Dust

19

Juliette stood in the airlock while gas was pumped in around her. The cleaning suit crinkled against her skin. She felt none of the fear from the last time she was sent out, but none of the deluded hope that drove many to exile. Somewhere between pointless dreams and hopeless dread was a desire to know the world. And, if possible, make it better.

The pressure in the airlock grew, and the folds of her suit found every raised scar across her body, wrinkles pressing where wrinkles had once burned. It was a million pricks from a million gentle needles, every sensitive part of her touched all at once, as if this airlock remembered, as if it knew her. A lover’s apology.

Clear plastic sheets had been hung over the walls. These began to ripple as they were forced tight around pipes, around the bench where she’d been dressed. Not long now. If anything, she felt excitement. Relief. A long project coming to an end.

She pulled one of the sample containers off her chest and cracked the lid, gathering some of the inert argon for a reference. Screwing the lid back on, she heard a dull and familiar thud within the recesses of the great outer door. The silo opened, and a wisp of fog appeared as pressurized gas pushed its way through, preventing the outside from getting in.

The fog swelled and swirled around her. It pushed at her back, urging her along. Juliette lifted a boot, stepped through the thick outer doors of Silo 18 and was outside once again.

The ramp was just as she remembered it: a concrete plane rising up through the last level of her buried home and toward the surface of the earth. Trapped dirt made slopes of hard corners, and streaks and splatters of mud stained the walls. The heavy doors thumped together behind her, and a dispersing fog rose up toward the clouds. Juliette began her march up the gentle rise.

“You okay?”

Lukas’s soft voice filled her helmet. Juliette smiled. It was good to have him with her. She pinched her thumb and finger together, which keyed the microphone in her helmet.

“No one has ever died on the ramp, Lukas. I’m doing just fine.”

He whispered an apology, and Juliette’s smile widened. It was a different thing altogether to venture out with this support behind her. Much different than being exiled while shamed backs were turned, no one daring to watch.

She reached the top of the ramp, and a feeling of rightness overtook her. Without the fear or the digital lies of an electronic visor, she felt what she suspected humans were meant to feel: a heady rush of disappearing walls, of raw land spread out in every direction, of miles and miles of open air and tumbling clouds. Her flesh tingled from the thrill of exploration. She had been here twice before, but this was something new. This had purpose.

“Taking my first sample,” she said, pinching her glove.

She pulled another of the small containers from her suit. Everything was numbered just like a cleaning, but the steps had changed. Weeks of planning and building had gone into this, a flurry of activity up top while her friends tunneled through the earth. She cracked the lid of the container, held it aloft for a count of ten, and then screwed the cap back on. The top of the vessel was clear. A pair of gaskets rattled inside, and twin strips of heat tape were affixed to the bottom. Juliette pressed waxy sealant around the lip of the lid, making it airtight. The numbered sample went into a flapped pouch on her thigh, joining the one from the airlock.

Lukas’s voice crackled through the radio: “We’ve got a full burn in the airlock. Nelson is letting it cool down before he goes in.”

Juliette turned and faced the sensor tower. She fought the urge to lift her hand, to acknowledge the dozens of men and women who were watching on the cafeteria’s wallscreen. She looked down at her chest and tried to clear her mind, to remember what she was supposed to do next.

Soil sample. She shuffled away from the ramp and the tower toward a patch of dirt that maybe hadn’t seen footsteps in centuries. Kneeling down — the undersuit pinching the back of her knee — she scooped dirt using the shallow container. The soil was packed hard and difficult to dig up, so she brushed more of the surface soil onto the top, filling the dish.

“Surface sample complete,” she said, pinching her glove. She screwed the lid on carefully and pressed the ring of wax before sliding it into a pouch on her other thigh.

“Good going,” Lukas said. He was probably aiming for encouragement. All she could hear was his intense worry.

“Taking the deep sample next.”

She grabbed the tool with both hands. She had built the large T on the top while wearing bulky suit gloves to make sure the grip would be right. With the corkscrew end pressed against the earth, she twisted the handle around and around, leaning her weight into her arms to force the blades through the dense soil.

Sweat formed on her brow. A drop of perspiration smacked her visor and trembled into a little puddle as her arms jerked with effort. A caustic and stiff breeze buffeted her suit, pushing her to the side. When the tool penetrated all the way to the tape mark on the handle, she stood and pulled the T-bar, using her legs.

The plug came free, an avalanche of deep soil spilling off and crumbling into the dry hole. She slid the case over the plug and locked it into place. Everything had the fit and polish of Supply’s best. She stowed the tool back in its pouch, slung it around onto her back, and took a deep breath.

“Good?” Lukas asked.

She waved at the tower. “I’m good. Two more samples left. How far along is the airlock?”

“Lemme check.”

While Lukas saw how the preparations for her return were going, Juliette trudged toward the nearest hill. Her old footsteps had been worn away by a light rain, but she remembered the path well. The crease in the hill stood like an inviting stairway, a ramp on which two forms still nestled.

She stopped at the base of the hill and pulled out another container with gaskets and heat tape inside. The cap came off easily. She held it up to the wind, allowing whatever blew inside to become trapped. For all they knew, these were the first tests made of the outside air. Reams and reams of bogus reports from previous cleanings had been nothing but numbers used to uphold and justify fears. It was a charade of progress, of efforts being made to right the world, when all they ever cared about was selling the story of how wrong it was.

The only thing more impressive to Juliette than the depths of the conspiracy had been the speed and relief with which its mechanisms had crumbled within IT. The men and women of level thirty-four reminded her of the children of Silo 17, frightened and wide-eyed and desperate for some adult they could cling to and trust. This foray of hers to test the outside air was looked upon with suspicion and fear elsewhere in the silo, but in IT, where they had pretended to do this work for generations, the chance to truly investigate had been seized by many with wild abandon.

Damn!

Juliette slapped the cover on the container. Her mind had wandered; she had forgotten to count to ten, had probably gone twice that.

“Hey, Jules?”

She squeezed her fingers together. “Yeah?” Releasing the mic, she locked the lid tight, made sure it said “2” on the top, and sealed the edges. She put it away with the other container, cursing her inattention.

“The airlock burn is complete. Nelson went in afterward to get things ready for you, but they’re saying it’s gonna be a while to charge the argon again. Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

She took a moment to survey herself and give an honest answer. A few deep breaths. Wiggled her joints. Looked up at the dark clouds to make sure her vision and balance were normal.

“Yeah. I feel fine.”

“Okay. And they are going to go with the flames when you come back. It looks like they really might’ve been necessary. We were getting some strange readings in the airlock before you left. As a precaution, Nelson is getting a scrub-down in the inner lock right now. We’ll have everything prepped for you as fast as we can.”

Juliette didn’t like the sound of any of that. Her passage through the Silo 17 airlock had been terrifying, but with no lasting consequences. Dumping soup on herself had been enough to survive. The theory they had been working under was that conditions outside weren’t as bad as they’d been led to believe, and that the flames were more a deterrent against not leaving the airlock than an actual necessity for cleansing the air. The challenge with this mission of hers was getting back inside without enduring another burn or another stint in the hospital. But she couldn’t put the silo at risk, either.

She squeezed her fingers together, thinking suddenly of all that was at stake. “Is there still a crowd up there watching?” she asked Lukas.

“Yeah. There’s a lot of excitement in the air. People can’t believe this is happening.”

“I want you to clear them out,” she said.

She let go of her thumb. There was no reply.

“Lukas? Do you read me? I want you to get everyone down to at least level four. Clear out anyone not working on this, okay?”

She waited.

“Yeah,” Lukas said. There was a lot of noise in the background. “We’re doing that right now. Trying to keep everyone calm.”

“Tell them it’s just a precaution. Because of the readings in the airlock.”

“Doing that.”

He sounded winded. Juliette hoped she wasn’t causing a panic for no reason.

“I’m going to get the last sample,” she said, focusing on the task at hand. They had prepared for the worst. Everything was going to be okay. She was thankful for the crude sensors they’d installed in the airlock. The next time out, she hoped to install a permanent array on the tower. But she couldn’t get too far ahead of herself. She approached one of the cleaners at the base of the hill.

The body they’d chosen belonged to Jack Brent. It had been nine years since he’d been sent to clean, having gone mad after his wife’s second miscarriage. Juliette knew very little else about him. And that had been her main criterion for the final sample.

She made her way to what was left of the body. The old suit had long turned a dull gray like the soil. What once was a metallic coating flaked away like old paint. The boots were eaten thin, the visor chipped. Jack lay with his arms folded across his chest, legs straight and parallel, almost as if he had taken a nap and had never gotten up. More like he had lain down to gaze at the clear blue sky in his visor.

Juliette pulled the last box out, the one marked “3”, and knelt beside the dead cleaner. It spooked her to think that this would’ve been her fate were it not for Scottie and Walker and the people of Supply who had risked so much. She lifted the sharp blade out of the sample box and cut a square patch from the suit. Setting the blade on the cleaner’s chest, she picked up the sample and dropped it into the container. Holding her breath, she grabbed the blade, careful not to nick her own suit, and sliced into the rotted undersuit where it had been exposed across the cleaner’s belly.

This last sample had to be prised out with the blade. If there was any flesh inside or gathered with it, she couldn’t tell. Everything was thankfully dark beneath the torn and dilapidated suit. But it seemed like nothing but soil in there, blown in amongst the dry bones.

She put the sample in the container and left the blade by the cleaner, no longer needing it and not wanting to risk handling it any further with the bulky gloves. She stood and turned toward the tower.

“You okay?”

Lukas’s voice sounded different. Muffled. Juliette exhaled, felt a little dizzy from holding her breath so long.

“I’m fine.”

“We’re almost ready for you. I’d start heading back.”

She nodded, even though he probably couldn’t see her at that distance, not even with the tall wallscreens magnifying the world.

“Hey, you know what we forgot?”

She froze and studied the tower.

“What is it?” she asked. “Forgot what?” Sweat trickled down her cheek, tickling her skin. She could feel the lace of scars at the back of her neck where her last suit had melted against her.

“We forgot to send you out with a pad or two,” Lukas said. “There’s already some build-up visible in here. And you know, while you’re out there…”

Juliette glared at the tower.

“I’m just saying,” Lukas said. “You maybe could have, you know, given it a bit of a cleaning—”

20

Juliette waited at the bottom of the ramp. She remembered the last time she’d done this, standing in the same place with a blanket of heat tape Solo had made, wondering if she’d run out of air before the doors opened, wondering if she’d survive what awaited her inside. She remembered thinking Lukas was in there, and then struggling with Bernard instead.

She tried to shake those memories free. Glancing down at her pockets, she made sure the flaps on all the pouches were tightly sealed. Every step of the upcoming decontamination flitted through her mind. She trusted that everything would be in place.

“Here we go,” Lukas radioed. Again, his voice was hollow and distant.

On cue, the gears in the airlock door squealed, and a plume of pressurized argon spilled through the gap. Juliette threw herself into the mist, an intense sensation of relief accompanying the move indoors.

“I’m in. I’m in,” she said.

The doors thumped shut behind her. Juliette glanced at the inner airlock door, saw a helmet on the other side of the glass porthole, someone peering in, watching. Moving to the ready bench, she opened the airtight box Nelson had installed in her absence. Needed to be quick. The gas chambers and the flames were all automated.

Ripping the sealed pouches off her thighs, she placed them inside. She unslung the borer with its sample and added that as well, then pushed the lid shut and engaged the locks. The practice run-through had helped. Moving in the suit felt comfortable. She had lain in bed at night thinking through each step until they were habit.

Shuffling across the small airlock, she gripped the edge of the immense metal tub she’d welded together. It was still warm from the last bout of flames, but the water Nelson had topped it up with had sapped much of the heat. With a deep and pointless breath, she lowered herself over the edge.

The water flooded against her helmet, and Juliette felt the first real onrush of fear. Her breath quickened. Being outside was nothing like being underwater again. The floods were in her mouth; she could feel herself taking tiny gulps of air, could taste the steel and rust from the steps; she forgot what she was supposed to be doing.

Glimpsing one of the handles at the bottom of the tub, she reached for it and pulled herself down. One boot at a time, she found the bar welded at the other end of the tub and slipped her feet under, held herself to the bottom, trusting that her back was covered. Her arms ached as she strained against the suit’s buoyancy. And even through her helmet and beneath that water, she could hear displaced fluid splashing over the lip and onto the airlock floor. She could hear the flames kick on and roar and lick at the tub.

“Three, four, five—” Lukas counted, and a painful memory flashed before her, the dull green emergency lights, the panic in her chest—

“Six, seven, eight—”

She could almost taste the oil and fuel from that final gasp as she emerged, alive, from the flooded depths.

“Nine, ten. Burn complete,” he said.

Letting go of the handles and kicking her boots free, she bobbed to the boiling surface, the heat of the water felt through her suit. She fought to get her knees and boots beneath her. Water splashed and steamed everywhere. She feared the longer this next step took, the more the air could attach itself to her, contaminating the second airlock.

She hurried to the door, boots slipping dangerously, the locking wheel already spinning.

Hurry, hurry, she thought to herself.

It opened a crack. She tried to dive through, slipped, landed painfully on the door’s jamb. Several gloved hands grabbed at her as she clawed her way forward, the two suited technicians yanking her through before slamming the door shut.

Nelson and Sophia — two of the former suit techs — had brushes ready. They dipped them into a vat of blue neutralizing agent and began scrubbing Juliette down before turning to themselves and each other.

Juliette turned her back and made sure they got that as well. She went to the vat and fished out the third brush, turned and started scrubbing Sophia’s suit. And saw that it wasn’t Sophia in there.

She squeezed her glove mic. “What the hell, Luke?”

Lukas shrugged, a wince of guilt on his face. She imagined he couldn’t stand the thought of someone else risking themselves. Or probably just wanted to be there by the airlock door in case something went wrong. Juliette couldn’t blame him; she would’ve done the same thing.

They scrubbed the second airlock while Peter Billings and a few others looked on from the sheriff’s office. Bubbles from the cleaning fluid floated up in the air, then trembled toward the vents where the air inside the new airlock was being pumped into the first. Nelson worked on the ceiling, which they’d kept low on purpose. Less air inside. Less volume. Easier to reach. Juliette searched Nelson’s face for any sign of trouble from his time in the inner airlock and blamed the flush and sweat on his energetic scrubbing.

“You’ve got perfect vacuum,” Peter said, using the radio in his office. Juliette motioned to the others, drew her hand across her neck, then closed her fist. They both nodded and went back to scrubbing. While new air was cycled in from the cafeteria, they went over each other one more time, and Juliette finally had a moment to revel in the fact that she was back. Back inside. They had done it. No burns, no hospitals, no contamination. And now they would hopefully learn something.

Peter’s voice filled her helmet again: “We didn’t want to tell you while you were suiting up, but the dig punched through to the other side about half an hour ago.”

Juliette felt a surge of both elation and guilt. She should’ve been down there. The timing was abysmal, but she had felt her window of opportunity closing there in the Up Top. She resigned herself to being happy for Solo and the kids, relieved by the end of their long ordeal.

The second airlock — with the sealed glass door she’d fashioned from a shower stall — began to open. Behind her, a bright light bloomed inside the old airlock, and the small porthole glowed red. A second round of flames surged and raged in the small room, bathing the spoiled walls, charring the very air, boiling off the water Juliette had spilled on the floor, and throwing the vat into a cauldron of raging steam.

Juliette waved the others out of the new airlock while she eyed the old one warily, remembering. Remembering being in there. Lukas came back and tugged her along, through the door and into the former jail cell where they stripped down to their undersuits for yet another round of showering. As she peeled off the soaking layers, all Juliette could think about was the sealed and fireproof box on the ready bench. She hoped it was worth the risk, that the answers to a host of cruel questions were tucked away, safely inside.

21

The great digging machine stood quiet and still. Dust fell from where it had chewed through the ceiling, and the large steel teeth and spinning discs gleamed from their journey through solid rock. Between the discs, the digger’s face was caked with dirt, debris, torn lengths of rebar, and large rocks. By the edge of the machine, where it jutted out into the heart of Silo 17, there was a black crack that connected two very different worlds.

Jimmy watched as strangers spilled from one of those worlds into his. Burly men with dark beards and yellow smiles, hands black with grease, stepped through and squinted up at the rusted pipes overhead, the puddles on the ground, the calm and quiet organs of a silo that had long ago rumbled and now sat deathly still.

They clasped Jimmy’s hand, called him Solo, and squeezed the terrified children. They told him Jules said hello. And then they adjusted the lights on their helmets, which threw golden cones before them, and went splashing off into Jimmy’s home.

Elise clutched Jimmy’s leg as another group of miners and mechanics squeezed past. Two dogs bounded with them, stopped to sniff at the puddles, then at a trembling Elise, before following their owners. Courtnee — Juliette’s friend — finished instructing a group before returning to Jimmy and the kids. Jimmy watched her move. Her hair was lighter than Juliette’s, her features sharper, she wasn’t quite as tall, but she had that same fierceness. He wondered if all the people from this other world would be the same: the men bearded and covered in soot, the women wild and resourceful.

Rickson rounded up the twins while Hannah cradled her crying baby and tried to soothe it back to sleep. Courtnee handed Jimmy a flashlight.

“I don’t have enough lights for all of you,” she said, “so you’ll want to stick close together.” She held her hand over her head. “The tunnel is high enough, just mind the support columns. And the ground is rough, so go slow and stick to the center.”

“Why can’t we stay here and have the doctor come to us?” Rickson asked.

Hannah shot him a look as she bounced the baby on her hip.

“It’s much safer where we’re taking you,” Courtnee said, glancing around at walls slick and corroded. The way she looked at Jimmy’s home made him feel defensive. They’d been getting along just fine for some time now.

Rickson flashed Jimmy a look like he had his own doubts about it being safer on the other side. Jimmy knew what he was scared of. Jimmy had heard the twins talking, and the twins had heard the older kids whispering. Hannah would have to get an implant in her hip like their mothers had. Rickson would be assigned a color and a job other than fending for his family. The young couple were just as wary of these adults as Jimmy was.

Despite their fears, they donned hard hats borrowed from those pouring into their world, clung to one another, and squeezed through the gap. Beyond the digger’s teeth, there was a dark tunnel like the Wilds when all the lights were off. But there was a coolness, and an echo to their voices different than the Wilds. The earth seemed to swallow them as Jimmy tried to keep up with Courtnee, and the kids tried to keep up with him.

They entered a metal door and passed through the long digging machine, which was warm inside. Down a narrow corridor, people squeezing past in the other direction, and finally out another door and back into the cool and dark of the tunnel. Men and women shouted to one another, lights dancing from their helmets as they wrestled with piles of rubble that climbed toward the ceiling and out of sight. Rocks shifted and clattered. There were mounds of them on either side, leaving a precarious pathway in the center. Workers filed past, smelling of mud and sweat. There was a boulder taller than Jimmy that the foot traffic had to bend around.

It felt odd to walk straight ahead in one direction like that. They walked and walked without ever bumping into a wall or bending back around. It was unnatural. That lateral void was more frightening than the darkness with its occasional lights. It was scarier than the veil of dust drifting from the ceiling or the occasional rock tumbling down from the piles. It was worse than the strangers bumping past them in the dark, or the steel beams in the middle of the passage that leapt up from the swirling shadows. It was the eeriness of there being nothing to stop them. Walk and walk and walk in one direction, no end to it all.

Jimmy was used to the up-and-down of the spiral staircase. That was normal. This was not. And yet he stumbled along across the rough surface of the chewed rock, past men and women calling to one another in the flash-beam-studded darkness, between piles of earth crowding the narrow center. They overtook men and women carrying parts of machines and lengths of steel taken from his silo, and Jimmy wanted to say something to them. Elise sniffled and said she was scared. Jimmy scooped her up and let her cling to his neck.

The tunnel went on and on. Even when a light could be seen at the end, a rough square of light, it took countless steps to make that bright maw grow larger. Jimmy thought of Juliette walking this far in the outside. It seemed impossible that she had survived such an ordeal. He had to remind himself that he had heard her voice dozens of times since, that she had really done it, had gone off for help and had kept her promise to come back for him. Their two worlds had been made one.

He dodged another steel column in the center of the tunnel. Aiming his flashlight up, he could see the overhead beams these columns supported. The loose rocks crumbling down gave Jimmy new cause for alarm, and he found himself less reluctantly following Courtnee. He pressed forward, toward the promise of light ahead, forgetting what he was leaving behind and where he was going and thinking only about getting out from underneath the tenuously held earth.

Far behind them, a loud crack sounded out, followed by the rumble of shifting rock and then shouts from workers to get out of the way. Hannah brushed past him. He set Elise down, and she and the twins rushed ahead, dancing in and out of the beam of Courtnee’s flashlight. Streams of people filed past, lights affixed to their hard hats, heading toward Jimmy’s home. He patted his chest reflexively, feeling for the old key that he had put on before leaving the server room. His silo was unprotected. But the fear he could sense in the kids somehow made him stronger. He wasn’t as terrified as they were. It was his duty to be strong.

The tunnel came to a blessed end, the twins scampering out first. They startled the gruff men and women in their dark blue coveralls with knee patches of grease and their leather aprons slotted with tools. Eyes grew wide on faces white with chalk and black from soot. Jimmy paused at the mouth of the tunnel and let Rickson and Hannah out first. All work ceased at the sight of the bundle cradled in Hannah’s arms. One of the women stepped forward and lifted a hand as if to touch the child, but Courtnee waved her back and told the rest to return to their work. Jimmy scanned the crowd for Juliette, even though he’d been told she was up top. Elise begged to be carried again, her tiny hands stretched up in the air. Jimmy adjusted his pack and obliged, ignoring the pain in his hip. The bag around Elise’s neck banged his ribs with its heavy book.

He joined the procession of little ones as they wove through the walls of workers frozen in place, workers who tugged their beards and scratched their heads and watched him as if he were a man from some fictional land. And Jimmy felt at his core that this was a grave mistake. Two worlds had been united, but they were not anything alike. Power surged here. Lights burned steady, and it was crowded with grown men and women. It smelled different. Machines rumbled rather than sat quiet. And the long decades of growing older sloughed off him in a sudden panic as Jimmy hurried to catch up with the others, just one of a number of frightened youth, emerging from shadows and silence into the bright and crowded and noisy.

22

A small bunkroom had been set up for the kids, with a private room down the hall for Jimmy. Elise was unhappy with the arrangements and clung to one of his hands with both of hers. Courtnee told them she had food being sent down and then they could shower. A stack of clean coveralls sat on one of the bunks, a bar of soap, a few worn children’s books. But first, she introduced a tall man in the cleanest pale red coveralls Jimmy could ever remember seeing.

“I’m Dr. Nichols,” the man said, shaking Jimmy’s hand. “I believe you know my daughter.”

Jimmy didn’t understand. And then he remembered that Juliette’s last name was Nichols. He pretended to be brave while this tall, clean-shaven man peered into his eyes and mouth. Next, a cold piece of metal was pressed to Jimmy’s chest, and this man listened intently through his tubes. It all seemed familiar. Something from Jimmy’s distant past.

Jimmy took deep breaths as he was told. The children watched warily, and he realized what a model he was for them, a model for normalcy, for courage. He nearly laughed — but he was supposed to be breathing for the doctor.

Elise volunteered to go next. Dr. Nichols lowered himself to his knees and checked the gap of her missing tooth. He asked about fairies, and when Elise shook her head and said she’d never heard of such a thing, a dime was produced. The twins rushed forward and begged to be next.

“Are fairies real?” Miles asked. “We used to hear noises in the farm where we grew up.”

Marcus wiggled in front of his brother. “I saw a fairy for real one day,” he said. “And I lost twenty teeth when I was young.”

“You did?” Dr. Nichols asked. “Can you smile for me? Excellent. Now open your mouth. Twenty teeth, you say.”

“Uh-huh,” Marcus said. He wiped his mouth. “And every one of them growed back except for the one Miles knocked out.”

“It was an accident,” Miles complained. He lifted his shirt and asked to have his breaths heard. Jimmy watched Rickson and Hannah huddle together around their infant as they studied the proceedings. He also noted that Dr. Nichols, even as he looked over the two boys, couldn’t stop glancing at the baby in Hannah’s arms.

The twins were given a dime each after their check-up. “Dimes are good luck for twins,” Dr. Nichols said. “Parents put two of these under their pillows in the hopes of having such healthy boys as you.”

The twins beamed and scrutinized the coins for any sign of a faded face or portion of a word to suggest they were real. “Rickson used to be a twin too,” Miles said.

“Oh?” Dr. Nichols shifted his attention to the older kids sitting side by side on the lower bunk.

“I don’t want to take the implant,” Hannah said coolly. “My mother had the implant, but it was cut out of her. I don’t want to be cut.”

Rickson wrapped an arm around her and held her close. He narrowed his eyes at the tall doctor, and Jimmy felt nervous.

“You don’t have to take the implant,” Dr. Nichols whispered, but Jimmy saw the way he glanced at Courtnee. “Do you mind if I listen to your child’s heartbeat? I just want to make sure it’s nice and strong—”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Rickson asked, thrusting his shoulders back.

Dr. Nichols studied the boy a moment. “You met my daughter, didn’t you? Juliette.”

He nodded. “Briefly,” he said. “She left soon after.”

“Well, she sent me down here because she cares about your health. I’m a doctor. I specialize in children, the youngest of them. I think your child looks very strong and healthy. I just want to be sure.” Dr. Nichols held up the metal disc at the end of his hearing tubes and pressed his palm against it. “There. So it’ll be nice and warm. Your boy won’t even know I’m taking a listen.”

Jimmy rubbed his chest where his breathing had been checked and wondered why the doctor hadn’t warmed it for him.

“For a dime?” Rickson asked.

Dr. Nichols smiled. “How about a few chits, instead?”

“What’s a chit?” Rickson asked, but Hannah was already adjusting herself on the bunk so the doctor could have a look.

Courtnee rested a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder while the check-ups continued. Jimmy turned to see what she needed.

“Juliette wanted me to call her as soon as you all were over here. I’ll be back to check on you in a little while—”

“Wait,” Jimmy said. “I’d like to come. I want to speak with her.”

“Me too,” said Elise, pressing against his leg.

Courtnee frowned. “Okay,” she said. “But let’s be quick, because you all need to eat and get freshened up.”

“Freshened up?” Elise asked.

“If you’re going to go up and see your new home, yeah.”

“New home?” Jimmy asked.

But Courtnee had already turned to go.

Jimmy hurried out the door and down the hall after Courtnee. Elise grabbed her shoulder bag, the one that held her heavy book, and scampered along beside him.

“What did she mean about a new home?” Elise asked. “When are we going back to our real home?”

Jimmy scratched his beard and wrestled with truth and lies. We may never go home, he wanted to say. No matter where we end up, it may never feel like home again.

“I think this will be our new home,” he told her, keeping his voice from cracking. He reached down and rested his wrinkled hand on her thin shoulder, felt how fragile she was, this flesh that words could crack. “It’ll be our home for a time, at least. Until they make our old home better.” He glanced ahead at Courtnee, who did not look back.

Elise stopped in the middle of the hallway and peered over her shoulder. When she turned back, the dim lights of Mechanical caught the water in her eyes. Jimmy was about to tell her not to cry when Courtnee knelt down and called Elise over. Elise refused to budge.

“Do you want to come with us to call Juliette and talk with her on the radio?” Courtnee asked.

Elise chewed on her finger and nodded. A tear rolled down her cheek. She clutched the bag with her book in it, and Jimmy remembered kids from another lifetime who used to cling to dolls in the same way.

“After we make this call and you get freshened up, I’ll get you some sweetcorn from the pantry. Would you like that?”

Elise shrugged. Jimmy wanted to say that none of the kids had ever tasted sweetcorn before. He had never heard of the stuff himself. But now he wanted some.

“Let’s go call Juliette together,” Courtnee said.

Elise sniffed and nodded. She took Jimmy’s hand and peered up at him. “What’s sweetcorn?” she asked.

“It’ll be a surprise,” Jimmy said, which was the dead truth.

Courtnee led them down the hall and around a bend. It took a moment for the twists and turns to remind Jimmy of the dark and wet place he’d left behind. Beyond the fresh paint and the humming lights, past the neat wires and the smell of fresh grease, lay a labyrinth identical to the rusted bucket he’d explored the past two weeks. He could almost hear the puddles squish beneath his feet, hear that screaming pump he tended suck at an empty basin — but that was a real noise at his feet. A loud yip.

Elise screamed, and at first Jimmy thought he’d stepped on her. But there at his feet was a large brown rat with a fearsome tail, crying and turning circles.

Jimmy’s heart stopped. Elise screamed and screamed, but then he realized it was his voice he was hearing. Elise’s arms were latched around his leg, making it difficult to turn and flee. And meanwhile, Courtnee bent over with laughter. Jimmy nearly fainted as Courtnee scooped the giant rat off the ground. When the thing licked at her chin, he realized it wasn’t a rat at all but a dog. A juvenile. He’d seen grown dogs in the mids of his silo when he was a boy, but had never seen a pup. Elise loosened her grip when she saw that the animal meant no harm.

“It’s a cat!” Elise cried.

“That’s no cat,” Jimmy said. He knew cats.

Courtnee was still laughing at him when a young man careened around the corner, panting, summoned no doubt by Jimmy’s startled screeches.

“There you are,” he said, taking the animal from Courtnee. The pup clawed at the man’s shoulder and tried to bite his earlobe. “Damn thing.” The mechanic swatted the pup’s face away. He gripped it by the scruff of its neck, its legs pawing at the air.

“Is that more of them?” Courtnee asked.

“Same litter,” the man said.

“Conner was to put them down weeks ago.”

The man shrugged. “Conner’s been digging that damn tunnel. But I’ll get on him about it.” He nodded to Courtnee and marched back the way he’d come, the animal dangling from its scruff.

“Gave you a fright,” Courtnee said, smiling at Jimmy.

“Thought he was a rat,” Jimmy said, remembering the hordes of them that’d taken over the lower farms.

“We got overrun with dogs when some people from Supply hunkered down here,” Courtnee said. She led them down the hall in the direction the man had gone. Elise, for once, was scampering out in front. “They’ve been busy ever since making more dogs. Found a litter of them myself in the pump room, beneath the heat exchangers. A few weeks ago, another was discovered in the tool lock-up. We’ll be finding them in our beds soon enough, damn things. All they do is eat and make mess all over the place.”

Jimmy thought of his youth in the server room, eating raw beans out of a can and shitting on the floor grates. You couldn’t hate a living thing for… living, could you?

The hall ahead came to a dead end. Elise was already exploring to the left as if she were looking for something.

“Walker’s workshop is this way,” Courtnee said.

Elise glanced back. There was a yip from somewhere, and she turned and carried on.

“Elise,” Jimmy called.

She peeked into an open door before disappearing inside. Courtnee and Jimmy hurried after.

When they turned the corner, they found her standing over a parts crate, the man from the hallway placing something back inside. Elise gripped the edge of the crate and bent forward. Yipping and scratching leaked out of the plastic bin.

“Careful, child.” Courtnee hurried her way. “They bite.”

Elise turned to Jimmy. One of the squirming animals was in her arms, a pink tongue flashing out.

“Put it back,” Jimmy said.

Courtnee reached for the animal, but the man corralling the pups already had it by its neck. He dropped the puppy back in with the others and kicked the lid shut with a bang.

“I’m sorry, boss.” He slid the crate aside with his foot while Elise made plaintive noises.

“Are you feeding them?” Courtnee asked. She pointed to a pile of scraps on an old plate.

“Conner is. Swear. They’re from that dog he took in. You know how he is about the thing. I told him what you said, but he’s been putting it off.”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Courtnee said, her eyes darting at young Elise. Jimmy could tell she didn’t want to discuss what needed doing in front of the child. “C’mon.” She guided Jimmy to the door and back into the hall. He in turn pulled a complaining child after him.

23

A familiar and unpleasant odor awaited them at their destination. It was the smell of hot electrics like the humming servers and the stench of unwashed men. For Jimmy, it was a noseful of his old self and his old home. An earful of it too. There was a hiss of static — a familiar, ghostly whisper like his radios made. He followed Courtnee into a room of workbenches and the wreck of countless projects underway or abandoned, it was difficult to tell which.

There was a scattering of computer parts on a counter by the door, and Jimmy thought how his father would have lectured to see them so poorly arranged. A man in a leather smock turned from one of the far benches, a smoking metal wand in his hand, tools studding his chest and poking out of a hundred pockets, a grizzled beard and a wild look in his eyes. Jimmy had never seen such a man in all his life.

“Courtnee,” the man said. He pulled a bright length of silver wire from his lips, set the wand down, and waved the smoke from his face. “Is it dinner?”

“It’s not yet lunch,” Courtnee told him. “I want you to meet two of Juliette’s friends. They’re from the other silo.”

“The other silo.” Walker adjusted a lens down over one eye and squinted at his visitors. He got up slowly from his stool. “I’ve spoken with you,” he said. He wiped his palm on the seat of his coveralls and extended his hand. “Solo, right?”

Jimmy stepped forward and accepted Walker’s hand. The two men chewed their beards and studied each other for a moment. “I prefer Jimmy,” he said at last.

Walker nodded. “Yes, yes. That’s right.”

“And I’m Elise.” She waved. “Hannah calls me Lily, but I don’t like being called Lily. I like Elise.”

“It’s a good name,” Walker agreed. He tugged on his beard and rocked back on his heels, studying her.

“They were hoping to get in touch with Jules,” Courtnee said. “And I was supposed to call her and let her know they’re here. Is she… did everything go okay?”

Walker seemed to snap out of a trance. “What? Oh. Oh, yes.” He clapped his hands. “Everything went, it seems. She’s back inside.”

“What did she go out for?” Jimmy asked. He knew Juliette had been working on something but not what. Just some Project she never wanted to discuss over the radio because she didn’t know who might be listening.

“She went to see what was out there, apparently,” Walker said. He grumbled something and eyed the open door to his workshop with a scrunched-up nose. He apparently didn’t believe this was a valid reason for going anywhere. After an uncomfortable pause, he dropped his gaze to his desk. His old hands deftly lifted an unusual-looking radio, one bristling with knobs and dials. “Let’s see if we can raise her,” he said.

He called for Juliette, and someone else answered. They said to wait a moment. Walker held the radio out to Jimmy, who took it from him, familiar enough with how they worked.

A voice crackled out of the air: “Yes? Hello—?”

It was Juliette’s voice. Jimmy squeezed the button.

“Jules?” He glanced at the ceiling and realized that for the first time in forever, she was above him somewhere, the two of them back under the same top. “Are you there?”

“Solo!” And he didn’t correct her. “You’re with Walker. Is Courtnee there?”

“Yes.”

“Great. That’s great. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I’ll be down as soon as I can. They’re making up a place for the kids near the farms, more like home. I’ve just got this… one little project to finish first. It should only be a few days.”

“It’s okay,” Jimmy said. He smiled nervously at Courtnee and felt very young all of a sudden. In truth, a few days felt like a very long time. He wanted to see Jules or go home. Or both. “I want to see you soon,” he added, changing his mind. “Don’t let it be too long.”

A burst of static. The sound of radio waves thinking. “It won’t be. I promise. Did you see my dad? He’s a doctor. I sent him down to check on you and the kids.”

“We saw him. He’s here.” Jimmy glanced down at Elise, who was tugging him toward the door, probably thinking of sweetcorn.

“Good. You said Courtnee was there. Can you put her on?”

Jimmy handed the radio over and saw that his hand was trembling. Courtnee took it. She listened to Juliette say something about the great stairway, and Courtnee updated her on the dig. There was talk of bringing the radio up so Jules could have it, an argument between them on why her father wasn’t up top to make sure she and someone named Nelson were okay, a lot that Jimmy didn’t understand. He tried to follow along, but his mind wandered. And then he realized Elise was nowhere to be seen.

“Where did that child get off to?” he asked. He ducked down and peered beneath the tool bench, saw nothing but a pile of parts and broken machines. He stood and checked behind one of the tall counters. It was a bad time for playing Hide and Find. He checked the far corner, and a cool taste of panic rose in his throat. Elise was quick to disappear back in his silo, was prone to distraction, just wandered off toward anything shiny or the slightest waft of fruit-smells. But here… with strangers and places he didn’t know. Jimmy lumbered across the room and peeked between the benches and behind the cluttered shelves, every second cranking up the sound of his heartbeat in his ears.

“She was just—” Walker started to say.

“I’m right here,” Elise called. She waved from the hallway, was standing just outside the door. “Can we get back to Rickson? I’m hungry.”

“And I promised you sweetcorn,” Courtnee said, smiling. Her conversation with Juliette was done. She had missed Jimmy’s minute or two of complete and utter panic. On the way to the door, she handed him the strange radio. “Jules wants you to take this with you.”

Jimmy accepted it gingerly.

“She said it might be a day or two, but she’ll see you at your new place by the lower farms.”

“I’m really hungry,” Elise called out impatiently. Jimmy laughed and told her to be polite, but his stomach was grumbling too. He joined her in the hallway and saw that she had her large memory book out of her shoulder bag. She clutched it tightly to her chest. Loose and colorful pages she had yet to sew in jutted out at odd angles.

“Follow me,” Courtnee said, leading them down the hall. “You are going to love Mama Jean’s sweetcorn.”

Jimmy felt certain this was true. He hurried along after Courtnee, eager to eat and then see Jules. Behind him, little Elise trailed along at her own pace. She cradled her large book in both arms — humming quietly to herself because she didn’t know how to whistle — her shoulder bag kicking and squirming and making noises of its own.

24

Juliette entered the airlock to retrieve the samples; she could feel the heat from the earlier fire — or else she was imagining it. It could’ve been her temperature going up inside the suit. Or it may simply have been the sight of that sealed container on the ready bench, its lid now discolored from the lick of flames.

She checked the container with the flat of her glove. The material on her palm didn’t grow tacky and stick to the metal; it felt cool to the touch. Over an hour of scrubbing down, changing into new suits, cleaning both airlocks, and now there was a box of clues. A box of outside air, of soil and other samples. Clues, perhaps, to all that was wrong with the world.

She retrieved the box and joined the others beyond the second airlock. A large lead-lined trunk was waiting, its joints sealed, the interior padded. The welded sample box was nestled inside. After the lid was shut, Nelson added a ring of caulk, and Lukas helped Juliette with her helmet. With it off, she realized how labored her breathing had become. Wearing that suit was starting to get to her.

She wiggled out of it while Peter Billings sealed all of the airlocks. His office adjacent to the cafeteria had been a construction site for the past week, and she could tell he would be glad for everyone to be gone. Juliette had promised to remove the inner lock as soon as possible, but that there would most likely be more excursions before that happened. First, she wanted to see about the small pockets of outside air she’d brought into the silo. And it was a long way down to the Suit Lab on thirty-four.

Nelson and Sophia went ahead of them to clear the stairwell. Juliette and Lukas followed after, one hand each on either side of the trunk like porters on a tandem. Another violation of the Pact, Juliette thought. People in silver, porting. How many laws could she break now that she was in a position to uphold them all? How clever could she be in justifying her actions?

Her thoughts drifted from her many hypocrisies to the dig far below, to the news that Courtnee had punched through, that Solo and the kids were safe. She hated that she couldn’t be down there with them, but at least her father was. Initially reluctant to play any role in her voyage outside, her father had then resisted leaving her to see to the kids instead. Juliette had convinced him they had taken enough precautions that a check-up of her health was unnecessary.

The trunk swayed and banged against the rail with a jarring clang, and she tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

“You okay back there?” Lukas called.

“How do porters do this?” she asked, switching hands. The weight of the lead-lined trunk pulled down, and its bulk was in the way of her legs. Lukas was lower down and able to walk in the center of the stairway with his arm straight by his side — much more comfortable-looking. She couldn’t manage anything similar from higher up. At the next landing, she made Lukas wait while she removed the belt threaded through the waist of her coveralls and tied this to the handle, looping it over her shoulder the way she’d seen a porter do. This allowed her to walk to the side, the weight of the box leaning against her hip, just how they carried those black bags with bodies to be buried. After a level, it almost grew comfortable, and Juliette could see the appeal of porting. It gave one time to think. The mind grew still while the body moved. But then the thought of black bags and what she and Lukas were porting, and her thoughts found a dark shadow to lie still in.

“How’re you doing?” she asked Lukas after two turns of complete silence.

“Fine,” he said. “Just wondering what we’re carrying here, you know? What’s inside the box.”

His mind had found similar shadows.

“You think this was a bad idea?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. It was hard to tell if that was a shrug, or if he was adjusting his grip.

They passed another landing. Nelson and Sophia had taped the doors off, but faces watched from behind dirty glass. Juliette spotted an elderly woman holding a bright cross against the glass. As she turned, the woman rubbed the cross and kissed it, and Juliette thought of Father Wendel and the idea that she was bringing fear, not hope, to the silo. Hope was what he and the church offered, some place to exist after death. Fear came from the chance that changing the world for the better could possibly make it worse.

She waited until they were beneath the landing. “Hey, Luke?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever wonder what happens to us after we’re gone?”

“I know what happens to us,” he said. “We get slathered in butter and chewed off the cob.”

He laughed at his own joke.

“I’m serious. Do you think our souls join the clouds and find some better place?”

His laughter stopped. “No,” he said after a long pause. “I think we simply stop being.”

They descended a turn and passed another landing, another door taped off and sealed as a precaution. Juliette realized their voices were drifting up and down a quiet and empty stairwell.

“It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be around one day,” Lukas said after a while. “I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”

Again, he adjusted his grip or shrugged. It was impossible to say.

“I’ll tell you what does last forever.” He turned his head to make sure she could hear, and Juliette braced for something corny like “love” or something unfunny like “your casseroles”.

“What lasts forever?” she obliged, sure to regret it but sensing that he was waiting for her to ask.

“Our decisions,” he said.

“Can we stop a moment?” Juliette asked. There was a burn where the strap rubbed across her neck. She set her end down on a step, and Lukas held his half to keep the trunk level. She checked the knot and stepped around to switch shoulders. “I’m sorry — ‘our decisions’?” She had lost him.

Lukas turned to face her. “Yeah. Our actions, you know? They last forever. Whatever we do, it’ll always be what we did. There’s no taking them back.”

This wasn’t the answer she was expecting. There was sadness in his voice as he said these things, that box resting against his knee, and Juliette was moved by the utter simplicity of his answer. Something resonated, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “Tell me more,” she said. She looped the strap around her other shoulder and readied to lift it again. Lukas held the rail with one hand and seemed content to rest there a moment longer.

“I mean, the world goes around the sun, right?”

“According to you.” She laughed.

“Well, it does. The Legacy and the man from Silo 1 confirm it.”

Juliette scoffed as if neither could be trusted. Lukas ignored her and continued.

“That means we don’t exist in one place. Instead, everything we do is left in… like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take—”

“And mistake.”

He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”

“Makes you not want to fuck up,” Juliette said, thinking on all the times she had, wondering if this box between them was one more mistake. She saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot.

And the stains would never wash out. That’s what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed. Always have had a brother die and a mother take her own life. Always have had taken that damn job as sheriff.

There was no going back. Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.

“You okay?” Lukas asked. “Ready to go on?”

But she knew he was asking more than if her arm was tired. He had this ability to spot her secret worries. He had a keen vision that allowed him to glimpse the smallest pinprick of hurt through heavy clouds.

“I’m fine,” she lied. And she searched her past for some noble deed, for a bloodless tread, for any touch on the world that had left it a brighter place. But when she had been sent to clean, she had refused. Always have had refused. She had turned her back and walked off, and there was no chance of going back and doing it any other way.

Nelson was waiting for them in the Suit Lab. He was already prepped and in his second suit, but with his helmet off. The suit Juliette wore outside and the two used to scrub her down had been left in the airlock. Only the radios installed in the collars had been saved. They were as precious as people, Juliette had joked. Nelson and Sophia had already installed them in this pair of suits; Lukas would have a third radio in the hall.

The trunk went on the floor by a cleared workbench; Juliette and Lukas both shook sensation and blood back into their arms. “You’ve got the door?” she asked Lukas.

He nodded and threw a last frowning glance at the trunk. Juliette could tell he would rather stay and help. He squeezed her arm and kissed her on the cheek before leaving and closing the door. Juliette sat on her cot and squeezed herself into yet another suit and could hear him and Sophia working seal tape around the door. The vents overhead had already been double-bagged. Juliette reckoned there was far less air in the container than she had allowed inside Silo 17 — and she had survived that ordeal — but they were still taking every precaution. They were acting as if even one of those containers had enough poison in it to kill everyone in the silo. It was a condition Juliette had insisted upon.

Nelson zipped up her back and folded the velcro flap over, sealing it tight. She tugged on her gloves. Both of their helmets clicked into place. To give them plenty of air and time, she had pulled an oxygen bottle from the acetylene kit. The flow of air was regulated with a small knob, and the overflow spilled out through a set of double valves. Testing the set-up, Juliette had found they could go for days on the trickle of air from the shared tank.

“You good?” she asked Nelson, testing the volume on her radio.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ready.”

Juliette appreciated the rapport they had developed, the rhythm of two mechanics on the same shift working the same project night after night. Most of their conversations regarded the project, challenges to overcome, tools to pass back and forth. But she had also learned that Nelson’s mother used to work with her father, was a nurse before moving down to the Deep to become a doctor. She also learned that Nelson had built the last two cleaning suits, had fitted Holston before cleaning, had just missed being assigned to her. Juliette had decided that this project was as much for his absolution as hers. He had put in long hours that she didn’t think she could expect from anyone else. They were both looking to make things right.

Selecting a flat screwdriver from the tool rack, she began scraping caulk from around the lid of the trunk. Nelson chose another driver and worked his side. When their efforts met, she checked with him, and they pried the lid open to reveal the metal container from the airlock bench. Lifting this out, they rested it on a cleared work surface. Juliette hesitated. From the walls, a dozen cleaning suits looked down on them in silent disapproval.

But they had taken all precautions. Even ludicrous ones. The suits they were wearing had been stripped down of all the excess padding, making it easier to work. The gloves as well. Every concession Lukas had asked for, she had provided. It’d been like Shirly with the backup generator and the dig, going so far as to throttle back the main genny to reduce the power load, even rigging the tunnel with blast charges in case of contamination, whatever it took to allow the project to move forward.

Juliette snapped back to the present as she realized Nelson was waiting on her. She grabbed the lid and hinged it open, pulled out the samples. There were two of air, one control sample of argon from the airlock, one each of surface and deep soil, and one of desiccated human remains. They were each placed on the workbench, and then the metal container was set aside.

“Where do you want to start?” Nelson asked. He grabbed a small length of steel pipe with a piece of chalk slotted into the end, an improvised writing device for gloved hands. A blackboard slate stood ready on the bench to take notes.

“Let’s start with the air samples,” she said. It had already been several hours in getting the samples down to the lab. Her private fear was that there’d be nothing left of the gaskets by now, nothing to observe. Juliette checked the labels on the containers and found the one marked “2”. It’d been taken near the hills.

“There’s irony here, you know,” Nelson said.

Juliette took the sample container from him and peered through the clear plastic top. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just…” He turned and checked the clock on the wall and scratched the time onto the slate, glanced back guiltily at Juliette. “Being allowed to do this, to see what’s out there, to even talk about it. I mean, I put your suit together. I was lead tech on the sheriff’s suit.” He frowned behind his clear dome. Juliette could see a shine on his brow. “I remember helping him get dressed.”

It was his third or fourth awkward attempt at an apology, and Juliette appreciated it. “You were just doing your job,” she assured him. And then she thought just how powerful that sentiment was, how far down a nasty road that could take a person, shuffling along and simply doing their job.

“But the irony is that this room—” He waved a glove at the suits peering down from the walls. “Even my mom thought this room was here to help people, help cleaners survive for as long as possible, help explore the outside world that nobody’s supposed to talk about. And finally, here we are. More than talking about it.”

Juliette didn’t say anything, but he was right. It was a room of both hope and dread. “What we yearn to find and what’s out there are two different things,” she eventually said. “Let’s stay focused.”

Nelson nodded and readied his chalk. Juliette shook the first sample container until the two gaskets inside separated. The durable one from Supply was perfectly whole. The yellow marks on the edge were still there. The other gasket was in far worse shape. Its red marks were already gone, the edges eaten away by the air inside the container. The same was true of the two samples of heat tape adhered to the bottom. The square piece from Supply was intact. She had cut the one from IT into a triangle in order to tell them apart. It had a small hole eaten through it.

“I’d say an eighth gone on the sample two gasket,” Juliette said. “One hole in the heat tape three millimeters across. Both Supply samples appear fine.”

Nelson wrote her observations down. This was how she had decided to measure the toxicity of the air, by using the seals and heat tape designed to rot out there and compare it to the ones she knew would last. She passed him the container so he could verify and realized that this was their first bit of data. This was confirmation as great as her survival on the outside. The equipment pulled from the cleaning suit storage bays was meant to fail. Juliette felt chills at the momentous nature of this first step. Already, her mind raced with all the experiments to perform next. And they hadn’t yet opened the containers to see what the air inside was like.

“I confirm an eighth of wear on the gasket,” Nelson said, peering inside the container. “I would go two and a half mils on the tape.”

“Mark two and a half,” she said. One way she would change this next time would be to keep their own slates. Her observations might affect his and vice versa. So much to learn. She grabbed the next sample while Nelson scratched his numbers.

“Sample one,” she said. “This one was from the ramp.” Peering inside, she spotted the whole gasket that had to be from Supply. The other gasket was half worn. It had nearly pinched all the way through in one place. Tipping the container upside down and rattling it, she was able to get the gasket to rest against the clear lid. “That can’t be right,” she said. “Let’s see that lamp.”

Nelson swiveled the arm of the worklight toward her. Juliette aimed it upward, bent over the workbench, and twisted her body and head awkwardly to peer past the dilapidated gasket toward the shiny heat tape beyond.

“I… I’d say half wear on the gasket. Holes in the heat tape five… no, six mils across. I need you to look at this.”

Nelson marked down her numbers before taking the sample. He returned the light to his side of the bench. She hadn’t expected a huge difference between the two samples, but if one sample was worse, it should be the one from the hills, not the ramp. Not where they were pumping out good air.

“Maybe I pulled them out in the wrong order,” she said. She grabbed the next sample, the control. She’d been so careful outside, but she did remember her thoughts being scrambled. She had lost count at one point, had held one of the canisters open too long. That’s what it was.

“I confirm,” Nelson said. “A lot more wear on these. Are you sure this one was from the ramp?”

“I think I screwed up. I held one of them open too long. Dammit. We might have to throw those numbers out, at least for any comparison.”

“That’s why we took more than one sample,” Nelson said. He coughed into his helmet, which fogged the dome in front of his face. He cleared his throat. “Don’t beat yourself up.”

He knew her well enough. Juliette grabbed the control sample, cursing herself under her breath, and wondered what Lukas was thinking out there in the hall, listening in on his radio. “Last one,” she said, rattling the container.

Nelson waited, chalk poised above the slate. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t…” She aimed the light inside. She rattled the container. Sweat trickled down her jaw and dripped from her chin. “I thought this was the control,” she said. She set the sample down and grabbed the next container, but it was full of soil. Her heart was pounding, her head spinning. None of this made sense. Unless she’d pulled the samples out in the wrong order. Had she screwed it all up?

“Yeah, that’s the control sample,” Nelson said. He tapped the canister she’d just checked with his length of pipe. “It’s marked right there.”

“Gimme a sec,” she said. Juliette took a few deep breaths. She peered inside the control sample once again, which had been collected inside the airlock. It should have captured nothing but argon. She handed the container to Nelson.

“Yeah, that’s not right,” he said. He shook the container. “Something’s not right.”

Juliette could barely hear. Her mind raced. Nelson peered inside the control sample.

“I think…” He hesitated. “I think maybe a seal fell out when you opened the lid. Which is no big deal. These things happen. Or maybe…”

“Impossible,” she said. She had been careful. She remembered seeing the seals in there. Nelson cleared his throat and placed the control sample on the workbench. He adjusted the worklight to point directly down into it. Both of them leaned over. Nothing had fallen out, she was sure of it. But then, she had made mistakes. Everyone was capable of them—

“There’s only one seal in there,” Nelson said. “I really think maybe it fell—”

“The heat tape,” Juliette said. She adjusted the light. There was a flash from the bottom of the container where a piece of tape was stuck. The other piece was gone. “Are you telling me that an adhered piece of tape fell out as well?”

“Well then, containers are out of order,” he said. “We have them backwards. This makes perfect sense if we got them all backwards. Because the one from the hill isn’t quite as worn as the ramp sample. That’s what it is.”

Juliette had thought of that, but it was an attempt to match what she thought she knew to what she was seeing. The whole point of going out was to confirm suspicions. What did it mean that she was seeing something completely different?

And then it hit her like a wrench to the skull. It hit her like a great betrayal. A betrayal by a machine that was always good to her, like a trusted pump that suddenly ran backwards for no apparent reason. It hit her like a loved one turning his back while she was falling, like some great bond that wasn’t simply taken away but never truly existed.

“Luke,” she said, hoping he was listening, that he had his radio on. She waited. Nelson coughed.

“I’m here,” he answered, his voice thin and distant. “I’ve been following.”

“The argon,” Juliette said, watching Nelson through both of their domes. “What do we know about it?”

Nelson blinked the sweat from his eyes.

“Know what?” Lukas said. “There’s a periodic table in there somewhere. Inside one of the cabinets, I think.”

“No,” Juliette said, raising her voice so she could be sure he heard. “I mean, where does it come from? Are we even sure what it is?”

25

There was a rattle in Donald’s chest, a flapping of some loosely connected thing, an internal alarm that his condition was deteriorating — that he was getting worse. He forced himself to cough, as much as he hated to, as much as his diaphragm was sore from the effort, as much as his throat burned and muscles ached. He leaned forward in his chair and hacked until something deep inside him tore loose and skittered across his tongue, was spat into his square of fetid cloth.

He folded the cloth rather than look and collapsed back into his chair, sweaty and exhausted. He took a deep, less-rattly breath. Another. A handful of cool gasps that didn’t quite torture him. Had anything ever felt so great as a painless breath?

Glancing around the room in a daze, he absorbed all that he had once taken for granted: remnants of meals, a deck of cards, a butterflied paperback with browned pages and striated spine — signs of shifts endured but not suffered. He was suffering. He suffered the wait before Silo 18 answered. He studied the schematic of all the other silos that he fretted over. Dead worlds is what he saw. All of them would die except for one. There was a tickle in his throat, and he knew for certain that he would be dead before he decided anything, before he found some way to help or choose or steer the project off its suicidal course. He was the only one who knew or cared — and his knowledge and compassion would be buried with him.

What was he thinking, anyway? That he could fix things? That he could put right a world he had helped destroy? The world was long past fixing. The world was long past setting to right. One glimpse of green fields and blue skies from a drone, and his mind had tumbled out of sorts. Now it’d been so long since that one glimpse that he’d begun to doubt it. He knew how the cleanings worked. He knew better than to trust the vision of some machine.

But foolish hope had him there, in that comm room, reaching out once more. Foolish hope had him dreaming of a stop to it all, some way to let these silos full of people live their own lives, free of all this meddling. It was curiosity as well, wanting to know what was going on in those servers, the last great mystery, one he could explore only with the help of this IT Head he had inducted himself. Donald just wanted answers. He longed for truth and for a painless death for himself and for Charlotte. An end to shifts and dreams. A final resting place, perhaps, up on that hill with a view of Helen’s grave. It wasn’t too much to hope for, he didn’t think.

He checked the clock on the wall. They were late to answer. Fifteen minutes already. Something was happening. He watched the second hand jitter around and realized the entire operation, all of the silos, was like a giant clock. The whole thing ran on automatic. It was winding down.

Invisible machines rode the winds around the planet, destroying anything human, returning the world to wilderness. The people buried underground were dormant seeds that would have to wait another two hundred years before they sprouted. Two hundred years. Donald felt his throat begin to tickle once more and wondered if he had two days in him.

At that moment, he only had fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes before the operators would come back on shift. These sessions of his had grown regular. It was not unusual to clear everyone out for classified discussions, but it was beginning to seem suspicious that he did it every day at the same exact time. He could see the way they looked at one another as they took their mugs and filed out. Probably thought it was some romance. Donald often felt as if it were a romance of sorts. A romance of olden times and truth.

Now he was being stood up. Half of this session had been wasted on listening to the line buzz and go unanswered. Something was happening over there. Something bad. Or maybe he was on edge from the reports of a dead body found in his own silo, some murder the folks in Security were looking into. It was strange that this barely stirred him. He cared more about other silos, had lost all empathy for his own.

There was a click in his ringing headset. “Hello?” he asked, his voice tired and weak. He trusted the machines to make him sound stronger.

There was no reply, just the sound of someone breathing. But that was good enough for an introduction. Lukas never failed to say hello.

“Mayor,” he said.

“You know I don’t like being called that,” she said. She sounded winded, as though she’d been running.

“You prefer Juliette?”

Silence. Donald wondered why he preferred to hear from her. Lukas, he was fond of. He had been there when the young man took his Rite, and Donald admired his curiosity, his study of the Legacy. It filled him with nostalgia to talk about the old world with Lukas. It was a therapy of sorts. And Lukas was the one helping him pry the lid off those servers to study their contents.

With Juliette, the allure was something different. It was the accusations and abuse, which he knew he fully deserved. It was the harsh silences and the threats. There was some part of Donald that wanted her to come end him before his cough could. Humiliation and execution — that was his path to exoneration.

“I know how you’re doing it,” Juliette finally said, fire in her voice. Venom. “I finally understand. I figured it out.”

Donald peeled his headset from one ear and wiped a trickle of sweat. “What do you understand?” he asked. He wondered if Lukas had uncovered something in one of the servers, something to set Juliette off.

“The cleanings,” she spat.

Donald checked the clock. Fifteen minutes were going to slip by in a hurry. The person reading that novel would be back soon, as well as the techs in the middle of that game of cards. “I’m happy to talk about the cleanings—”

“I’ve just been outside,” she told him.

Donald covered his microphone and coughed. “Outside where?” he asked. He thought of the tunnel she claimed to be digging, the racket they had been making over there that had recently gone silent. He thought she meant she’d been beyond the boundaries of her silo.

“Outside outside. The hills. The world the ancients left behind. I took samples.”

Donald leaned forward in his seat. She meant to threaten him, but all he heard was a promise. She meant to torture him, but all he felt was excitement. Outside. And to take samples. He dreamed of such a venture. Dreamed of discovering what he had breathed out there, what they had done to the world, if it was getting better or worse. Juliette must think he held the answers, but he had nothing but questions.

“What did you find?” he whispered. And he damned the machines that would make him sound disinterested, that would make him sound as if he knew. Why couldn’t he just say that he had no idea what was wrong with the world or with himself and please, please help him? Help each other.

“You aren’t sending us out there to clean. You’re sending something else. I’ll tell you what I found—”

To Donald, her voice was the entire universe. The weight of the soil overhead vanished, as did the solidness beneath his feet. It was just him in a bubble, and that voice.

“—we took two samples and another from the airlock that should’ve been inert gas. We took a sample from the ramp and one from the hills.”

Suddenly, he was the silent one. His coveralls clung to him. He waited and waited, but she outlasted him. She wanted him to beg for it. Maybe she knew how lost he was.

“What did you find?” he asked again.

“That you’re a lying sack of ratshit. That everything we’ve been told, any time we’ve trusted you, we’ve been fools. We take for granted everything you show us, everything you tell us, and none of it’s true. Maybe there were no ancients. You know these goddamn books over here? Burn them all. And you let Lukas believe this crap—”

“The books are real,” Donald said.

“Ratshit. Like the argon? Is the argon real? What the hell are you pumping into the airlocks when we go out to clean?”

Donald repeated her question in his head. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Stop with the games. I know what’s going on now. When you send us outside, you pump our airlocks full of something that eats away at us. It takes the seals and gaskets first, and then our bodies. You’ve got it down to a science, haven’t you? Well, I found the camera feeds you hid. I cut them weeks ago. Yeah, that was me. And I saw the power lines coming in. I saw the pipes. The gas is in the pipes, isn’t it?”

“Juliette, listen to me—”

“Don’t you say my name like you know me. You don’t know me. All these talks, telling me how my silo was built like you built it yourself, telling Lukas about a disappeared world like you’d seen it with your own eyes. Were you trying to get us to like you? To think you were our friend? Saying you want to help us?”

Donald watched the clock tick down. The techs would be back soon. He’d have to yell at them to get out. He couldn’t leave the conversation like this.

“Stop calling us,” Juliette said. “The buzzing and the flashing lights, it’s giving us headaches. If you keep doing this every day, I’m going to start tearing shit down, and I’ve got enough to worry about.”

“Listen… Please—”

“No, you listen. You are cut off from us. We don’t want your cameras, your power, your gas. I’m cutting it all. And no one will ever clean from here again. No more of this bullshit argon. The next time I go out, it’ll be with clean air. Now fuck off and leave us to it.”

“Juliette—”

But the line was dead.

Donald pulled his headset off and threw it against the desk. Playing cards scattered, and the book fell from its perch, losing someone’s place.

Argon? What the hell had come over her? The last time she’d been so angry was when she said she had found some machine, threatened to come after him. But this was something else. Argon. Pumped out with a cleaning. He had no idea what she was talking about. Pumped out with a cleaning—

A bout of dizziness struck him, and Donald sank back into his chair. His coveralls were damp with sweat. He clutched a bloody rag and remembered a fog-filled airlock. He remembered stumbling down a ramp with a jostling crowd, crying for Helen, the vision of bomb blasts seared in his retinas, Anna and Charlotte tugging him along, while a white cloud billowed out around him.

The gas. He knew how the cleanings went. There was gas to pressurize the airlock. Gas to push against the outside air. Gas to push out.

“The dust is in the air,” Donald said. He leaned against the counter, his knees weak. The nanos eating away at mankind, they were loosed on the world with every cleaning, little puffs like clockwork, tick-tock with each exile.

The headphones sat there quietly. “I am an ancient,” Donald said, using her words. He grabbed the headphones from the desk and repeated into the microphone, loudly, “I am an ancient! I did this!”

He sagged once more against the desk, catching himself before he fell. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Louder, yelling it: “I’m sorry!”

But nobody was listening.

26

Charlotte worked the aileron on the drone’s left wing up and down. There was still a bit of play in the cables that guided the flap. She grabbed a work rag hanging from the drone’s tail and dabbed the back of her neck. Reaching into her tool bag, she chose a medium screwdriver. Beneath the drone lay a scattering of parts, everything she could find inside that the drone didn’t need. The bombing computer, the munitions mounts from the wings, the release servos. She’d taken out every camera but one, had even stripped out some of the bracing struts that helped the drone pull up to a dozen Gs. This would be a straight flight, no stress on the wings. They would go low and fast this time, not caring if the drone was spotted. It was important to see further, to make sure, to verify. Charlotte had spent a week working on the blasted thing, and all she could think about was how quickly the last two had broken down and how lucky that first flight now seemed.

Lying on her back, she worked her shoulders and hips and squirmed beneath the tail of the drone. The access panel was already open, the cables exposed. Every panel would get a fine bead of caulk before it went back together, sealing the machine against the dust. This’ll work, she told herself as she adjusted the servo arm holding the cable. It would have to. Seeing her brother, the state he was in, had her thinking they didn’t have another flight in them. It would be all or nothing. It wasn’t just the coughing — he now seemed to be losing his mind.

He had come back from his latest call and had forgotten to bring her dinner. He had also forgotten the last part for the radio he had promised. Now he paced around the drone while she worked, mumbling to himself. He paced down the hall to the conference room and dug through his notes. He stomped back toward the drone, coughing and picking up a conversation she didn’t feel a part of.

“—their fear, don’t you see? We do it with their fear.”

She peeked out from under the drone to see him waving his hands in the air. He looked ashen. There were specks of blood on his coveralls. It was almost time to throw in the towel, get in that lift, turn them both in. Just so he would see someone.

He caught her looking at him.

“Their fear doesn’t just color the world they see,” he said, his eyes wild. “They poison the world with it. It’s a toxin, this fear. They send their own out to clean, and that poisons the world!”

Charlotte didn’t know how to respond. She wiggled back out to work the aileron again, thinking of how much faster this would go with two people. She considered asking for his help, but her brother couldn’t seem to stand still, much less hold a wrench.

“And this got me thinking, about the gas. I mean, I should have known, right? We pump it into their homes when we’re done with them. That’s how we end their existence. It’s all the same gas. I’ve done it.” Donald walked in a tight circle, jabbing his chest with his finger. He coughed into the crook of his arm. “God knows I’ve done it. But that’s not the only thing!”

Charlotte sighed and pulled her driver back out. Still a touch too loose.

“Maybe they can twist this around, you know?” He began to wander back to the conference room. “They turned off their cameras. And there was that silo that turned off its demolitions. Maybe they can turn off the gas—”

His voice trailed off with him. Charlotte studied the hallway at the back of the warehouse. The light spilling from the conference room danced with his shadow as he paced back and forth among his notes and charts, walking in circles. They were both stuck in circles. She could hear him cursing. His erratic behavior reminded her of their grandmother, who had gone ungracefully. This would be how she remembered him when he was gone: coughing up blood and babbling nonsense. He would never be Congressman Keene in a pressed suit, never her older and competent brother, never again.

While he agonized over what to do, Charlotte had her own ideas. How about they wake everyone up like Donald had done for her? There were only a hundred or so men on shift at any one time. There were thousands of women asleep. Many thousands. Charlotte thought of the army she could raise. But she wondered if Donny was right — if they would refuse to fight their fathers and husbands and brothers. It took a strange kind of courage to do that.

The light down the hall wavered again with shadows. Pacing back and forth, back and forth. Charlotte took a deep breath and worked the flap on the wing. She thought about his other idea to set the world straight, to clear the air and free the imprisoned. Or at least to give them all a chance. An equal chance. He had likened it to knocking down borders in the old world. There was some saying he repeated about those who had an advantage and wanted to keep it, about the last ones up pulling the ladder after them. “Let’s lower the ladders,” he had said more than once. Don’t let the computers decide. Let the people.

Charlotte still didn’t get how that might work. And neither, obviously, did her brother. She wiggled back under the drone and tried to imagine a time when people were born into their jobs, when they had no choice. First sons did what their fathers did. Second sons went to war, to the sea, or to the Church. Any boy who followed was left on his own. Daughters went to the sons of others.

Her wrench slipped off the cable stay — her knuckles banging the fuselage. Charlotte cursed and studied her hand, saw blood welling up. She sucked on her knuckle and remembered another injustice that had once given her pause. She remembered being on deployment and feeling grateful that she was born in the States, not in Iraq. A roll of the dice. Invisible borders drawn on maps that were as real as the walls of silos. Trapped by circumstance. What life you lived was divined by some calculus of your people, your leaders, like computers tallying your fate.

She crawled out once again and tried the wing. The play in the cable was gone. The drone was in the best condition Charlotte could make her. She gathered the wrenches she would no longer need and began slotting them into her tool bag when there was a ding at the end of the shelves, off toward the elevators.

Charlotte froze. Her first thought was of food. The ding meant Donny bringing her food. But her brother’s shadow could be seen down the hall.

She heard a lift door slide open. Someone was running. Several someones. Boots rang out like thunder, and Charlotte risked yelling Donald’s name. She shouted it down the hall once before rushing around the drone and grabbing the tarp. She spun the tarp like a fisherman’s net across the wide wings and the scattering of parts and tools. Had to hide. Hide her work and then herself. Donny had heard her. He would hide as well.

The tarp drifted to the ground on a cushion of trapped air; it billowed out and settled. Charlotte turned toward the hallway to run to Donny just as men spilled from the tall shelves. She fell to the ground at once, certain she’d been spotted. Boots clomped past. Gripping the edge of the tarp, she lifted it slowly and curled her knees against her body. She used her shoulder and hip to wiggle underneath the tarp to join the drone. Donny had heard her call out. He would hear the boots and hide in the bathroom attached to the conference room, hide in the shower. Somewhere. They couldn’t know they were down there. How had these people gotten in? Her brother said he had the highest access.

The running receded. They were heading straight to the back of the warehouse, almost as if they knew. Voices nearby. Men talking. Slower footsteps shuffling past the drone. Charlotte thought she heard Donny cry out as he was discovered. Crawling on her belly, she scooted beneath the drone to the other edge of the tarp. The voices were fading, slow footsteps walking past. Her brother was in trouble. She remembered a conversation from a few days prior and wondered if he’d been recognized in the elevator. A handyman had seen him. The darkness beneath the tarp closed in around her at the thought of being left alone, of him being taken. She relied on him. She was going crazy enough locked in that warehouse with him to keep her company. Without him — she didn’t want to imagine.

Resting her chin on the cool steel plating, she slid her arms forward and lifted the tarp with the backs of her hands. A low sliver of the world was exposed. She could see boots dangerously close. She could smell oil on the decking. Ahead of her, it looked like a man having a hard time walking, another man in silver coveralls helping to support him, their feet shuffling along as if with a single mind.

Beyond them, a hallway was thrown into brightness; all the overhead lights Donny preferred to leave off were now on. Charlotte sucked in her breath as her brother was pulled from the conference room. One of the men in the bright silver coveralls punched him in the ribs. Her brother grunted, and Charlotte felt the blow to her own side. She dropped the tarp with one hand and covered her mouth in horror. The other hand trembled as it lifted the tarp further, not wanting to see but needing to. Her brother was hit again, but the shuffling man waved an arm. She could hear a feeble voice commanding them to stop.

The two men in silver held her brother down on the ground and did as they were told. Charlotte forgot to breathe as she watched the man who shuffled along as if weak — watched him march into the lit hallway. He had white hair as brilliant as the bulbs overhead. He labored to walk, leaned on the young man beside him, arm draped across his back, until he came to a stop by her brother.

Charlotte could see Donny’s eyes. He was fifty meters away, but she could see how wide they were. Her brother stared up at this old and feeble man, didn’t look away even as he coughed, a bad fit from the blow to his ribs, drowning out something being said by the man who could barely stand.

Her brother tried to speak. He said something over and over, but she couldn’t hear. And the thin man with the white hair could barely stand, could barely stand but could still swing his boots. The young man beside him propped him up, and Charlotte watched, cowed and trembling, as a leg was brought back over and over before lashing forward, a heavy boot slamming into her brother with ferocious might, Donny’s own legs scrambling to shield himself, hugging his shins as two men pinned him to the ground, giving him nowhere to hide from kick after brutal, stomping, and angry kick.

27

“Are you sure you should be digging around in there?” Lukas asked.

“Hold the light still,” Juliette said. “I’ve got one more to go.”

“But shouldn’t we talk about this?”

“I’m just looking, Luke. Except that right now, I can’t see a damn thing.”

Lukas adjusted the light, and Juliette crawled forward. It was the second time she’d explored beneath the floor grates at the bottom of the server room ladder. It was here that she’d traced the camera feeds over a month ago, soon after Lukas made her mayor. He had shown her how they could see anywhere within the silo, and Juliette had asked who else could see. Lukas had insisted no one until she found the feeds disappearing through a sealed port where the outer edge of the silo wall should be. She remembered seeing other lines in that bundle. Now she wanted to make sure.

She worked the last screw on the cover panel. It came off, exposing the dozens of wires she’d cut, each of them bursting with hundreds of tiny filaments like silver strands of hair. Running parallel to the bundles were thick cables that reminded her of the main feeds from the two generators in Mechanical. There were also two copper pipes buried in there.

“Have you seen enough?” Lukas asked. He crouched down behind her where the floor grating had been removed and aimed the light over her shoulder.

“In the other silo, this level still has power. All of thirty-four has full power with no generator running.” She tapped the thick cables with her screwdriver. “The servers over there are still humming as well. And some of the survivors tapped into that power to run pumps and things up and down the silo. I think all that juice comes from here.”

“Why?” Lukas asked. He played the light across the bundle and seemed more interested now.

“Because they needed the power for the pumps and grow lights,” Juliette said, amazed she had to spell it out.

“No, why are they providing this power in the first place?”

“Maybe they don’t trust us to keep things running on our own. Or maybe the servers require more juice than we can generate. I don’t know.” She leaned to the side and peered back at Lukas. “What I want to know is why they left it running after they tried to kill everyone. Why not shut it off with everything else?”

“Maybe they did. Maybe your friend hacked in here and turned it back on.”

Juliette laughed. “No. Not Solo—”

There was a voice down the hall. The crawl space grew dark as Lukas spun the flashlight around. There shouldn’t have been anyone else down there.

“It’s the radio,” he said. “Let me see who it is.”

“The flashlight,” Juliette called out — but he was already gone. His boots rang and faded down the hallway.

Juliette reached ahead of herself and felt for the copper pipes. They were the right size. Nelson had shown her where the argon tanks were kept. There was a pump and filter mechanism that was supposed to draw a fresh supply of argon from deep within the earth, similar to how the air handlers worked. But now Juliette knew to trust nothing. Pulling out the floor panels and the wall panels behind the tanks, she had discovered two lines feeding into the gas tanks separate from the supply system. A supply system she now suspected did absolutely nothing. Just like with the gaskets and heat tape, the second power feed, the visor of lies, everything had a false front. The truth lay buried beneath.

Lukas stomped back toward her. He knelt down, and the light returned to the crawlspace.

“Jules, I need you to get out of there.”

“Please hand me the flashlight,” she told him. “I can’t see shit.” This was going to be another argument like when she’d cut the camera feeds. As if she would cut these pipes without knowing what was in them—

“I need you to get out here. I… please.”

And she heard it in his voice. Something was wrong. Juliette looked back and caught an eyeful of flashlight.

“One sec,” she said. She wiggled back toward him on her palms and the toes of her boots until she reached the open access panel. She left her multi-tool behind.

“What is it?” She sat up and stretched her back, untied her hair, gathered the loose ends, and began tying it back. “Who was that?”

“Your father—” Lukas began.

“Something wrong with my father?”

He shook his head. “No, that was him that called. It… one of the kids is gone.”

“Missing?” But she knew that wasn’t what he meant. “Lukas, what happened?” She stood and dusted off her chest and knees, headed toward the radio.

“They were on their way up to the farms. There was a crowd heading down. One of the kids went over the rails—”

“Fell?”

“Twenty levels,” Lukas said.

Juliette couldn’t believe this. She grabbed the radio and pressed a palm against the wall, suddenly dizzy. “Who was it?”

“He didn’t say.”

Before she squeezed the mic, she saw that the set had been left on channel 17 from the last time she’d called Jimmy. Her dad must’ve been using Walker’s new portable. “Dad? Do you read me?”

She waited. Lukas held out his canteen, but Juliette waved him away.

“Jules? Can I get back to you? Something else has just come up.”

Her father sounded shaken. There was a lot of static in the line. “I need to know what’s going on,” she told him.

“Hold on. Elise—”

Juliette covered her mouth.

“—we’ve lost Elise. Jimmy went looking for her. Baby, we had a problem coming up. There was a crowd heading down. An angry crowd. They knew who I had with me. And Marcus went over the rails. I’m sorry—”

Juliette felt Lukas’s hand on her shoulder. She wiped her eyes. “Is he—?”

“I haven’t made my way down yet to check. Rickson got hurt in the scuffle. I’m tending to him. Hannah and Miles and the baby are fine. We’re at Supply right now. Look, I really need to go. We can’t find Elise, and Jimmy took off after her. Someone said they saw her heading up. I don’t want you to do anything, but I thought you’d want to know about the boy.”

Her hand trembled as she squeezed the mic. “I’m coming down. You’re at Supply on one-ten?”

There was a long pause. She knew he was debating whether or not to argue with her about heading that way. The radio popped as he gave up without a fight.

“I’m at one-ten, yeah. I’m heading down to see about the boy. I’ll leave Rickson and the others here. I told Jimmy to bring Elise back here once he finds her.”

“Don’t leave them there,” Juliette said. She didn’t know whom they could trust, where they might be safe. “Take them with you. Dad, get them back to Mechanical. Get them home.” Juliette wiped her forehead. The entire thing was a mistake. Bringing them over was a mistake.

“Are you sure?” her father asked. “The crowd we ran into. I think they were heading that way.”

28

Elise was lost in the bizarre. She had heard someone call it that, and it was the right name for the place, a place of crowds beyond imagining, a land so wildly strange that its name barely did it justice.

How she found herself there was a bit bewildering. Her puppy had disappeared in a great confrontation of strangers — more people than she thought could exist at one time — and she had chased up the steps after it. One person after another had pointed helpfully upward. A woman in yellow said she saw a man with a dog heading toward the bizarre. Elise had gone up ten levels until she’d reached landing one-hundred.

There had been two men on the landing blowing smoke from their noses. They had said someone just passed through with a dog. They had waved her inside.

Level one-hundred in her home was a scary wasteland of narrow passages and empty rooms scattered with trash and debris and rats. Here it was all of that but full of people and animals and everyone shouting and singing. It was a place of bright colors and awful smells, of people breathing smoke in and out, smoke they held in their fingers and kept going with small sparks of fire. There were men who wore paint on their faces. A woman dressed all in red with a tail and horns who had waved Elise inside a tent, but Elise had turned and ran.

She ran from one fright to another until she was completely lost. There were knees everywhere to bump into. No longer looking for Puppy, now she just wanted out. She crawled beneath a busy counter and cried, but that got her nowhere. It did give her a terribly close view of a fat and hairless animal that made noises like Rickson snoring, though. This animal was led right by her with a rope around its neck. Elise dried her eyes and pulled her book out, looked through pictures until she could name it a pig. Naming things always helped. They weren’t nearly so scary after that.

It was Rickson who got her moving again, even though he wasn’t there. Elise could hear his loud voice booming through the Wilds telling her there was nothing to be afraid of. He and the twins used to send her on errands through the pitch black when she was just old enough to walk. They would send her for blackberries and plums and delicacies near the stairs when there were people still around to fear. “The littlest ones are the safest,” Rickson used to tell her. That was years ago. She wasn’t so little anymore.

She put her book away and decided that the dark Wilds with their leafy fingers brushing her neck and the clicking of pumps and chattering teeth were worse than painted people leaking smoke from their noses. With her face chapped from crying, she crawled out from beneath the counter and jostled among the knees. Always turning right — which was the trick to getting through the Wilds in the dark — she found herself in a smoky hallway with loud hisses and a smell in the air like boiling rat.

“Hey, kid, you lost?”

A boy with short-cropped hair and bright green eyes studied her from the edge of a booth. He was older than her, but not by much. As big as the twins. Elise shook her head. She reconsidered and nodded.

The boy laughed. “What’s your name?”

“Elise,” she said.

“That’s a different name.”

She shrugged, not sure what to say. The boy caught her eyeing a man beyond him as he lifted strips of sizzling meat with a large fork.

“You hungry?” the boy asked.

Elise nodded. She was always hungry. Especially when she was scared. But maybe that was because she got scared when she went out looking for food, and she went out looking for food when she was hungry. Hard to remember which came first. The boy disappeared behind the counter. He came back with a thick piece of meat.

“Is it rat?” Elise asked.

The boy laughed. “It’s pig.”

Elise scrunched up her face, remembering the animal that grunted at her earlier. “Does it taste like rat?” she asked, full of hope.

“You say that louder and my dad’ll have your hide. You want some or not?” He handed the strip of meat over. “I’m guessing you don’t have two chits on you.”

Elise accepted the meat and didn’t say. She took a small bite, and little bursts of happiness exploded in her mouth. It was better than rat. The boy studied her.

“You’re from the Mids, aren’t you?”

Elise shook her head and took another bite. “I’m from Silo 17,” she said, chewing. Her mouth was full of saliva. She eyed the man cooking the strips of meat. Marcus and Miles should be there to try some.

“You mean level seventeen?” The boy frowned. “You don’t look like a topper. No, too dirty to be a topper.”

“I’m from the other silo,” Elise said. “West of here.”

“What’s a westophere?” the boy asked.

“West. Where the sun sets.”

The boy looked at her funny.

“The sun. It comes up in the east and sets in the west. That’s why maps point up. They point up at north.” She thought about pulling her book out and showing him the maps of the world, explaining how the sun went around and around, but her hands were covered in grease, and anyway the boy didn’t seem interested. “They dug over and rescued us,” she explained.

At this, the boy’s eyes went wide. “The dig. You’re from the other silo. It’s real?”

Elise finished the strip of pig and licked her fingers. She nodded.

The boy shoved a hand at her. Elise wiped her palm on her hip and grabbed it with her own.

“My name’s Shaw,” he said. “You want another piece of pig? Come under the counter. I’ll introduce you to my father. Hey, Pa, I want you to meet someone.”

“I can’t. I’m looking for Puppy.”

Shaw scrunched up his face. “Puppy? You’d want the next hall over.” He nodded the direction. “But c’mon, pig is much better. Dog is chewy like rat, and puppy is just more expensive than dog but tastes the same.”

Elise froze. The pig that went by earlier with a rope around its neck, maybe that one was a pet. Maybe they ate pets, just like Marcus and Miles always wanted to keep a rat for fun, even when everyone else was hungry. “They eat puppy?” she asked this boy.

“If you’ve got the chits, sure.” Shaw grabbed her hand. “Come back to the grill with me. I want you to meet my dad. He says you all aren’t real.”

Elise pulled away. “I’ve got to find my puppy.” She turned and scurried through the crowd in the direction the boy had nodded.

“Whaddya mean, your puppy—?” he yelled after her.

Around a line of stalls, Elise found another smoky hall. More smells like rat on a stick over an open flame. An old woman wrestled with a bird, two angry wings flapping from her fists. Elise stepped in poop and nearly slipped. The strangeness all around melted with the thought of her puppy gone. She heard someone yell about a dog, and searched for the voice. An older boy, probably Rickson’s age, was holding up a piece of red meat, a giant piece with white stripes that looked like bones. There was a pen there and signs with numbers on them. People from the crowd stopped to peer inside. Some of them pointed inside the pen and asked questions.

Elise fought through them toward the sound of yipping. There were live dogs in the pen. She could see through the slats and almost over the top when she was on her tiptoes. A huge animal the size of a pig lunged at the fence and growled at her, and the fence shook. It was a dog, but with a rope around its jaw so it couldn’t open. Elise could feel its hot breath blowing out its nose. She scooted out of everyone’s way and around the side.

There was a smaller pen in the back. Elise went past the counter to where two young men tended a smoking grill. Their backs were turned. They took something from a woman and handed her a package. Elise grabbed the top of the smaller fence and peered over. There was a dog on its side with five — no, six little animals eating at its belly. She thought they were rats at first, but they were the tiniest of puppies. They made Puppy seem like a grown dog. And they weren’t eating the dog — they were sucking like Hannah’s baby did at her breast.

Elise was so fixated on the tiny critters that she didn’t see the animal at the base of the fence lunge at her until it was too late. A black nose and a pink tongue bounced up and caught her on the jaw. She peered directly down the other side of the fence and saw Puppy, who bounded up at her again.

Elise cried out. Reaching over the fence, she had both hands on the animal, when someone grabbed her from behind.

“Don’t think you can afford that one,” one of the men behind the counter said.

Elise squirmed in his grip and tried to keep a hold of Puppy.

“Easy now,” the man said. “Let it go.”

“Let me go!” Elise cried.

Puppy slipped from her grasp. Elise wiggled loose, the shoulder strap of her bag yanked over her head. She fell at the man’s feet and got back up, reached for Puppy again.

“Well, now,” she heard the man say.

Elise reached over the fence and grabbed her pet again. Puppy’s feet scratched at the fence to help. His front paws draped over her shoulder, a wet tongue in her ear. Elise turned to find a man towering over her, a bloody white piece of fabric tied over his chest, her Memory Book in his hands.

“What’s this?” he asked, thumbing through the pages. A few of the loose papers shuffled free and he grabbed at them frantically.

“That’s my book,” Elise said. “Give it back.”

The man peered down at her. Puppy licked her face.

“Trade you for that one,” he said, pointing at Puppy.

“They’re both mine,” she insisted.

“Naw, I paid for that runt. But this’ll do.” He weighed her book in his hands, then reached down and steered Elise out of the booth and back toward the crowded hall.

Elise reached for the book. Her bag was being left behind. Puppy nipped her on the hand and nearly squirmed free. She was crying, she realized, as she squealed for the man to give her back her things. He showed his teeth and grabbed her by the hair, was angry now. “Roy! Come grab this runt.”

Elise screeched. The boy from outside yelling “dog” to everyone who passed by headed toward her. Puppy was nearly free. She was losing her grip again, and the man was going to rip out her hair.

She lost Puppy, and Elise squealed as the man lifted her off the ground. Then there was a flash, like a dog pouncing, but it was brown coveralls rather than brown fur that flew past, and the large man let out a grunt and fell to the ground. Elise went spilling after.

He no longer had a grip on her hair. Elise saw her bag. Her book. She grabbed both, clutched a handful of loose pages. Shaw was there, the boy who fed her pig. He scooped up Puppy and grinned at Elise.

“Run,” he said, flashing his teeth.

Elise ran. She danced away from the boy in the hall and bounced off people in the crowd. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Shaw running after her, Puppy clutched to his chest upside down, paws in the air. The crowd rattled and made room as the men from the stall came after them.

“This way!” Shaw yelled, laughing, as he overtook Elise and turned a corner. Tears streamed from her eyes, but Elise was laughing too. Laughing and terrified and happy to have her book and her pet and getting away and this boy who was nicer to her than the twins. They dashed beneath another of the counters — the smell of fresh fruit — and someone yelled at them. Shaw ran through a dark room with unmade beds, through a kitchen with a woman cooking, then back out into another stall. A tall man with dark skin shook a spatula at them, but they were already out among the crowds, running and laughing and dancing between—

And then someone in the crowd snatched him up. Large and powerful hands jerked the boy into the air. Elise stumbled. Shaw kicked and screamed at this man, and Elise looked up and saw that it was Solo holding him. He smiled down at Elise through his thick beard.

“Solo!” Elise squealed. She grabbed his leg and squeezed.

“This boy got something of yours?” he asked.

“No, he’s a friend. Put him down.” She scanned the crowd for any sign of the men chasing them. “We should go,” she told Solo. She squeezed his leg once more. “I want to go home.”

Solo rubbed her head. “And that’s just where we’re heading.”

29

Elise let Solo carry her bag and her book while she clutched Puppy. They made their way through the crowds, out of the bizarre, and back to the stairwell. Shaw trailed after them, even after Solo told the boy to get back to his family. And as Elise and Solo made their way down the stairwell to find the others, she kept glancing back to catch sight of Shaw in his brown coveralls, peeking from around the central post or through the rails of a landing higher up. She thought about telling Solo that he was still there, but she didn’t.

A few levels below the bizarre, a porter caught up to them and delivered a message. Jewel was heading down and looking for them. She had half the porters hunting for Elise. And Elise never knew that she’d been missing.

Solo made her drink from his canteen while they waited at the next landing. She then poured a small puddle into his old and wrinkled hands, and Puppy took grateful sips. It took what felt like forever for Jewel to arrive, but when she did, it was in a thunder of hurrying boots. The landing shook. Jewel was all sweaty and out of breath, but Solo didn’t seem to care. The two of them hugged, and Elise wondered if they’d ever let go. People came and went from the landing and gave them funny looks as they passed. Jewel was smiling and crying both when they finally released each other. She said something to Solo, and it was his turn to cry. Both of them looked at Elise, and she could see that it was secrets or something bad. Jewel picked her up next and kissed her on the cheek and hugged her until it was hard to breathe.

“It’s gonna be okay,” she told Elise. But Elise didn’t know what was wrong.

“I got Puppy back,” she said. And then she remembered that Jewel didn’t know about her new pet. She looked down to see Puppy peeing on Jewel’s boot, which must be like saying hello.

“A dog,” Jewel said. She squeezed Elise’s shoulder. “You can’t keep her. Dogs are dangerous.”

“She’s not dangerous!”

Puppy chewed on Elise’s hand. Elise pulled away and rubbed Puppy’s head.

“Did you get her from the bazaar? Is that where you went?” Jewel looked to Solo, who nodded. Jewel took a deep breath. “You can’t take things that don’t belong to you. If you got it from a vendor, it’ll have to go back.”

“Puppy came from the Deep,” Elise said. She bent down and wrapped her arms around the dog. “He came from Mechanical. We can take him back there. But not to the bizarre. I’m sorry I took him.” She squeezed Puppy and thought about the man holding up the red meat with the white ribs. Jewel turned to Solo again.

“It didn’t come from the bazaar,” he confirmed. “She plucked it from a box down in Mechanical.”

“Fine. We’ll straighten this out later. We need to catch up with the others.”

Elise could tell that all of them were tired, including her and Puppy, but they set out anyway. The adults seemed eager to get down, and after seeing the bizarre Elise felt the same way. She told Jewel she wanted to go home, and Jewel said that’s where they were heading. “We ought to make things how they used to be,” Elise told them both.

For some reason that made Jewel laugh. “You’re too young to be nostalgic,” she said.

Elise asked what nostalgic meant, and Jewel said, “It’s where you think the past was better than it really was, only because the present sucks so bad.”

“I get nostalgic a lot,” Elise declared.

And Jewel and Solo both laughed at that. But then they looked sad after. Elise caught them looking at each other like this a lot, and Jewel kept wiping at her eyes. Finally, Elise asked them what was wrong.

They stopped in the middle of the stairway and told her. Told her about Marcus, who had slipped over the rails when that crazy crowd had knocked her down and Puppy had gotten away. Marcus had fallen and died. Elise looked at the rails beside her and didn’t see how Marcus could slip over rails so high. She didn’t understand how it had happened, but she knew it was like when their parents had gone off and never came back. It was like that. Marcus would never come laughing through the Wilds again. She wiped her face and felt awful for Miles, who wasn’t a twin anymore.

“Is that why we’re going home?” she asked.

“It’s one of the reasons,” Jewel said. “I never should’ve brought you here.”

Elise nodded. There was no arguing with that. Except she had Puppy now, and Puppy had come from here. And no matter what she told Jewel, Elise wasn’t giving him back.

Juliette allowed Elise to lead the way. Her legs were sore from the run down; she had nearly lost her footing more than once. Now she was eager to see the kids together and home, couldn’t stop blaming herself for what had happened to Marcus. The levels went by full of regrets, and then there was a call on the radio.

“Jules, are you there?”

It was Shirly, and she sounded upset. Juliette pulled the radio from her belt. Shirly must’ve been with Walker, using one of his sets. “Go ahead,” she said. She kept a hand on the rail and followed Elise and Solo. A porter and a young couple squeezed by heading in the other direction.

“What the hell is going on?” Shirly asked. “We just had a mob come through here. Frankie got overrun at the gates. He’s in the infirmary. And I’ve got another two or three dozen people heading through this blasted tunnel of yours. I didn’t sign on for this.”

Juliette figured it was the same group that led to Marcus’s death. Jimmy turned and eyed the radio and its news. Juliette turned down the volume so Elise couldn’t hear.

“What do you mean by another two or three dozen? Who else is over there?” Juliette asked.

“Your dig team, for one. Some mechanics from third shift who should be sleeping but want to see what’s on the other side. And the planning committee you sent.”

“The planning committee?” Juliette slowed her pace.

“Yeah. They said you sent them. Said it was okay to inspect the dig. Had a note from your office.”

Juliette remembered Marsha saying something about this before the Town Hall. But she had been busy with the suits.

“Did you not send them?” Shirly asked.

“I may have,” Juliette admitted. “But this other group, the mob, my dad and them had a run-in on their way down. Someone fell to their death.”

There was silence on the other end. And then: “I heard we had a fall. Didn’t know it was related. I tell you, I’m this close to pulling everyone back and shutting this down. Things are out of hand, Jules.”

I know, Juliette thought. But she didn’t broadcast this. Didn’t utter it out loud. “I’ll be there soon. On my way now.”

Shirly didn’t respond. Juliette clipped the radio to her belt and cursed herself. Jimmy hung back to speak with her, allowing Elise to walk further ahead.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” Juliette told him.

The two of them walked in silence for a turn of the staircase.

“The people in the tunnel, I saw some of them taking what’s not theirs,” Jimmy said. “It was dark when they brought us over, but I saw people carrying pipe and equipment from my silo back to this one. Like it was the plan the whole time. But then you said we were going to rebuild my home. Not use it for spares.”

“I did. I do. I do mean to rebuild it. As soon as we get down there, I’ll talk to them. They aren’t taking spares.”

“So you didn’t tell them it was okay?”

“No. I… I may have told them it made sense to come get you and the kids, that the extra silo would mean certain… redundancies—”

“That’s what a spare is.”

“I’ll talk to them. I promise. Everything will be all right in the end.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“Yeah,” Solo finally said. “You keep saying that.”

30

Charlotte awoke in darkness, damp with sweat. Cold. The metal decking was cold. Her face was sore from it resting so long on the steel. She worked a half-dead arm from beneath her and rubbed her face, felt the marks there from the diamond plating.

The attack on Donny returned like a dimly remembered dream. She had curled up and waited. Had somehow held back her tears. And whether exhausted from the effort or terrified of moving, she had eventually succumbed to sleep.

She listened for footsteps or voices before cracking the tarp. It was pitch black outside. As black there as under the drone. Like a chick from a nest, she crawled out from beneath the metal bird, her joints stiff, a weight on her chest, a terrible solitude all around her.

Her worklight was somewhere beneath the tarp. She uncovered the drone and patted around, felt some tools, knocked over and noisily scattered a ratchet set. Remembering the drone’s headlamp, she felt inside an open access panel, found the test switch, and pressed it. A golden carpet was thrown out in front of the bird’s beak. It was enough to find her worklight.

She grabbed this and a large wrench as well. She was no longer safe. A mortar had flown into camp and had leveled a tent, had taken a bunkmate. Another could come whistling down at any time.

She aimed her flashlight toward the elevators, afraid of what they could disgorge without warning. In the silence, she could hear her heartbeat. Charlotte turned and headed for the conference room, for the last place she’d seen him.

There was no sign of struggle on the floor. Inside the conference room, the table was still scattered with notes. Maybe not as many as before. And the several bins scattered among the chairs were gone. Someone had done a poor job of cleaning up. Someone would be back.

Charlotte doused the lights and turned to go. Stepping through the place where he’d been attacked, she saw this time the splattered blood on the wall. She felt the sobs she’d wrestled down before falling asleep rise up to seize her throat, constricting it, wondered if her brother was still alive. She could see the man with the white hair standing there, kicking and kicking, an unholy rage in him. And now she had no one. She hurried through the dark warehouse toward the glowing drone. Pulled from sleep, shown a frightening world, and now she’d been left alone.

The light from the drone’s beak spilled across the floor and illuminated a door.

Not quite alone.

Charlotte gathered her wits. She reached into the access panel and turned the drone’s headlamp off. She carefully rearranged the tarp. It would no longer do to leave things amiss — she must always assume she might have visitors. With her worklight bobbing, she made for the door, stopped, went back for her tool bag. The drone was now a distant priority. With her tools and light, she hurried past the barracks and to the end of the hall, into the flight room. The workbench on the far wall held a radio pieced together over the weeks. It worked. She and her brother had listened to the chatter from distant worlds. Maybe there was a way to make it transmit. She pawed through the spare parts he had left for her, searching. If nothing else, she could listen. Maybe she could find out what they’d done to him. Maybe she could hear from him — or reach out to another soul.

31

With every cough, Donald’s ribs exploded into a thousand splinters. This shrapnel pierced his lungs and his heart and sent a tidal wave up his spinal column. He was convinced this was taking place inside his body, these bombs of bone and nerve. Already, he missed the simple torture of burning lungs and searing throat. His bruised and cracked ribs now made a mockery of old torments. Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.

He lay on his cot, bleeding and bruised, having given up on escape. The door was sound, and the space above the ceiling panels led nowhere. He didn’t think he was on the admin levels. Maybe Security. Perhaps residential. Or someplace he wasn’t familiar with. The hallway outside remained eerily quiet. It could be the middle of the night. Banging on the door was brutal on his aching ribs, and shouting hurt his throat. But the worst pain was imagining what he’d dragged his sister into, what would become of her. When the guards or Thurman came back, he should tell them she was down there, beg for them to be merciful. She had been like a daughter to Thurman, and Donald was the only one to blame for waking her up. Thurman would see that. He would put her back under where she might sleep until the end came for them all. It would be for the best.

Hours passed. Hours of bruised swelling and feeling his pulse throb in a dozen places. Donald tossed and turned, and day and night became even less distinguishable in that buried crypt. A feverish sweat overtook him, one born of regret and fear more than infection. He had nightmares of frozen pods set ablaze, of fire and ice and dust, of flesh melting and bone turning to powder.

Falling in and out of sleep, he had another dream. A dream of a cold night on a wide ocean, of a ship sinking beneath his feet, the deck trembling from the savagery of the sea. Donald’s hands were frozen to the wheel of the ship, his breath a fog of lies. Waves lapped over the rails as his command sank deeper and deeper. And all around him on the water were lifeboats ablaze. All the women and children burned out there, screaming, trapped in lifeboats shaped like cryopods that were never meant to reach the shore.

Donald saw that now. He saw it awake — panting, coughing, sweating — as well as in his dreams. He remembered thinking once that the women had been set aside so that there would be nothing to fight over. But the opposite was true. They were there to give the rest of them something to fight for. Someone to save. It was for them that men worked these dark shifts, slept through these dark nights, dreaming of what would never be.

He covered his mouth, rolled over in bed, and coughed up blood. Someone to save. The folly of man — the folly of the blasted silos he had helped to build — this assumption that things needed saving. They ought to have been left on their own, both people and the planet. Mankind had the right to go extinct. That’s what life did: it went extinct. It made room for the next in line. But individual men had often railed against the natural order. They had their illegally cloned children, their nano treatments, their spare parts, and their cryopods. Individual men like those who did this.

Approaching boots signaled a meal, an end to the interminable nightmare of being asleep with wild thoughts and lying awake with bodily pain. It had to be breakfast, because he was starving. It meant he’d been up for much of the night. He expected the same guard who’d delivered his last meal, but the door cracked open to reveal Thurman. A man in Security silver stood behind him, unsmiling. Thurman entered alone and shut the door, confident that Donald posed no threat to him. He appeared better, fitter, than he had the day before. More time awake, perhaps. Or a flood of new doctors loosed in his bloodstream.

“How long are you keeping me here?” Donald asked, sitting up. His voice was scratchy and distant, the sound of autumn leaves.

“Not long,” Thurman said. The old man dragged the trunk away from the foot of the bed and sat on it. He studied Donald intently. “You’ve only got a few days to live.”

“Is that a medical diagnosis? Or a sentencing?”

Thurman raised an eyebrow. “It’s both. If we keep you here and leave you untreated, you will die from the air you breathed. We’re putting you under, instead.”

“God forbid you put me out of my misery.”

Thurman seemed to consider this. “I’ve thought about letting you die in here. I know the pain you’re in. I could fix you or let you break all the way down, but I don’t have the heart for either.”

Donald tried to laugh, but it hurt too much. He reached for the glass of water on the tray and took a sip. A pink spiral of blood danced on the surface as he lowered the glass.

“You’ve been busy this last shift,” Thurman said. “There are drones and bombs missing. We’ve woken up a few of the people who went into freeze recently to piece together your handiwork. Do you have any idea what you’ve risked?”

There was something worse than anger in Thurman’s voice. Donald couldn’t place it at first. Not disappointment. It wasn’t any form of rage. The rage had drained from his boots. This was something subdued. It was something like fear.

“What I’ve risked?” Donald asked. “I’ve been cleaning up your mess.” He sloshed water as he saluted his old mentor. “The silos you damaged. That silo that went black all those years ago. It was still there—”

“Silo forty. I know.”

“And seventeen.” Donald cleared his throat. He grabbed the heel of bread from the tray and took a dry bite, chewed until his jaws ached, chased it with blood-smeared water. He knew so much that Thurman didn’t. This occurred to him in that moment. All the talks with the people of 18, the time spent poring over drawings and notes, the weeks of piecing things together, of being in charge. He knew in his present condition that he was no match for Thurman in a fight, but he still felt the stronger of the two. It was his knowledge that made him feel that way. “Seventeen wasn’t dead,” he said before taking another bite of bread.

“So I’ve learned.”

Donald chewed.

“I’m shutting down eighteen today,” Thurman said quietly. “What that facility has cost us…” He shook his head, and Donald wondered if he was thinking of Victor, the head of heads, who had blown his own head off over an uprising that took place there. In the next moment, it occurred to him that the people he’d placed so much hope in were now gone as well. All the time spent smuggling parts to Charlotte, dreaming of an end to the silos, hope of a future under blue skies, all for nothing. The bread felt stale as he swallowed.

“Why?” he asked.

“You know why. You’ve been talking to them, haven’t you? What did you think was going to become of that place? What were you thinking?” The first hints of anger crept into Thurman’s voice. “Did you think they were going to save you? That any of us can be saved? What the hell were you thinking?”

Donald didn’t plan on answering, but a response came as reflexively as a cough: “I thought they deserved better than this. I thought they deserved a chance—”

“A chance for what?” Thurman shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. We planned for enough.” He muttered this last to himself. “The shame is that I have to sleep at all, that I can’t be here to manage everything. It’s like sending drones up when you need to be there yourself, your hand on the yoke.” Thurman made a fist in the air. He studied Donald a while. “You’re going under first thing in the morning. It’s a far cry from what you deserve. But before I’m rid of you, I want you to tell me how you did it, how you ended up here with my name. I can’t let that happen again—”

“So now I’m a threat.” Donald took another pull of water, flooding the tickle in his throat. He tried to take a deep breath, but the pain in his chest made him double over.

“You aren’t, but the next person who does this might be. We tried to think of everything, but we always knew the biggest weakness, the biggest weakness of any system, was a revolt from the top.”

“Like silo twelve,” Donald said. He remembered that silo falling as a dark shadow emerged from its server room. He had witnessed this, had ended that silo, had written a report. “How could you not expect what happened there?” he asked.

“We did. We planned for everything. It’s why we have spares. It’s why we have the Rite, a chance to try a man’s soul, a box to put our ticking time bombs in. You’re too young to understand this, but the most difficult task mankind ever tried to master — and that we never quite managed — was how to pass supreme power from one hand to the next.” Thurman spread his arms. His old eyes sparkled, the politician in him reawakened. “Until now. We solved it here with the cryopods and the shifts. Power is temporary, and it never leaves the same few hands. There is no transfer of power.”

“Congratulations,” Donald spat. And he remembered suggesting to Thurman once that he could be President, and Thurman had suggested it would be a demotion. Donald saw that now.

“Yes. It was a good system. Until you managed to subvert it.”

“I’ll tell you how I did it if you answer something for me.” Donald covered his mouth and coughed.

Thurman frowned and waited for him to stop. “You’re dying,” he said. “We’ll put you in a box so you can dream until the end. What could you possibly want to know?”

“The truth. I have so much of it, but still a few holes. They hurt more than the holes in my lungs.”

“I doubt that,” Thurman said. But he seemed to consider the offer. “What is it you want to know?”

“The servers. I know what’s on them. All the details of everyone’s lives in the silos, where they work, what they do, how long they live, how many kids they have, what they eat, where they go, everything. I want to know what it’s for.”

Thurman studied him. He didn’t say anything.

“I found the percentages. The list that shuffles. It’s the chances that these people survive when they’re set free, isn’t it? But how does it know?”

“It knows,” Thurman said. “And that’s what you think the silos do?”

“I think there’s a war playing out, yes. A war between all these silos, and only one will win.”

“Then what do you need from me?”

“I think there’s something else. Tell me, and I’ll tell you how I took your place.” Donald sat up and hugged his shins while a coughing fit ravaged his throat and ribs. Thurman waited until he was done.

“The servers do what you say. They keep track of all those lives, and they weigh them. They also decide the lotteries, which means we get to shape these people in a very real way. We increase our odds, allow the best to thrive. It’s why the chances keep improving the longer we’re at this.”

“Of course.” Donald felt stupid. He should have known. He had heard Thurman say over and over that they left nothing to chance. And wasn’t a lottery just that?

He caught the look Thurman was giving him. “Your turn,” he said. “How’d you do it?”

Donald leaned back against the wall. He coughed into his fist while Thurman looked on, wide-eyed and silent. “It was Anna,” Donald said. “She found out what you had planned. You were going to put her under after she was done helping you, and she feared she would never wake up again. You gave her access to the systems so she could fix your problem with forty. She set it up so that I would take your place. And she left a note asking for my help, left it in your inbox. I think she wanted to ruin you. To end this.”

“No,” Thurman said.

“Oh, yes. And I woke up and didn’t understand what she was asking of me. I found out too late. And in the meantime, there were still problems with silo forty. When I woke up and started this shift, forty—”

“Forty was already taken care of,” Thurman said.

Donald rested his head back and stared at the ceiling. “They made you think so. Here’s what I think. I think silo forty hacked the system, that’s what Anna found. They hacked their camera feeds so we couldn’t know what was going on, a rogue head of IT, a revolt from the top, just like you said. The cutting of the camera feeds was when they went black. But before that, they hacked the gas lines so we couldn’t kill them. And before that, they hacked the bombs meant to bring down their silos in case any of this happened. They worked their way backwards. By the time they went black, they were in charge. Like me. Like what Anna did for me.”

“How could they—?”

“Maybe she was helping them, I don’t know. She helped me. And somehow word spread to others. Or maybe by the time Anna was done saving your ass, she realized they were right and we were wrong. Maybe she left silo forty alone in the end to do whatever they pleased. I think she thought they might save us all.”

Donald coughed, and thought of all the hero sagas of old, of men and women struggling for righteousness, always with a happy ending, always against impossible odds, always bullshit. Heroes didn’t win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story — the dead didn’t say a word. All of it was bullshit.

“I bombed silo forty before I understood what was going on,” Donald said. He gazed at the ceiling, feeling the weight of all those levels, of the dirt and the heavy sky. “I bombed them because I needed a distraction, because I didn’t care. I killed Anna because she brought me here, because she saved my life. I did your job for you both times, didn’t I? I put down two rebellions you never saw coming—”

“No.” Thurman stood. He towered over Donald.

“Yes,” Donald said. He blinked away welling tears, could feel a hole in his heart where his anger toward Anna once lay. All that was there now was guilt and regret. He had killed the one who had loved him the most, had fought for the things that were right. He had never stopped to ask, to think, to talk.

“You started this uprising when you broke your own rules,” he told Thurman. “When you woke her up, you started this. You were weak. You threatened everything, and I fixed it. And goddamn you to hell for listening to her. For bringing me here. For turning me into this!”

Donald closed his eyes. He felt the tickle of escaping tears as they rolled down his temples, and the light through his lids quivered as Thurman’s shadow fell over him. He braced for a blow. He tilted his head back, lifted his chin, and waited. He thought of Helen. He thought of Anna. He thought of Charlotte. And remembering, he started to tell Thurman about his sister and where she was hiding before those blows landed, before he was struck as he deserved to be for helping these monsters, for being their unwitting tool at every turn. He started to tell Thurman about Charlotte, but there was a brightening of light through his lids, the slinking away of a shadow, and the slamming of an angry door.

32

Lukas sensed something was wrong before he slotted the headphones into the jack. The red lights above the servers throbbed red, but it was the wrong time of day. The calls from Silo 1 came like clockwork. This call had come in the middle of dinner. The buzzing and flashing lights had moved to his office and then to the hallway. Sims, the old Security chief, had tracked Lukas down in the break room to let him know someone was getting in touch, and Lukas’s first thought was that their mysterious benefactor had a warning for them. Or maybe he was calling to thank them for finally stopping with the digging.

There was a click in his headset as the connection was made. The lights overhead stopped their infernal blinking. “Hello?” he said, catching his breath.

“Who is this?”

Someone different. The voice was the same, but the words were wrong. Why wouldn’t this person know who he was?

“This is Lukas. Lukas Kyle. Who is this?”

“Let me speak to the head of your silo.”

Lukas stood up straight. “I am the head of this silo. Silo eighteen of World Order Operation Fifty. Who am I speaking to?”

“You’re speaking to the man who dreamed up that World Order. Now get me the head. I have here a… Bernard Holland.”

Lukas nearly blurted out that Bernard was dead. Everyone knew Bernard was dead. It was a fact of life. He had watched him burn rather than go out to clean, watched him burn rather than allow himself to be saved. But this man didn’t know that. And the complexities of life on the other end of that line, that infallible line, caused the room to wobble. The gods weren’t omnipotent. Or they didn’t sup around the same table. Or the one who called himself Donald was more rogue than even Lukas had believed he might be. Or — as Juliette would claim if she were there — these people were fucking with him.

“Bernard is… ah, he is indisposed at the moment.”

There was a pause. Lukas could feel the sweat bead up on his forehead and neck, the heat of the servers and the conversation getting to him.

“How long before he’s back?”

“I’m not sure. I can, uh, try to get him for you?” His voice lilted at the end of what shouldn’t have been a question.

“Fifteen minutes,” the voice said. “After that, things are going to go very badly for you and everyone over there. Very badly. Fifteen minutes.”

The line clicked dead before Lukas could object or argue for more time. Fifteen minutes. The room continued to wobble. He needed Jules. He would need someone to pretend to be Bernard — maybe Nelson. And what had this man meant when he said he had dreamed up the World Order? That wasn’t possible.

Lukas hurried to the ladder and raced down. He grabbed the portable radio from the charging rack and scrambled back up the ladder. He would call Juliette on his way to tracking down Nelson. A different voice would win him some time until he could sort this out. In a way, this was a call he’d always expected, someone wanting to know what in the hell was going on in their silo, but it had never come. He had expected it, and now it took him by surprise.

“Jules?” He reached the top of the ladder and tried the radio. What if she didn’t answer? Fifteen minutes. And then what? How bad could they really make it for them in the silo? The other voice — Donald — had tossed around dire and vacuous warnings from time to time. But this felt different. He tried Juliette again. His heart shouldn’t be pounding so. He opened the server room door and raced down the hall.

“Can I call you back?” Jules asked, the radio in his palm crackling with her voice. “I’ve got a nightmare down here. Five minutes?”

Lukas was breathing hard. He dodged around Sims in the hallway, who spun to watch him go. Nelson would be in the Suit Lab. Donald squeezed the transmit button. “Actually, I could use some help right now. Are you still on your way down?”

“No, I’m here. Just left the kids with my dad. I’m heading to Walker’s to get a battery. Are you running? You’re not coming down here, are you?”

Deep breaths. “No, I’m looking for Nelson. Someone called, said they need to speak to Bernard, that there would be trouble for us otherwise. Jules — I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

He rounded the bend and saw that the door to the Suit Lab was open. Strips of seal tape fluttered around the jamb.

“Calm down,” Juliette told him. “Take it easy. Who did you say called? And why are you looking for Nelson?”

“I was going to have him talk to this guy, pretend he’s Bernard, at least to buy us some time. I don’t know who’s calling. It sounds like the same guy, but it’s not.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to get Bernard, said he was the one who dreamed up Operation Fifty. Dammit, Nelson’s not here.” Lukas glanced around the workbenches and tool cabinets. He remembered passing Sims. The old Security chief had clearance to the server room. Lukas left the Suit Lab and rushed back down the hall.

“Lukas, you aren’t making any sense.”

“I know, I know. Hey, I’ll call you back. I need to catch Sims—”

He jogged down the hallway. Offices flew past, most of them empty, workers who had transferred out of IT or those at dinner. He spotted Sims turning a corner toward the security station.

“Sims!”

The Security chief peered back around the corner, stepped into the hall, and studied Lukas as he ran at him. Lukas wondered how many minutes had passed, how strict this man was going to be.

“I need your help,” he said. He pointed to the server room door, which stood at the junction of the two halls. Sims turned and studied the door with him.

“Yeah?”

Lukas entered his code and pushed the door open. Inside, the lights were back to throbbing red. No way it’d been fifteen minutes already. “I need a huge favor,” he told Sims. “Look, it’s… complicated, but I need you to talk to someone for me. I need you to pretend to be Bernard. You knew him well enough, right?”

Sims pulled up. “Pretend to be who?”

Lukas turned and grabbed the larger man’s arm, urged him along. “No time to explain. I just need you to answer this guy’s questions. It’s like a drill. Just be Bernard. Tell yourself that you’re Bernard. Act angry or something. And get off the line as quickly as you can. In fact, say as little as possible.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“I’ll explain afterward. I just need you to get through this. Fool this guy.” He guided Sims to the open server and handed him the headphones. Sims studied them as though he’d never seen a pair. “Just put those over your ears,” Lukas said. “I’m going to plug you in. It’s like a radio. Remember, you are Bernard. Try to sound like him, okay? Just be him.”

Sims nodded. His cheeks were red, a bead of sweat running down his brow. He looked ten years younger and nervous as hell.

“Here you go.” Lukas slotted the cord into the jack, thinking that Sims was probably even better for this than Nelson. This would buy them some time until he could figure out what was going on. He watched as Sims flinched, must’ve heard a greeting in the headphones.

“Hello?” he asked.

“Confident,” Lukas hissed. The radio in his hand crackled with Juliette’s voice, and he turned down the volume, didn’t want it overheard. He would have to call her back.

“Yes, this is Bernard.” Sims talked through his nose, high and tight. It sounded more like a man doing a woman’s voice than a fair approximation of the former silo head. “This is Bernard,” Sims said again, more insistently. He turned to Lukas and pleaded with his eyes, looked absolutely helpless. Lukas waved his hand in a small circle. Sims nodded as he listened to something, then pulled the headset off.

“Okay?” Lukas hissed.

Sims held the headset out to Lukas. “He wants to speak to you. I’m sorry. He knows it isn’t him.”

Lukas groaned. He tucked the radio under his arm, Juliette’s voice tiny and distant, and pulled on the headset, slick with sweat.

“Hello?”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Bernard is… I couldn’t reach him.”

“He’s dead. Was it an accident, or was he murdered? What’s going on over there? Who’s in charge? We’ve got no feeds over here.”

“I’m in charge,” Lukas said. He was painfully aware that Sims was studying him. “Everything is just fine over here. I can have Bernard call you—”

“You’ve been talking with someone over here.”

Lukas didn’t respond.

“What did he tell you?”

Lukas glanced at the wooden chair and the pile of books. Sims followed his gaze, and his eyes widened at the sight of so much paper.

“We’ve been talking about population reports,” Lukas said. “We put down an uprising. Yes, Bernard was injured during the fighting—”

“I have a machine here that tells me when you’re lying.”

Lukas felt faint. It seemed impossible, but he believed the man. He turned around and collapsed into the chair. Sims studied him warily. His Security chief could tell that things weren’t right.

“We’re doing the best we can,” Lukas said. “Everything’s in order over here. I am Bernard’s shadow. I passed the Rite—”

“I know. But I think you’ve been poisoned. I’m very sorry, son, but this is something I should have done a long time ago. It’s for the good of everyone. I truly am sorry.” And then, cryptically and softly, almost as if to someone else, the voice uttered the words: “Shut them down.”

“Wait—” Lukas said. He turned to Sims, and now they looked helplessly at one another. “Let me—”

Before he could finish, there was a hissing sound above him. Lukas glanced up to find a white cloud billowing down from the vents. An expanding mist. He remembered exhaust fumes like this from long ago, back when he was locked inside the server room and the people in Mechanical tried to divert gas to choke him out. He remembered the feeling that he was going to suffocate inside that room. But this fog was different. It was thick and sinister.

Lukas pulled his undershirt over his mouth and yelled for Sims to come with him. They both dashed through the server room, dodging between the tall black machines, avoiding the cloud where they could. They got to the door that led out to IT, which Lukas figured was airtight. The red light on the panel blinked happily. Lukas didn’t remember locking the door. Holding his breath, he punched in his code and waited for the light to turn green. It didn’t. He punched it in again, concentrating, feeling lightheaded from not enough air, and the keypad buzzed and blinked at him with its red and solitary eye.

Lukas turned to Sims to complain and saw the large man peering down at his palms. His hands were covered in blood. Blood was pouring from Sims’s nose.

33

Juliette cursed the radio and finally let Walker have a try. Courtnee watched them both with concern. Lukas had come through a couple of times, but all they’d heard was the patter of boots and the hissing of his breathing or some kind of static.

Walker examined the portable. The radio had grown needlessly complex with the knobs and dials he’d added. He fiddled with something and shrugged. “Looks okay to me,” he said, tugging on his beard. “Must be on the other end.”

One of the other radios on the bench barked. It was the large unit he’d built, the one with the wire dangling from the ceiling. There was a familiar voice followed by a burst of static: “Hello? Anyone? We’ve got a problem down here.”

Juliette raced around the workbench and grabbed the mic before Walker or Courtnee could. She recognized that voice. “Hank, this is Juliette. What’s going on?”

“We’ve got… ah, reports from the Mids of some kind of vapor leak. Are you still in that area?”

“No, I’m down in Mechanical. What kind of vapor leak? And from where?”

“In the stairwell, I think. I’m out on the landing right now and don’t see anything, but I hear a racket above me. Sounds like a ton of traffic. Can’t tell if it’s heading up or down. No fire alarm, though.”

“Break. Break.”

It was another voice cutting in. Juliette recognized it as Peter. He was calling for a pause in the chatter so he could say something.

“Go ahead, Peter.”

“Jules, I’ve got some kind of leak up here as well. It’s in the airlock.”

Juliette looked to Courtnee, who shrugged. “Confirm that you have smoke in the airlock,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s smoke. And it’s in the airlock you added, the new one. Wait. No… that’s strange.”

Juliette found herself pacing between Walker’s workbenches. “What’s strange? Describe what you’re seeing.” She imagined an exhaust leak, something from the main generator. They would have to shut it down, and the backup was gone. Fuck. Her worst nightmare. Courtnee frowned at her, was probably thinking the same thing. Fuck, fuck.

“Jules, the yellow door is open. I repeat, the inner airlock door is wide open. And I didn’t do it. It was locked just a bit ago.”

“What about the smoke?” Juliette asked. “Is it getting worse? Stay low and cover your face. You’ll want a wet rag or something—”

“It’s not smoke. And it’s inside the new door you welded up. That door is still shut. I’m looking through the glass right now. The smoke is all inside there. And I… I can see through the yellow door. It’s wide open. It’s… holy shit—”

Juliette felt her heart race. The tone of his voice. She couldn’t remember Peter ever uttering a cuss word in all the time she’d known him, and she’d known him through the worst of it. “Peter?”

“Jules, the outer door is open. I say again, the outer airlock door is wide open. I can see straight through the airlock and to… what looks like a ramp. I think I’m looking outside. Gods, Juliette, I’m looking straight outside—”

“I need you to get out of there,” Juliette said. “Leave everything as it is and get out. Shut the cafeteria door behind you. Seal it up with something. Tape or caulk or something from the kitchen. Do you read?”

“Yes. Yes.” His voice was labored. Juliette recalled Lukas telling her something bad was about to happen. She looked to Walker, who still had the new portable in his hand. She needed the old portable. She shouldn’t have let him modify the thing. “I need you to raise Luke,” she said.

Walker shrugged helplessly. “I’m trying,” he said.

“Jules, this is Peter again. I’ve got traffic heading my way up the stairs. I can hear them. Sounds like half the silo. I don’t know why they’re heading this way.”

Juliette thought of what Hank had said about hearing traffic on the stairwell. If there was a fire, everyone was supposed to man a hose or get to a safe level and wait for assistance. Why would people be running up?

“Peter, don’t let them near the office. Keep them away from the airlock. Don’t let them through.”

Her mind whirled. What would she do if she were up there? Have to get in there with a suit on and shut those doors. But that would mean opening the new airlock door. The new airlock door! It shouldn’t be there. Forget the sign of smoke, the outside air was now attached to the silo. The outside air—

“Peter?”

“Jules— I… I can’t stay here. Everyone’s acting crazy. They’re in the office, Jules. I… I don’t want to shoot anyone— I can’t.”

“Listen to me. The vapor. It’s the argon, isn’t it?”

“It… maybe. Yeah. It looked like that. I only saw it fill the airlock the once, when you went out. But yeah—”

Juliette felt her heart sink, her head spin. Her boots no longer touched the floor as she hovered, empty inside, numb and half-deaf. The gas. The poison. The seal missing from the sample canister. That fucker in Silo 1 and his threats. He’d done it. He was killing them all. A thousand useless plans and schemes flitted through Juliette’s mind, all of them hopeless and too late. Far too late.

“Jules?”

She squeezed the mic to answer Peter, and then realized the voice was coming from Walker’s hands. It was coming from the portable radio.

“Lukas,” she gasped. Her vision blurred as she reached for the other radio.

34

“Jules? Goddammit. My volume was down. Can you hear me?”

“I hear you, Lukas. What the hell is going on?”

“Shit. Shit.”

Juliette heard clangs and bangs.

“I’m okay. I’m okay. Shit. Is that blood? Okay, gotta get to the pantry. Are you still with me?”

Juliette realized she wasn’t breathing. “Are you talking to me? What blood?”

“Yeah, I’m talking to you. Fell down the ladder. Sims is dead. They’re doing it. They’re shutting us down. My stupid nose. I’m going in the pantry—” The feed turned into static.

“Lukas? Lukas!” She turned to Walker and Courtnee, both watching with wide and wet eyes.

“—no good. Cam’t geb recebtion in there.” Lukas’s voice was garbled as though he were pinching his nose or holding back a sneeze. “Baby, you’ve gotta seal yourselb off. Can’t stob my nose—”

Panic surged through Juliette. Shutting them down. The threats of ending them with the push of a button. Ending them. A silo like Solo’s. Maybe a second flitted by, two seconds, and in that brief flash she recalled him telling her stories of the way his silo fell, the rush up top, the spilling out into the open air, the bodies piling up that she had waded through years later. All in an instant, she was transported back and forth through time. This was Silo 17’s past; she was witnessing the fall of that silo as it played out in her home. And she had seen their grim future, had seen what was to come of her world. She knew how this ended. She knew that Lukas was already dead.

“Forget the radio,” she told him. “Lukas, I want you to forget the radio and seal yourself in that pantry. I’m going to save as many as I can.”

She grabbed the other radio, which was tuned to her silo. “Hank, do you read me?”

“Yes—?” She could hear him panting. “Hello?”

“Get everyone down to Mechanical. Everyone you can and as fast as you can. Now.”

“I feel like I should be going up,” Hank said. “Everyone is storming up.”

“No!” Juliette screamed into her radio. Walker startled and dropped the other radio’s microphone. “Listen to me, Hank. Everyone you can. Down here. Now!”

She cradled the radio in both hands, glanced around the room to see what else she should grab.

“Are we sealing off Mechanical?” Courtnee asked. “Like before?”

Courtnee must’ve been thinking about the steel plating welded across security during the holdout. The scars of those joints were still visible, the plating long gone.

“No time for that,” Juliette said. She didn’t add that it might all be pointless. The air could already be spoiled. No telling how long it took. A part of her mind wanted to focus on all that lay above her, all that she couldn’t save, the people and the things as well. Everything good and needed in the world that was now out of reach.

“Grab anything crucial and let’s go.” She looked to the two of them. “We need to go right now. Courtnee, get to the kids and get them back to their silo—”

“But you said… that mob—”

“I don’t care about them. Go. And take Walk with you. See that he gets to the dig. I’ll meet you there.”

“Where are you going?” Courtnee asked.

“To get as many others as I can.”

The hallways of Mechanical were strangely devoid of panic. Juliette ran through scenes of normalcy, of people walking to and from their shifts, trolleys of spare parts and heavy pumps, a shower of sparks from someone welding, a flickering flashlight and a passer-by tapping it with their fist. The radio had brought word to her ahead of time. No one else knew.

“Get to the dig,” she shouted to everyone she passed. “That’s an order. Now. Now. Go.”

There was a delayed response. Questions. Excuses. People explained where they were heading, that they were busy, that they didn’t have time right then.

Juliette saw Dawson’s wife, Raina, who would’ve been just coming off shift. Juliette grabbed her by the shoulders. Raina’s eyes widened, her body stiffened, to be handled like that.

“Get to the classroom,” Juliette told her. “Get your kids, get all the kids, and get them through the tunnel. Now.”

“What the hell’s going on?” someone asked. A few people jostled by in the narrow passageway. One of Juliette’s old hands from first shift was there. A crowd was forming.

“Get to the fucking dig,” Juliette shouted. “We’ve got to clear out. Grab everyone you can, your kids, anything you think you need. This is not a drill. Go. Go!”

She clapped her hands. Raina was the first to turn and run, pushing herself through the packed corridor. Those who knew her best leapt into action soon after, rounding up others. Juliette raced toward the stairwell, shouting as she did for everyone to get to the other silo. She vaulted over the security gates, the guard on duty looking up with a startled “Hey!” Behind her, she could hear someone else yelling for everyone to follow, to get moving. Ahead of her, the stairway itself trembled. She could hear welds singing and loose struts rattling. Over this, she could hear the sound of boots stomping her way.

Juliette stood at the bottom of the stairwell and peered up through that wide gap between the stairs and the stairwell’s concrete wall. Various landings jutted out overhead, wide bands of steel that became narrow ribbons higher up. The shaft receded into darkness. And then she saw the white clouds like smoke higher up. Maybe from the Mids.

She squeezed the radio.

“Hank?”

No response.

“Hank, come back.”

The stairway hummed with the harmonics of heavy but distant traffic. Juliette stepped closer and rested a hand on the rail. It vibrated, numbing her hand. The clanging of boots grew louder. Looking up, she could see hands sliding down the rail above her, could hear voices shouting encouragement and confusion.

A handful of people from the one-thirties spilled down the last turn and seemed confused about where to go next. They had the bewildered look of people who had never known that the stairway ended, that there was this floor of concrete below their homes. Juliette yelled at them to head inside. She turned and shouted into Mechanical for someone to show them the way, to let them through security. They stumbled past, most of them empty-handed, one or two with children clutched to their chests or towed behind, or with bundles cradled in their arms. They spoke of fire and smoke. A man shuffled down, holding a bloody nose. He insisted that they should be heading up, that they should all be heading up.

“You,” Juliette said, grabbing the man by the arm. She studied his face, the crimson dripping from his knuckles. “Where are you coming from? What happened?” She indicated his nose.

“I fell,” he said, uncovering his face to talk. “I was at work—”

“Okay. That’s fine. Follow the others.” She pointed. Her radio barked with a disembodied voice. Shouting. An unholy din. Juliette moved away from the stairs and covered one ear, pressed the radio to the other. It sounded vaguely like Peter. She waited until he was done.

“Can barely hear you!” she yelled. “What’s going on?”

She covered her ear again and strained for his words. “—getting through. To the outside. They’re getting out—”

Her back found the concrete of the stairwell. She slid down into a crouch. A few dozen people scampered down the stairs. Some stragglers in the yellow of Supply joined them, clutching a few things. Hank arrived, finally, directing traffic, shouting at those who seemed eager to turn back, to head in the other direction. A handful of people from Mechanical came out to help. Juliette concentrated on Peter’s voice.

“—can’t breathe,” he said. “Cloud coming in. I’m in the galley. People pouring up. Everyone. Acting crazy. Falling over. Everyone dead. The outside—”

He gasped and wheezed between every other word. The radio clicked off. Juliette screamed into the handset a few times, but she couldn’t raise him. Gazing up the stairwell, she saw the fog overhead. The smoke pouring out into the stairway seemed to thicken. It grew more and more dense as Juliette watched, horrified.

And then something dark punched through — a shadow amid the white. It grew. There was a scream, a terrible peal as it flew down and down, past the landings, on the other side of the stairwell, and then a thudding boom as a person slammed into the deck. The violence of the impact was felt in Juliette’s boots.

More screams. This time from those nearby, those dozens spilling down the stairwell, the few who had made it. They crawled over one another in a dash for Mechanical. And the white smoke, it descended down the stairwell like a hammer.

35

Juliette followed the others into Mechanical — she was the last one through. The arms on one of the security gates had been busted backward. A crowd surged over the gates while some hopped sideways through the gap. The guard who was meant to prevent this helped people down on the other side and directed them where to go.

Juliette threw herself over and hurried through the crowd toward the bunkroom where the kids had been put up. Someone was clattering around in the break room as she passed, hopefully looting needed things. Hopefully looting. The world had gone suddenly mad.

The bunkroom was empty. She assumed Courtnee had already gotten there. No one was getting out of Mechanical, anyway. And it was probably already too late. Juliette doubled back down the hall and headed for the winding stairs that penetrated the levels of Mechanical. She surged with a packed crowd down to the generator room and the site of the dig.

There were piles of tailings and chunks of concrete studded with rebar around the oil rig, which continued to bob its head up and down as if it knew the sad ways of the world, as if depressedly resigned to what was happening, as if saying: “Of course. Of course.”

More tailings and rubble from the dig formed piles inside the generator room, everything that hadn’t yet been shoveled down the shaft to mine six. There was a scattering of people, but not the crowds Juliette had hoped. The great crowds were likely dead. And then a fleeting thought, an urge to laugh and feel ridiculous, the idea that the smoke was nothing, that the airlock up top had held, that everything was okay and that her friends would soon rib her about this panic she had caused.

But this hope vanished as quickly as it came. Nothing could cut through the metallic fear on her tongue, the sound of Peter’s voice telling her that the airlock was wide open, that people were collapsing, Lukas telling her that Sims was dead.

She pushed through the crowd pouring into the tunnel and called out for the children. Then she spotted Courtnee and Walker. Walker was wide-eyed, his jaw sagging. Juliette saw the crowds through his eyes and realized the burden she had left Courtnee with, the challenge of dragging this recluse once again from his lair.

“Have you seen the kids?” she yelled over the crowd.

“They’re already through!” Courtnee yelled back. “With your father.”

Juliette squeezed her arm and hurried into the darkness. There were lights flashing ahead — the few who had battery-powered torches, those with miner’s hats on — but between these beams were wide swaths of pitch black. She jostled with the invisible others who materialized solidly out of shadow. Rocks clattered down from the piles of tailings to either side; dust and debris fell from the ceiling, eliciting shrieks and curses. The passage was narrow between the rows of rubble. The tunnel had been made for a handful of people to pass through, no more. Most of the massive hole bored through the earth had been left full of the scraps the digging had generated.

Where logjams formed, some people attempted to scamper up and along the tops of these piles. This just pushed heaps of dirt and rock down on those between, filling the tunnel with screams and curses. Juliette helped dig someone out and urged everyone to stay in the center, not to shove, even as someone practically climbed over her back.

There were others who tried to turn back, afraid and confused and distrusting of this dark run in a straight line. Juliette and others yelled for them to continue on. A nightmare formed of bumping into the support beams hastily erected in the center of the tunnel, of crawling on hands and knees over tall piles from partial cave-ins, of a baby crying at the top of its lungs somewhere. The adults did a better job of dampening their sobs, but Juliette passed by dozens crying. The journey felt interminable, as if they would crawl and stumble through that tunnel for the rest of time, until the poisonous air caught them from behind.

A jam of foot traffic formed ahead, people shoving at each others’ backs, and flashlight beams played over the steel wall of the digger. The end of the tunnel. The access door at the back of the machine was open. Juliette found Raph standing by the door with one of the flashlights, his pale face aglow in the darkness, eyes wide and white.

“Jules!”

She could barely hear him over the voices echoing back and forth in the dark shaft. She made her way to him, asked him who had already passed through.

“It’s too dark,” he said. “They can only get through one at a time. What the hell is going on? Why all the people? We thought you said—”

“Later,” she told him, hoping there would be a later. She doubted it. More likely, there would be piles of bodies at both ends of this silo. That would be the great difference between 17 and 18. Bodies at both ends. “The kids?” she asked, and as soon as she did, she wondered why with all the dead and dying she would concentrate on so few. The mother she never was, she suspected. The primal urge to look after her brood when far more than that was in peril.

“Yeah, quite a few kids came through.” He paused and shouted directions to a couple who didn’t want to enter the metal door at the back of this digger. Juliette could hardly blame them. They weren’t even from Mechanical. What did these people think was going on? Just following the panicked shoutings of others. Probably thought they were lost in the mines. It was a wild experience even for Juliette, who had scaled hills and seen the outside.

“What about Shirly?” Juliette asked.

He aimed his torch inside. “Saw her for sure. I think she’s in the digger. Directing traffic.”

She squeezed Raph’s arm, looked back at the writhing darkness of shadowy forms behind her. “Make sure you get through,” she told him, and his pale face nodded his consent.

Juliette squeezed into the queue and entered the back of the digger. Cries and shouts rattled within like children screaming into empty soup cans. Shirly was at the back of the power plant, directing the shuffling and shoving mass of people through a crack in the darkness so narrow that everyone had to turn sideways. The lights that’d been rigged up inside the digger to work the tailings were off, the backup generator idle, but Juliette could feel the residual heat from it having been run. She could hear the clicking of metal as it cooled. She wondered if Shirly had been operating the unit in order to move the machine and its power plant back toward Silo 18. She and Courtnee had been arguing over where the digger belonged.

“What the hell?” Shirly asked Juliette when she spotted her.

Juliette felt like bursting into tears. How to explain what she feared, that this was the end of everything they’d ever known? She shook her head and bit her lip. “We’re losing the silo,” she finally managed. “The outside’s getting in.”

“So why send them this way?” Shirly had to yell over the clamor of voices. She pulled Juliette to the other side of the generator, away from all the shouting.

“The air is coming down the stairwell,” Juliette said. “There’s no stopping it. I’m going to seal off the dig.”

Shirly chewed on this. “Take down the supports?”

“Not quite. The charges you wanted rigged up—”

Shirly’s face hardened. “Those charges are rigged from the other side. I rigged them to seal off this side, to seal off this silo, to protect us from the air over here.”

“Well, now all we have is the air over here.” Juliette passed Shirly the radio, which was all she’d taken from her home. Shirly cradled it in her arms. She balanced it atop her torch, which bloomed against Juliette’s chest. In the light that spilled back, Juliette could see a mask of confusion on her poor friend’s face. “Watch over everyone,” Juliette told her. “Solo and the kids—” She eyed the generator. “The farms here are salvageable. And the air—”

“You’re not going to—” Shirly started.

“I’ll make sure the last of them get through. There were a few dozen behind me. Maybe another hundred.” Juliette grasped her old friend’s arms. She wondered if they were still friends. She wondered if there was still that bond between them. She turned to go.

“No.”

Shirly grabbed Juliette’s arm, the radio falling and clattering to the floor. Juliette tried to yank free.

“I’ll be damned,” Shirly shouted. She spun Juliette around. “I’ll be goddamned if you’re leaving me to this, in charge of this. I’ll be goddamned—”

There were cries somewhere, from a child or an adult, it was impossible to tell. Just a cacophony of confused and terrified voices echoing in the packed confines of that great steel machine. And in the darkness, Juliette couldn’t see the blow coming, couldn’t see Shirly’s fist. She just felt it on her jaw, marveled at the bright flash of light in the pitch black, and then remembered nothing for a while.

She came to moments or minutes later — it was impossible to tell. Curled up on the steel deck of the digger, the voices around her subdued and far away, she lay still while her face throbbed.

Fewer people. Just the ones who’d made it, and they were moving on through the bowels of the digger. She had been out for a minute or two, it seemed. Maybe longer. Much longer. Someone called her name, was looking for her in the black, but she was invisible curled up on the far side of the generator in the shadow of shadows. Someone called her name.

And then a great boom in the distance. It was like a sheet of three-inch steel falling and banging next to her head. A great rumble in the earth, a tremor felt right through the digger, and Juliette knew. Shirly had gone to the control room and had taken her place. She had set off the charges meant to protect her old home from this new one. She had doomed herself with the others.

Juliette wept. Someone called her name, and Juliette realized it was coming from the radio near her head. She reached for it numbly, her senses scrambled. It was Lukas.

“Luke,” she whispered, squeezing the transmit button. His voice meant he was outside the steel locker, the airtight pantry full of food. She thought of Solo surviving for decades on those cans. Lukas could too, if anyone could. “Get back inside,” she said, sobbing. “Seal yourself off.” She cradled the radio in both hands and remained curled up on the deck.

“I can’t,” Lukas said. There was coughing, an agonizing wheeze. “I had to… had to hear your voice. One last time.” The next bout of coughing could be felt in Juliette’s own chest, which was full to bursting. “I’m done, Jules. I’m done…”

“No.” She cried this to herself, and then squeezed the radio. “Lukas, you get inside that pantry right now. Lock it and hold on. Just hold on—”

She listened to him cough and struggle to find his voice. When it came, it was a rattle. “Can’t. This is it. This is it. I love you, Jules. I love you…”

The last was a whisper, barely more than static. Juliette wept and slapped the floor and screamed at him. She cursed him. She cursed herself. And through the open door of the digger, a cloud of dust billowed in on a cool breeze, and Juliette could taste it on her tongue, on her lips. It was the dry chalk of crushed rock, the remnants of Shirly’s blast far down the tunnel, the taste of everything she had ever known… dead.