead by the time it happened. The numbers made this looming holocaust seem so damn… arbitrary.
Donald used the folder in his hand to point at the report. “Did you notice eighteen moved up two spots?”
She had noticed. “You don’t think you’ve become too… attached, do you?”
He looked away. “I have a history with this silo. That’s all.”
Charlotte hesitated. She didn’t want to press further, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t mean the silo,” she said. “You seem… different each time you talk to her.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was sent to clean,” he said. “She’s been outside.”
For a moment Charlotte thought that was all he was going to say on the matter. As if this were enough, as if it explained everything. He was quiet a pause, his eyes flicking back and forth.
“No one is supposed to come back from that,” he finally said. “I don’t think the computers take this into account. Not just what she survived, but that eighteen is hanging in there. By all accounts, they shouldn’t be. If they make it through this… you wonder if they don’t give us the best hope.”
“You wonder,” Charlotte said, correcting him. She waved the piece of paper. “There’s no way we’re smarter than these computers, brother.”
Donald appeared sad. “We can be more compassionate than them,” he said.
Charlotte fought the urge to argue. She wanted to point out that he cared about this silo because of the personal contact. If he knew the people behind any of the other silos — if he knew their stories — would he root for them? It would be cruel to suggest this, however true.
Donald coughed into his rag. He caught Charlotte staring at him, glanced at the bloodstained cloth, put it away.
“I’m scared,” she told him.
Donald shook his head. “I’m not. I’m not afraid of this. I’m not afraid of dying.”
“I know you’re not. That’s obvious, or you would see someone. But you have to be afraid of something.”
“I am. Plenty. I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.”
“Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded.
Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said.
12
That night, Charlotte awoke from a nightmare of flying. She sat up in her cot, springs crying out like a nest of birds, and could still feel herself swooping down through the clouds, the wind on her face.
Always dreams of flying. Dreams of falling. Wingless dreams where she couldn’t steer, couldn’t pull up. A plummeting bomb zeroing in on a man with his family, a man turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun, a glimpse of Charlotte’s father and mother and brother and herself before impact and loss of signal—
The nest of birds beneath her fell quiet. Charlotte untangled her fists from the sheets, which were damp with all that dreams wrung from terrified flesh. The room hung heavy and somber around her. She could feel the empty bunks all around, that sense that her fellow pilots had been summoned away in the night, leaving her alone. She rose and padded across the hall to the bathroom, feeling her way and sliding the switches up just a fraction to keep the lights dim. She understood sometimes why her brother had lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse. Shadows of un-people stalked those halls. She could feel herself pass through the ghosts of the sleeping.
She flushed and washed her hands. There was no going back to her bunk, no chance of returning to sleep, not after that dream. Charlotte tugged on a pair of the red coveralls Donny had brought her, one of three colors, a little variety for her locked-up life. She couldn’t remember what the blue or gold ones were for, but she remembered reactor red. The red coveralls had pouches and slots for tools. She wore them while working, and so they were rarely the cleanest. Loaded up, the coveralls weighed near on twenty pounds, and they rattled as she walked. She zipped up the front and made her way down the hallway.
Curiously, the lights in the warehouse were already on. It had to be in the middle of the night. She was good about turning them off, and nobody else had access to that level. Her mouth suddenly dry, she crept towards the nearby drones under their tarps, the sound of whispers leaking from the shadows.
Beyond the drones — near the tall shelves with boxes of spares and tools and emergency rations — a man knelt over the still form of another. The figure turned at the sound of her jangling tools.
“Donny?”
“Yeah?”
A flush of relief. The sprawling body beneath her brother wasn’t a body at all. It was a puffy suit laid out with its arms and legs spread, an empty and lifeless form.
“What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Late,” he said. He dabbed his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Or early, depending. Did I wake you?”
Charlotte watched as he shifted his body to block her view of the suit. Flopping one leg up, he began to fold the outfit in on itself. A pair of shears and a roll of silvery tape sat by his knees, a helmet, gloves, and a bottle like a dive tank nearby. A pair of boots as well. The fabric whispered as it moved; it was this that she had mistaken for voices.
“Hm? No, you didn’t wake me. I got up to go to the bathroom. Thought I heard something.”
It was a lie. She had come out to work on a drone in the middle of the night, anything to stay awake, to stay grounded. Donald nodded and pulled a rag from his breast pocket. He coughed into this before stuffing it away.
“What’re you doing up?” she asked.
“I was just going through some supplies.” Donny made a pile out of the suit parts. “Some things they needed above. Didn’t want to risk sending someone else down for them.” He glanced at his sister. “You want me to fetch you something hot for breakfast?”
Charlotte hugged herself and shook her head. She hated the reminder of being trapped on that level, needing him to get her things. “I’m getting used to the rations in the crates,” she told him. “The coconut bars in the MREs are growing on me.” She laughed. “I remember hating them during basic.”
“I really don’t mind getting you something,” Donny said, obviously looking for an excuse to get out of there, some way to change topics. “And I should have the last of what we need for the radio soon. I put in a requisition for a microphone, which I can’t find anywhere else. There’s one in the comm room that’s acting up, which I might steal if nothing else works.”
Charlotte nodded. She watched her brother stuff the suit back into one of the large plastic containers. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She recognized when he was holding something back. It was what big brothers did.
Crossing to the nearest drone, she pulled the tarp off and laid out a spanner set on the forward wing. She had always been clumsy with tools, but weeks of work on the drones, of persistence if not patience, and she was getting the hang of how they were put together. “So what do they need the suit for?” she asked, forcing herself to sound nonchalant.
“I think it’s something to do with the reactor.” He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Charlotte allowed the lie to echo a bit. She wanted her brother to hear it.
Opening the skin of the drone’s wing, Charlotte remembered coming home from basic training with new muscles and weeks of competitive fierceness forged among a squad of men. This was before she’d let herself go while on deployment. Back then, she’d been a wiry and fit teenager, her brother off at graduate school, and his first teasing remark about her new physique had landed him on the sofa, his arm pinned behind his back, laughing and teasing her further.
Laughing, that is, until a sofa cushion had been pressed to the side of his face, and Donny had squealed like a stuck pig. Fun and games had turned into something serious and scary, her brother’s fear of being buried alive awakening something primal in him, something she never teased him for and never wanted to see again.
Now she watched as he sealed the bin with the suit inside and slid it back under a shelf. It wasn’t needed elsewhere in the silo, she knew. Donald fumbled for his rag, and his coughing resumed. She pretended to be fixated on the drone while he had his fit. Donny didn’t want to talk about the suit or the problem with his lungs, and she didn’t blame him. Her brother was dying. Charlotte knew her brother was dying, could see him like she saw him in her dreams, turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun. She saw him the way she saw every man in that last instant of their lives. There was Donny’s beautiful face on her screen, watching the inevitable fall from the sky.
He was dying, which is why he wanted to stockpile food for her and make sure she could leave. It was why he wanted to make sure she had a radio, so she would have someone to talk to. Her brother was dying, and he didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to die down there in that pit in the ground where he couldn’t breathe.
Charlotte knew damn well what the suit was for.
11
The silicon-carbon batteries the drones ran on were the size of toaster ovens. Charlotte judged each one to weigh between thirty and forty pounds. They had been pulled from two of the drones and wrapped in webbing taken from one of the supply crates. Charlotte gripped one battery in each hand and took lunging squats in a slow lap around the warehouse, her thighs screaming and quivering, her arms numb.
A trail of sweat marked her progress, but she had a long way to go. How had she let herself get so out of shape? All the running and exercise during basic, just to sit at a console and fly a drone, to sit on her butt and play war games, to sit in a cafeteria and eat slop, to sit and read.
She’d gotten overweight, is what. And it hadn’t bothered her until she’d woken up in this nightmare. She’d never felt the urge to get up and move around until someone had frozen her stiff for a few hundred years. Now she wanted the body back that she remembered. Legs that worked. Arms that weren’t sore just from brushing her teeth. Maybe it was silly of her, thinking she could go back, be who she once was, return to a world she remembered. Or maybe she was being impatient with her recovery. These things took time.
She made it back around to the drones, a full lap. That she could complete a circuit of the room meant progress. It’d been a few weeks since her brother had woken her, and the routine of eating, exercising, and working on the drones was beginning to seem normal. The insane world she had been woken up to was starting to feel real. And that terrified her.
She lowered the batteries to the ground and took a series of deep breaths. Held them. The routine of military life had been similar. It had prepared her for this, was all that kept her from going crazy. Being cooped up was not new. Living in the middle of a desert wasteland where it wasn’t safe to go out was not new. Being surrounded by men she ought to fear was not new. Stationed in Iraq during the Second Iranian War, Charlotte had grown accustomed to these things, to not leaving base, to not wanting to leave her bunk or a bathroom stall. She was used to this struggle to keep sane. It was mental as much as physical exercise that was required.
She showered in one of the stalls down from drone control, toweled off, sniffed each of her three sets of coveralls, and decided it was time to prod Donny into doing laundry again. She pulled on the least offensive of the three, hung the towel to dry from the foot of an upper bunk, and then made up her bed Air Force crisp. Donald had once lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse, but Charlotte had almost grown comfortable in the barracks with its ghosts. It felt like home.
Down the hall from the barracks stood a room of pilot stations. Most were covered in plastic sheets. There was a flat desk along the same wall that bore a mosaic of large monitors. It was here that the radio set was being pieced together. Her brother had gathered a jumble of spare parts one at a time from the lower storerooms. It might be decades or even centuries before anyone noticed they were gone.
Charlotte flicked on the light bulb she’d rigged over the table and powered up the set. She could already get quite a few stations. She tuned the knob until she heard static and left it there, waiting on voices. Until then, she pretended it was the sea rolling up onto a beach. Sometimes it was rain on a canopy of fat leaves. Or a crowd of people quietly talking in a dark theater. She pawed through the bin of parts Donald had amassed and looked for a better set of speakers, still needed a microphone or some way to transmit. She wished she was more mechanically inclined. All she knew how to do was plug things together. It was like assembling a rifle or a computer — she just joined anything that would mate and flicked on the power. It had only resulted in smoke the one time. What it mostly took was patience, which she didn’t have a lot of. Or time, which she was drowning in.
Footsteps down the hall signaled breakfast. Charlotte turned down the volume and cleared room on the desk as Donny entered, a tray in his hands.
“Morning,” she said, getting up to take the tray from him. Her legs felt wobbly from the workout. As her brother stepped into the spill of light from the dangling bulb, she noted his frown. “Everything okay?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We might have a problem.”
Charlotte set the tray down. “What is it?”
“I ran into a guy I knew from my first shift. Was stuck on the lift with him. A handyman.”
“That’s not good.” She lifted the dented metal cover from one of the plates. There was an electrical board and a coil of wire beneath. Also, the small screwdriver she’d asked for.
“Your eggs are under the other one.”
She set the lid aside and grabbed her fork. “Did he recognize you?”
“I couldn’t tell. I kept my head down until he got off. But I knew him as well as I’ve known anyone in this place. It feels like yesterday that I borrowed tools from him, asked him to change a light for me. Who knows what it feels like for him. That might’ve been yesterday or a dozen years ago. Memory works weird in this place.”
Charlotte took a bite of eggs. Donny had put a touch too much salt on them. She imagined him up there with the shaker, his hand trembling. “Even if he did recognize you,” she said around a bite of food, “he might think you’re on another shift as yourself. How many people know you as Thurman?”
Donald shook his head. “Not many. But still, this could come crashing down on us at any moment. I’m going to bring some food up from the pantry, more dry goods. Also, I went in and changed the clearance for your badge so you can access the lifts. And I double-checked that no one else could get down here. I’d hate for you to get trapped if something happened to me.”
Charlotte moved her eggs around her plate. “I don’t like thinking about that,” she said.
“Another bit of a problem. The head of this silo is going off shift in a week, which will make things a little complicated. I’m relying on him to orient the next guy to my status. Things have been going a little too smoothly thus far—”
Charlotte laughed and took another bite of eggs. “Too smoothly,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d hate to see rough. What’s the latest on your favorite silo?”
“The IT head picked up today. Lukas.”
Charlotte thought her brother sounded disappointed. “And?” she asked. “Learn anything new?”
“He managed to crack another server. It’s more of the same data, everything about its residents, every job they’ve had, who they’re related to, from birth to death. I don’t understand how those machines go from that information to this ranked list. It seems like a bunch of noise, like there has to be something else.”
He produced a sheet of folded paper, a new printout of the rankings of the silos. Charlotte cleared a space on the workbench, and he smoothed the report.
“See? The order has changed again. But what determines that?”
She studied the report while she ate, and Donald grabbed one of his folders of notes. He spent a lot of time working in the conference room where he could spread things out and pace back and forth, but Charlotte preferred it when he sat at that drone station. He would sit there for hours sometimes, going through his notes while Charlotte worked on the radio, the two of them listening for chatter among the static.
“Silo six is back on top again,” she muttered. It was like reading the side of a cereal box while she ate, all those numbers that made little sense. One column was labeled Facility, which Donald said was what they used to call the silos. Beside each silo was a percentage like a massive dose of daily vitamins: 99.992%, 99.989%, 99.987%, 99.984%. The last silo with a percentage read 99.974%. Every silo below this was marked off or had N/A listed. Silos 40, 12, 17, and a handful of others were included in that latter category.
“You still think the one on top is the only one that gets to survive?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Have you told these people you’re talking to? Because they’re way down the list.”
He just looked at her and frowned.
“You haven’t. You’re just using them to help you figure all this out.”
“I’m not using them. Hell, I saved that silo. I save it every day that I don’t report what’s going on over there.”
“Okay,” Charlotte said. She returned to her eggs.
“Besides, they probably figure they’re using me. Hell, I think they get more out of our talks than I do. Lukas, the one who heads up their IT, he peppers me with all these questions about the way the world used to be—”
“And the mayor?” Charlotte turned and studied her brother closely. “What does she get out of it?”
“Juliette?” Donald thumbed through a folder. “She enjoys threatening me.”
Charlotte laughed. “I would love to hear that.”
“If you get that radio sorted, you might.”
“And then you’ll spend more time working down here? It would be good, you know. Lessen the risk of being recognized.” She scraped her plate with her fork, not willing to admit the real reason she wanted him down there more was how empty the place felt when he was gone.
“Absolutely.” Her brother rubbed his face, and Charlotte saw how tired he was. Her gaze fell back to the numbers while she ate.
“It makes it seem arbitrary, doesn’t it?” she wondered aloud. “If these numbers mean what you think they mean. They’re functionally equivalent.”
“I doubt the people who planned all this look at it that way. All they need is one of them. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s like a bunch of spares in a box. You pluck one out, and all you care about is if it’ll work. That’s it. They just want to see everything is one hundred percent all the way down.”
Charlotte couldn’t believe that’s what they had in mind. But Donny had shown her the Pact and enough of his notes to convince her. All the silos but one would be exterminated. Their own included.
“How long before the next drone is ready?” he asked.
Charlotte took a sip of juice. “Another day or two. Maybe three. I’m really going light with this one. Not even sure if it’ll fly.” The last two hadn’t made it as far as the first. She was getting desperate.
“Okay.” He rubbed his face again, his palms muffling his voice. “We’re gonna have to decide before too long what we’re gonna do. If we do nothing, this nightmare plays out for another two hundred years, and you and I won’t last that long.” He started to laugh, but it turned into a cough. Donald fished into his coveralls for his handkerchief, and Charlotte looked away. She studied the dark monitors while he had one of his fits.
She didn’t want to admit this to him, but her inclination was to let it play out. It seemed as if a bunch of precision machines were in control of humanity’s fate, and she tended to trust computers a lot more than her brother did. She had spent years flying drones that could fly themselves, that could make decisions on which targets to hit, could guide missiles to precise locations. She often felt less like a pilot and more like a jockey, a person on a beast that could race along on its own, that only needed someone there to occasionally take the reins or shout encouragement.
She glanced over the numbers on the report again. Hundredths of a percentage point would decide who lived and who died. And most would die. She and her brother would either be asleep or long dead by the time it happened. The numbers made this looming holocaust seem so damn… arbitrary.
Donald used the folder in his hand to point at the report. “Did you notice eighteen moved up two spots?”
She had noticed. “You don’t think you’ve become too… attached, do you?”
He looked away. “I have a history with this silo. That’s all.”
Charlotte hesitated. She didn’t want to press further, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t mean the silo,” she said. “You seem… different each time you talk to her.”
He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “She was sent to clean,” he said. “She’s been outside.”
For a moment Charlotte thought that was all he was going to say on the matter. As if this were enough, as if it explained everything. He was quiet a pause, his eyes flicking back and forth.
“No one is supposed to come back from that,” he finally said. “I don’t think the computers take this into account. Not just what she survived, but that eighteen is hanging in there. By all accounts, they shouldn’t be. If they make it through this… you wonder if they don’t give us the best hope.”
“You wonder,” Charlotte said, correcting him. She waved the piece of paper. “There’s no way we’re smarter than these computers, brother.”
Donald appeared sad. “We can be more compassionate than them,” he said.
Charlotte fought the urge to argue. She wanted to point out that he cared about this silo because of the personal contact. If he knew the people behind any of the other silos — if he knew their stories — would he root for them? It would be cruel to suggest this, however true.
Donald coughed into his rag. He caught Charlotte staring at him, glanced at the bloodstained cloth, put it away.
“I’m scared,” she told him.
Donald shook his head. “I’m not. I’m not afraid of this. I’m not afraid of dying.”
“I know you’re not. That’s obvious, or you would see someone. But you have to be afraid of something.”
“I am. Plenty. I’m afraid of being buried alive. I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing.”
“Then do nothing,” she insisted. She nearly begged him right then to put a stop to this madness, to their isolation. They could go back to sleep and leave this to the machines and to the God-awful plans of others. “Let’s not do anything,” she pleaded.
Her brother rose from his seat, squeezed her arm, and turned to leave. “That might be the worst thing,” he quietly said.
12
That night, Charlotte awoke from a nightmare of flying. She sat up in her cot, springs crying out like a nest of birds, and could still feel herself swooping down through the clouds, the wind on her face.
Always dreams of flying. Dreams of falling. Wingless dreams where she couldn’t steer, couldn’t pull up. A plummeting bomb zeroing in on a man with his family, a man turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun, a glimpse of Charlotte’s father and mother and brother and herself before impact and loss of signal—
The nest of birds beneath her fell quiet. Charlotte untangled her fists from the sheets, which were damp with all that dreams wrung from terrified flesh. The room hung heavy and somber around her. She could feel the empty bunks all around, that sense that her fellow pilots had been summoned away in the night, leaving her alone. She rose and padded across the hall to the bathroom, feeling her way and sliding the switches up just a fraction to keep the lights dim. She understood sometimes why her brother had lived in the conference room at the other end of the warehouse. Shadows of un-people stalked those halls. She could feel herself pass through the ghosts of the sleeping.
She flushed and washed her hands. There was no going back to her bunk, no chance of returning to sleep, not after that dream. Charlotte tugged on a pair of the red coveralls Donny had brought her, one of three colors, a little variety for her locked-up life. She couldn’t remember what the blue or gold ones were for, but she remembered reactor red. The red coveralls had pouches and slots for tools. She wore them while working, and so they were rarely the cleanest. Loaded up, the coveralls weighed near on twenty pounds, and they rattled as she walked. She zipped up the front and made her way down the hallway.
Curiously, the lights in the warehouse were already on. It had to be in the middle of the night. She was good about turning them off, and nobody else had access to that level. Her mouth suddenly dry, she crept towards the nearby drones under their tarps, the sound of whispers leaking from the shadows.
Beyond the drones — near the tall shelves with boxes of spares and tools and emergency rations — a man knelt over the still form of another. The figure turned at the sound of her jangling tools.
“Donny?”
“Yeah?”
A flush of relief. The sprawling body beneath her brother wasn’t a body at all. It was a puffy suit laid out with its arms and legs spread, an empty and lifeless form.
“What time is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Late,” he said. He dabbed his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Or early, depending. Did I wake you?”
Charlotte watched as he shifted his body to block her view of the suit. Flopping one leg up, he began to fold the outfit in on itself. A pair of shears and a roll of silvery tape sat by his knees, a helmet, gloves, and a bottle like a dive tank nearby. A pair of boots as well. The fabric whispered as it moved; it was this that she had mistaken for voices.
“Hm? No, you didn’t wake me. I got up to go to the bathroom. Thought I heard something.”
It was a lie. She had come out to work on a drone in the middle of the night, anything to stay awake, to stay grounded. Donald nodded and pulled a rag from his breast pocket. He coughed into this before stuffing it away.
“What’re you doing up?” she asked.
“I was just going through some supplies.” Donny made a pile out of the suit parts. “Some things they needed above. Didn’t want to risk sending someone else down for them.” He glanced at his sister. “You want me to fetch you something hot for breakfast?”
Charlotte hugged herself and shook her head. She hated the reminder of being trapped on that level, needing him to get her things. “I’m getting used to the rations in the crates,” she told him. “The coconut bars in the MREs are growing on me.” She laughed. “I remember hating them during basic.”
“I really don’t mind getting you something,” Donny said, obviously looking for an excuse to get out of there, some way to change topics. “And I should have the last of what we need for the radio soon. I put in a requisition for a microphone, which I can’t find anywhere else. There’s one in the comm room that’s acting up, which I might steal if nothing else works.”
Charlotte nodded. She watched her brother stuff the suit back into one of the large plastic containers. There was something he wasn’t telling her. She recognized when he was holding something back. It was what big brothers did.
Crossing to the nearest drone, she pulled the tarp off and laid out a spanner set on the forward wing. She had always been clumsy with tools, but weeks of work on the drones, of persistence if not patience, and she was getting the hang of how they were put together. “So what do they need the suit for?” she asked, forcing herself to sound nonchalant.
“I think it’s something to do with the reactor.” He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Charlotte allowed the lie to echo a bit. She wanted her brother to hear it.
Opening the skin of the drone’s wing, Charlotte remembered coming home from basic training with new muscles and weeks of competitive fierceness forged among a squad of men. This was before she’d let herself go while on deployment. Back then, she’d been a wiry and fit teenager, her brother off at graduate school, and his first teasing remark about her new physique had landed him on the sofa, his arm pinned behind his back, laughing and teasing her further.
Laughing, that is, until a sofa cushion had been pressed to the side of his face, and Donny had squealed like a stuck pig. Fun and games had turned into something serious and scary, her brother’s fear of being buried alive awakening something primal in him, something she never teased him for and never wanted to see again.
Now she watched as he sealed the bin with the suit inside and slid it back under a shelf. It wasn’t needed elsewhere in the silo, she knew. Donald fumbled for his rag, and his coughing resumed. She pretended to be fixated on the drone while he had his fit. Donny didn’t want to talk about the suit or the problem with his lungs, and she didn’t blame him. Her brother was dying. Charlotte knew her brother was dying, could see him like she saw him in her dreams, turning at the last minute to shield his eyes against the noonday sun. She saw him the way she saw every man in that last instant of their lives. There was Donny’s beautiful face on her screen, watching the inevitable fall from the sky.
He was dying, which is why he wanted to stockpile food for her and make sure she could leave. It was why he wanted to make sure she had a radio, so she would have someone to talk to. Her brother was dying, and he didn’t want to be buried, didn’t want to die down there in that pit in the ground where he couldn’t breathe.
Charlotte knew damn well what the suit was for.
Silo 18
13
An empty cleaning suit lay spread across the workbench, one of its arms draped over the edge, elbow bent at an unnatural angle. The unblinking visor of the detached helmet gazed silently up at the ceiling. The small screen inside the helmet had been removed to leave a clear plastic window out on the real world. Juliette leaned over the suit, occasional drops of sweat smacking its surface, as she tightened the hex screws that held the lower collar onto the fabric. She remembered the last time she’d built a suit like this.
Nelson, the young IT tech in charge of the cleaning lab, labored at an identical bench on the other side of the workshop. Juliette had selected him as her assistant for this project. He was familiar with the suits, young, and didn’t appear to be against her. Not that the first two criteria mattered.
“The next item we need to discuss is the population report,” Marsha said. The young assistant — an assistant Juliette had never asked for — juggled a dozen folders until she found the right one. Recycled paper lay strewn across the neighboring workbench, turning an area for building things into a lowly desk. Juliette glanced up and watched as Marsha shuffled through a folder. Her assistant was a slight girl just out of her teens, graced with rosy cheeks and dark hair in tight coils. Marsha had been the assistant to the last two mayors, a short but tumultuous span of time. Like the gold ID card and the apartment on level six, she had come with the job.
“Here it is,” Marsha said. She bit her lip and scanned the report, and Juliette saw that it was printed on one side only. The amount of paper her office went through and repulped could afford to feed an apartment level for a year. Lukas had once joked that it was to keep the recyclers in business. The chance he was right had kept her from laughing.
“Can you hand me those gaskets?” Juliette asked, pointing to Marsha’s side of the workbench.
The young girl pointed to a bin of lock washers. And then an assortment of cotter pins. Finally, her hand drifted over the gaskets. Juliette nodded. “Thanks.”
“So, we’re under five thousand residents for the first time in thirty years,” Marsha said, returning to her report. “We’ve had a lot of… passings.” Juliette could feel Marsha glance up at her, even as she concentrated on seating the gasket into the collar. “The lottery committee is calling for an official count, just so we can get a sense of—”
“The lottery committee would perform a census every week if they could.” Juliette rubbed oil onto the gasket with her finger before seating the other side of the collar.
Marsha laughed politely. “Yes, well, they want to hold another lottery soon. They asked for another two hundred numbers.”
“Numbers,” Juliette grumbled. Sometimes she thought that was all Lukas’s computers were good for, a bunch of tall machines to pull numbers from their whirring butts. “Did you tell them my idea about an amnesty? They do know we’re about to double our space, right?”
Marsha shifted uncomfortably. “I told them,” she said. “And I told them about the extra space. I don’t think they took it so well.”
Across the workshop, Nelson looked up from the suit he was working on. It was just the three of them in the old lab where people had once been outfitted to die. Now they were working on something else, a different reason to send people outside.
“Well, what did the committee say?” Juliette asked. “They do know that when we reach this other silo, I’m going to need people to come with me and get it up and running again. The population here is going to dip.”
Nelson bent back to his work. Marsha closed the folder on the population report and looked at her feet.
“What did they say to my idea of suspending the lottery?”
“They didn’t say anything,” Marsha said. She glanced up, and the overhead lights caught the wet film across her eyes. “I don’t think many of them believe in your other silo.”
Juliette laughed and shook her head. Her hand was trembling as she set the last lock screw into the collar. “It doesn’t really matter what the committee believes, does it?” Though she knew this was true of her as well. It was true of anyone. The world out there was the way it was no matter how much doubt or hope or hate a person breathed into it. “The dig is underway. They’re clearing three hundred feet a day. I suppose the lottery committee will just have to make the trip down to see for themselves. You should tell them that. Tell them to go see.”
Marsha frowned and made a note. “The next thing on the agenda…” She grabbed her ledger. “There’s been a rash of complaints about—”
There was a knock at the door. Juliette turned, and Lukas entered the Suit Lab, smiling. He waved at Nelson, who saluted back with a 3/8 spanner. Lukas seemed unsurprised to see Marsha there. He clasped her on the shoulder. “You should just move that big wooden desk of hers down here,” he joked. “You’ve got the porting budget for it.”
Marsha smiled and tugged at one of her dark springs. She looked around the lab. “I really should,” she said.
Juliette watched her young assistant blush in Lukas’s presence and laughed to herself. The helmet locked into the collar with a neat click. Juliette tested the release mechanism.
“Do you mind if I borrow the mayor?” Lukas asked.
“No, I don’t mind,” Marsha said.
“I do.” Juliette studied one of the suit’s sleeves. “We’re way behind schedule.”
Lukas frowned. “There is no schedule. You set the schedule. And besides, have you even gotten permission for this?” He stood beside Marsha and crossed his arms. “Have you even told your assistant what you’re planning?”
Juliette glanced up guiltily. “Not yet.”
“Why? What’re you doing?” Marsha lowered her ledger and studied the suits for what seemed the first time.
Juliette ignored her. She glared at Lukas. “I’m behind schedule because I want to get this done before they complete the dig. They’ve been on a tear. Hit some soft soil. I’d really like to be down there when they punch through.”
“And I’d like for you to be at that meeting today, which you’re going to miss if you don’t get a move on.”
“I’m not going,” Juliette said.
Lukas shot a look at Nelson, who set down his spanner, gathered Marsha, and slid out the door. Juliette watched them leave and realized her young Lukas had more authority than she gave him credit for.
“It’s the monthly town hall,” Lukas said. “The first since your election. I told Judge Picken you’d be there. Jules, you’ve gotta play mayor or you won’t be one for much longer—”
“Fine.” She raised her hands. “I’m not mayor. I so decree it.” She scrawled the air with a driver. “Signed and stamped.”
“Not fine. What do you think the next person will make of all this?” He waved his hand at the workbenches. “You think you’ll be able to play these games? This room will go right back to what it was built for in the first place.”
Juliette bit down the urge to snap at him, to tell him these weren’t games she was playing, that it was something far worse.
Lukas looked away from whatever face she was making. His eyes settled on the stack of books piled up by the cot she had brought in. She slept there sometimes when the two of them were disagreeing or when she just needed a place to be alone. Not that she’d slept much recently. She rubbed her eyes and tried to remember the last time she’d gotten four hours in a row. Her nights were spent welding in the airlock. Her days were spent in the Suit Lab or down behind the comm hub. She didn’t really sleep anymore — she just passed out here and there.
“We should keep those locked up,” Lukas said, indicating the books. “Shouldn’t keep them out.”
“No one would believe them if they opened them,” Juliette said.
“For the paper.”
She nodded. He was right. She saw information; others would see money. “I’ll take them back down,” she promised, and the anger drained away like oil from a cracked casing. She thought of Elise, who had told her over the radio of a book she was making, a single book from all her favorite pages. Juliette needed a book like that. Except where Elise’s was probably full of pretty fish and bright birds, Juliette’s would catalog darker things. Things in the hearts of men.
Lukas took a step closer. He rested a hand on her arm. “This meeting—”
“I hear they’re thinking about a revote,” Juliette said, cutting him off. She wiped a loose strand of hair off her face, tucked it behind her ear. “I’m not going to be mayor for long anyway. Which is why I need to get this done. By the time everyone votes again, it shouldn’t matter.”
“Why? Because you’ll be the mayor of a different silo by then? Is that your plan?”
Juliette rested a hand on the domed helmet. “No. Because I’ll have my answers by then. Because people will see by then. They’ll believe me.”
Lukas crossed his arms. He took a deep breath. “I’ve got to get down to the servers,” he said. “If no one’s there to answer the call, the lights eventually start flashing in the offices and everyone asks what the hell they’re for.”
Juliette nodded. She’d seen it for herself. She also knew that Lukas liked the long talks behind the server as much as she did. Except that he was better at it. All her talks led to arguments. He was good at smoothing things over, figuring things out.
“Please tell me you’ll go to the meeting, Jules. Promise me you’ll go.”
She scanned the suit on the other table to see how far along Nelson was. They’d need one more suit for the extra person in the second airlock. If she worked through the night and all day tomorrow—
“For me,” he pleaded.
“I’ll go.”
“Thank you.” Lukas glanced at the old clock on the wall, its red arms visible behind hazed plastic. “I’ll see you for dinner?”
“Sure.”
He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. When he turned to go, Juliette began arranging her tools on the leather pad, setting them aside for later. She picked up a clean cloth and wiped her hands. “Oh, and Luke?”
“Yeah?” He paused at the door.
“Tell that fucker I said hello.”
14
Lukas left the Suit Lab and headed toward the server room on the other side of thirty-four. He passed a tech room that sat empty. The men and women who used to work in there now took up slack in the Down Deep and in Supply where mechanics and workers had lost their lives. People from IT sent to replace those they’d killed.
Juliette’s friend Shirly had been left in charge of the aftermath down in Mechanical. She was forever complaining to his office about skeleton shifts, and then complaining again when Lukas reassigned anyone to help. What did she want from him? People, he supposed. Just not his people.
A handful of techs and security personnel standing outside the break room fell silent as Lukas approached. He waved, and hands went up politely. “Sir,” someone said, which made him cringe. The chatter resumed only after he rounded the corner, and Lukas remembered being in on conversations like that as his former boss had stormed past.
Bernard. Lukas used to think he understood what it meant to be in charge. You did what you wanted. Decisions were arbitrary. You were cruel for the sake of being cruel. And now he found himself agreeing to worse things than he had ever imagined. Now he knew about a world of such horrors, that maybe men of his ilk weren’t suited to lead. It wasn’t a thing he could ever say out loud, but perhaps a revote would be for the best. Juliette would make a great lab tech there in IT. Soldering and welding weren’t all that different, just matters of scale. And then he tried to imagine her building a suit for someone to clean in, or her sitting idly by while they took orders from another silo on how many births were allowed that week.
It was more likely that a new mayor would mean time apart. Or that he would have to file for a transfer to Mechanical and learn to turn a wrench. From head of IT to a third-shift greaser. Lukas laughed. He coded open the server room door and thought there might be something romantic about that, giving up his job and life to be with her. Maybe something more romantic than going up at night to hunt for stars. He would have to get used to Juliette bossing him around, but that wouldn’t be a stretch. Enough degreaser, and her old room down there could be livable. As he wove his way through the servers, he thought of how he had lived in far worse, right there beneath his feet. It was being together that mattered.
The lights overhead weren’t yet blinking. He was early or the man named Donald was late. Lukas made his way toward the far wall, passing by several servers with their sides off and wires streaming out. With Donald’s help, he was figuring out how to fully access the machines, see what was on them. Nothing exciting yet, but he was making progress.
He stopped at the comm server, which had been his home within a home some lifetime ago. Now it was a different sort of conversation he fell into behind that server. It was a different sort of person on the other end of the line.
One of the rickety wooden chairs from below had been brought up. Lukas remembered climbing the ladder and pushing it ahead of him, Juliette yelling at him that they should lower a rope, the two of them arguing like young porters. Beside the chair, a stack of book tins made a side table of sorts. One of the Legacy books was splayed out on top. Lukas made himself comfortable and picked up the book. He had marked pages by creasing the corners. There were small dots in the margins where he had questions. He flipped through the book and scanned the material while he waited on the call.
What once had been boring about the books was now all he cared about. During his imprisonment — his Rite — he had been forced to read the parts of the Order on human behavior. Now he pored over these sections. And Donald, the voice on the other end of the line, had him fairly convinced that these were more than mere stories, these Robbers Cave boys and Milgrams and Skinners. Some of these things had truly happened.
He had graduated from these stories to find even more lessons in the Legacy books. It was the history of the old world that now commanded his attention. Episodic uprisings had occurred over thousands of years. He and Jules argued over whether or not there could be an end to such cyclic violence. The books suggested such hope was folly. And then Lukas had discovered an entire chapter on the dangers of an uprising’s aftermath, the very situation in which they now found themselves. He read about men with strange names — Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Lenin — who fought to liberate a people and then enslaved them into something even worse.
They were legends, Juliette insisted. Myths. Like the ghouls parents use to make their children behave. She saw those chapters to mean that tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. Always with the tearing down, she said, as if the scraps and ashes could be pieced back together.
Lukas disagreed. He thought, and Donald said, that these stories were real. Yes, the revolutions were painful. There would always be a period when things were worse. But eventually, they get better. People learn from their mistakes. This is what he had tried to convince her of one night after a call from Donald had kept them up through the dim time. Jules, of course, had to get in the last word. She had taken him up to the cafeteria and had pointed to the glow over the horizon, to the lifeless hills, to the rare glint of sunlight on decrepit towers. “Here is your world made better,” she had told him. “Here is man well learned from his mistakes.”
Always with the last word, though Lukas had more to say. “Maybe this is the bad time that comes before,” he had whispered into his coffee. And Juliette, for her part, had pretended not to hear.
The pages beneath Lukas’s fingers pulsed red. He glanced up at the lights overhead, now flashing with the incoming call. There was a buzzing from the comm server, a blinking indicator over the very first slot. He gathered the headset and untangled the cord, slotted it into the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Lukas.” The machine removed all intonation from the voice, all emotion. Except for disappointment. That it was not Juliette who answered elicited a letdown that could be felt if not quite heard. Or perhaps it was all in Lukas’s head.
“Just me,” he said.
“Very well. Just so you know, I have pressing matters here. Our time is short.”
“Okay.” Lukas found his place in the book. He skipped down to where they’d previously left off. These talks reminded him of his studies with Bernard, except now he had graduated from the Order to the Legacy. And Donald was swifter than Bernard, more open with his answers. “So… I wanted to ask you something about this Rousseau guy—”
“Before we do,” Donald said, “I need to implore you again to stop with the digging.”
Lukas closed the book on his finger, marking his place. He was glad Juliette had agreed to attend the Town Hall. She got animated whenever this topic came up. Because of an old threat she’d made, Donald seemed to think they were digging toward him, and she made Lukas vow to leave the lie alone. She didn’t want them finding out about her friends in 17 or her plans to rescue them. Lukas found the ruse uncomfortable. Where Juliette distrusted this man — who had warned them both that their home could be shut down at any time through mysterious means — Lukas saw someone trying to help them at some cost to himself. Jules thought Donald was scared for his own life. Lukas thought Donald was frightened for them.
“I’m afraid that the digging will have to continue,” Lukas said. He nearly blurted out: She won’t stop, but best for there to be some sense of solidarity.
“Well, my people can pick up the vibrations. They know something is happening.”
“Can you tell them we’re having trouble with our generator? That it’s misaligned again?”
There was a disappointed sigh that the computers couldn’t touch. “They’re smarter than that. What I’ve done is ordered them not to waste their time looking into it, which is all I can do. I’m telling you, nothing good can come of this.”
“Then why are you helping us? Why stick your neck out? Because that’s what it seems like you’re doing.”
“My job is to see that you don’t die.”
Lukas studied the inside of the server tower, the winking lights, the wires, the boards. “Yeah, but these conversations, going through these books with me, calling every single day like clockwork, why do you do it? I mean… what is it that you get out of these conversations?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, a rare lack of surety from the steady voice of their supposed benefactor.
“It’s because… I get to help you remember.”
“And that’s important?”
“Yes. It’s important. It is to me. I know what it feels like to forget.”
“Is that why these books are here?”
Another pause. Lukas felt that he was stumbling accidentally toward some truth. He would have to remember what was being said and tell Juliette later.
“They are there so that whoever inherits the world — whoever is chosen — will know…”
“Know what?” Lukas asked desperately. He feared he was going to lose him. Donald had trod near to this in prior conversations, but had always pulled away.
“To know how to set things right,” Donald said. “Look, our time is up. I need to go.”
“What did you mean about inheriting the world?”
“Next time. I need to go. Stay safe.”
“Yeah,” Lukas said. “You too—”
But his headphone had already clicked. The man who somehow knew so much about the old world had signed off.
15
Juliette had never attended a Town Hall before. Like sows giving birth, she knew such things took place, but had never felt the urge to witness the spectacle. Her first time would be while as mayor, and she hoped it would be her last.
She joined Judge Picken and Sheriff Billings on the raised platform while residents spilled from the hallway and found their seats. The platform they’d put her on reminded her of the stage in the bazaar, and Juliette remembered her father comparing these meetings to plays. She never took him to mean that as a compliment.
“I don’t know any of my lines,” she whispered cryptically to Peter Billings.
The two of them sat close enough that their shoulders touched. “You’ll do fine,” Peter said. He smiled at a young woman in the front row, who wiggled her fingers back at him, and Juliette saw that the young sheriff had met someone. Life was continuing apace.
She tried to relax. She studied the crowd. A lot of unfamiliar faces out there. A few she recognized. Three doors led in from the hallway. Two of the doors opened on aisles that sliced through the rows of ancient benches. The third aisle was pressed against the wall. They divided the room into thirds, much as less-well-defined boundaries partitioned the silo. Juliette didn’t have to be told these things. The people making their way inside made it obvious.
The Up Top benches in the center of the room were already packed, and more people stood behind the benches at the back of the hall, people she recognized from IT and from the cafeteria. The Mids benches off to one side were half full. Juliette noticed most of these residents sat close to the aisle, as near to the center as possible. Farmers in green. Hydroponic plumbers. People with dreams. The other side of the room was nearly bare. This was for the Down Deep. An elderly couple sat together in the front row of this section, holding hands. Juliette recognized the man, a bootmaker. They had come a long way. Juliette kept waiting for more residents of the Deep to show, but it was too much of a hike. And now she recalled how distant these meetings seemed while working in the depths of the silo. Often, she and her friends only heard what was being discussed and what rules were being passed after it had already happened. Not only was it a far climb, but most of them were too busy surviving the day-to-day to trudge anywhere for a discussion on tomorrows.
When the flow of residents became a trickle, Judge Picken rose to begin the meeting. Juliette prepared to be bored half to death by the proceedings. A quick talk, an introduction, and then they would listen to what ailed the people. Promise to make it better. Get right back to doing the same things.
What she needed to do was get back to work. There was so much that needed accomplishing up at the airlock and down in the Suit Lab. The last thing she wanted to do was listen to minor grievances, a call for a revote, or anyone bitching about her digging. She suspected what was serious to others would feel minor to her. There was something about being sent to one’s death and surviving a baptism of fire upon one’s return that pushed most squabblings into the deepest recesses of one’s mind.
Picken banged his gavel and called the meeting to order. He welcomed everyone and ran down the prepared docket. Juliette squirmed on her bench. She gazed out into the crowd and saw that the vast majority were gazing right back at her rather than watching the judge. She only caught the end of Picken’s last sentence because of her name: “—hear from your mayor, Juliette Nichols.”
He turned and waved her up to the podium. Peter patted her on the knee for encouragement. As she walked to the podium, the metal decking creaked beneath her boots where it wasn’t screwed down tight. That was the only sound. And then someone in the audience coughed. And there was a rustling among the benches as bodies lurched back into motion. Juliette gripped the podium and marveled at the mix of colors facing her, the blues and whites and reds and browns and greens. Scowls above them, she saw. Angry people from all walks of life. She cleared her throat and realized how unprepared she was. She had hoped to say a few words, to thank the people for their concerns, to assure them that she was working tirelessly to forge a new and better life for them. Just give her a chance, she wanted to say.
“Thank you—” she began, and Judge Picken tugged on her arm and pointed to the microphone attached to the podium. Someone in the back shouted that they couldn’t hear. Juliette swiveled the microphone closer and saw that the faces in the crowd were the same as those along the stairwell. They were wary of her. Awe, or something like it, had eroded into suspicion.
“I’m here today to listen to your questions. Your concerns,” she said, the loudness of her voice startling her. “Before I do, I’d like to say a few things about what we hope to accomplish this year—”
“Did you let poison in here?” someone yelled from the back.
“Excuse me?” Juliette asked. She cleared her throat.
A lady stood up, a baby in her arms. “My child’s had a fever ever since you returned!”
“Are the other silos real?” someone shouted.
“What was it like out there?”
A man bolted up from the Mids benches, his face ruddy with rage. “What’re you doin’ down there that’s causing so much noise—?”
A dozen others stood and began shouting as well. Their questions and complaints forged a single noise, an engine of anger. The packed center section spilled outward into the aisles as people needed room to point and wave for attention. Juliette saw her father, standing in the very back, noticeable for his placid demeanor, his worried frown.
“One at a time—” Juliette said. She held her palms out. The crowd lurched forward, and then a shot rang out.
Juliette flinched.
There was another loud bang right beside her, and the gavel was no longer limp in Judge Picken’s hand. The wooden disc on the podium leapt and spun as he pounded it back into place, over and over. Deputy Hoyle lurched out of a trance by the door and swam through the crowds in the aisle, urging everyone back into their seats and to hold their tongues. Peter Billings was up from the bench yelling for everyone to be calm as well. Eventually, a tense silence fell over the crowd. But something was whirring in these people. It was like a motor not yet running but one that wanted to, an electrical buzz just beneath the surface, humming and holding back. Juliette chose her words carefully.
“I can’t tell you what it’s like out there—”
“Can’t or won’t?” someone asked. This person was silenced by a glare from Deputy Hoyle, who ranged the aisle. Juliette took a deep breath.
“I can’t tell you because we don’t know.” She raised her hands to hold the crowd still a moment. “Everything we’ve been told about the world beyond our walls has been a lie, a fabrication—”
“How do we know you’re not the one lying?”
She sought the voice among the crowd. “Because I’m the one admitting that we don’t know a damned thing. I’m the one who came here today to tell you that we should go out and see for ourselves. With fresh eyes. With real curiosity. I’m proposing that we do what has never been done, and that’s to go and take a sample, to bring back a taste of the air out there and see what’s wrong with the world—”
Outbursts from the back drowned out the rest of her sentence. People were up out of their seats again, even as others reached to restrain them. Some were curious now. Some were even more outraged. The gavel barked, and Hoyle loosed his baton and waved it at the front row. But the crowd was beyond calming. Peter stepped forward, a hand on the butt of his gun.
Juliette backed away from the podium. There was a squeal from the speakers as Judge Picken knocked the microphone with his arm. The wooden puck was lost, leaving him to bang on the podium itself, which Juliette saw was marked with half-moon frowns and smiles from past attempts at restoring calm.
Deputy Hoyle had to back up against the stage as the crowd lurched forward, many of them with questions still, most with unbridled fury. Spittle foamed on quivering lips. Juliette heard more accusations, saw the lady with her baby who blamed Juliette for some sickness. Marsha ran to the back of the stage and threw open a metal door painted to look like real wood — and Peter waved Juliette inside, back to the Judge’s chambers. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to calm these people down, to tell them she meant well, that she could fix this if they would just let her try. But she was being dragged back, past a cloakroom of dark robes that hung like shadows, steered down a hall where pictures of past judges hung askew, to an old metal desk painted to resemble the door.
The shouts were sealed off behind them. The door banging with fists for a moment, Peter cursing. Juliette collapsed into an old leather chair repaired with tape and held her face in her hands. Their anger was her anger. She could feel herself directing it toward Peter and Lukas, who had made her mayor. She could feel herself directing it toward Lukas for begging her to leave the digging and come up top, for making her come to this meeting. As if this rabble could be appeased.
A burst of noise filtered down the hall as the door opened for a moment. Juliette expected Judge Picken to join them. She was surprised to see her father instead.
“Dad.”
She rose from the old chair and crossed the room to greet him. Her father wrapped his arms around her, and Juliette found that place in the center of his chest where she could remember finding comfort as a child.
“I heard you might be here,” her father whispered.
Juliette didn’t say anything. As old as she felt, the years melted away to have him there, to have his arms around her.
“I also heard what you’re planning, and I don’t want you to go.”
Juliette stepped back to study her father. Peter excused himself. The noise from outside wasn’t as loud this time when the door cracked, and Juliette realized Judge Picken had allowed her father passage, was out there calming the crowd. Her dad had seen those people react to her, had heard what people had said. She fought back a sudden welling of tears.
“They didn’t give me a chance to explain—” she started, swiping at her eyes. “Dad, there are other worlds out there like our own. It’s crazy to sit here, fighting amongst ourselves, when there are other worlds—”
“I’m not talking about the digging,” her father said. “I heard what you’re planning up top.”
“You heard…” She wiped her eyes again. “Lukas—” she muttered.
“It wasn’t Lukas. That technician, Nelson, came by for a check-up, asked me if I was going to be on standby in case anything went wrong. I had to pretend to know what he was talking about. I assume you were going to announce your plans out there just now?” He glanced toward the cloakroom.
“We need to know what’s out there,” Juliette said. “Dad, they haven’t been trying to make it better. We don’t know the first thing—”
“Then let the next cleaner see. Let them sample when they’re sent out. Not you.”
She shook her head. “There won’t be anymore cleaning, Dad. Not while I’m mayor. I won’t send anyone out there.”
He placed a hand on her arm. “And I won’t let my daughter go.”
She pulled away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to. I’m taking every precaution. I promise.”
Her father’s face hardened. He turned his hand over and gazed at his palm.
“We could use your help,” she said, hoping to bridge any new rift she feared she was creating. “Nelson’s right. It would be nice to have a doctor on the team.”
“I don’t want any part in this,” he said. “Look what happened to you the last time.” He glanced at her neck, where the suit’s metal collar had left a hook of a scar.
“That was the fire,” Juliette told him, adjusting her coveralls.
“And the next time it’ll be something else.”
They studied one another in that chamber where people were quietly judged, and Juliette felt a familiar temptation to run away from conflict. It was countered by a new desire to bury her face in her father’s chest and sob in a way that women her age weren’t allowed, that mechanics never could.
“I don’t want to lose you again,” she told her dad. “You’re the only family I’ve got left. Please support me in this.”
It was difficult to say. Vulnerable and honest. A part of Lukas now lived inside of her — this was something he had imparted.
Juliette waited for the reaction and saw her father’s face relax. It may have been her imagination, but she thought he moved a step closer, let down his guard.
“I’ll give you a check-up before and after,” he said.
“Thank you. Oh, speaking of a check-up, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about.” She worked the long sleeve of her coveralls up her forearm and studied the white marks along her wrist. “Have you ever heard of scars going away with time? Lukas thought—” She looked up at her father. “Do they ever go away?”
Her father took a deep breath and held it awhile. His gaze drifted over her shoulder and far away.
“No,” he said. “Not scars. Not even with time.”
13
An empty cleaning suit lay spread across the workbench, one of its arms draped over the edge, elbow bent at an unnatural angle. The unblinking visor of the detached helmet gazed silently up at the ceiling. The small screen inside the helmet had been removed to leave a clear plastic window out on the real world. Juliette leaned over the suit, occasional drops of sweat smacking its surface, as she tightened the hex screws that held the lower collar onto the fabric. She remembered the last time she’d built a suit like this.
Nelson, the young IT tech in charge of the cleaning lab, labored at an identical bench on the other side of the workshop. Juliette had selected him as her assistant for this project. He was familiar with the suits, young, and didn’t appear to be against her. Not that the first two criteria mattered.
“The next item we need to discuss is the population report,” Marsha said. The young assistant — an assistant Juliette had never asked for — juggled a dozen folders until she found the right one. Recycled paper lay strewn across the neighboring workbench, turning an area for building things into a lowly desk. Juliette glanced up and watched as Marsha shuffled through a folder. Her assistant was a slight girl just out of her teens, graced with rosy cheeks and dark hair in tight coils. Marsha had been the assistant to the last two mayors, a short but tumultuous span of time. Like the gold ID card and the apartment on level six, she had come with the job.
“Here it is,” Marsha said. She bit her lip and scanned the report, and Juliette saw that it was printed on one side only. The amount of paper her office went through and repulped could afford to feed an apartment level for a year. Lukas had once joked that it was to keep the recyclers in business. The chance he was right had kept her from laughing.
“Can you hand me those gaskets?” Juliette asked, pointing to Marsha’s side of the workbench.
The young girl pointed to a bin of lock washers. And then an assortment of cotter pins. Finally, her hand drifted over the gaskets. Juliette nodded. “Thanks.”
“So, we’re under five thousand residents for the first time in thirty years,” Marsha said, returning to her report. “We’ve had a lot of… passings.” Juliette could feel Marsha glance up at her, even as she concentrated on seating the gasket into the collar. “The lottery committee is calling for an official count, just so we can get a sense of—”
“The lottery committee would perform a census every week if they could.” Juliette rubbed oil onto the gasket with her finger before seating the other side of the collar.
Marsha laughed politely. “Yes, well, they want to hold another lottery soon. They asked for another two hundred numbers.”
“Numbers,” Juliette grumbled. Sometimes she thought that was all Lukas’s computers were good for, a bunch of tall machines to pull numbers from their whirring butts. “Did you tell them my idea about an amnesty? They do know we’re about to double our space, right?”
Marsha shifted uncomfortably. “I told them,” she said. “And I told them about the extra space. I don’t think they took it so well.”
Across the workshop, Nelson looked up from the suit he was working on. It was just the three of them in the old lab where people had once been outfitted to die. Now they were working on something else, a different reason to send people outside.
“Well, what did the committee say?” Juliette asked. “They do know that when we reach this other silo, I’m going to need people to come with me and get it up and running again. The population here is going to dip.”
Nelson bent back to his work. Marsha closed the folder on the population report and looked at her feet.
“What did they say to my idea of suspending the lottery?”
“They didn’t say anything,” Marsha said. She glanced up, and the overhead lights caught the wet film across her eyes. “I don’t think many of them believe in your other silo.”
Juliette laughed and shook her head. Her hand was trembling as she set the last lock screw into the collar. “It doesn’t really matter what the committee believes, does it?” Though she knew this was true of her as well. It was true of anyone. The world out there was the way it was no matter how much doubt or hope or hate a person breathed into it. “The dig is underway. They’re clearing three hundred feet a day. I suppose the lottery committee will just have to make the trip down to see for themselves. You should tell them that. Tell them to go see.”
Marsha frowned and made a note. “The next thing on the agenda…” She grabbed her ledger. “There’s been a rash of complaints about—”
There was a knock at the door. Juliette turned, and Lukas entered the Suit Lab, smiling. He waved at Nelson, who saluted back with a 3/8 spanner. Lukas seemed unsurprised to see Marsha there. He clasped her on the shoulder. “You should just move that big wooden desk of hers down here,” he joked. “You’ve got the porting budget for it.”
Marsha smiled and tugged at one of her dark springs. She looked around the lab. “I really should,” she said.
Juliette watched her young assistant blush in Lukas’s presence and laughed to herself. The helmet locked into the collar with a neat click. Juliette tested the release mechanism.
“Do you mind if I borrow the mayor?” Lukas asked.
“No, I don’t mind,” Marsha said.
“I do.” Juliette studied one of the suit’s sleeves. “We’re way behind schedule.”
Lukas frowned. “There is no schedule. You set the schedule. And besides, have you even gotten permission for this?” He stood beside Marsha and crossed his arms. “Have you even told your assistant what you’re planning?”
Juliette glanced up guiltily. “Not yet.”
“Why? What’re you doing?” Marsha lowered her ledger and studied the suits for what seemed the first time.
Juliette ignored her. She glared at Lukas. “I’m behind schedule because I want to get this done before they complete the dig. They’ve been on a tear. Hit some soft soil. I’d really like to be down there when they punch through.”
“And I’d like for you to be at that meeting today, which you’re going to miss if you don’t get a move on.”
“I’m not going,” Juliette said.
Lukas shot a look at Nelson, who set down his spanner, gathered Marsha, and slid out the door. Juliette watched them leave and realized her young Lukas had more authority than she gave him credit for.
“It’s the monthly town hall,” Lukas said. “The first since your election. I told Judge Picken you’d be there. Jules, you’ve gotta play mayor or you won’t be one for much longer—”
“Fine.” She raised her hands. “I’m not mayor. I so decree it.” She scrawled the air with a driver. “Signed and stamped.”
“Not fine. What do you think the next person will make of all this?” He waved his hand at the workbenches. “You think you’ll be able to play these games? This room will go right back to what it was built for in the first place.”
Juliette bit down the urge to snap at him, to tell him these weren’t games she was playing, that it was something far worse.
Lukas looked away from whatever face she was making. His eyes settled on the stack of books piled up by the cot she had brought in. She slept there sometimes when the two of them were disagreeing or when she just needed a place to be alone. Not that she’d slept much recently. She rubbed her eyes and tried to remember the last time she’d gotten four hours in a row. Her nights were spent welding in the airlock. Her days were spent in the Suit Lab or down behind the comm hub. She didn’t really sleep anymore — she just passed out here and there.
“We should keep those locked up,” Lukas said, indicating the books. “Shouldn’t keep them out.”
“No one would believe them if they opened them,” Juliette said.
“For the paper.”
She nodded. He was right. She saw information; others would see money. “I’ll take them back down,” she promised, and the anger drained away like oil from a cracked casing. She thought of Elise, who had told her over the radio of a book she was making, a single book from all her favorite pages. Juliette needed a book like that. Except where Elise’s was probably full of pretty fish and bright birds, Juliette’s would catalog darker things. Things in the hearts of men.
Lukas took a step closer. He rested a hand on her arm. “This meeting—”
“I hear they’re thinking about a revote,” Juliette said, cutting him off. She wiped a loose strand of hair off her face, tucked it behind her ear. “I’m not going to be mayor for long anyway. Which is why I need to get this done. By the time everyone votes again, it shouldn’t matter.”
“Why? Because you’ll be the mayor of a different silo by then? Is that your plan?”
Juliette rested a hand on the domed helmet. “No. Because I’ll have my answers by then. Because people will see by then. They’ll believe me.”
Lukas crossed his arms. He took a deep breath. “I’ve got to get down to the servers,” he said. “If no one’s there to answer the call, the lights eventually start flashing in the offices and everyone asks what the hell they’re for.”
Juliette nodded. She’d seen it for herself. She also knew that Lukas liked the long talks behind the server as much as she did. Except that he was better at it. All her talks led to arguments. He was good at smoothing things over, figuring things out.
“Please tell me you’ll go to the meeting, Jules. Promise me you’ll go.”
She scanned the suit on the other table to see how far along Nelson was. They’d need one more suit for the extra person in the second airlock. If she worked through the night and all day tomorrow—
“For me,” he pleaded.
“I’ll go.”
“Thank you.” Lukas glanced at the old clock on the wall, its red arms visible behind hazed plastic. “I’ll see you for dinner?”
“Sure.”
He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. When he turned to go, Juliette began arranging her tools on the leather pad, setting them aside for later. She picked up a clean cloth and wiped her hands. “Oh, and Luke?”
“Yeah?” He paused at the door.
“Tell that fucker I said hello.”
14
Lukas left the Suit Lab and headed toward the server room on the other side of thirty-four. He passed a tech room that sat empty. The men and women who used to work in there now took up slack in the Down Deep and in Supply where mechanics and workers had lost their lives. People from IT sent to replace those they’d killed.
Juliette’s friend Shirly had been left in charge of the aftermath down in Mechanical. She was forever complaining to his office about skeleton shifts, and then complaining again when Lukas reassigned anyone to help. What did she want from him? People, he supposed. Just not his people.
A handful of techs and security personnel standing outside the break room fell silent as Lukas approached. He waved, and hands went up politely. “Sir,” someone said, which made him cringe. The chatter resumed only after he rounded the corner, and Lukas remembered being in on conversations like that as his former boss had stormed past.
Bernard. Lukas used to think he understood what it meant to be in charge. You did what you wanted. Decisions were arbitrary. You were cruel for the sake of being cruel. And now he found himself agreeing to worse things than he had ever imagined. Now he knew about a world of such horrors, that maybe men of his ilk weren’t suited to lead. It wasn’t a thing he could ever say out loud, but perhaps a revote would be for the best. Juliette would make a great lab tech there in IT. Soldering and welding weren’t all that different, just matters of scale. And then he tried to imagine her building a suit for someone to clean in, or her sitting idly by while they took orders from another silo on how many births were allowed that week.
It was more likely that a new mayor would mean time apart. Or that he would have to file for a transfer to Mechanical and learn to turn a wrench. From head of IT to a third-shift greaser. Lukas laughed. He coded open the server room door and thought there might be something romantic about that, giving up his job and life to be with her. Maybe something more romantic than going up at night to hunt for stars. He would have to get used to Juliette bossing him around, but that wouldn’t be a stretch. Enough degreaser, and her old room down there could be livable. As he wove his way through the servers, he thought of how he had lived in far worse, right there beneath his feet. It was being together that mattered.
The lights overhead weren’t yet blinking. He was early or the man named Donald was late. Lukas made his way toward the far wall, passing by several servers with their sides off and wires streaming out. With Donald’s help, he was figuring out how to fully access the machines, see what was on them. Nothing exciting yet, but he was making progress.
He stopped at the comm server, which had been his home within a home some lifetime ago. Now it was a different sort of conversation he fell into behind that server. It was a different sort of person on the other end of the line.
One of the rickety wooden chairs from below had been brought up. Lukas remembered climbing the ladder and pushing it ahead of him, Juliette yelling at him that they should lower a rope, the two of them arguing like young porters. Beside the chair, a stack of book tins made a side table of sorts. One of the Legacy books was splayed out on top. Lukas made himself comfortable and picked up the book. He had marked pages by creasing the corners. There were small dots in the margins where he had questions. He flipped through the book and scanned the material while he waited on the call.
What once had been boring about the books was now all he cared about. During his imprisonment — his Rite — he had been forced to read the parts of the Order on human behavior. Now he pored over these sections. And Donald, the voice on the other end of the line, had him fairly convinced that these were more than mere stories, these Robbers Cave boys and Milgrams and Skinners. Some of these things had truly happened.
He had graduated from these stories to find even more lessons in the Legacy books. It was the history of the old world that now commanded his attention. Episodic uprisings had occurred over thousands of years. He and Jules argued over whether or not there could be an end to such cyclic violence. The books suggested such hope was folly. And then Lukas had discovered an entire chapter on the dangers of an uprising’s aftermath, the very situation in which they now found themselves. He read about men with strange names — Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Lenin — who fought to liberate a people and then enslaved them into something even worse.
They were legends, Juliette insisted. Myths. Like the ghouls parents use to make their children behave. She saw those chapters to mean that tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. Always with the tearing down, she said, as if the scraps and ashes could be pieced back together.
Lukas disagreed. He thought, and Donald said, that these stories were real. Yes, the revolutions were painful. There would always be a period when things were worse. But eventually, they get better. People learn from their mistakes. This is what he had tried to convince her of one night after a call from Donald had kept them up through the dim time. Jules, of course, had to get in the last word. She had taken him up to the cafeteria and had pointed to the glow over the horizon, to the lifeless hills, to the rare glint of sunlight on decrepit towers. “Here is your world made better,” she had told him. “Here is man well learned from his mistakes.”
Always with the last word, though Lukas had more to say. “Maybe this is the bad time that comes before,” he had whispered into his coffee. And Juliette, for her part, had pretended not to hear.
The pages beneath Lukas’s fingers pulsed red. He glanced up at the lights overhead, now flashing with the incoming call. There was a buzzing from the comm server, a blinking indicator over the very first slot. He gathered the headset and untangled the cord, slotted it into the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Lukas.” The machine removed all intonation from the voice, all emotion. Except for disappointment. That it was not Juliette who answered elicited a letdown that could be felt if not quite heard. Or perhaps it was all in Lukas’s head.
“Just me,” he said.
“Very well. Just so you know, I have pressing matters here. Our time is short.”
“Okay.” Lukas found his place in the book. He skipped down to where they’d previously left off. These talks reminded him of his studies with Bernard, except now he had graduated from the Order to the Legacy. And Donald was swifter than Bernard, more open with his answers. “So… I wanted to ask you something about this Rousseau guy—”
“Before we do,” Donald said, “I need to implore you again to stop with the digging.”
Lukas closed the book on his finger, marking his place. He was glad Juliette had agreed to attend the Town Hall. She got animated whenever this topic came up. Because of an old threat she’d made, Donald seemed to think they were digging toward him, and she made Lukas vow to leave the lie alone. She didn’t want them finding out about her friends in 17 or her plans to rescue them. Lukas found the ruse uncomfortable. Where Juliette distrusted this man — who had warned them both that their home could be shut down at any time through mysterious means — Lukas saw someone trying to help them at some cost to himself. Jules thought Donald was scared for his own life. Lukas thought Donald was frightened for them.
“I’m afraid that the digging will have to continue,” Lukas said. He nearly blurted out: She won’t stop, but best for there to be some sense of solidarity.
“Well, my people can pick up the vibrations. They know something is happening.”
“Can you tell them we’re having trouble with our generator? That it’s misaligned again?”
There was a disappointed sigh that the computers couldn’t touch. “They’re smarter than that. What I’ve done is ordered them not to waste their time looking into it, which is all I can do. I’m telling you, nothing good can come of this.”
“Then why are you helping us? Why stick your neck out? Because that’s what it seems like you’re doing.”
“My job is to see that you don’t die.”
Lukas studied the inside of the server tower, the winking lights, the wires, the boards. “Yeah, but these conversations, going through these books with me, calling every single day like clockwork, why do you do it? I mean… what is it that you get out of these conversations?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, a rare lack of surety from the steady voice of their supposed benefactor.
“It’s because… I get to help you remember.”
“And that’s important?”
“Yes. It’s important. It is to me. I know what it feels like to forget.”
“Is that why these books are here?”
Another pause. Lukas felt that he was stumbling accidentally toward some truth. He would have to remember what was being said and tell Juliette later.
“They are there so that whoever inherits the world — whoever is chosen — will know…”
“Know what?” Lukas asked desperately. He feared he was going to lose him. Donald had trod near to this in prior conversations, but had always pulled away.
“To know how to set things right,” Donald said. “Look, our time is up. I need to go.”
“What did you mean about inheriting the world?”
“Next time. I need to go. Stay safe.”
“Yeah,” Lukas said. “You too—”
But his headphone had already clicked. The man who somehow knew so much about the old world had signed off.
15
Juliette had never attended a Town Hall before. Like sows giving birth, she knew such things took place, but had never felt the urge to witness the spectacle. Her first time would be while as mayor, and she hoped it would be her last.
She joined Judge Picken and Sheriff Billings on the raised platform while residents spilled from the hallway and found their seats. The platform they’d put her on reminded her of the stage in the bazaar, and Juliette remembered her father comparing these meetings to plays. She never took him to mean that as a compliment.
“I don’t know any of my lines,” she whispered cryptically to Peter Billings.
The two of them sat close enough that their shoulders touched. “You’ll do fine,” Peter said. He smiled at a young woman in the front row, who wiggled her fingers back at him, and Juliette saw that the young sheriff had met someone. Life was continuing apace.
She tried to relax. She studied the crowd. A lot of unfamiliar faces out there. A few she recognized. Three doors led in from the hallway. Two of the doors opened on aisles that sliced through the rows of ancient benches. The third aisle was pressed against the wall. They divided the room into thirds, much as less-well-defined boundaries partitioned the silo. Juliette didn’t have to be told these things. The people making their way inside made it obvious.
The Up Top benches in the center of the room were already packed, and more people stood behind the benches at the back of the hall, people she recognized from IT and from the cafeteria. The Mids benches off to one side were half full. Juliette noticed most of these residents sat close to the aisle, as near to the center as possible. Farmers in green. Hydroponic plumbers. People with dreams. The other side of the room was nearly bare. This was for the Down Deep. An elderly couple sat together in the front row of this section, holding hands. Juliette recognized the man, a bootmaker. They had come a long way. Juliette kept waiting for more residents of the Deep to show, but it was too much of a hike. And now she recalled how distant these meetings seemed while working in the depths of the silo. Often, she and her friends only heard what was being discussed and what rules were being passed after it had already happened. Not only was it a far climb, but most of them were too busy surviving the day-to-day to trudge anywhere for a discussion on tomorrows.
When the flow of residents became a trickle, Judge Picken rose to begin the meeting. Juliette prepared to be bored half to death by the proceedings. A quick talk, an introduction, and then they would listen to what ailed the people. Promise to make it better. Get right back to doing the same things.
What she needed to do was get back to work. There was so much that needed accomplishing up at the airlock and down in the Suit Lab. The last thing she wanted to do was listen to minor grievances, a call for a revote, or anyone bitching about her digging. She suspected what was serious to others would feel minor to her. There was something about being sent to one’s death and surviving a baptism of fire upon one’s return that pushed most squabblings into the deepest recesses of one’s mind.
Picken banged his gavel and called the meeting to order. He welcomed everyone and ran down the prepared docket. Juliette squirmed on her bench. She gazed out into the crowd and saw that the vast majority were gazing right back at her rather than watching the judge. She only caught the end of Picken’s last sentence because of her name: “—hear from your mayor, Juliette Nichols.”
He turned and waved her up to the podium. Peter patted her on the knee for encouragement. As she walked to the podium, the metal decking creaked beneath her boots where it wasn’t screwed down tight. That was the only sound. And then someone in the audience coughed. And there was a rustling among the benches as bodies lurched back into motion. Juliette gripped the podium and marveled at the mix of colors facing her, the blues and whites and reds and browns and greens. Scowls above them, she saw. Angry people from all walks of life. She cleared her throat and realized how unprepared she was. She had hoped to say a few words, to thank the people for their concerns, to assure them that she was working tirelessly to forge a new and better life for them. Just give her a chance, she wanted to say.
“Thank you—” she began, and Judge Picken tugged on her arm and pointed to the microphone attached to the podium. Someone in the back shouted that they couldn’t hear. Juliette swiveled the microphone closer and saw that the faces in the crowd were the same as those along the stairwell. They were wary of her. Awe, or something like it, had eroded into suspicion.
“I’m here today to listen to your questions. Your concerns,” she said, the loudness of her voice startling her. “Before I do, I’d like to say a few things about what we hope to accomplish this year—”
“Did you let poison in here?” someone yelled from the back.
“Excuse me?” Juliette asked. She cleared her throat.
A lady stood up, a baby in her arms. “My child’s had a fever ever since you returned!”
“Are the other silos real?” someone shouted.
“What was it like out there?”
A man bolted up from the Mids benches, his face ruddy with rage. “What’re you doin’ down there that’s causing so much noise—?”
A dozen others stood and began shouting as well. Their questions and complaints forged a single noise, an engine of anger. The packed center section spilled outward into the aisles as people needed room to point and wave for attention. Juliette saw her father, standing in the very back, noticeable for his placid demeanor, his worried frown.
“One at a time—” Juliette said. She held her palms out. The crowd lurched forward, and then a shot rang out.
Juliette flinched.
There was another loud bang right beside her, and the gavel was no longer limp in Judge Picken’s hand. The wooden disc on the podium leapt and spun as he pounded it back into place, over and over. Deputy Hoyle lurched out of a trance by the door and swam through the crowds in the aisle, urging everyone back into their seats and to hold their tongues. Peter Billings was up from the bench yelling for everyone to be calm as well. Eventually, a tense silence fell over the crowd. But something was whirring in these people. It was like a motor not yet running but one that wanted to, an electrical buzz just beneath the surface, humming and holding back. Juliette chose her words carefully.
“I can’t tell you what it’s like out there—”
“Can’t or won’t?” someone asked. This person was silenced by a glare from Deputy Hoyle, who ranged the aisle. Juliette took a deep breath.
“I can’t tell you because we don’t know.” She raised her hands to hold the crowd still a moment. “Everything we’ve been told about the world beyond our walls has been a lie, a fabrication—”
“How do we know you’re not the one lying?”
She sought the voice among the crowd. “Because I’m the one admitting that we don’t know a damned thing. I’m the one who came here today to tell you that we should go out and see for ourselves. With fresh eyes. With real curiosity. I’m proposing that we do what has never been done, and that’s to go and take a sample, to bring back a taste of the air out there and see what’s wrong with the world—”
Outbursts from the back drowned out the rest of her sentence. People were up out of their seats again, even as others reached to restrain them. Some were curious now. Some were even more outraged. The gavel barked, and Hoyle loosed his baton and waved it at the front row. But the crowd was beyond calming. Peter stepped forward, a hand on the butt of his gun.
Juliette backed away from the podium. There was a squeal from the speakers as Judge Picken knocked the microphone with his arm. The wooden puck was lost, leaving him to bang on the podium itself, which Juliette saw was marked with half-moon frowns and smiles from past attempts at restoring calm.
Deputy Hoyle had to back up against the stage as the crowd lurched forward, many of them with questions still, most with unbridled fury. Spittle foamed on quivering lips. Juliette heard more accusations, saw the lady with her baby who blamed Juliette for some sickness. Marsha ran to the back of the stage and threw open a metal door painted to look like real wood — and Peter waved Juliette inside, back to the Judge’s chambers. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to calm these people down, to tell them she meant well, that she could fix this if they would just let her try. But she was being dragged back, past a cloakroom of dark robes that hung like shadows, steered down a hall where pictures of past judges hung askew, to an old metal desk painted to resemble the door.
The shouts were sealed off behind them. The door banging with fists for a moment, Peter cursing. Juliette collapsed into an old leather chair repaired with tape and held her face in her hands. Their anger was her anger. She could feel herself directing it toward Peter and Lukas, who had made her mayor. She could feel herself directing it toward Lukas for begging her to leave the digging and come up top, for making her come to this meeting. As if this rabble could be appeased.
A burst of noise filtered down the hall as the door opened for a moment. Juliette expected Judge Picken to join them. She was surprised to see her father instead.
“Dad.”
She rose from the old chair and crossed the room to greet him. Her father wrapped his arms around her, and Juliette found that place in the center of his chest where she could remember finding comfort as a child.
“I heard you might be here,” her father whispered.
Juliette didn’t say anything. As old as she felt, the years melted away to have him there, to have his arms around her.
“I also heard what you’re planning, and I don’t want you to go.”
Juliette stepped back to study her father. Peter excused himself. The noise from outside wasn’t as loud this time when the door cracked, and Juliette realized Judge Picken had allowed her father passage, was out there calming the crowd. Her dad had seen those people react to her, had heard what people had said. She fought back a sudden welling of tears.
“They didn’t give me a chance to explain—” she started, swiping at her eyes. “Dad, there are other worlds out there like our own. It’s crazy to sit here, fighting amongst ourselves, when there are other worlds—”
“I’m not talking about the digging,” her father said. “I heard what you’re planning up top.”
“You heard…” She wiped her eyes again. “Lukas—” she muttered.
“It wasn’t Lukas. That technician, Nelson, came by for a check-up, asked me if I was going to be on standby in case anything went wrong. I had to pretend to know what he was talking about. I assume you were going to announce your plans out there just now?” He glanced toward the cloakroom.
“We need to know what’s out there,” Juliette said. “Dad, they haven’t been trying to make it better. We don’t know the first thing—”
“Then let the next cleaner see. Let them sample when they’re sent out. Not you.”
She shook her head. “There won’t be anymore cleaning, Dad. Not while I’m mayor. I won’t send anyone out there.”
He placed a hand on her arm. “And I won’t let my daughter go.”
She pulled away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to. I’m taking every precaution. I promise.”
Her father’s face hardened. He turned his hand over and gazed at his palm.
“We could use your help,” she said, hoping to bridge any new rift she feared she was creating. “Nelson’s right. It would be nice to have a doctor on the team.”
“I don’t want any part in this,” he said. “Look what happened to you the last time.” He glanced at her neck, where the suit’s metal collar had left a hook of a scar.
“That was the fire,” Juliette told him, adjusting her coveralls.
“And the next time it’ll be something else.”
They studied one another in that chamber where people were quietly judged, and Juliette felt a familiar temptation to run away from conflict. It was countered by a new desire to bury her face in her father’s chest and sob in a way that women her age weren’t allowed, that mechanics never could.
“I don’t want to lose you again,” she told her dad. “You’re the only family I’ve got left. Please support me in this.”
It was difficult to say. Vulnerable and honest. A part of Lukas now lived inside of her — this was something he had imparted.
Juliette waited for the reaction and saw her father’s face relax. It may have been her imagination, but she thought he moved a step closer, let down his guard.
“I’ll give you a check-up before and after,” he said.
“Thank you. Oh, speaking of a check-up, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about.” She worked the long sleeve of her coveralls up her forearm and studied the white marks along her wrist. “Have you ever heard of scars going away with time? Lukas thought—” She looked up at her father. “Do they ever go away?”
Her father took a deep breath and held it awhile. His gaze drifted over her shoulder and far away.
“No,” he said. “Not scars. Not even with time.”
Silo 1
16
Captain Brevard was nearly through his seventh shift. Only three more to go. Three more shifts of sitting behind security gates reading the same handful of novels over and over until the yellowed pages gave up and fell out. Three more shifts of whipping his deputies at table tennis — a new deputy on each shift — and telling them that it’d been forever since he’d last played. Three more shifts of the same old food and the same old movies and the same old everything else bland that greeted him when he woke. Three more. He could make it.
Silo 1’s Security chief now counted down shifts much as he had once counted down years to retirement. Let them be uneventful, was his mantra. The blandness was good. Vanilla was the taste of passing time. Such was his thought as he stood before an open cryopod splattered with dried blood, a foul taste very un-vanilla-like in his mouth.
A pop of blinding light erupted from Deputy Stevens’s camera as the young man took another shot of the pod’s interior. The body had been removed hours ago. A med tech had been servicing a neighboring pod when he noticed a smear of blood on the lid of this one. He had cleaned half the smear away before he realized what it was. Brevard now studied the tracks that the med tech’s cleaning rag had left behind. He took another bitter sip of coffee.
His mug had lost its steam. It was the cold air in that warehouse of bodies. Brevard hated it down there. He hated waking up naked in that place, hated being brought back down and put to sleep, hated what the room did to his coffee. He took another sip. Three shifts left, and then retirement, whatever that meant. Nobody thought along that far. Only to their next shift.
Stevens lowered his camera and nodded toward the exit. “Darcy’s back, sir.”
The two officers watched as Darcy, the night guard, crossed the hall of cryopods. Darcy had been first on the scene early that morning, had woken Deputy Stevens, who had woken his superior. Darcy had then refused to slag off and get some sleep as ordered. He had instead accompanied the body up to Medical and had volunteered to wait on test results while the other men went over the crime scene. Darcy now waved a piece of paper a bit too enthusiastically as he headed their way.
“I can’t stand this guy,” Stevens whispered to his chief.
Brevard took a diplomatic sip of his coffee and watched his night guard approach. Darcy was young — late twenties, early thirties — with blond hair and a permanent, goofy grin. Just the sort of inexperienced person police forces loved to place on night shifts when all the bad shit went down. It wasn’t logical, but it was tradition. Experience won you deep sleep for when the crazies were out.
“You won’t believe what I’ve got,” Darcy said, twenty paces away and more than a touch overeager.
“You’ve got a match,” Brevard said dryly. “The blood on the lid goes with the pod.” He nearly added that what Darcy most certainly didn’t have was a hot cup of coffee for him or Stevens.
“That’s part of it,” Darcy said, appearing vexed. “How’d you know?” He took a few deep breaths and handed over the report.
“Because matches are exciting,” Brevard said, accepting the sheet. “You wave a match in the air like you’ve got something to say. Lawyers and jury members get excited over a match.” And rookies, he wanted to add. He wasn’t sure what Darcy did before orientation, but it wasn’t police work. Glancing down at the report, Brevard saw a standard DNA match, a series of bars lined up with one another, lines drawn between the bars where they were identical. And these two were identical, the DNA on file for the pod and the blood sample taken from the lid.
“Well, there’s more,” Darcy said. The night guard took another deep breath. He had obviously run down the hall from the lift. “Lots more.”
“We think we’ve got it pieced together,” Stevens said with confidence. He nodded toward the open cryopod. “It’s pretty clear that a murder took place here. It started—”
“Not a murder,” Darcy interjected.
“Give the deputy a chance,” Brevard said, lifting his mug. “He’s been looking at this for hours.”
Darcy started to say something but caught himself. He rubbed under his eyes, seemed exhausted, but nodded.
“Right,” Stevens said. He pointed his camera at the cryopod. “Blood on the lid means the struggle began out here. The man we found inside must’ve been subdued by our killer after a fight, that’s how his blood got on the lid. And then he was tossed inside his own cryopod. His hands were bound, I’m assuming at gunpoint, because I didn’t note any marks around the wrists, no other sign of struggle. He was shot once in the chest.” Stevens pointed to the streaks and spots of blood on the inside of the lid. “We’ve got splatter here, indicating the victim was sitting up. But the way it ran suggests the lid was shut immediately after. And the coloration tells me that this likely happened on our shift, certainly within the past month.”
Brevard watched Darcy’s face the entire time, saw how it scrunched up in disagreement. The kid thought he knew better than the deputy.
“What else?” Brevard asked Stevens, prodding his second-in-command along further.
“Oh, yes. After murdering the victim, our perp inserted an IV and a catheter to keep the body from decomposing, so we’re looking at someone with medical training. He might, of course, still be on this shift. Which is why we thought it best to discuss this down here and not around the med team. We’ll want to question them one at a time.”
Brevard nodded and took a sip of coffee. He waited on the night guard’s reaction.
“It wasn’t murder,” Darcy said, exasperated. “Do you guys want to hear what else I have? For starters, the blood on the lid matches the database entry for the pod, just like you said, but it doesn’t match the victim. The guy inside is someone else.”
Brevard nearly spat out his coffee. He wiped his moustache with his hand. “What?” he asked, not sure that he’d heard correctly.
“The blood on the outside was mixed with saliva. It came from a second person. Doc said it was probably a cough, maybe a chest wound. So our suspect is likely injured.”
“Wait. So who’s the guy we found in the pod?” Stevens asked.
“They’re not sure. They ran his blood, but it seems his records have been tampered with. The guy this pod is registered to, he shouldn’t be on the executive wing at all. Should’ve been in Deep Freeze. And the blood from the inside of the lid matches a partial record from the executive files, which would place him in here somewhere—”
“Partial record?” Brevard asked.
Darcy shrugged. “The files are all kinds of fouled up. According to Doctor Whitmore.”
“Ah,” Deputy Stevens said, snapping his fingers. “I’ve got it. I know what happened here.” He pointed his camera at the pod. “There’s a struggle out here, okay? A guy who doesn’t want to be put under. He manages to break free, knows how to hack the—”
“Hold up,” Brevard said, raising a hand. He could see on Darcy’s face that there was more. “Why do you keep insisting this wasn’t a murder? We’ve got a gunshot wound, blood splatter, a closed lid, no weapon, a man with his hands bound, and blood on the lid of this pod, whoever the hell it’s registered to. Everything about this screams murder.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Darcy said. “It wasn’t murder because the guy was plugged in. He was plugged in the entire time, even before he was shot. And the pod was still on and running. This Troy fellow — or whoever it is that we pulled out of there — he’s still alive.”
17
The three men left the pod behind and headed for the medical wing and the operating room. Brevard’s mind raced. He didn’t need this crap on one of his shifts. This was not vanilla. He imagined the reports he would have to write after this, how much fun it would be to brief the next captain.
“Do you think we should get the Shepherd involved?” Stevens asked, referring to the head executive up on the administration wing, a man who kept mostly to himself.
Brevard scoffed. He coded open the Deep Freeze door and led the men out into the hallway. “I think this is a little below his pay grade, don’t you? Shepherd has entire silos to worry about. You can see how it wears on him, how he keeps himself locked up. It’s our job to handle cases like this. Even murder.”
“You’re right,” Stevens said.
Darcy, still winded, labored to keep up.
They rode the lift up two levels. Brevard thought about how the body with the gun wound had felt as he had inspected it. The man had been as cold as a stiff in a morgue, but then weren’t they all when they first woke up? He thought about all the damage the freezing and thawing produced, how the machines in their blood were supposed to keep them patched together, cell by cell. What if those little machines could do the same for a gunshot wound?
The lift opened on sixty-eight. Brevard could hear voices from the OR. It was difficult to let go of the theories that’d been percolating between him and Stevens for the past hour. It was hard to let go and adapt to everything Darcy had told them. The idea of records being tampered with made this a much more complex problem. Only three shifts to go, and now all this. But if the victim was indeed alive, catching their perp was all but guaranteed. If he was in any condition to talk, he could ID the man who shot him.
The doctor and one of his assistants were in the waiting room outside the little-used OR. Their gloves were off, the doctor’s gray hair wild and unkempt as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Both men appeared exhausted. Brevard glanced through the observation window and saw the same man they’d pulled from the pod. He was lying as if asleep, his color completely different, tubes and wires snaking inside a pale blue paper gown.
“I hear we’ve had an extraordinary turnaround,” Brevard said. He crossed to the sink and dumped his coffee down the drain, looked around for a fresh pot and didn’t see one. He would’ve taken on another shift right then for a hot mug, a pack of smokes, and permission to burn them.
The doctor patted his assistant on the arm and gave him instructions. The young man nodded and fished in his pocket for a pair of gloves before backing his way through the door and into the operating room. Brevard watched him check the machines hooked up to the man.
“Can he talk?” Brevard asked.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Whitmore said. He scratched his gray beard. “We had quite the scene up here when he came to. The patient is much stronger than he appears.”
“And not quite as dead,” Stevens said.
Nobody laughed.
“He was very animated,” Dr. Whitmore said. “He insisted his name wasn’t Troy. This was before I ran the tests.” He nodded at the piece of paper Brevard was now carrying.
Brevard looked to Darcy for confirmation.
“I was using the john,” Darcy admitted sheepishly. “I wasn’t here when he woke up.”
“We gave him a sedative. And I took a blood sample in order to ID him.”
“What did you come up with?” Brevard asked.
Dr. Whitmore shook his head. “His records have been expunged. Or so I thought.” Taking a plastic cup from one of the cabinets, he ran some water from the sink and took a swig. “They were coming up partials because I don’t have access to them. Just rank and cryo level. I remembered seeing this before on my very first shift. It was another guy from the executive wing, and then I remembered where you found this gentleman.”
“The executive wing,” Brevard said. “But this wasn’t his pod, right?” He remembered what Darcy had told him. “The blood on the lid matches the pod, but the man inside is someone else. Wouldn’t that suggest someone used their own pod in order to stash a body?”
“If my hunch is correct, it’s worse than that.” Dr. Whitmore took another sip of water and ran his fingers through his hair. “The name on the executive pod, Troy, matches the swab I took from the lid, but that man should be in Deep Freeze right now. He was put under over a century ago and hasn’t been woken up since.”
“But that was his blood on the lid,” Stevens said.
“Which means he has been woken up since,” Darcy pointed out.
Brevard glanced at his night-shift officer and realized he’d misjudged the young man. That was the blasted thing about working these shifts with different people every time. You couldn’t really get to know anyone, couldn’t gauge their worth.
“So the first thing I did was look in the medical records for any strange activity in the Deep Freeze. I wanted to see if anyone had ever been disturbed from there.”
Brevard felt uneasy. The doctor was doing all of his work for him. “Did you find anything?” he asked.
Dr. Whitmore nodded. He waved toward the terminal on the waiting room desk. “There has been activity in the Deep Freeze initiated by this office. Not on my shift, mind you. But twice now, people have been woken up from coordinates that place them there. One of them was in the middle of the old Deep Freeze, that storehouse from before orientation.”
The doctor paused to allow this to sink in.
It took Brevard a moment. His sleep-deprived night guard proved a hair quicker.
“A woman?” Darcy asked.
Dr. Whitmore frowned. “It’s hard to say, but that’s my suspicion. I don’t have access to this person’s records for some reason. I sent Michael down to check, to get a visual on who’s in there.”
“We could be dealing with a murder of passion,” Stevens said.
Brevard grunted in agreement. He was already thinking the same thing. “Say there’s a man who can’t handle the loneliness. He’s been waking up his wife in secret, would probably have to be an administrator to have access. Someone finds out, a non-executive, and so he has to kill the man. But… he gets killed instead—” Brevard shook his head. It was getting too complicated. He was too decaffeinated for this.
“Here’s the kicker,” Dr. Whitmore said.
Brevard groaned in anticipation. He regretted having dumped out his cold coffee. He waved for the news.
“There’s been one other case of someone pulled from Deep Freeze, and this guy, I do have access to his records.” Dr. Whitmore scanned the three security officers. “Anyone wanna guess the guy’s name?”
“His name is Troy,” Darcy said.
The doctor snapped his fingers, his eyes wide with surprise. “Bingo.”
Brevard turned to his night guard. “And how the hell did you come up with that?”
Darcy shrugged. “Everyone loves a match.”
“So let me get this straight,” Brevard said. “We’ve got a rogue killer from the Deep Freeze knocking off an administrator, taking his place and likely his codes, and waking up women.” The chief turned to Stevens. “Okay, I think you’re right. It’s time to get Shepherd involved. This just hit his pay grade.”
Stevens nodded and turned toward the door. But there was a slap of hurrying boots out in the hall before he could leave. Michael, one of the medical assistants who had helped remove the body from the pod, flew around the corner in a lather and out of air. Resting his hands on his knees, he took several deep breaths, his eyes on his boss.
“I said be quick,” Dr. Whitmore said. “I didn’t mean for you to race.”
“Yessir—” Michael took a series of deep breaths. “Sirs, we’ve got a problem.” The medical assistant looked to the men from Security and grimaced.
“What is it?” Brevard asked.
“It was a woman,” Michael said, nodding. “Sure enough. But the readout on her pod was flashing, so I ran a quick check.” He scanned their faces, his eyes wild, and Brevard knew. He knew, but someone else beat him to it.
“She’s dead,” Darcy said.
The assistant nodded vigorously, his hands on his knees. “Anna,” he muttered. “The name on the pod was Anna.”
••••
The man in the OR with no name tested his restraints, his old and sinewy arms bulging. Dr. Whitmore begged the gentleman to hold still. Captain Brevard stood on the other side of the gurney. He could smell the odor of a man newly awakened, a man left for dead. Wild eyes sought him out among those gathered. The man who had been shot seemed to recognize Brevard as the one in charge.
“Unloose me,” the old man said.
“Not until we know what happened,” Brevard told him. “Not until you’re better.”
The leather cuffs around the old man’s wrists squeaked as he tested them. “I’ll be better when I’m off this damn table.”
“You’ve been shot,” Dr. Whitmore said. He rested a hand on his patient’s shoulder to calm him.
The old man lowered his head to his pillow, his eyes travelling from doctor to security officer and back again. “I know,” he said.
“Do you remember who did it?” Brevard asked.
The man nodded. “His name’s Donald.” His jaw clenched and unclenched.
“Not Troy?” Brevard asked.
“That’s what I meant. Same guy.” Brevard watched the old man’s hands squeeze into twin fists and then relax. “Look, I’m one of the Heads of this silo. I demand to be released. Check my records—”
“We’ll get this sorted out—” Brevard started to say.
The restraints creaked. “Check the damn records,” the old man said again.
“They’ve been tampered with,” Brevard told him. “Can you tell us your name?”
The man lay still for a moment, muscles relaxing. He stared up at the ceiling. “Which one?” he asked. “My name is Paul. Most people call me by my last name, Thurman. I used to go by Senator—”
“Shepherd,” Captain Brevard said. “Paul Thurman is the name of the man they call Shepherd.”
The old man narrowed his eyes. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been called a number of things in my time, but never that.”
16
Captain Brevard was nearly through his seventh shift. Only three more to go. Three more shifts of sitting behind security gates reading the same handful of novels over and over until the yellowed pages gave up and fell out. Three more shifts of whipping his deputies at table tennis — a new deputy on each shift — and telling them that it’d been forever since he’d last played. Three more shifts of the same old food and the same old movies and the same old everything else bland that greeted him when he woke. Three more. He could make it.
Silo 1’s Security chief now counted down shifts much as he had once counted down years to retirement. Let them be uneventful, was his mantra. The blandness was good. Vanilla was the taste of passing time. Such was his thought as he stood before an open cryopod splattered with dried blood, a foul taste very un-vanilla-like in his mouth.
A pop of blinding light erupted from Deputy Stevens’s camera as the young man took another shot of the pod’s interior. The body had been removed hours ago. A med tech had been servicing a neighboring pod when he noticed a smear of blood on the lid of this one. He had cleaned half the smear away before he realized what it was. Brevard now studied the tracks that the med tech’s cleaning rag had left behind. He took another bitter sip of coffee.
His mug had lost its steam. It was the cold air in that warehouse of bodies. Brevard hated it down there. He hated waking up naked in that place, hated being brought back down and put to sleep, hated what the room did to his coffee. He took another sip. Three shifts left, and then retirement, whatever that meant. Nobody thought along that far. Only to their next shift.
Stevens lowered his camera and nodded toward the exit. “Darcy’s back, sir.”
The two officers watched as Darcy, the night guard, crossed the hall of cryopods. Darcy had been first on the scene early that morning, had woken Deputy Stevens, who had woken his superior. Darcy had then refused to slag off and get some sleep as ordered. He had instead accompanied the body up to Medical and had volunteered to wait on test results while the other men went over the crime scene. Darcy now waved a piece of paper a bit too enthusiastically as he headed their way.
“I can’t stand this guy,” Stevens whispered to his chief.
Brevard took a diplomatic sip of his coffee and watched his night guard approach. Darcy was young — late twenties, early thirties — with blond hair and a permanent, goofy grin. Just the sort of inexperienced person police forces loved to place on night shifts when all the bad shit went down. It wasn’t logical, but it was tradition. Experience won you deep sleep for when the crazies were out.
“You won’t believe what I’ve got,” Darcy said, twenty paces away and more than a touch overeager.
“You’ve got a match,” Brevard said dryly. “The blood on the lid goes with the pod.” He nearly added that what Darcy most certainly didn’t have was a hot cup of coffee for him or Stevens.
“That’s part of it,” Darcy said, appearing vexed. “How’d you know?” He took a few deep breaths and handed over the report.
“Because matches are exciting,” Brevard said, accepting the sheet. “You wave a match in the air like you’ve got something to say. Lawyers and jury members get excited over a match.” And rookies, he wanted to add. He wasn’t sure what Darcy did before orientation, but it wasn’t police work. Glancing down at the report, Brevard saw a standard DNA match, a series of bars lined up with one another, lines drawn between the bars where they were identical. And these two were identical, the DNA on file for the pod and the blood sample taken from the lid.
“Well, there’s more,” Darcy said. The night guard took another deep breath. He had obviously run down the hall from the lift. “Lots more.”
“We think we’ve got it pieced together,” Stevens said with confidence. He nodded toward the open cryopod. “It’s pretty clear that a murder took place here. It started—”
“Not a murder,” Darcy interjected.
“Give the deputy a chance,” Brevard said, lifting his mug. “He’s been looking at this for hours.”
Darcy started to say something but caught himself. He rubbed under his eyes, seemed exhausted, but nodded.
“Right,” Stevens said. He pointed his camera at the cryopod. “Blood on the lid means the struggle began out here. The man we found inside must’ve been subdued by our killer after a fight, that’s how his blood got on the lid. And then he was tossed inside his own cryopod. His hands were bound, I’m assuming at gunpoint, because I didn’t note any marks around the wrists, no other sign of struggle. He was shot once in the chest.” Stevens pointed to the streaks and spots of blood on the inside of the lid. “We’ve got splatter here, indicating the victim was sitting up. But the way it ran suggests the lid was shut immediately after. And the coloration tells me that this likely happened on our shift, certainly within the past month.”
Brevard watched Darcy’s face the entire time, saw how it scrunched up in disagreement. The kid thought he knew better than the deputy.
“What else?” Brevard asked Stevens, prodding his second-in-command along further.
“Oh, yes. After murdering the victim, our perp inserted an IV and a catheter to keep the body from decomposing, so we’re looking at someone with medical training. He might, of course, still be on this shift. Which is why we thought it best to discuss this down here and not around the med team. We’ll want to question them one at a time.”
Brevard nodded and took a sip of coffee. He waited on the night guard’s reaction.
“It wasn’t murder,” Darcy said, exasperated. “Do you guys want to hear what else I have? For starters, the blood on the lid matches the database entry for the pod, just like you said, but it doesn’t match the victim. The guy inside is someone else.”
Brevard nearly spat out his coffee. He wiped his moustache with his hand. “What?” he asked, not sure that he’d heard correctly.
“The blood on the outside was mixed with saliva. It came from a second person. Doc said it was probably a cough, maybe a chest wound. So our suspect is likely injured.”
“Wait. So who’s the guy we found in the pod?” Stevens asked.
“They’re not sure. They ran his blood, but it seems his records have been tampered with. The guy this pod is registered to, he shouldn’t be on the executive wing at all. Should’ve been in Deep Freeze. And the blood from the inside of the lid matches a partial record from the executive files, which would place him in here somewhere—”
“Partial record?” Brevard asked.
Darcy shrugged. “The files are all kinds of fouled up. According to Doctor Whitmore.”
“Ah,” Deputy Stevens said, snapping his fingers. “I’ve got it. I know what happened here.” He pointed his camera at the pod. “There’s a struggle out here, okay? A guy who doesn’t want to be put under. He manages to break free, knows how to hack the—”
“Hold up,” Brevard said, raising a hand. He could see on Darcy’s face that there was more. “Why do you keep insisting this wasn’t a murder? We’ve got a gunshot wound, blood splatter, a closed lid, no weapon, a man with his hands bound, and blood on the lid of this pod, whoever the hell it’s registered to. Everything about this screams murder.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Darcy said. “It wasn’t murder because the guy was plugged in. He was plugged in the entire time, even before he was shot. And the pod was still on and running. This Troy fellow — or whoever it is that we pulled out of there — he’s still alive.”
17
The three men left the pod behind and headed for the medical wing and the operating room. Brevard’s mind raced. He didn’t need this crap on one of his shifts. This was not vanilla. He imagined the reports he would have to write after this, how much fun it would be to brief the next captain.
“Do you think we should get the Shepherd involved?” Stevens asked, referring to the head executive up on the administration wing, a man who kept mostly to himself.
Brevard scoffed. He coded open the Deep Freeze door and led the men out into the hallway. “I think this is a little below his pay grade, don’t you? Shepherd has entire silos to worry about. You can see how it wears on him, how he keeps himself locked up. It’s our job to handle cases like this. Even murder.”
“You’re right,” Stevens said.
Darcy, still winded, labored to keep up.
They rode the lift up two levels. Brevard thought about how the body with the gun wound had felt as he had inspected it. The man had been as cold as a stiff in a morgue, but then weren’t they all when they first woke up? He thought about all the damage the freezing and thawing produced, how the machines in their blood were supposed to keep them patched together, cell by cell. What if those little machines could do the same for a gunshot wound?
The lift opened on sixty-eight. Brevard could hear voices from the OR. It was difficult to let go of the theories that’d been percolating between him and Stevens for the past hour. It was hard to let go and adapt to everything Darcy had told them. The idea of records being tampered with made this a much more complex problem. Only three shifts to go, and now all this. But if the victim was indeed alive, catching their perp was all but guaranteed. If he was in any condition to talk, he could ID the man who shot him.
The doctor and one of his assistants were in the waiting room outside the little-used OR. Their gloves were off, the doctor’s gray hair wild and unkempt as if he’d been running his fingers through it. Both men appeared exhausted. Brevard glanced through the observation window and saw the same man they’d pulled from the pod. He was lying as if asleep, his color completely different, tubes and wires snaking inside a pale blue paper gown.
“I hear we’ve had an extraordinary turnaround,” Brevard said. He crossed to the sink and dumped his coffee down the drain, looked around for a fresh pot and didn’t see one. He would’ve taken on another shift right then for a hot mug, a pack of smokes, and permission to burn them.
The doctor patted his assistant on the arm and gave him instructions. The young man nodded and fished in his pocket for a pair of gloves before backing his way through the door and into the operating room. Brevard watched him check the machines hooked up to the man.
“Can he talk?” Brevard asked.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Whitmore said. He scratched his gray beard. “We had quite the scene up here when he came to. The patient is much stronger than he appears.”
“And not quite as dead,” Stevens said.
Nobody laughed.
“He was very animated,” Dr. Whitmore said. “He insisted his name wasn’t Troy. This was before I ran the tests.” He nodded at the piece of paper Brevard was now carrying.
Brevard looked to Darcy for confirmation.
“I was using the john,” Darcy admitted sheepishly. “I wasn’t here when he woke up.”
“We gave him a sedative. And I took a blood sample in order to ID him.”
“What did you come up with?” Brevard asked.
Dr. Whitmore shook his head. “His records have been expunged. Or so I thought.” Taking a plastic cup from one of the cabinets, he ran some water from the sink and took a swig. “They were coming up partials because I don’t have access to them. Just rank and cryo level. I remembered seeing this before on my very first shift. It was another guy from the executive wing, and then I remembered where you found this gentleman.”
“The executive wing,” Brevard said. “But this wasn’t his pod, right?” He remembered what Darcy had told him. “The blood on the lid matches the pod, but the man inside is someone else. Wouldn’t that suggest someone used their own pod in order to stash a body?”
“If my hunch is correct, it’s worse than that.” Dr. Whitmore took another sip of water and ran his fingers through his hair. “The name on the executive pod, Troy, matches the swab I took from the lid, but that man should be in Deep Freeze right now. He was put under over a century ago and hasn’t been woken up since.”
“But that was his blood on the lid,” Stevens said.
“Which means he has been woken up since,” Darcy pointed out.
Brevard glanced at his night-shift officer and realized he’d misjudged the young man. That was the blasted thing about working these shifts with different people every time. You couldn’t really get to know anyone, couldn’t gauge their worth.
“So the first thing I did was look in the medical records for any strange activity in the Deep Freeze. I wanted to see if anyone had ever been disturbed from there.”
Brevard felt uneasy. The doctor was doing all of his work for him. “Did you find anything?” he asked.
Dr. Whitmore nodded. He waved toward the terminal on the waiting room desk. “There has been activity in the Deep Freeze initiated by this office. Not on my shift, mind you. But twice now, people have been woken up from coordinates that place them there. One of them was in the middle of the old Deep Freeze, that storehouse from before orientation.”
The doctor paused to allow this to sink in.
It took Brevard a moment. His sleep-deprived night guard proved a hair quicker.
“A woman?” Darcy asked.
Dr. Whitmore frowned. “It’s hard to say, but that’s my suspicion. I don’t have access to this person’s records for some reason. I sent Michael down to check, to get a visual on who’s in there.”
“We could be dealing with a murder of passion,” Stevens said.
Brevard grunted in agreement. He was already thinking the same thing. “Say there’s a man who can’t handle the loneliness. He’s been waking up his wife in secret, would probably have to be an administrator to have access. Someone finds out, a non-executive, and so he has to kill the man. But… he gets killed instead—” Brevard shook his head. It was getting too complicated. He was too decaffeinated for this.
“Here’s the kicker,” Dr. Whitmore said.
Brevard groaned in anticipation. He regretted having dumped out his cold coffee. He waved for the news.
“There’s been one other case of someone pulled from Deep Freeze, and this guy, I do have access to his records.” Dr. Whitmore scanned the three security officers. “Anyone wanna guess the guy’s name?”
“His name is Troy,” Darcy said.
The doctor snapped his fingers, his eyes wide with surprise. “Bingo.”
Brevard turned to his night guard. “And how the hell did you come up with that?”
Darcy shrugged. “Everyone loves a match.”
“So let me get this straight,” Brevard said. “We’ve got a rogue killer from the Deep Freeze knocking off an administrator, taking his place and likely his codes, and waking up women.” The chief turned to Stevens. “Okay, I think you’re right. It’s time to get Shepherd involved. This just hit his pay grade.”
Stevens nodded and turned toward the door. But there was a slap of hurrying boots out in the hall before he could leave. Michael, one of the medical assistants who had helped remove the body from the pod, flew around the corner in a lather and out of air. Resting his hands on his knees, he took several deep breaths, his eyes on his boss.
“I said be quick,” Dr. Whitmore said. “I didn’t mean for you to race.”
“Yessir—” Michael took a series of deep breaths. “Sirs, we’ve got a problem.” The medical assistant looked to the men from Security and grimaced.
“What is it?” Brevard asked.
“It was a woman,” Michael said, nodding. “Sure enough. But the readout on her pod was flashing, so I ran a quick check.” He scanned their faces, his eyes wild, and Brevard knew. He knew, but someone else beat him to it.
“She’s dead,” Darcy said.
The assistant nodded vigorously, his hands on his knees. “Anna,” he muttered. “The name on the pod was Anna.”
The man in the OR with no name tested his restraints, his old and sinewy arms bulging. Dr. Whitmore begged the gentleman to hold still. Captain Brevard stood on the other side of the gurney. He could smell the odor of a man newly awakened, a man left for dead. Wild eyes sought him out among those gathered. The man who had been shot seemed to recognize Brevard as the one in charge.
“Unloose me,” the old man said.
“Not until we know what happened,” Brevard told him. “Not until you’re better.”
The leather cuffs around the old man’s wrists squeaked as he tested them. “I’ll be better when I’m off this damn table.”
“You’ve been shot,” Dr. Whitmore said. He rested a hand on his patient’s shoulder to calm him.
The old man lowered his head to his pillow, his eyes travelling from doctor to security officer and back again. “I know,” he said.
“Do you remember who did it?” Brevard asked.
The man nodded. “His name’s Donald.” His jaw clenched and unclenched.
“Not Troy?” Brevard asked.
“That’s what I meant. Same guy.” Brevard watched the old man’s hands squeeze into twin fists and then relax. “Look, I’m one of the Heads of this silo. I demand to be released. Check my records—”
“We’ll get this sorted out—” Brevard started to say.
The restraints creaked. “Check the damn records,” the old man said again.
“They’ve been tampered with,” Brevard told him. “Can you tell us your name?”
The man lay still for a moment, muscles relaxing. He stared up at the ceiling. “Which one?” he asked. “My name is Paul. Most people call me by my last name, Thurman. I used to go by Senator—”
“Shepherd,” Captain Brevard said. “Paul Thurman is the name of the man they call Shepherd.”
The old man narrowed his eyes. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve been called a number of things in my time, but never that.”
Silo 17
18
The earth growled. Beyond the walls of the silo, the earth grumbled and the noise steadily grew.
It had begun as a distant thrum a few days ago, had sounded like a hydroponics pump kicking on at the end of a long run of pipe, a vibration that could be felt between the pads of one’s feet and the slick metal floor. And then yesterday it had morphed into a steady quake that travelled up Jimmy’s knees and bones and into his clenched teeth. Above him, drops of water shivered from pipes, a light drizzle splashing into puddles that had not yet fully dried from the vanishing floods.
Elise squealed and patted the top of her head as she was struck with a drop. She glanced up with a gapped smile and watched for more of the bombardment.
“That’s an awful racket,” Rickson said. He played his flashlight across the far wall of the old generator room where the noise seemed to originate.
Hannah clapped her hands together and told the twins to get away from the wall. Miles — at least Jimmy thought it was Miles; he could hardly tell the twins apart — had his ear pressed to the concrete, his eyes closed, his mouth agape in concentration. His brother Marcus tugged him back toward the others, face lit up with excitement.
“Get behind me,” Jimmy said. His feet tingled from the vibrations. He could feel the noise in his chest as some unseen machine chewed through solid rock.
“How much longer?” Elise asked.
Jimmy tousled her hair and enjoyed the embrace of her worried arms around his waist. “Soon,” he told her. The truth was, he didn’t know. They’d spent the past two weeks keeping the pump running and Mechanical dry. That morning, they had woken up to find the noise of the digging intolerable. The racket had gotten worse throughout the day, and still the blank wall stood solid before them, still the light rain from wet and shivering pipes continued. The twins splashed in puddles, growing impatient. The baby, inexplicably, slept peacefully in Hannah’s arms. They’d been there for hours, listening to the grumbles grow, waiting for something to happen.
The end of the long wait was presaged by mechanical sounds interspersed amid the racket of crushing rock. A squeal of metal joints, the clang of fearsome teeth, the size and breadth of the din becoming confusing as it came from everywhere all at once, from the floor and ceiling and the walls on all sides. Puddles were thrown into chaos. Water flew up from the ground as well as falling from above. Jimmy nearly lost his footing.
“Step back,” he yelled over the clamor. He shuffled away from the wall with Elise attached to his hip, the others obeying, wide-eyed and arms out for balance.
A section of concrete fell away, a flat sheet the size of a man. It sloughed off and fell straight down, crumbling into rubble as it hit. Dust filled the air — it seemed to emanate from within the wall itself, concrete releasing powder like a great exhalation.
Jimmy took a few more steps back, and the kids followed, worry replacing excitement. It no longer sounded like an approaching machine — it sounded like hundreds of them. They were everywhere. They were in their chests.
The din reached a furious peak, more concrete falling away, metal screaming as if beaten, great clangs and shots of sparks, and then the great digger broke through, a crack and then a gash appearing in a circular arc like a shadow racing across the wall.
The size of the cut put the noise into perspective. Cutting teeth burst through from the ceiling, spun down beneath the floor, then rose back up on the other side. Iron rods jutted out where they’d been severed. There was the smell of burning metal and chalk. The digger was coming through the wall of level one-forty-two and chewing up a good bit of the concrete above and below. It was boring a hole bigger than a silo level was tall.
The twins whooped and hollered. Elise squeezed Jimmy’s ribs so hard he had to work to breathe. The baby stirred in Hannah’s arms, but its cries could barely be heard over the tumult. Another great spin from the teeth, another lap from ceiling to floor, and they broke through more fully and revealed themselves to be more like wheels, dozens of discs spinning within a larger disc. A boulder fell from the ceiling and tumbled across the floor toward the larger of the two generators. Jimmy expected the silo itself to come raining down around them.
A light bulb overhead shattered from the vibrations, a glitter of glass amid the drizzle of trapped flood water. “Back!” Jimmy yelled. They were clear across the wide generator room from the digger, but everywhere felt too close. The ground shook, making it difficult to stand. Jimmy felt suddenly afraid. This thing would keep coming, would bore straight through the silo and carry on; it was out of control—
The chewing disc entered the room, sharpened wheels spinning and screaming in the air, rock thrown up on one side and crumbling down from the other. The violence lessened. The squealing of dry metal joints grew less deafening. Hannah cooed to her child, rocking her arms back and forth, eyes wide and fixed on this intrusion into their home.
Somewhere, shouts emerged. They leaked through the falling rock. The rotating disc slowed to a halt, while some of the smaller wheels spun a while longer. Their edges revealed themselves as shiny and new where their battle through the earth had worn them bare. A length of rebar was wrapped around one like a knotted bootlace.
A respite of silence grew. The child fell still once more. A distant clatter and hum — the digger’s rumbling belly perhaps — was the only sound.
“Hello?”
A shout from around the digger.
“Yeah, we’re through,” another voice called. A woman’s voice.
Jimmy swept up Elise, who hugged his neck and locked her ankles around his waist. He ran toward the wall of studded steel before him.
“Hey!” Rickson called as he hurried after.
The twins raced along as well.
Jimmy couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t Elise squeezing him this time — it was the idea of visitors. Of people not to be afraid of. Someone he could run to rather than from.
Everyone felt it. They raced, grinning, toward the digger’s maw.
Between the gap in the wall and the silent disc, an arm emerged, a shoulder, a woman climbing up from the cut tunnel that dipped below the floor.
She pushed herself to her knees, stood up straight, and brushed her hair from her face.
Jimmy pulled up. The group stopped a dozen paces away. A woman. A stranger. She stood in their silo, smiling, covered in dust and grime.
“Solo?” she asked.
Her teeth flashed. She was pretty, even covered in dirt. She walked toward the group and tugged off a pair of thick gloves while someone else crawled out from behind the digger’s teeth. An outstretched hand. The baby crying. Jimmy shook the woman’s hand, mesmerized by her smile.
“I’m Courtnee,” the woman said. She swept her gaze over the children, her smile widening. “You must be Elise.” She squeezed the young girl’s shoulder, which caused the grip around Jimmy’s neck to tighten.
A man emerged from behind the digger, pale as fresh paper with hair just as white, and turned to survey the wall of cutting teeth.
“Where’s Juliette?” Jimmy asked, hiking Elise higher on his hip.
Courtnee frowned. “Didn’t she tell you? She went outside.”
18
The earth growled. Beyond the walls of the silo, the earth grumbled and the noise steadily grew.
It had begun as a distant thrum a few days ago, had sounded like a hydroponics pump kicking on at the end of a long run of pipe, a vibration that could be felt between the pads of one’s feet and the slick metal floor. And then yesterday it had morphed into a steady quake that travelled up Jimmy’s knees and bones and into his clenched teeth. Above him, drops of water shivered from pipes, a light drizzle splashing into puddles that had not yet fully dried from the vanishing floods.
Elise squealed and patted the top of her head as she was struck with a drop. She glanced up with a gapped smile and watched for more of the bombardment.
“That’s an awful racket,” Rickson said. He played his flashlight across the far wall of the old generator room where the noise seemed to originate.
Hannah clapped her hands together and told the twins to get away from the wall. Miles — at least Jimmy thought it was Miles; he could hardly tell the twins apart — had his ear pressed to the concrete, his eyes closed, his mouth agape in concentration. His brother Marcus tugged him back toward the others, face lit up with excitement.
“Get behind me,” Jimmy said. His feet tingled from the vibrations. He could feel the noise in his chest as some unseen machine chewed through solid rock.
“How much longer?” Elise asked.
Jimmy tousled her hair and enjoyed the embrace of her worried arms around his waist. “Soon,” he told her. The truth was, he didn’t know. They’d spent the past two weeks keeping the pump running and Mechanical dry. That morning, they had woken up to find the noise of the digging intolerable. The racket had gotten worse throughout the day, and still the blank wall stood solid before them, still the light rain from wet and shivering pipes continued. The twins splashed in puddles, growing impatient. The baby, inexplicably, slept peacefully in Hannah’s arms. They’d been there for hours, listening to the grumbles grow, waiting for something to happen.
The end of the long wait was presaged by mechanical sounds interspersed amid the racket of crushing rock. A squeal of metal joints, the clang of fearsome teeth, the size and breadth of the din becoming confusing as it came from everywhere all at once, from the floor and ceiling and the walls on all sides. Puddles were thrown into chaos. Water flew up from the ground as well as falling from above. Jimmy nearly lost his footing.
“Step back,” he yelled over the clamor. He shuffled away from the wall with Elise attached to his hip, the others obeying, wide-eyed and arms out for balance.
A section of concrete fell away, a flat sheet the size of a man. It sloughed off and fell straight down, crumbling into rubble as it hit. Dust filled the air — it seemed to emanate from within the wall itself, concrete releasing powder like a great exhalation.
Jimmy took a few more steps back, and the kids followed, worry replacing excitement. It no longer sounded like an approaching machine — it sounded like hundreds of them. They were everywhere. They were in their chests.
The din reached a furious peak, more concrete falling away, metal screaming as if beaten, great clangs and shots of sparks, and then the great digger broke through, a crack and then a gash appearing in a circular arc like a shadow racing across the wall.
The size of the cut put the noise into perspective. Cutting teeth burst through from the ceiling, spun down beneath the floor, then rose back up on the other side. Iron rods jutted out where they’d been severed. There was the smell of burning metal and chalk. The digger was coming through the wall of level one-forty-two and chewing up a good bit of the concrete above and below. It was boring a hole bigger than a silo level was tall.
The twins whooped and hollered. Elise squeezed Jimmy’s ribs so hard he had to work to breathe. The baby stirred in Hannah’s arms, but its cries could barely be heard over the tumult. Another great spin from the teeth, another lap from ceiling to floor, and they broke through more fully and revealed themselves to be more like wheels, dozens of discs spinning within a larger disc. A boulder fell from the ceiling and tumbled across the floor toward the larger of the two generators. Jimmy expected the silo itself to come raining down around them.
A light bulb overhead shattered from the vibrations, a glitter of glass amid the drizzle of trapped flood water. “Back!” Jimmy yelled. They were clear across the wide generator room from the digger, but everywhere felt too close. The ground shook, making it difficult to stand. Jimmy felt suddenly afraid. This thing would keep coming, would bore straight through the silo and carry on; it was out of control—
The chewing disc entered the room, sharpened wheels spinning and screaming in the air, rock thrown up on one side and crumbling down from the other. The violence lessened. The squealing of dry metal joints grew less deafening. Hannah cooed to her child, rocking her arms back and forth, eyes wide and fixed on this intrusion into their home.
Somewhere, shouts emerged. They leaked through the falling rock. The rotating disc slowed to a halt, while some of the smaller wheels spun a while longer. Their edges revealed themselves as shiny and new where their battle through the earth had worn them bare. A length of rebar was wrapped around one like a knotted bootlace.
A respite of silence grew. The child fell still once more. A distant clatter and hum — the digger’s rumbling belly perhaps — was the only sound.
“Hello?”
A shout from around the digger.
“Yeah, we’re through,” another voice called. A woman’s voice.
Jimmy swept up Elise, who hugged his neck and locked her ankles around his waist. He ran toward the wall of studded steel before him.
“Hey!” Rickson called as he hurried after.
The twins raced along as well.
Jimmy couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t Elise squeezing him this time — it was the idea of visitors. Of people not to be afraid of. Someone he could run to rather than from.
Everyone felt it. They raced, grinning, toward the digger’s maw.
Between the gap in the wall and the silent disc, an arm emerged, a shoulder, a woman climbing up from the cut tunnel that dipped below the floor.
She pushed herself to her knees, stood up straight, and brushed her hair from her face.
Jimmy pulled up. The group stopped a dozen paces away. A woman. A stranger. She stood in their silo, smiling, covered in dust and grime.
“Solo?” she asked.
Her teeth flashed. She was pretty, even covered in dirt. She walked toward the group and tugged off a pair of thick gloves while someone else crawled out from behind the digger’s teeth. An outstretched hand. The baby crying. Jimmy shook the woman’s hand, mesmerized by her smile.
“I’m Courtnee,” the woman said. She swept her gaze over the children, her smile widening. “You must be Elise.” She squeezed the young girl’s shoulder, which caused the grip around Jimmy’s neck to tighten.
A man emerged from behind the digger, pale as fresh paper with hair just as white, and turned to survey the wall of cutting teeth.
“Where’s Juliette?” Jimmy asked, hiking Elise higher on his hip.
Courtnee frowned. “Didn’t she tell you? She went outside.”
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги