Dust

51

Darcy rode the elevator up to the armory. He put the small bag with the bullet away and stuffed the blood results into his pocket, stepped out of the elevator and fumbled for the wide bank of light switches. Something told him the pilot missing from the cryopod in Emergency Personnel was hiding on this level. It was the level where they’d found the man posing as the Shepherd. It was also where a handful of pilots had been stationed a month or so ago during a flurry of activity. He and Stevens and a few of the others had searched the level several times already, but Darcy had a feeling. It started with the fact that the lift required a security override before it would even bring him to that level.

Only a handful of top personnel and those in Security could manage that sort of override, and on his previous visits Darcy had seen why. Crates of munitions and ammo lined the shelves. There were tarps draped over what appeared to be military drones. Pyramids of bombs sitting on racks. Not anything you wanted the kitchen staff stumbling across when they came down for a can of powdered potatoes and jabbed the wrong button in the lift.

Previous searches hadn’t turned up anyone else, but there had to be thousands of places among the tall shelves with their large plastic bins. Darcy peered into these shelves as the lights overhead flickered on. He imagined that he was this pilot, moments after he’d killed a man, arriving there in a lift splattered with blood, on the run and looking for a place to hide.

Crouching, he examined the polished concrete outside the lift. Stepping back and tilting his head, he studied the shine. There was a bit more gleam in front of the door. Perhaps it was from the uneven traffic, the shuffle of boots, the gradual wear. He lowered himself to the floor and took a deep sniff, noted the smell of leaves and pine trees, of lemon and a time forgotten, back when things grew and the world smelled fresh.

Someone had cleaned the floor here. Recently, he thought. He remained crouched and peered through the aisles of weapons and emergency gear, aware that he wasn’t alone. What he should do is head straight for Brevard and bring in backup. There was a man in here capable of killing, someone from Emergency Personnel with military training, someone with access to every weapon in those crates. But this man was also wounded, hiding, and scared. And backup seemed like a bad idea.

It wasn’t so much that Darcy was the one who had pieced this together and deserved the credit, it was his increasing certainty that these murders pointed straight to the top. The people involved in this were of the highest rank. Files had been tampered with, Deep Freeze disturbed, neither of which should’ve been possible. The people he reported to might be involved. And Darcy had stood there propping up the real Shepherd while the old man laid boots into his impostor. Nothing about that was protocol. That shit was personal. He knew the guy that took the beating, used to see him up late shifts all the time, had spoken with him now and then. It was hard to imagine that guy killing people. Everything was upside down.

Darcy pulled his flashlight off his hip and began to search the shelves. He needed something more than a bright light, something more than they assigned to night guards. There were designations on the bins from a different life, one barely remembered. He pried open the lids on several bins — the vacuum seals softly popping — before he found what he was looking for: An H&K .45, a pistol both modern and ancient. Top of the line when it rolled off the factory floor, but those factories were little more than memories. He slotted a clip into the weapon and hoped the ammo was good. He felt more confident with the firearm and crept through the storeroom with renewed purpose, not the cursory laps from the day before when eighty levels needed searching.

He peeked under each of the tarps. Beneath one, he found loose tools and scattered parts, a drone partly disassembled or being repaired. Recent work? It was impossible to tell. There was no dust, but there wouldn’t be under the tarp. He walked the perimeter, looked for white foam pellets on the ground from any ceiling panels that may have been disturbed, checked the offices at the very back, looked for any places where the shelves might be scaled, any large bins high up. He headed toward the barracks and noticed the low metal hangar door for the first time.

Darcy made sure the safety was off. He gripped the handle on the door and threw it up, then crouched down and aimed his flashlight and pistol into the gloom.

He very nearly shot up someone’s bedroll. There was a rumpled pile of pillows and blankets that looked at first like a person sleeping. He saw more of the folders like the ones he’d helped gather from the conference room. This was probably where the man they’d snagged had been hiding. He’d have to show Brevard and get the place cleaned up. He couldn’t imagine living like that, like a rat. He shut the hangar and moved to the door down the wall, the one that led to the barracks. Opening it a crack, Darcy made sure the hall was clear. He moved quietly from room to room, sweeping each. No sign of habitation in the bunkrooms. The bathrooms were still and quiet. Eerie, almost. Leaving the women’s, he thought he heard a voice. A whisper. Something beyond the doorway at the very end.

Darcy readied his pistol and stood at the end of the hall. He pressed his ear to the door and listened.

Someone talking. He tried the knob and found it unlocked, took a deep breath. Any sign of a man reaching for a weapon, and he would shoot. He could already hear himself explaining to Brevard what had happened, that he’d had a hunch, had followed a clue, didn’t think to ask for backup, had come down and found this man wounded and bleeding. He drew first. Darcy had been protecting himself. One more dead body and another case closed. That was his line if this went badly. All this and more flashed through his mind as he threw the door open and raised his weapon.

A man turned from the end of the room. Darcy yelled for him to freeze as he shuffled closer, his training ingrained and coming as naturally as a heartbeat. “Don’t move,” he shouted, and the man raised his hands. It was a young man in gray coveralls, one arm over his head and the other held limply at his side.

And then Darcy saw that something was wrong. Everything was wrong. It wasn’t a man at all.

“Don’t shoot,” Charlotte pleaded. She raised one hand and watched this man approach her, a gun aimed at her chest.

“Stand up and step away from the desk,” the man said. His voice was unwavering. He gestured with his gun to indicate the wall.

Charlotte glanced at the radio. Juliette asked if she could hear her, asked her to finish what she was saying, but Charlotte didn’t test this man by reaching for the transmit button. She eyed the scattering of tools, the screwdrivers, the wire cutters, and remembered the gruesome fight from the day before. Her arm throbbed beneath the gauze wrapping. It hurt to raise her hand even to her shoulder. The man closed the distance between them.

“Both hands up.”

His stance — the way he held his gun — reminded her of basic training. She did not doubt that he would shoot her.

“I can’t raise it any more than this,” she said. Again, Juliette pleaded for her to say something. The man eyed the radio.

“Who’re you talking to?”

“One of the silos,” she said. She slowly reached for the volume.

“Don’t touch it. Against the wall. Now.”

She did as he said. Her one consolation was the hope that he would take her to her brother. At least she would know what they’d done with him. Her days of isolation and worry had come to an end. She felt a twinge of relief to have been discovered.

“Turn around and face the wall. Place your hands behind your back. Cross your wrists.”

She did this. She also turned to the side and glanced over her shoulder at him, caught a glimpse of a white plastic tie pulled from his belt. “Forehead on the wall,” he told her. And then she felt him approach, could smell him, could hear him breathing, and thoughts of spinning around and putting up a fight evaporated as the tie cinched painfully around her wrists.

“Are there any others?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Just me.”

“You’re a pilot?”

Charlotte nodded. He gripped her elbow and spun her around. “What’re you doing here?” Seeing the bandage on her arm, his eyes narrowed. “Eren shot you.”

She didn’t respond.

“You killed a good man,” he said.

Charlotte felt tears well up. She wished he would just take her wherever they were going, put her back to sleep, let her see Donny, whatever came next. “I didn’t want to,” was her feeble defense.

“How did you get here? You were with the other pilots? It’s just… women don’t…”

“My brother woke me,” Charlotte said. She nodded at the man’s chest, where a Security emblem blazed. “You took him.” And she remembered the day they came for Donny, a young man propping up Thurman. She recognized this man in front of her, and more tears came. “Is he… still alive?”

The man looked away for a moment. “Yes. Barely.”

Charlotte felt tears track down her cheeks.

The man faced her again. “He’s your brother?”

She nodded. With her arms strapped behind her, she couldn’t wipe her nose, couldn’t even reach her shoulder to wipe it on her coveralls. She was surprised this man had come alone, that he wasn’t calling for backup. “Can I see him?” she asked.

“I doubt that. They’re putting him back under today.” He aimed his gun at the radio as Juliette again called for some response. “This isn’t good, you know. You’ve put these people in danger, whoever you’re talking to. What were you thinking?”

She studied this man. He looked to be her age, early thirties, looked more like a soldier than a cop. “Where are the others?” she asked. She glanced toward the door. “Why aren’t you taking me in?”

“I will. But I want to understand something before I do. How did you and your brother… how did you get out?”

“I told you, he woke me.” Charlotte glanced at the table where Donny’s notes lay. She had left the folders open. The map was on top, the Pact memo visible. The security guard turned to see what she was looking at. He stepped away from her and rested a hand on one of the folders.

“So who woke your brother?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Charlotte was beginning to worry. Him not taking her in felt like a bad thing, like he was operating outside the rules. She had seen men in Iraq operate outside the rules. It was never to do anything good. “Please just take me to see my brother,” she said. “I surrender. Just take me in.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, then turned his attention back to the folders. “What is all this?” He picked up the map and studied it, set it down and picked up another piece of paper. “We pulled crates of this stuff out of the other room. What the hell are you two working on?”

“Just take me in,” Charlotte begged. She was getting scared.

“In a minute.” He studied the radio, found the volume, turned it down. He put his back to the desk and leaned against it, the pistol held casually by his hip. He was going to drop his pants, Charlotte realized. He was going to force her to her knees. He hadn’t seen a woman in several hundred years, was wanting to understand how to wake them up. That’s what he wanted. Charlotte considered running for the door, hoping he might shoot her, hoping he would either miss or hit her square—

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Charlotte felt tears roll down her cheeks. Her voice quivered, but she managed to whisper her name.

“Mine’s Darcy. Relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Charlotte began to shake. It was exactly what she imagined a man would say before doing something vile.

“I just want to understand what the hell’s going on before I turn you over. Because everything I’ve seen today suggests this is bigger than you and your brother. Bigger than my job. Hell, for all I know, the moment I take you up to the office, they’re going to put me under and put you back to work down here.”

Charlotte laughed. She turned her head and wiped the tears hanging from her jaw onto her shoulder. “Not likely,” she said. And she began to suspect that this man really wasn’t going to hurt her, that he was just as curious as he seemed. Her gaze drifted back to the folders. “Do you know what they have planned for us?” she asked.

“Hard to say. You killed a very important man. You shouldn’t be up. They’ll put you in Deep Freeze would be my guess. Alive or dead, I don’t know.”

“No, not what they’re gonna do to me and my brother — what they have planned for all of us. What happens after our last shift.”

Darcy thought for a moment. “I… I don’t know. Never thought about it.”

She nodded to the folders beside him. “It’s all in there. When I go back to sleep, it won’t matter if I’m alive or dead. I’ll never get up again. Neither will your sister or mom or wife or whoever they have here.”

Darcy glanced at the folders, and Charlotte realized his not taking her in right away was an opportunity, not a problem. This is why they couldn’t let anyone know the truth. If people knew, they wouldn’t stand for it.

“You’re making this up,” Darcy said. “You don’t know what will happen after—”

“Ask your boss. See what he says. Or your boss’s boss. And keep asking. Maybe they’ll give you a pod down in Deep Freeze next to mine.”

Darcy studied her for a heartbeat. He set his pistol down and unbuttoned the top button on his coveralls. And then the next. He kept unbuttoning them down to his waist, and Charlotte knew she’d been right about what he planned to do. She prepared to jump him, to kick him between the legs, to bite him—

Darcy took the folders and slid them around his back, tucked them into his shorts. He began buttoning up his coveralls.

“I’ll look into it. Now let’s go.” He picked up the gun and gestured toward the door, and Charlotte took a grateful breath. She walked around the drone control stations. Inside, she felt torn. She had wanted this man to take her in, but now she wanted to talk more. She had feared him, but now she wanted to trust him. Salvation seemed to come from being arrested, from being put back to sleep, and yet some other salvation seemed to lie within reach.

Her heart pounded as she was marched into the hallway. Darcy shut the door to the control room. She passed the bunkrooms and the bathrooms, waited at the end of the hall for him to open the door to the armory, her hands useless behind her back.

“I knew your brother, you know,” Darcy said as he held the door for her. “He never seemed like the sort. Neither do you.”

Charlotte shook her head. “I never wanted to hurt anyone. We were only ever after the truth.” She passed through the armory and toward the lift.

“That’s the problem with the truth,” Darcy said. “Liars and honest men both claim to have it. It puts people in my position in something of a predicament.”

Charlotte pulled to a stop. This seemed to startle Darcy, who took a step back and tightened his grip on his pistol. “Let’s keep moving,” he told her.

“Wait,” Charlotte said. “You want the truth?” She turned and nodded at the drones beneath their tarps. “How about you stop trusting what people are telling you? Stop deciding who to believe with your gut. Let me show you. See what’s out there for yourself.”

52

Donald’s side was a sea of purples, blacks, and blues. He held his undershirt up, his coveralls hanging from his hips, and inspected his ribs in the bathroom mirror. In the center of the bruise there was a patch of orange and yellow. He touched this — barely a brush of his fingertips — and a jolt of electricity shot down his legs and into his knees. He nearly collapsed, and it took a moment to gather his breath. He lowered his shirt gingerly, buttoned his coveralls up, and hobbled back to his cot.

His shins hurt from protecting himself from Thurman’s blows. There was a knot on his forearm like a second elbow. And every time a coughing fit seized him, he wanted to die. He tried to sleep. Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying. Donald was all three.

He turned out the light beside his cot and lay in the darkness. The cryopods and shifts were exaggerated forms of sleep, he thought. What seemed unnatural was more a matter of degree than of kind. Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.

He coughed, which brought bolts of agony to his ribs and flashes of light to his vision. Donald prayed to black out, to pass away, but the gods in charge of his fate were expert torturers. Just enough — but not too much. Don’t kill the man, he could hear his wounds whispering to one another. We need him alive so that he can suffer for what he’s done.

The coughing passed with the taste of copper on his lips, blood misting his coveralls — but he didn’t care. He laid his head back, soaked in sweat from pain and exertion, and listened to the feeble groans escaping his lips.

Hours or minutes passed. Days. There was a rap at the door, the slide and click of a tumbler, someone flicking on the lights. It would be a guard with dinner or breakfast or some other meaningless designation of time of day. It would be Thurman to lecture him, to grill him, to take him and put him to sleep.

“Donny?”

It was Charlotte. The hall behind her was third-shift dim. As she came to him, a man filled the doorway, one of the security officers. They had discovered her and were locking her up as well. But they were giving him this moment at least. He sat up too quickly, nearly lost his balance, but their arms found one another, both of them wincing in the embrace.

“My ribs,” Donald hissed.

“Watch my arm,” his sister said.

She untangled herself and stepped back, and Donald was about to ask her what was wrong with her arm, but she pressed a finger to her lips. “Hurry,” she said. “This way.”

Donald peered past her to the man in the doorway. The guard gazed up and down the hallway, was more concerned about someone coming than about him or his sister escaping. The ache in Donald’s ribs lessened as he realized what was going on.

“We’re leaving?” he asked.

His sister nodded and helped him stand. Donald followed her into the hall.

So many questions, but silence was paramount. Now wasn’t the time. The security officer closed the door and locked it. Charlotte was already heading toward the lifts. Donald limped after her, barefoot, his left leg singing with every step. They were on the admin level. He passed the accounting offices where spares and supplies were managed; Records, where the major happenings of every silo were tallied and entered into the servers; Population Control, where so many of his reports had once originated. All the offices quiet at what must’ve been an early-morning hour.

The security station was unmanned. Beyond it, a lift was waiting for them, persistently buzzing in a hold state. Donald noted a strong odor of cleaning agent in the lift. Charlotte slammed the hold button back in, scanned her ID, and pressed the armory level. The guard slid through the closing doors sideways, and Donald noticed the gun in his hand. It wasn’t for fear of being discovered by others that he was carrying that gun, Donald realized. They weren’t quite free. The young man stood on the other side of the lift and watched him and his sister warily.

“I know you,” Donald said. “You work the late shift.”

“Darcy,” the guard said. He didn’t offer his hand. Donald thought of the empty security station and realized this man should’ve been there.

“Darcy, right. What’s going on?” He turned to his sister. A gauze wrapping could be seen peeking out from her short-sleeved undershirt. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She watched the floors light up and slide by with obvious trepidation. “We flew another drone.” She turned to Donald, her eyes on fire. “It made it through.”

“You saw it?” His wounds were forgotten; the man standing in the lift with the gun was forgotten. It had been so long since that first flight gave him a brief glimpse of blue skies that he had grown to doubt it, had come to think it had never happened at all. The other flights had failed, had never reached as far. The elevator slowed as it approached the storehouse.

“The world isn’t gone,” Charlotte confirmed. “Just our piece of it.”

“Let’s get off the lift,” Darcy said. He waved the gun. “And then I want to understand what the hell is going on. And look, I’m not above having you both locked up before the morning shift comes on. I’ll deny we ever talked like this.”

Just inside the armory, Donald took a deep, wheezing breath and patted his back pocket. He pulled out the cloth and coughed, bent over to reduce the strain on his ribs. He folded the cloth away quickly so Charlotte couldn’t see.

“Let’s get you some water,” she said, looking to the storehouse of supplies.

Donald waved her off and turned to Darcy. “Why are you helping us?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“I’m not helping you,” Darcy insisted. “I’m hearing you out.” He nodded to Charlotte. “Your sister has made some bold claims, and I did a little reading while she put her bird together.”

“I gave him some of your notes,” Charlotte said. “And the drone flight. He helped me launch it. I put her down in a sea of grass. Real grass, Donny. The sensors held out for another half hour. We just sat there and stared at it.”

“But still,” Donald said, looking to Darcy. “You don’t know us.”

“I don’t know my bosses, either. Not really. But I saw the beating you took, and it didn’t sit right with me. You two are fighting for something, and it might be something bad, something I’m going to stop, but I’ve noticed a pattern. Any question I ask outside of my duties, and the flow of information stops. They want me to work the night shift and have a fresh pot on in the morning, but I remember being something more in a different life. I was taught to follow orders, but only up to a point.”

Donald nodded grimly. He wondered if this young man had been deployed overseas. He wondered if he’d suffered from PTSD, had been on any meds. Something had come back to him, something like a conscience.

“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” Donald said. He led them away from the lift doors and toward the aisle of supplies that held canned water and MREs. “My old boss — the man you watched give me this limp — explained some things. More than he likely meant to. Most of this is what I’ve put together, but he filled in some blanks.”

Donald lifted the lid on one of the wooden crates his sister had pried open. He winced in pain, and Charlotte rushed to help him. He grabbed a can of water and popped the lid, took a long swig while Charlotte pulled out two more cans. Darcy switched his gun to his other hand to accept a can, and Donald felt the presence of crate after crate of guns around him. He was sick of the things. Somehow, the fear of the one in Darcy’s hand was gone. The pain in his chest was a different sort of bullet wound. A quick death would be a blessing.

“We aren’t the first people to try and help a silo,” Donald said. “That’s what Thurman told me. And a lot more makes sense now. C’mon.” He led them off that aisle and down another. A light flickered overhead. It would die soon. Donald wondered if anyone would bother to replace it. He found the plastic crate he was looking for hidden among a sea of others, tried to pull it down, and felt a cry from his ribs. He sucked it up and hauled it anyway, his sister helping with one hand, and together they carried it to the conference room. Darcy followed.

“Anna’s work,” he grunted, hefting the container onto the conference table while Darcy hit the lights. There was a schematic of the silos beneath a thick sheet of glass, and the glass was marked with old wax notes, scratched into illegibility by elbows and folders and glasses of whisky. All of his other notes were gone, but that was okay. He needed to look for something old, something from the past, from his previous shift. He pulled out several folders and flopped them onto the table. Charlotte began looking through them. Darcy remained by the door and glanced occasionally at the floor in the hall, which remained splattered with dried blood.

“There was a silo shut down a while back for broadcasting on a general channel. Not on my shift.” He pointed to Silo 10 on the table, which bore the remnants of a red X. “A burst of conscience broadcast on a handful of channels, and then it was shut down. But it was Silo 40 that kept Anna busy for the better part of a year.” He found the folder he was looking for, flipped it open. Seeing her handwriting blurred his vision. He hesitated, ran his hands across her words, remembering what he’d done. He had killed the one person trying to help him, the one person who loved him. The one person reaching out to these silos to help. All because of his own guilt and self-loathing for loving her back. “Here’s a rundown of the events,” he said, forgetting what he was looking for.

“Get to the point,” Darcy said. “What’s this all about? My shift is up in two hours, and it’ll be daylight soon. I’ll need both of you under lock and key before then.”

“I’m getting there.” Donald wiped his eyes and composed himself, waved his hand at a corner of the table. “All of these silos went dark a long time ago. A dozen or so of them. It started with 40. They must’ve had some kind of silent revolution. A bloodless one, because we never got any reports. They never acted strange. A lot like what’s going on in eighteen right now—”

“Was,” Charlotte said. “I heard from them. They’ve been shut down.”

Donald nodded. “Thurman told me. I meant to say ‘was’. Thurman also hinted that they were originally going to build fewer silos but kept adding more for redundancy. There are a few reports I found that suggested this as well. You know what I think? I think they added too many. They couldn’t monitor them all closely enough. It’s like having a camera on every street corner, but you don’t have enough people watching the feeds. And so this one slipped under the rails.”

“What do you mean when you say these silos went dark?” Darcy asked. He sidled closer to the table and studied the layout under the glass.

“All the camera feeds went out at the same time. They wouldn’t answer our calls. The Order mandated that we shut them down in case they’d gone rogue, so we gassed the place. Popped the doors. And then another silo went dark. And another. The heads on shift here figured that in addition to the camera feeds, they’d sorted out the gas lines as well. So they sent the collapse codes to all of these silos—”

“Collapse codes?”

Donald nodded and drowned a cough with a gulp of water. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. It was comforting to see all the notes out on the table. The pieces were fitting together.

“The silos were built to fail, and all but one of them will. There’s no gravity to take them down, so they had us build them — they had me design them — with great slabs of concrete between the levels.” He shook his head. “It never made sense at the time. It made the dig deeper, increased costs, it’s an insane amount of concrete. I was told it had something to do with bunker busters or radiation leaks. But it was worse than that. It was so they’d have something to take down. The walls aren’t going anywhere — they’re tied to the earth.” He took another sip of water. “That’s why the concrete. And it was because of the gas that they didn’t want lifts. Never understood why they had us take them out. Said they wanted the design more ‘open’. It’s harder to gas a place if you can block off the levels.”

He coughed into the crook of his arm, then drew a finger around a portion of the conference table. “These silos were like a cancer. Forty must’ve communicated with its neighbors, or they just took them offline as well, hacked them remotely. The heads on shift here in our silo started waking people up to deal with it. The collapse codes weren’t working, nothing was. Anna figured they’d discovered the blast charges in forty and had blocked the frequency — something like that.”

He paused and remembered the sound of static from her radio, the jargon she’d used that gave him headaches but made her seem so smart and confident. His gaze fell to the corner of the room where a cot once lay, where she used to sneak over in the middle of the night and slip into his arms. Donald finished his water and wished he had something stronger.

“She finally managed to hack the detonators and bring the silos down,” he said. “It was this or they were going to risk sending drones up or boots over, which is last-page Order stuff. Back of the book.”

“Which is what we’ve been doing,” Charlotte said.

Donald nodded. “I did even more of it before I woke you, back when this level was crawling with pilots.”

“So that’s what happened to these silos? They were collapsed?”

“That’s what Anna said. Everything looked good. The people in charge over here were relying on her, taking her word. We were all put back to sleep. I figured it was my last snooze, that I’d never wake up again. Deep Freeze. But then I was brought out for another shift, and people were calling me by a different name. I woke up as someone else.”

“Thurman,” Darcy said. “The Shepherd.”

“Yeah, except I was the sheep in that story.”

“You were the one who nearly got over the hill?”

Donald saw the way Charlotte stiffened. He returned his attention to the folders and didn’t answer.

“This woman you’re talking about,” Darcy said. “Was she the same one who messed up the database?”

“Yeah. They gave her full access to fix this problem they were having; it was that severe. And her curiosity got her looking in other places. She found this note about what her father and others had planned, realized these collapse codes and gas systems weren’t just for emergencies. We were all one big ticking time bomb, every single silo. She realized that she was going to be put in cryo and never wake up again. And even though she could change anything she wanted, she couldn’t change her gender. Couldn’t make it so that anyone would wake her up, and so she tried to get me to help. She put me in her father’s place.”

Donald paused and fought back the tears. Charlotte rested her hand on his back. The room was quiet for a long moment.

“But I didn’t understand what she wanted me to do. I started digging on my own. And meanwhile, Silo 40 isn’t gone at all. The place is still standing. I realize this when another silo goes dark.” Donald paused. “I was acting head at the time, wasn’t thinking straight, and I signed off on a bombing. Whatever it took to make it all go away. I didn’t care about the tremors, being spotted, just ordered it done. We cratered anything over there that was still standing. Drones and bombs started thinning them out.”

“I remember,” Darcy said. “That was about when I got on shift. There were pilots up in the cafeteria all the time. They worked a lot in the middle of the night.”

“And they worked down here. When they were done and went back under, I woke up my sister. I was just waiting for them to leave. I didn’t want to drop bombs. I wanted to see what was out there.”

Darcy checked the clock on the wall. “And now we’ve all seen it.”

“There’s another two hundred years or so before all the silos go down,” Donald said. “You ever think about why this silo only has lifts, doesn’t have any stairs? You want to know why they call it the express but the damn thing still takes forever to get anywhere?”

“We’re rigged to blow,” Darcy said. “There’s that same mass of concrete between every level.”

Donald nodded. This kid was fast. “If they let us walk up a flight of stairs, we’d see. We’d know. And enough people here would know what that was for, what this meant. They might as well put the countdown clock on every desk. People would go insane.”

“Two hundred years,” Darcy said.

“That might feel like a lot of time to others, but that’s a couple naps for us. But see, that’s the whole point. They need us dead so no one remembers. This whole thing—” Donald waved at the conference table with the depiction of the silos. “It’s as much a time machine as a ticking clock. It’s a way of wiping the earth clean and propelling some group of people, some tribe chosen practically at random, into a future where they inherit the world.”

“More like sending them back into the past,” Charlotte said. “Back into some primitive state.”

“Exactly. When I first learned about the nanos, it was something Iran was working on. The idea was to target an ethnic group. We already had machines that could work on a cellular level. This was just the next step. Going after a species is even easier than targeting a race. It was child’s play. Erskine, the man who came up with this, said it was inevitable, that someone would eventually do it, create a silent bomb that wipes out all of humanity. I think he was right.”

“So what’re you looking for in these folders?” Darcy asked.

“Thurman wanted to know if Anna ever left the armory. I’m pretty sure she did. Things would show up down here that I couldn’t find on the shelves. And he said something about gas lines—”

“We’ve got an hour and a half before I need to get you back,” Darcy said.

“Yeah, okay. So Thurman found something here in this silo, I think. Something his daughter did, something she snuck out and did. I think she left another surprise. When they gassed eighteen, Thurman mentioned that they did it right this time. That they undid someone’s mess. I thought he was talking about my mess, my fighting to save the place, but it was Anna who had changed things. I think she moved some valves around, or if it’s all computerized, just changed some code. There are two types of machines, both of which are in my blood right now. There are those that keep us together, like in the cryopods. And then there are the machines outside around the silos, those we pump inside them to break people down. It’s the ultimate haves versus the have-nots. I think Anna tried to flip this around, tried to rig it up so the next silo we shut down would get a dose of what we get. She was playing Robin Hood on a cellular level.”

He finally found the report. It was well-worn. It had been looked through hundreds of times.

“Silo seventeen,” he said. “I wasn’t around when it was put down, but I looked into this. There was a guy there who answered a call after the place was gassed. But I don’t think it was gassed. Not correctly. I think Anna took what we get in our pods to stitch us up and sent that instead.”

“Why?” Charlotte asked.

Donald looked up. “To stop the world from ending. To not murder anyone. To show people some compassion.”

“So everyone at seventeen is okay?”

Donald flipped through the pages of the report. “No,” he said. “For whatever reason, she couldn’t stop the airlock from popping. That’s part of the procedure. And with the amount of gas outside, they didn’t stand a chance.”

“I spoke to someone at seventeen,” Charlotte said. “Your friend… that mayor is over there. There are people there. She said they tunneled their way over.”

Donald smiled. He nodded. “Of course. Of course. She wanted me to think she was coming after us.”

“Well, I think she’s coming after us now.”

“We need to get in touch with her.”

“What we need to do,” Darcy said, “is start thinking about the end of this shift. There’s going to be a helluva beating in about an hour.”

Donald and Charlotte turned to him. He was standing by the door, right near where Donald had been kicked over and over.

“I mean my boss,” Darcy said. “He’s gonna be pissed when he wakes up and discovers a prisoner escaped during my shift.”

53

Juliette and Raph stopped at the lower deputy station to look for another radio or a spare battery. They found neither. The charging rack was still on the wall, but it hadn’t been wired into the makeshift power lines trailing through the stairwell. Juliette weighed whether or not it was worth staying there and getting some juice in the portable or if she should just wait until they got to the Mids station or IT—

“Hey,” Raph whispered. “Do you hear something?”

Juliette shined her flashlight deep into the offices. She thought she heard someone crying. “C’mon,” she said.

She left the charger alone and headed back toward the holding cells. There was a dark form sitting in the very last cell, sobbing. Juliette thought it was Hank at first, that he had wandered up to the nearest thing like a home to him, only to realize what state this world was in. But the man wore robes. It was Father Wendel who peered up at them from behind the bars. The tears in his eyes caught in the glare of the flashlight. A small candle burned on the bench beside him, wax dripping to the ground.

The door to the holding cell wasn’t shut all the way. Juliette pulled it open and stepped inside. “Father?”

The old man looked awful. He had the tattered remains of an ancient book in his hands. Not a book, but a stack of loose pages. There were pages scattered all over the bench and on the floor. As Juliette cast her light down, she could see that she was standing on a carpet of fine print. There was a pattern of black bars across all the pages, sentences and words made unreadable. Juliette had seen pages like this once in a book kept inside a cage, a book where only one sentence in five could be read.

“Leave me,” Father Wendel said.

She was tempted to, but she didn’t. “Father, it’s me, Juliette. What’re you doing here?”

Wendel sniffled and sorted through the pages as though he were looking for something. “Isaiah,” he said. “Isaiah, where are you? Everything’s out of order.”

“Where’s your congregation?” Juliette asked.

“Not mine anymore.” He wiped his nose, and Juliette felt Raph tug on her elbow to leave the man be.

“You can’t stay here,” she said. “Do you have any food or water?”

“I have nothing. Go.”

“C’mon,” Raph hissed.

Juliette adjusted the heavy load on her back, those sticks of dynamite. Father Wendel laid out more pages around his boots, checking the front and back of each as he did so.

“There’s a group down below planning another dig,” she told him. “I’m going to find them a better place, and they’re going to get our people out of here. Maybe you could come to one of the farms with us and see about getting some food, see if you can help. The people down below could use you.”

“Use me for what?” Wendel asked. He slapped a page down on the bench, and several other pages scattered. “Hellfire or hope,” he said. “Take your pick. One or the other. Damnation or salvation. Every page. Take your pick. Take your pick.” He looked up at them, beseeching them.

Juliette shook her canteen, cracked the lid, and held it out to Wendel. The candle on the bench sputtered and smoked, shadows growing and shrinking. Wendel accepted the canteen and took a sip. He handed it back.

“Had to see it with my own eyes,” he whispered. “I went into the dark to see the devil. I did. Walked and walked, and here it is. Another world. I led my flock to damnation.” He twisted up his face, studied one of the pages for a moment. “Or salvation. Take your pick.”

Plucking the candle from the bench, he held a page close to it in order to see it better. “Ah, Isaiah, there you are.” And with the baritone of a Sunday, he read: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances.” Wendel touched a corner of the page to the flame and roared again: “Its desolate inheritances!”

The page burned until he had to release it. It moved through the air like an orange, shrinking bird.

“Let’s go,” Raph hissed, more insistently this time.

Juliette held up a hand. She approached Father Wendel and crouched down in front of him, rested a hand on his knee. The anger she had felt toward him over Marcus was gone. The anger she had felt as he instilled outrage in his people toward her and her digging was gone. Replacing that anger was guilt — guilt from knowing that all of their fears and mistrust had been warranted.

“Father,” she said. “Our people will be damned if they stay in this place. I can’t help them. I won’t be here. They are going to need your guidance if they’re to make it to the other side.”

“They don’t need me,” he said.

“Yes, they do. Women in the depths of this silo weep for their babies. Men weep for their homes. They need you.” And she knew this was true. It was in the hard times that they needed him the most.

“You will see them through,” Father Wendel said. “You will see them through.”

“No, I won’t. You are their salvation. I am off to damn those who did this. I’m going to send them straight to hell.”

Wendel looked up from his lap. Hot wax flowed over his fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice. The smell of burnt paper filled the room, and he rested a hand on Juliette’s head.

“In that case, my child, I bless your journey.”

The trip up the stairwell was heavier with that blessing. Or maybe it was the weight of the explosives on her back, which Juliette knew would’ve been useful for the tunneling below. They could be used for salvation, but she was using them for damnation. They were like the pages of Wendel’s book in that they offered plenty of both. As she approached the farms, she reminded herself that Erik had insisted she take the dynamite. There were others eager to see her pull this off.

She and Raph arrived at the lower farms, and she knew something was wrong the moment they stepped inside. Cracking the door released a surge of heat, a blast of angry air. Her first thought was a fire, and she knew from living in that silo that there were no longer any water hoses that worked. But the bloom of bright lights down the hall and along the outer grow plots hinted at something else.

There was a man lying on the ground by the security gates, his body sideways across the hall. Stripped down to his shorts and undershirt, Juliette didn’t recognize Deputy Hank until she was nearly upon him. She was relieved when he moved. He shielded his eyes and tightened his grip on the pistol resting on his chest; sweat soaked his clothes.

“Hank?” Juliette asked. “Are you okay?” She was already feeling sticky herself, and poor Raph seemed liable to wilt.

The deputy sat up and rubbed the back of his neck. He pointed to the security gates. “You get a little shade if you crowd up against them.”

Juliette looked down the hall at the lights. They were drawing a ton of power. Every plot appeared to be lit at once. She could smell the heat. She could smell the plants roasting in it. She wondered how long the skimpy wiring job in the stairwell could withstand such a draw of current.

“Are the timers stuck? What’s going on?”

Hank nodded down the hallway. “People’ve been staking plots. A fight broke out yesterday. You know Gene Sample?”

“I know Gene,” Raph said. “From Sanitation.”

Hank frowned. “Gene’s dead. Happened when the lights went out. And then they fought over who had rights to bury him, treated poor Gene like fertilizer. Some folks banded together and hired me to restore order. I told them to keep the lights on until things got settled.” He wiped the back of his neck. “Before you lay into me, I know it ain’t good for the crops, but they were already ravaged. My hope is to sweat these people out, make enough of them move on to give everyone some breathing space. I give it another day.”

“In another day, you’ll have a fire somewhere. Hank, the wiring outside runs hot enough already with the lights cycling. I’m shocked they can power all of this. When a breaker goes out up on the thirties, you’re gonna have nothing but dark for a very long time down here.”

Hank peered down the hall. Juliette saw rinds and cores and scraps of food on the other side of the gates. “How’re they paying you? In food?”

He nodded. “The food’s all gonna go bad. They plucked everything. People were just actin’ crazy when they got here. I think a few headed up, but there are all these rumors that the door to this silo is open and if you go up much further, you die. And if you go down, you die. Lots of rumors.”

“Well, you need to dispel those rumors,” Juliette said. “I’m sure it’s better up or down than it is here. Have you seen Solo and the kids, the ones who used to live here? I heard they came up this way.”

“Yup. A few of those kids were staking a plot right down the hall before I rigged the lights. But they left a few hours ago.” Hank eyed Juliette’s wrist. “What time is it, anyway?”

Juliette glanced at her watch. “It’s a quarter past two.” She saw he was about to ask another question. “In the afternoon,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“We’re going to try and catch up with them,” Juliette said. “Can I leave you to handle these lights? You can’t draw this much power. And get more people to move up from here. The farms in the Mids are doing much better, or they were when I was here. And if you have people looking for work, they can use hands in Mechanical.”

Hank nodded and struggled to his feet. Raph was already heading to the exit, his coveralls spotted with sweat. Juliette clasped Hank on the shoulder before heading off as well.

“Hey,” Hank called out. “You said what time it was. But what day is it?”

Juliette hesitated at the door. She turned and saw Hank gazing at her, his hand shielding his eyes. “Does it matter?” she asked. And when Hank didn’t respond, she supposed it didn’t. All the days were the same now, and every one numbered.

54

Jimmy decided to search for Elise on two more levels before turning back. He had begun to suspect that he’d missed her, that she’d run inside a level after her animal or to use the bathroom and he’d gone right by. Most likely, she was back at the farms with everyone else while he was stomping up and down the silo alone.

At the next landing, he checked inside the main door, saw nothing but darkness and silence, called out for Elise, and debated going even one level further. Turning back to the stairwell, a flash of brown caught his eye above. He shielded his old eyes and peered up through the green gloom to see a boy peering over the rails at him. The kid waved. Jimmy did not wave back.

He headed for the stairs with a mind of returning to the lower farms, but he soon heard the patter of light footsteps spiraling down toward him. Another kid to look after, he thought. He didn’t wait for the boy, but continued along. It took a turn and a half before the child caught up to him.

Jimmy turned to berate the kid for bugging him, but he recognized the boy up close. The brown coveralls and the wiry mop of corn-colored hair. It was the kid who had chased Elise through the bazaar.

“Hey,” the boy hissed, breathing hard. “You’re that guy.”

“I’m that guy,” Jimmy agreed. “I suppose you’re looking for food. Well, I don’t have a thing—”

“No.” The kid shook his head. He had to be nine or ten. About the same age as Miles. “I need you to come with me. I need your help.”

Everyone needed Jimmy’s help. “I’m a bit busy,” he said. He turned to go.

“It’s Elise,” the boy said. “I followed her here. Through the mines. Some people up there won’t let her go.” He glanced up the stairwell, his voice a whisper.

“You’ve seen Elise?” Jimmy asked.

The boy nodded.

“What do you mean, people?”

“It’s a bunch of them from that church. My dad goes to their Sundays.”

“And you say they have Elise?”

“Yeah. And I found her dog. Her dog was trapped behind a busted door a few levels down from here. I penned it up so it couldn’t get loose. And then I found where they’re keeping Elise. I tried to get to her, but some guy told me to scram.”

“Where was this?” Jimmy asked.

The boy pointed up. “Two levels,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

“Shaw.”

“Good work, Shaw.” Jimmy hurried to the stairwell and started down.

“I said up from here,” the boy said.

“I need to grab something,” Jimmy told him. “It’s not far.”

Shaw hurried after him. “Okay. And look, mister, I want you to know how hungry I was. But that I wasn’t going to eat the dog.”

Jimmy paused and allowed the boy to catch up. “I didn’t think you would,” he said.

Shaw nodded. “Just so Elise knows,” he said. “I want to make sure she knows I would never do that.”

“I’ll make sure she knows,” Jimmy said. “Now c’mon. Let’s hurry.”

Two levels down, Jimmy peeked inside a dark hallway; he played his flashlight across the walls, then turned guiltily to Shaw, who crowded behind him. “Went too far,” Jimmy admitted.

He turned and began climbing back up a level, frustrated with himself. So hard to remember where he put everything. Such a long time ago. He used to have mnemonics for recalling his stashes. He had hidden a rifle way up on level fifty-one. He remembered that because it took a hand to hold the rifle and another finger to pull the trigger. Five and one. That rifle was wrapped in a quilt and buried in the bottom of an old trunk. But he’d left one down here as well. He had carried it down to Supply a lifetime ago; it would’ve been the trip when he found Shadow. Hadn’t carried it all the way back up — not enough hands. One-eighteen. That was it. Not one-nineteen. He hurried up to the landing, his legs getting sore, and went inside the hallway he and Shaw had passed moments prior.

This was it. Apartments. He had left things in lots of them. Poop, mostly. He didn’t know you could go in the farms, right in the dirt. The kids taught him that late in life. Elise taught him. Jimmy thought of people doing something bad to Elise, and he remembered what he’d done to people when he was a boy. He’d been young when he’d taught himself to fire a rifle. He remembered the noise it made. He remembered what it did to empty soup cans and people. It made things jump and fall still. Third apartment down on the left.

“Hold this,” he told Shaw, stepping inside the apartment. He handed his flashlight to the boy, who kept it trained in the center of the room. Jimmy grabbed the metal dresser shoved against one wall and pulled it out a ways. Just like yesterday. Except for the thick dust on the top of the dresser. His old bootprints were gone. He climbed up to the top and pushed the ceiling panel up and to the side, asked for the flashlight. A rat squeaked and scattered as he shined the light in there. The black rifle was waiting on him. Jimmy took it down and blew the dust off.

Elise didn’t like her new clothes. They had taken her coveralls from her, saying the color was all wrong, and had wrapped her in a blanket that was sewn up the front and scratchy. She’d asked to leave several times, but Mr. Rash said she had to stay. There were rooms up and down the halls with old beds, and everything smelled awful, but there were people trying to clean it up and make it better. But Elise just wanted Puppy and Hannah and Solo. She was shown a room and was told it would be her new home, but Elise lived beyond the Wilds and never wanted to live anyplace else.

They took her back to the big room where she’d signed her name and had her sit on the bench some more. If she tried to go, Mr. Rash squeezed her wrist. When she cried, he squeezed even harder. They made her sit on a bench they called something else while a man read from a book. The man with the white robes and the bald patch had left, and a new man had taken his place to read from a book. There was a woman off to the side with two other men, and she didn’t look happy. A lot of people on the benches spent time watching this woman instead of the man reading.

Elise was both sleepy and restless. What she wanted to do was get away and nap somewhere else. And then the man was done reading, and he lifted the book up into the air, and everyone around her said the same thing, which was really strange, as if they all knew they were going to say it beforehand, and their voices were funny and hollow like they knew the words but didn’t know what they meant.

The man with the book waved the men and the woman up, and it seemed almost like they carried her. There were two tables pushed together back near the colored window with the light shining through it. The woman made a noise as they lifted her to the tables. She had a blanket on like Elise’s but bigger, making it easy for the men to expose her bare leg. The people on the benches strained to see better. Elise felt less sleepy than she had before. She whispered to Mr. Rash to find out what they were doing, and he told her to be quiet, not to talk.

The man with the book brought a knife out of his robes. It was long and flashed like a bright fish.

“Be ye fruitful and multiply,” he said. He faced the audience, and the woman moved about on the tables, but she couldn’t go anywhere. Elise wanted to tell them not to hold her wrists so tight.

“Behold,” the man said, reading from the book, “I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you.” And Elise wondered if they were going to plant something. And he went on and said, “Neither shall all flesh be cut off anymore. And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the blade shall be seen in the cloud.”

He held the knife even higher, and the people on the benches mumbled something. Even a boy younger than Elise knew the words. His lips moved like the others’.

The man took the knife to the woman, but he didn’t give it to her. There was a man holding her feet and another her wrists, and she tried to be still. And then Elise knew what they were doing. It was the same as her mom and Hannah’s mom. And a fearsome scream came from the woman as the knife went in, and Elise couldn’t stop watching, and blood came out and down her leg, and Elise could feel it on her own leg, and tried to squirm free, but then it was her wrist being held, and she knew one day this would be her, and the screaming went and went, and the man dug around with the knife and his fingers, a shine of sweat on the top of his head, saying something to the men, who were having trouble with the woman, and there were whispers along the benches, and Elise felt hot, and more blood until the man with the knife erupted with a shout and stood facing the benches with something between his fingers, blood running down his arm to his elbow, his blanket drooping open, a smile on his face as the screams died down.

“Behold!” he shouted.

And the people were clapping. The men bandaged the woman on the table, then brought her down, though she could barely stand. Elise saw that there was another woman by the stage. They were lining up. And the clapping gained a rhythm like when she and the twins would march up the stairs watching each other’s feet, clap, clap at the same time. The clapping grew louder and louder. Until there was a giant clap that made them all go quiet. A clap that made her heart leap up in her chest.

Heads turned to the back of the room. Elise’s ears hurt from the loud bang. Someone shouted and pointed, and Elise turned and saw Solo in the doorway. White powder rained down from the ceiling, and he had something long and black in his hands. Beside him stood Shaw, the boy in the brown coveralls from the bizarre. Elise wondered how he was there.

“Excuse me,” Solo said. He scanned the benches until he saw Elise, and his teeth shined through his beard. “I’ll be taking that young lady with me.”

There were shouts. Men got up from their seats and yelled and pointed, and Mr. Rash shouted something about his wife and property and how dare he interrupt. And the man with the blood and the knife was outraged and stormed down the aisle, which made Solo lift the black thing to his shoulder.

Another clap like it was God doing it with his biggest palms, a bang so loud it made Elise’s insides hurt. There was a noise after it, a shattering of glass, and she turned and saw the pretty colored window was even more broke than before.

The people stopped shouting and moving toward Solo, which Elise thought was a very good thing.

“Come along,” Solo said to Elise. “Hurry now.”

Elise got up from the bench and started toward the aisle, but Mr. Rash grabbed her by the wrist. “She is my wife!” Mr. Rash shouted, and Elise realized this was a bad thing to be. It meant she couldn’t leave.

“You do marriages quick,” Solo said to the quiet crowd. He waved the black thing at them all, and this seemed to make them nervous. “What about funerals?”

The black thing pointed at Mr. Rash. Elise felt his grip on her loosen. She made it to the aisle and ran past the man with the dripping blood, ran to Solo and Shaw and down the hall.

55

Juliette was drowning again. She could feel the water in her throat, the sting in her eyes, the burn in her chest. As she climbed the stairwell, she could sense the old flood around her, but that wasn’t what made her feel as though she couldn’t breathe. It was the voices ranging up and down the stairwell shaft, the evidence already of vandalism and theft, the long stretches of wire and pipe gone missing, the scattering of stalk and leaf and soil from those hurrying away with stolen plants.

She hoped to rise above the injustices strewn about her, to escape this last spasm of civility before chaos reigned. It was coming, she knew. But as high as she and Raph climbed, there were people throwing open doors to explore and loot, to claim territory, to yell down from landings some finding or shout up some question. In the depths of Mechanical, she had lamented how few had survived. And now it seemed like so many.

Stopping to fight any of this would be a waste of time. Juliette worried about Solo and the kids. She worried about the razed farms. But the weight of the explosives in her pack gave her purpose, and the calamity surrounding her gave her resolve. She was out to see that this never happened again.

“I feel like a porter,” Raph said, wheezing between words.

“If you fall behind, we’re heading for thirty-four. Both of the mid farms should have food. You can get water from the hydro pumps.”

“I can keep up with you,” Raph insisted. “Just saying it’s unbecoming.”

Juliette laughed at the proud miner. She wanted to point out the number of times she’d made this run, always with Solo lagging behind and waving her on, promising he’d catch up. Her mind flashed back to those days, and suddenly her silo was still alive and thriving, churning with civilization, so far away and moving forward without her — but still there and alive.

No more.

But there were other silos, dozens of them, teeming with life and lives. Somewhere, a parent was lecturing a child. A teenager was stealing a kiss. A warm meal was being served. Paper was being recycled into pulp and back into paper; oil was gurgling up and being burned; exhaust was being vented into the great and forbidden outside. All of those worlds were humming forward, each of them ignorant of the others. Somewhere, a person who dared to dream was being sent out to clean. Someone was being buried, another born.

Juliette thought of the children of Silo 17, born into violence, never knowing anything else. That would happen again. It would happen right here. And her annoyance with the Planning Committee and Father Wendel’s congregation was misplaced, she thought. Had her mechanics not lashed out? Was she not lashing out right then? What was any group but a bunch of people? And what were people but animals as prone to fear as rats at the sound of boots?

“—catch up with you later, then,” Raph called out, his voice distant, and Juliette realized she was pulling away. She slowed and waited for him. Now was not a time for being alone, for climbing without company. And in that silo of solitude, where she had fallen for Lukas because he was there for her in voice and spirit, she missed him more terribly than she ever had. Hope had been stripped away, foolish hope. There was no getting back to him, no seeing him ever again, even as she was deathly sure that she would join him soon enough.

A foray into the second mids farm won some food, though it was deeper than Juliette remembered. Raph’s flashlight revealed signs of recent activity: boot prints in mud that had not yet dried, a watering pipe broken for a drink that continued to drip but had not yet emptied, a stepped-on tomato that was not yet covered in ants. Juliette and Raph took what they could carry — green peppers, cucumbers, blackberries, a precious orange, a dozen underripe tomatoes — enough for a few meals. Juliette ate as many blackberries as she could, for they travelled poorly. She normally shied away from them, hated how they left her fingers stained. But what once was nuisance now seemed a blessing. This was how the last of the supplies went in a hurry, each of a few hundred people taking more than they needed, even the things they didn’t truly want.

It wasn’t far to thirty-four from the farm. For Juliette, it almost felt like a return home. There would be ample power there, her tools and her cot, a radio, some place to work during this last tremble of a dying people, some place to think, to regret, to build one last suit. The weariness in her legs and back spoke to her, and Juliette realized she was climbing once again in order to escape. It was more than vengeance she was after. This was a flight from the sight of her friends, whom she had failed. It was a hole she was after. But unlike Solo, who had lived in a hole beneath the servers, she was hoping to make a crater on the heads of others.

“Jules?”

She paused halfway across the landing of thirty-four, the doors to IT just ahead. Raph had stopped at the top step. He knelt down and ran his finger across the tread, lifted it to show her something red. Touched his finger to his tongue.

“Tomato,” he said.

Someone was already there. The day Juliette had wasted curled up and crying in the belly of the digger haunted her now.

“We’ll be fine,” she told him. The day she had chased Solo came back to her. She had thundered down these steps, had found the doors barred, had snapped a broom in half getting inside. This time, the doors opened easily. The lights inside were full bright. No sign of anyone.

“Let’s go,” she said. She hurried quietly and quickly. It wouldn’t do to be spotted by people she didn’t know, wouldn’t want them following her. She wondered if Solo had at least been cautious enough to close up the server room and the grate. But no, at the end of the hall she saw the server room door was open. There were voices somewhere. The stench of smoke. A haze in the air. Or was she losing her mind and imagining Lukas and the gas coming for him? Is that why she was here? Not for the radio, to find a home for her friends, nor to build a suit, but because here was a mirrored place, identical to her own, and maybe Lukas was below, waiting for her, alive in this dead world—

She pushed her way into the server room, and the smoke was real. It gathered at the ceiling. Juliette hurried through the familiar servers. The smoke tasted different than the burnt grease of an overheating pump, the tang of an electrical fire, the scorched rubber of an impeller running dry, the bitterness of motor exhaust. It was a clean burning. She covered her mouth with the crook of her arm, remembered Lukas complaining of fumes, and hurried into the haze.

It was coming from the hatch behind the comm server, a rising column of smoke. There was a fire in Solo’s hovel, his bedding, perhaps. Juliette thought of the radio down there, the food. She unzipped her coveralls and pulled her sweat-soaked undershirt up over her face, heard Raph yelling at her not to go as she reached down and lowered herself onto the ladder, practically slid down it until her boots slammed into the grating below.

Staying low, she could just barely see through the haze. She could hear the crackle of flame, a strange and crisp sound. Food and radio and computer and precious schematics on the walls. The one treasure not on her mind as she rushed forward was the books. And it was the books that were burning.

A pile of books, a pile of empty metal tins, a young man in a white robe throwing more books onto the pile, the smell of fuel. He had his back turned, a bald patch on the back of his head glimmering with sweat, but he seemed unconcerned by the blaze. He was feeding it. He returned to the shelves for more to burn.

Juliette ran behind him to Solo’s bed and grabbed a blanket, a rat scurrying out of its folds as she lifted it. She hurried toward the fire, eyes stinging, throat burning, and tossed the blanket across the pile of books. The blaze was momentarily swallowed, but it leaked at the seams. The blanket began to smoke. Juliette coughed into her shirt and ran back for the mattress, needed to smother the fire, thought of the empty reservoir of water in the next room, all that was being lost.

The man in the robe spotted her as she lifted the mattress. He howled and threw himself at her. They tumbled into the mattress and the nest of bedding. A boot flashed toward her face, and Juliette jerked her head back. The young man screamed. He was like a white flapping bird loose in the bazaar and swooping at heads. Juliette yelled for him to get away. The blaze leapt higher. She tugged at the mattress, him on top of it, and the man spilled off the other side. Only moments to get the fire under control before all was lost. Only moments. She grabbed Solo’s other blanket and beat at the flames. Couldn’t fight them and the man both. No time. She coughed and yelled for Raph, and the man in the robes came at her again, his eyes wild, arms flailing. Juliette lowered her shoulder into his stomach, ducked beneath his arms, and the man spilled over her back. He fell to the ground and encircled her legs, dragging her down with him.

Juliette tried to wriggle free, but he was clawing his way from her ankles to her waist. Flames rose behind him. The blanket had caught. The man screamed unholy rage, had lost his mind. Juliette pushed against his shoulders and squirmed on her ass to pull free. She could barely breathe, could barely see. The man on top of her screamed with renewed fervor, and it was his robes on fire. The flames marched up his back and over them both, and Juliette was back in that airlock, a blanket over her head, burning alive.

A boot flew across her face and struck the young priest, and she felt the strength leave the arms clinging to her. Someone pulled her from behind. Juliette kicked free, the smoke too thick now to see. She tried to get her bearings, was coughing uncontrollably, wondered where the radio was, knew it was gone. And someone was tugging her down a narrow hall, Raph’s pale face making him little more than a ghost in smoke, urging her up the ladder ahead of him.

The server room was filling with smoke. The fire down below would spread until it ate up all that burned, leaving just charred metal and melted wires behind. Juliette helped Raph out of the ladderway and grabbed the hatch. She threw it on top and saw that it was useless for keeping out the smoke, was a blasted grate.

Raph disappeared behind one of the servers. “Quick!” he yelled. Juliette crawled on her hands and knees and found him pressed against the back of the comm hub, one foot against the server beside it, shoving with all of his might.

Juliette helped him. Aching muscles bulged and burned. They rocked against the unmoving metal, Juliette dimly aware of screws holding the base to the floor, but the weight of the tower helped. Metal groaned. With a heave, screws tore loose and the tall black tower tilted, trembled, and then crashed atop the hole in the ground, covering it.

Juliette and Raph collapsed, coughing, heaving for air. The room was hazy with smoke, but no more was leaking inside. And the screams far below them eventually died out.

56

There were voices outside the drone lift. Boots. Men walking back and forth, searching for them.

Donald and Charlotte clung to one another in the darkness of that low-ceilinged space. Charlotte had looked for some way to secure the door, but it was a featureless wall of metal with just a tiny release for the latch. Donald held back a cough, could feel a tickle in his throat grow until it covered every square inch of his flesh. He kept both hands clasped over his mouth and listened to the muted shouts of “clear” and “all clear”.

Charlotte stopped fumbling with the door, and they simply huddled together and tried not to move, for the floor made popping noises any time they shifted their weight. They had spent all day in the small lift, waiting for the search party to come back to their level. Darcy had left to be on shift when everyone woke up. It had been a long day of fitful non-sleep for Donald and his sister, a day when he knew the search party would expand and grow desperate. Now they had a killer on the loose and an escaped prisoner from Deep Freeze, too. He could imagine the consternation this was causing Thurman. He could imagine the beating he would get when they were discovered. He just prayed these boots would go away. But they didn’t. They grew nearer.

There was a bang on the metal hangar door, the pounding of an angry fist. Donald could feel Charlotte tense her arm across his back, crushing his cracked ribs. The door moved. Donald tried to push against it to hold it in place, but there was no leverage. The steel squeaked against his sweaty palms. This was it. Charlotte tried to help, but someone was cracking open their hiding spot. A flashlight blinded them both — it shined right in their eyes.

“Clear!” came the yell, close enough that Donald could smell the coffee on Darcy’s breath. The door was slammed shut, a palm slapping it twice. Charlotte collapsed. Donald dared to clear his throat.

It was after dinner by the time they finally emerged, tired and starving. It was quiet and dark in the armory. Darcy had said he would try to come back when his shift started, but he had been worried the night shift wouldn’t be as quiet as usual, not so suited to slinking away.

Donald and Charlotte hurried down the barracks hall and into separate bathrooms. Donald could hear the pipes rattle as his sister flushed. He ran the sink and coughed up blood, spat and watched the crimson threads spiral down the drain, drank from the tap, spat again, and finally used the bathroom himself.

Charlotte already had the radio uncovered and powered up by the time he got to the end of the hall. She hailed anyone who might hear. Donald stood behind her and watched her switch from channel eighteen to seventeen, repeating the call. No one answered. She left it on seventeen and listened to static.

“How did you raise them the last time?” Donald asked.

“Just like this.” She stared at the radio for a moment before turning in her seat to face him, her brow furrowed with worry. Donald expected a thousand questions: How long before they were taken? What were they going to do next? How could they get someplace safe? A thousand questions, but not the one she asked, her voice a sad whisper: “When did you go outside?”

Donald took a step back. He wasn’t sure how to answer. “What do you mean?” he asked, but he knew what she meant.

“I heard what Darcy said about you nearly getting over a hill. When was this? Are you still going out? Is that where you go when you leave me? Is that why you’re sick?”

Donald slumped against one of the drone control stations. “No,” he said. He watched the radio, hoping for some voice to break through the static and save him. But his sister waited. “I only went once. I went… thinking I’d never come back.”

“You went out there to die.”

He nodded. And she didn’t get angry with him. She didn’t yell or scream like he feared she might, which was why he had never told her before. She simply stood and rushed to him and wrapped her arms around his waist. And Donald cried.

“Why are they doing this to us?” Charlotte asked.

“I don’t know. I want to make it stop.”

“But not like that.” His sister stepped back and wiped her eyes. “Donny, you have to promise me. Not like that.”

He didn’t reply. His ribs ached from where she’d embraced him. “I wanted to see Helen,” he finally said. “I wanted to see where she’d lived and died. It was… a bad time. With Anna. Trapped down here.” He remembered how he had felt about Anna then, how he felt about her now. So many mistakes. He had made mistakes at every turn. It made it difficult to make anymore decisions, to act.

“There has to be something we can do,” Charlotte said. Her eyes lit up. “We could lighten a drone enough to carry us from here. The bunker busters must weigh sixty kilos. If we lighten another drone up, it could carry you.”

“And fly it how?”

“I’ll stay here and fly it.” She saw the look on his face and frowned. “Better that one of us gets out,” she said. “You know I’m right. We could launch before daylight, just send you as far as you can go. At least live a day away from this place.”

Donald tried to imagine a flight on the back of one of those birds, the wind pelting his helmet, tumbling off in a rough landing, lying in the grass and staring up at the stars. He pulled his rag out and filled it with blood, shook his head as he put it away. “I’m dying,” he told her. “Thurman said I have another day or two. He told me that a day or two ago.”

Charlotte was silent.

“Maybe we could wake another pilot,” he suggested. “I could hold a gun to his head. We could get you and Darcy both out of here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” his sister said.

“But you would have me go out there alone?”

She shrugged. “I’m a hypocrite.”

Donald laughed. “Must be why they recruited you.”

They listened to the radio.

“What do you think is going on in all those other silos right now?” Charlotte asked. “You dealt with them. Is it as bad there as it is here?”

Donald considered this. “I don’t know. Some of them are happy enough, I suppose. They get married and have kids. They have jobs. They don’t know anything beyond their walls, so I guess they don’t have some of the stress about what’s out there that you and I feel. But I think they have something else that we don’t have, this deep feeling that something is wrong with how they’re living. Buried, you know. And we understand that, and it chokes us, but they just have this chronic anxiety, I think. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen men happy enough here to get through their shifts. I’ve watched others go mad. I used to… I used to play solitaire for hours on my computer upstairs, and that’s when my brain was truly off and I wasn’t miserable. But then, I wasn’t really alive, either.”

Charlotte reached out and squeezed his hand.

“I think some of the silos that went dark have it best—”

“Don’t say that,” Charlotte whispered.

Donald looked up at her. “No, not that. I don’t think they’re dead, not all of them. I think some of them withdrew and are living how they want quietly enough that no one will come after them. They just want to be left alone, not controlled, free to choose how they live and die. I think it’s what Anna wanted them to have. Living down here on this level for a year, trying to find some life without being able to go outside, I think it changed how she viewed all this.”

“Or maybe it was being out of that box for a little while,” Charlotte said. “Maybe she didn’t like what it felt like to be put away.”

“Or that,” Donald agreed. Again, he thought how things would’ve been different had he woken her with some trust, had heard her out. If Anna was there to help, everything would be better. It pained him, but he missed her as much as he missed Helen. Anna had saved him, had tried to save others, and Donald had misunderstood and had hated her for both actions.

Charlotte let go of his hand to adjust the radio. She tried hailing someone on both channels, ran her fingers through her hair and listened to static.

“There was a while there when I thought this was a good thing,” Donald said. “What they did, trying to save the world. They had me convinced that a mass extinction was inevitable, that a war was about to break out and claim everyone. But you know what I think? I think they knew that if a war broke out between all these invisible machines, that some pockets of people would survive here and there. So they built this. They made sure the destruction was complete so they could control it.”

“They wanted to make sure the only pockets of people who survived were in their pockets,” Charlotte said.

“Exactly. They weren’t trying to save the world — they were trying to save themselves. Even if we’d gone extinct, the world would’ve gone right on along without us. Nature finds a way.”

“People find a way,” Charlotte said. “Look at the two of us.” She laughed. “We’re like weeds, aren’t we, the two of us? Nature sneaking out along the edge. We’re like those silos that wouldn’t behave. How did they think they would ever contain all this? That something like this wouldn’t happen?”

“I don’t know,” Donald said. “Maybe the kinds of people who try to shape the world feel like they’re smarter than chaos itself.”

Charlotte switched the channels back and forth in case someone was answering on one or the other. She seemed exasperated. “They should just let us be,” she said. “Just stop and let us grow however we must.”

Donald lurched out of his chair and stood up straight.

“What is it?” Charlotte asked. She reached for the radio. “Did you hear something?”

“That’s it,” Donald told her. “Leave us be.” He fumbled for his rag and coughed. Charlotte stopped playing with the radio. “C’mon,” he said. He waved at the desk. “Bring your tools.”

“For the drone?” she asked.

“No. We need to put together another suit.”

“Another suit?”

“For going outside. And you said those bunker busters weigh sixty kilos. Exactly how much is a kilo?”

57

“This is not a good plan,” Charlotte said. She tightened the breathing apparatus attached to the helmet and grabbed one of the large bottles of air, began fastening the hose to it. “What’re we going to do out there?”

“Die,” Donald told her. And he saw the look she gave him. “But maybe a week from now. And not here.” He had an array of supplies laid out. Satisfied, he began stuffing them into one of the small military backpacks. MREs, water, a first-aid kit, a flashlight, a pistol and two clips, extra ammo, a flint, and a knife.

“How long do you think this air will last?” Charlotte asked.

“Those bottles are for sending troops overground to other silos, so they must have enough to reach the furthest one. We just need to go a little further than that, and we won’t be as loaded down.” He cinched up the pack and placed it next to the other one.

“It’s like we’re lightening up a drone.”

“Exactly.” Picking up a roll of tape, he pulled a folded map out of his pocket and began affixing it to the sleeve of one of the suits.

“Isn’t that my suit?”

Donald nodded. “You’re a better navigator. I’m going to follow you.”

There was a ding on the other side of the shelves from the direction of the lifts. Donald dropped what he was doing and hissed for Charlotte to hurry. They made for the drone lift, but Darcy called out to let them know it was just him. He emerged from the tall shelves with a load in his arms, fresh coveralls and a tray heaped with food.

“Sorry,” he said, seeing the panic he’d caused. “It’s not like I can warn you.” He held out the trays apologetically. “Leftovers from dinner.”

He set the trays down, and Charlotte gave him a hug. Donald saw how quickly connections were made in desperate times. Here was a prisoner embracing a guard for not beating her, for showing an ounce of compassion. Donald was glad for the second suit. It was a good plan.

Darcy peered down at the scattering of tools and supplies. “What’re you doing?” he asked.

Charlotte checked with her brother. Donald shook his head.

“Look,” Darcy said, “I’m sympathetic to your situation. I am. I don’t like what’s going on around here, either. And the more that comes back — the more I remember about who I was — the more I think I’d be fighting this alongside you. But I’m not all-in with you guys. And this—” He pointed to the suits. “This doesn’t look good to me. This doesn’t look smart.”

Charlotte passed a plate and a fork to Donald. She sat on one of the plastic storage bins and dug into what looked like a canned roast, beets, and potatoes. Donald sat beside her and slid his fork through the slick roast, chopping it up into bites. “Do you remember what you did before all this?” Donald asked. “Is it coming back to you?”

Darcy nodded. “Some. I’ve stopped taking my meds—”

Donald laughed.

“What? Why’s that funny?”

“I’m sorry.” Donald apologized and waved his hand. “It’s just that… it’s nothing. It’s a good thing. Were you in the army?”

“Yeah, but not for long. I think I was in the Secret Service.” Darcy watched them eat for a moment. “What about you two?”

“Air Force,” Charlotte said. She jabbed her fork at Donald, whose mouth was full. “Congressman.”

“No shit?”

Donald nodded. “More of an architect, really.” He gestured at the room around them. “This is what I went to school for.”

“Building stuff like this?” Darcy asked.

“Building this,” Donald said. He took another bite.

“No shit.”

Donald nodded and took a swig of water.

“Who did this to us, then? The Chinese?”

Donald and Charlotte turned to one another.

“What?” Darcy asked.

“We did this,” Donald said. “This place wasn’t built for a just-in-case. This is what it was designed for.”

Darcy looked from one of them to the other, his mouth open.

“I thought you knew. It’s all in my notes.” Once you know what to look for, Donald thought. Otherwise, it was too obvious and audacious to see.

“No. I thought this was like that mountain bunker, where the government goes to survive—”

“It is,” Charlotte said. “But this way they get the timing down just right.”

Darcy stared down at his boots while Donald and his sister ate. For a last meal, it wasn’t all that bad. Donald looked down at the sleeve of the coveralls he’d borrowed from Charlotte and saw the bullet hole in them for the first time. Maybe that was why she had acted as if he was crazy for putting them on. Across from him, Darcy began to slowly nod his head. “Yeah,” he said. “God, yeah. They did this.” He looked up at Donald. “I put a guy in Deep Freeze a couple shifts ago. He was yelling all this crazy stuff. A guy from accounting.”

Donald set his tray aside. He finished his water.

“He wasn’t crazy, was he?” Darcy asked. “That was a good man.”

“Probably,” Donald said. “He was getting better, at least.”

Darcy ran his fingers over his short hair. His attention went back to the scattering of supplies. “The suits,” he said. “You’re thinking of leaving? Because you know I can’t help you do that.”

Donald ignored the question. He went to the end of the aisle and retrieved the hand truck. He and Charlotte had already loaded the bunker buster on it. There was a plastic tag dangling from the nose cone that she said he would need to pull before it was armed. She had already removed the altimeter controls and safety overrides. She had called it a “dumb bomb” when she was done. Donald pushed the cart toward the elevator.

“Hey,” Darcy said. He got up from his bin and blocked the aisle. Charlotte cleared her throat, and Darcy turned to see that she was holding a gun on him.

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said.

Darcy’s hand hovered over a bulging pocket. Donald pushed the handcart toward him, and Darcy stepped back.

“We need to discuss this,” Darcy said.

“We already have,” Donald told him. “Don’t move.” He stopped the handcart beside Darcy and reached into the young guard’s pocket. He withdrew the pistol and stuck it into his own pocket, then asked for Darcy’s ID. The young man handed it to him. Donald pocketed this, and then leaned the cart back on its wheels and continued toward the lift.

Darcy followed him at a distance. “Just slow down,” he said. “You’re thinking of setting that off? C’mon, man. Take it easy. Let’s talk. This is a big decision.”

“Not arrived at lightly, I promise. The reactor below us powers the servers. The servers control everyone’s lives. We’re going to set these people free. Let them live and die how they choose.”

Darcy laughed nervously. “Servers control their lives? What’re you talking about?”

“They pick the lottery numbers,” Donald said. “They decide who is worthy to pass themselves along. They cull and shape. They play mock wars to pick a winner. But not for long.”

“Okay, but there’s just three of us. This is too big for just us to decide. Seriously, man—”

Donald stopped the cart right outside of the lift. He turned to Darcy, saw that his sister had gotten to her feet to stay close to him.

“You want me to name all the times in history that one person led to the death of millions?” Donald asked. “Something like five or a dozen people made this happen. You might be able to trace it back to three. And who knows if one of those men was influencing the other two? Well, if one man can build this, it shouldn’t take more than that to bring it all down. Gravity is a bitch until she’s on your side.” Donald pointed down the aisle. “Now come sit down.”

When Darcy didn’t move, Donald drew not the guard’s gun, but the one from his other pocket that he knew was locked and loaded. The disappointment and hurt on the young man’s face before he turned and complied was a physical blow. Donald watched him march back down the aisle, past Charlotte. He caught his sister’s arm before she followed, gave her a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. “Go ahead and get your suit on,” he told her.

She nodded, followed Darcy, sat back down on the bin and began to work herself into her suit.

“This isn’t happening,” Darcy said. He eyed the pistol Charlotte had set aside while she squirmed into her suit.

“Don’t even think about it,” Donald said. “In fact, you should get busy getting dressed.”

The guard and his sister both turned to peer at him quizzically. Charlotte was just getting her legs into her suit. “What’re you talking about?” she asked.

Donald picked up the hammer sitting among the tools and showed it to her. “I’m not risking that it doesn’t go off,” he said.

She tried to stand up, but her feet weren’t all the way through the suit legs. “You said you had a way of setting it off remotely!”

“I do. Remotely from you.” He aimed the gun at Darcy. “Get dressed. You’ve got five minutes to get inside that lift—”

Darcy lunged for the gun sitting beside Charlotte. Charlotte was faster and snatched it off the bin. Donald took a step back, and then realized his sister was aiming the gun at him. “You get dressed,” she told her brother. Her voice was shaky, her eyes shining. “This isn’t what we discussed. You promised.”

“I’m a liar,” Donald said. He coughed into the crook of his arm and smiled. “You’re a hypocrite and I’m a liar.” He began to back toward the lift, his gun trained on Darcy. “You’re not going to shoot me,” he told his sister.

“Give me the gun,” Darcy told Charlotte. “He’ll listen if I’m holding it.”

Donald laughed. “You aren’t going to shoot me either. That gun’s not loaded. Now get dressed. You two get out of here. I’m giving you half an hour. The drone lift takes twenty minutes to get to the top. The best thing to use for jamming the door is an empty bin. I left one over there.”

Charlotte was crying and tugging at the legs of her suit, trying to get her feet all the way through. Donald had known she’d never go without him unless he made her, that she’d do something stupid. She would run and embrace him and beg him to come, insist that she would stay there and die with him. The only chance of getting her out had been to leave Darcy with her. He was a hero. He would save himself and her both. Donald jabbed the call button on the non-express.

“Half an hour,” he repeated. He saw that Darcy was already unzipping his suit to get in. His sister was yelling at him and trying to stand up, nearly tripped and fell. She started to kick the suit off rather than put it on the rest of the way. The elevator dinged and opened. Donald leaned the cart back and pulled it inside. Tears welled up in his eyes to see the pain he was causing Charlotte. She was halfway down the aisle toward him as the doors began to close.

“I love you,” he said. He wasn’t sure if she heard him. The doors squeezed shut on the sight of her. He scanned his ID, pressed a button, and the lift began to move.

58

The comm hub cooled, even as the fire raged below. Wisps of smoke curled out from underneath it. Juliette studied the interior of the great black machine and saw a ruin of broken circuit boards. The long row of headset jacks had shattered, and several of the wires at the base of the machine had stretched and snapped when it tipped over.

“Will it burn out?” Raph asked, eyeing the wisps of smoke.

Juliette coughed. She could still feel the smoke in her throat, could taste those burning pages. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She watched the lights overhead for any sign of faltering. “What power this silo has runs beneath the grates down there.”

“So this silo could go dark as the mines at any time?” Raph scrambled to his feet. “I’m gonna get our bags, have our flashlights handy. And you need to drink some more water.”

Juliette watched him trot off. She could feel those books burning beneath her. She could feel the wires inside the radio melting. She didn’t think the power would go — hoped it wouldn’t go — but so much else was being lost. The large schematics that had helped her find the digger might be ash already. The schematics to help her choose which silo to reach out to, which silo to dig for, gone.

Tall black machines hummed and whirred all around her, those square-shouldered and unmoved giants. Unmoved save for one. Juliette rose to her feet and studied the fallen server, and the link between those machines and the silos became even more obvious. Here was one collapsed like her home. Like Solo’s home. She studied the arrangement of the servers and remembered that their layout was identical to the layout of the silos. Raph returned with both of their bags. He handed Juliette her canteen of water. She took a sip, lost in thought.

“I’ve got your flashli—”

“Wait,” Juliette said. She twisted the cap back onto her canteen and walked between the servers. She went to the back of one and studied the silver plate above the nest of wires. There was a silo symbol there with its three downward-pointing triangles. The number “29” was etched in the center.

“What’re you looking for?” Raph asked.

Juliette tapped the plate. “Lukas used to say he needed to work on server six or server thirty or whatever. I remember him showing me how these things were laid out like the silos. We have a schematic right here.”

She set off in the direction of servers seventeen and eighteen. Raph followed along. “Should we worry about the power?” he asked.

“There’s nothing we can do about that. The decking and walls down there shouldn’t get hot enough to catch. When it burns out, we’ll go see—” Something caught Juliette’s eye as she traced a route between the servers. The wires underneath the floor grates darted in and out of their chutes, running to the bases of the machines. It was a series of red wires amid all the black ones that stopped her.

“What now?” Raph asked. He was watching her as though he were worried. “Hey, are you feeling okay? Because I’ve seen miners get a rock to their crowns and act loopy for a day—”

“I’m fine,” Juliette said. She pointed to the run of wires, turned and imagined those wires leading from one server to another. “A map,” she said.

“Yes,” Raph agreed. “A map.” He took her by the arm. “Why don’t you come sit down? You breathed a lot of smoke—”

“Listen to me. The girl on the radio, the one from Silo 1, she said there was a map with these red lines on it. It came up after I told her about the digger. She seemed really excited, said she understood why all the lines went off and converged. This was before the radio stopped working.”

“Okay.”

“These are the silos,” Juliette said. She held out her hands to the tall servers. “C’mere. Look.” She hurried around the next row, studied the plates as she searched. Fourteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. “Here we are. And this is where we tunneled. And that’s our old silo.” She pointed to the next server.

“So you’re saying we can choose which of these to call on the radio by seeing who’s close? Because we have a map just like this down below. Erik’s got one.”

“No, I’m saying those red lines on her map are like these wires. See? Tunneling deep underground down there. The diggers weren’t meant to go from one silo to the next. Bobby was the one who told me how difficult that thing was to turn. It was aimed somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I would need that map to tell. Unless—” She turned to Raph, whose pale face she saw was smudged with smoke and soot. “You were on the dig team. How much fuel did that tank in the digger hold?”

He shrugged. “We never measured in gallons. Just topped it up. Court had the tank dipped a few times to see how much we were burning. I remember her saying we would never use up what was in there.”

“That’s because it was designed to go further. Much further. We need to dip the tank again to get an idea. And Erik’s map should show which way that digger was pointing to begin with. If only—” She snapped her fingers. “We’ve got the other digger.”

“I’m not following. Why would we need two diggers? We’ve only got one generator that works.”

Juliette squeezed his arm, could feel herself beaming, her mind racing. “We don’t need the other one to dig. We just need to see where it’s pointing. If we trace that line on a map and project out where our own digger should’ve gone, those two lines should cross. And if the fuel supply matches that distance, that’s like a confirmation. We can see where and how far this place is that she was telling me about. This seed place. She made it sound like another silo, but one out where the air was—”

There were voices at the other end of the room, someone entering from the hall. Juliette pulled Raph against one of the servers and threw her finger over her mouth. But someone could be heard coming straight for them, a quiet clicking, like fingers tapping on metal. Juliette fought the urge to run, and then a brown shape emerged at her feet, and there was a hiss as a leg was lifted, a stream of urine spattering her boot.

“Puppy!” she heard Elise scream.

Juliette hugged the kids and Solo. She hadn’t seen them since her silo fell. They reminded her why she was doing this, what she was fighting for, what was worth fighting for. A rage had built up inside of her, a single-minded pursuit of digging through the earth down below and digging for answers outside. And she had lost sight of this, these things worth saving. She had been too concerned with those who deserved to be damned.

This anger melted as Elise clung to her neck and Solo’s beard scratched her face. Here was what was left, what they still had, and protecting it was more important than vengeance. That’s what Father Wendel had discovered. He had been reading the wrong passages in his book, passages of hate rather than hope. And Juliette had been just as blind. She had been prepared to rush off and leave everyone behind.

Raph joined her and the kids, and they huddled together around one of the servers and discussed what they’d seen of the violence below. Solo had a rifle with him and kept saying they needed to secure the door, needed to hunker down.

“We should hide in here and wait for them to kill each other,” he said, a wild look in his eyes.

“Is that how you survived all the years over here?” Raph asked.

Solo nodded. “My father put me away. It was a long time before I left. It was safer that way.”

“Your father knew what was going to happen,” Juliette said. “He locked you away from it all. It’s the same reason we’re down here, all of us, living like this. Someone did the same thing a long time ago. They put us away to save us.”

“So we should hide again,” Rickson said. He looked to the others. “Right?”

“How much food do you have left in the pantry?” Juliette asked Solo. “Assuming the fire didn’t get to it.”

He pulled on his beard. “Three years’ worth. Maybe four. But just for me.”

Juliette did the math. “Let’s say two hundred people made it over, though I don’t think it was that many. What’s that? Maybe five days?” She whistled. A new appreciation for all the various farms of her old home dawned on her. To provide for thousands of people for hundreds of years, the balance was meticulous. “We need to stop hiding altogether,” she said. “What we need…” She studied the faces of these few who trusted her completely. “We need a Town Hall.”

Raph laughed, thinking she was joking.

“A what?” Solo asked.

“We need a meeting. With everyone. Everyone left. We need to decide if we’re gonna stay hidden or get out of here.”

“I thought we were going to dig to another silo,” Raph said. “Or dig to this other place.”

“I don’t think we have time for digging. It would take weeks, and the farms are ravaged. Besides, I’ve got a better idea. A quicker way.”

“What about those sticks of dynamite you’ve been hauling? I thought we were going after the people who did this.”

“That’s still an option. Look, we need to do this anyway. We need to get out of here. Otherwise, Jimmy’s right. We’ll just kill each other. So we need to round everyone up.”

“We’ll have to do it back down in the generator room,” Raph said. “Someplace big enough. Or maybe the farms.”

“No.” Juliette turned and surveyed the room around her. She saw past the tall servers to the far walls, saw how wide the space was. “We’ll do it here. We’ll show them this place.”

“Here?” Solo asked. “Two hundred people? Here?” He seemed visibly shaken, began tugging on his beard with both hands.

“Where will everyone sit?” Hannah asked.

“How will they see?” Elise wanted to know.

Juliette studied the wide hall with the tall, black machines. Many of them clicked and whirred. Wires trailed from the tops and wove their way through the ceiling. She knew from tracing the camera feeds in her old home that they were all interconnected. She knew how the power fed into the bases, how the side panels came off. She ran her hand across one of the machines Solo had marked with the days of his youth. They had added up to years.

“Go to the Suit Lab and grab my tool bag,” she told Solo.

“A Project?” he asked.

She nodded, and Solo disappeared amid the tall machines. Raph and the kids studied her. Juliette smiled. “You kids are going to enjoy this.”

With the wires cut from the top and the bolts removed from the base, all it took was a good shove. It went over much easier than the comm hub. Juliette watched with satisfaction as the machine tipped, trembled, and then crashed down with a bang felt through her boots. Miles and Rickson slapped hands and whooped in the manner of boys destroying things. Hannah and Shaw had already moved on to the next server. Elise scampered up on top with a boost from Juliette, wire cutters in her hand, Puppy barking at her to be safe.

“Like cutting hair,” Juliette said, watching Elise work.

“We could do Solo’s beard next,” Elise suggested.

“I doubt he’d like that,” Raph said.

Juliette turned to see that the miner had returned from his errand. “I dropped over a hundred notes,” he told her. “Couldn’t write more than that. My hand was cramping. I sprinkled them around so some will be sure to get to the bottom.”

“Good. And you wrote that there was food up here? Enough for everyone?”

He nodded.

“Then we should get that machine off the hatch and make sure we can deliver. Otherwise, we’re going to have to raid the farms above us.”

Raph followed her to the comm hub. They made sure the smoke wasn’t curling up, and Juliette ran her hand along the base, feeling for heat. Solo’s hovel was metal on all sides, so her hope was that the fire didn’t spread past the pile of books. But there was no telling. The fallen hub made a horrible screech as it was shoved to the side. A cloud of dark smoke billowed out.

Juliette waved her hand over her face and coughed. Raph ran to the other side of the server and made as if to shove it back. “Wait,” Juliette said, ducking out of the cloud. “It’s clearing.”

The server room grew hazy, but there was no great outpouring of smoke. Just a leak from what had been trapped down there. Raph started to lower himself into the hole, but Juliette insisted on going first. She clicked her flashlight on and descended into the dissipating smoke.

She crouched at the bottom and breathed through her undershirt. The beam of her flashlight stood out like a solid thing, as if she could strike someone with it if they came at her. But no one was coming. There was a form in the middle of the hall, still shouldering. The smell was awful. The smoke cleared further, and Juliette yelled up to Raph that it was okay to descend.

He clanged down noisily while Juliette stepped over the body and surveyed the damage in the room. The air was warm and muggy, and it was difficult to breathe. She imagined for a moment what Lukas had gone through, down there and choking. More than smoke brought tears to her eyes.

“Those were books.”

Raph joined her and stared at the black patch in the center of the room. He must’ve seen that they were books when he rescued her, because there was no sign of them left. Those pages were in the air now. They were in their lungs. Juliette choked on memories of the past.

She went to the wall and studied the radio. The metal cage was still bent back from where she’d busted it off the wall so long ago. She flipped the power switch, but nothing happened. The plastic knob was tacky and warm. The insides of the thing were probably a single blob of rubber and copper.

“Where’s this food?” Raph asked.

“Through there,” Juliette said. “Use a rag on the door.”

He went off to explore the apartment and pantry while Juliette studied the remains of an old desk, a misshapen computer monitor sitting in the center, the panel shattered from the heat. There was no sign of Solo’s bedding, just a pile of metal boxes that once held books, some of them sagging from the extreme heat. Juliette saw black footprints trailing behind her and realized the rubber on the soles of her boots was melting from the heat. She heard Raph yelling excitedly from the next room. Juliette passed through the door and found him clutching an armload of cans, his chin pressed to the ones on top of the pile, a goofy grin on his face.

“There’s shelves of this,” he said.

Juliette went to the pantry door and shined her light inside. It was a vast cavern with an odd can here or there. But some of the shelves in the back appeared fuller. “If everyone shows up, it’ll last us a few days, no more,” she said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have called for everyone.”

“No,” Juliette said. “We’re doing the right thing.” She turned to the wall by the small eating table. The fire hadn’t made it through the door. The tall schematics the size of blankets hung there, perfectly intact. Juliette flipped through them, looking for the ones she needed. She found them and ripped them free. Folding them up, she heard a muted thud far above them, the sound of another server falling.

59

They arrived in a trickle, and then in clumps, and then in crowds. They marveled at the steady lights in the hallways and explored the offices. None of these people had ever seen the inside of IT. Few of them had spent much time in the Up Top, except on pilgrimages after a cleaning. Families wandered from room to room; kids clutched reams of paper; many came to Juliette or the others with the notes Raph had folded and dropped, asking about the food. In just a few days, they looked different. Coveralls were stained and torn, faces stubbled and gaunt, eyes ringed with dark circles. In just a few days. Juliette saw that they had only a few days more before things grew desperate. Everyone saw that.

Those who arrived early helped prepare the food and push over the last of the servers. The smells of warm vegetables and soup filled the room. Two of the hottest servers, numbers 40 and 38, had been lowered to the ground with their power intact. Open cans were arranged atop their hot sides, the contents of each can simmering. There wasn’t enough silverware, so many stood drinking the soups and vegetable juice straight from warm cans.

Hannah helped Juliette set up for the Town Hall while Rickson tended to the baby. One of the schematics was already pinned to the wall, and Hannah was working on the other. Lines were carefully traced with thread, Hannah double-checking Juliette’s work. A charcoal was used to mark the route. Juliette watched another group file in. It occurred to her that this was her second Town Hall and that the first hadn’t gone so well. It occurred to her that this would most likely be her last.

Most of those gathered were from the farms, but then a few mechanics and miners began to show. Tom Higgins and the Planning Committee arrived from the Mids deputy station. Juliette saw one of them standing on a fallen server with a charcoal and paper, jabbing his finger as he attempted to count heads, cursing the milling crowd for making it difficult. She laughed, and then realized it was important, what he was doing. They would need to know. A cleaning suit lay empty at her feet, one of her props for the Town Hall. They would need to know how many suits and how many people.

Courtnee arrived and squeezed through the crowd, which came as a shock. Juliette beamed and embraced her friend.

“You smell like smoke,” Courtnee said.

Juliette laughed. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“The note said it was life or death.”

“It did?” She looked to Raph.

He shrugged. “Some of them might’ve said that,” he said.

“So what is this?” Courtnee said. “A long climb for some soup? What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell everyone at once.” To Raph: “Can you see about getting everyone in here? And maybe send Miles and Shaw or one of the porters to the stairwell to see if any others are on their way.”

While he left, Juliette noticed that everyone was already sitting on the servers, backs to each other, slurping from cans while more were opened and arranged from the great stacks behind Solo. He had taken over popping the cans with some electric contraption that plugged into a floor outlet. Many of those seated were eyeing the pile of food hauled up from the pantry. Many more were eyeing her. The whispers were like an escape of steam.

Juliette fretted and paced as the numbers in the room swelled. Shaw and Miles returned to say the stairway was pretty quiet, maybe a few more heading up. It felt as though an entire day had passed since Juliette and Raph had fought the fire below; she didn’t want to glance at her watch and know the truth of the hour. She felt tired. Especially as everyone sat there, tipping their cans to their lips and tapping the bottoms, wiping their faces with their sleeves, watching her. Waiting.

The food had them quiet and momentarily content. The cans had their hands and mouths busy. It had won her some reprieve. Juliette knew it was now or never.

“I know you’re wondering what this is all about,” she began. “Why we’re here.” She raised her voice, and the conversations across the fallen servers fell quiet. “And I don’t mean here, in this room. I mean this silo. Why did we run? There are a lot of rumors swirling, but I am here to tell you the truth. I have brought you into this most secretive of rooms to tell you the truth. Our silo was destroyed. It was poisoned. Those who did not make it over with us are gone.”

There was a hiss of whispers. “Poisoned by who?” someone shouted.

“The same people who put us underground hundreds of years ago. I need you to listen. Please listen.”

The crowd quietened.

“Our ancestors were put underground so that we might survive while the world got better. As many of you know, I went outside before our home was taken from us. I sampled the air out there, and I think the farther we get from this place, the better the conditions are. Not only do I suspect this from what we measured, I have heard from another silo that there are blue skies beyond the—”

“Ratshit!” someone yelled. “I heard that was a lie, something they did to your brain before you went to clean.”

Juliette found the person who’d said that. It was an older porter, one whose profession was the locus not just of rumors but also of secrets too dangerous to sell. While people whispered again, she saw a new arrival shuffle through the thick metal door at the far end of the room. It was Father Wendel, his arms crossed over his chest, hands stuffed into his sleeves. Bobby bellowed for everyone to shut up, and they gradually did. Juliette waved a greeting to Father Wendel, and heads turned.

“I need you to take some of what I’m about to say on faith,” Juliette said. “Some of what I say I know for certain. I know this: We could stay here and make a life, but I don’t know for how long. And we would live in fear. Not just fear of each other, but fear that disaster can visit us at any time. They can open our doors without asking, can poison our air without telling, and they can take our lives without warning. And I don’t know what kind of life that would be.”

The room was as still as death.

“The alternative is to go. But if we do, there’s no coming back—”

“Go where?” someone yelled. “Another silo? What if it’s worse than this one?”

“Not another silo,” Juliette said. She moved to the side so they could see the schematic on the wall. “Here they are. The fifty silos. This one was our home.” She pointed, and there was a rustle as everyone strained to see. Juliette felt her throat tighten with emotion at the overwhelming joy and sadness of telling the truth to her people. She slid her finger to the adjacent silo. “This is where we are now.”

“So many,” she heard someone whisper.

“How far are they?” another asked.

“I drew a line to show how we got here.” She pointed. “It may be hard to see from the back. And this line here, this is where our digging machine was pointing.” She traced it with her finger so they could see where it led. Her finger went sideways off the map and to the wall. Waving to Elise, Juliette had her come up and press her finger to a spot she’d already marked.

“This schematic is for the silo we’re currently in.” She moved to the next sheet of paper. “It shows another digging machine at the base—”

“We don’t want your digging—”

Juliette turned to the audience. “I don’t want to dig either. Honestly, I don’t think we have enough fuel left, because we’ve been burning it since we got here and because we worked the machine hard to get her to turn. And I don’t think we have food for more than a week or two, not for everyone. We’re not digging. But our schematic matched the size and location of the machine we found back home. It matched it perfectly to scale and even the direction it was pointing. I have a schematic here of this silo and this digger.” She ran her hand over the other sheet of paper, then went back to the large map. “When I plot this, look how the line goes between all the other silos, not touching any of them.” She walked and slid her finger across the line until she touched Elise’s finger. Elise beamed up at her.

“We have a good guess of the fuel we used to get to this silo, and how much remains. We know how much fuel we started with and how fast it burns. And what we determined is that the digger was loaded up with just enough fuel — with maybe ten percent extra — to have taken us directly to this spot.” She again touched Elise’s finger. “And the diggers are aimed slightly up. We think they were placed here to take us to this point — to get us out of here.” She paused. “I don’t know when they were going to tell us — if they were ever going to tell us — but I say we don’t wait to be asked. I say we go.”

“Just go?”

Juliette scanned the audience and saw that it was one of the men from the Planning Committee.

“I think it might be safer out there for us than if we stay. I know what will happen if we stay. I want to see if it’s better if we leave.”

“You hope it’s safer,” someone said.

Juliette didn’t search for the voice. She let her gaze drift across the crowd. Everyone was thinking the same thing, herself included.

“That’s right. I hope. I have the word of a stranger. I have whispers from someone I’ve never met. I have a feeling in my gut, in my heart. I have these lines that cross on a map. And if you think that’s not enough, then I agree with you. I’ve lived my entire life only believing what I can see. I need proof. I need to see results. And even then I need to see them a second and a third time before I get a glimpse of how things truly are. But this is a case where what I know for certain — the life that awaits us here — is not worth living. And there’s a chance that a better one can be found elsewhere. I’m willing to go see, but only if enough of you are with me.”

“I’m with you,” Raph said.

Juliette nodded. The room blurred a little. “I know you are,” she said.

Solo raised his hand. With his other, he tugged on his beard. Juliette felt Elise take her hand. Shaw held a squirming puppy, but still managed to raise his.

“How will we get there if we don’t aim to dig?” one of the miners hollered.

Juliette bent at the waist to grab something at her feet. While her head was down, she wiped at her eyes. She stood and lifted one of the cleaning suits, held it in one hand, a helmet in the other.

“We’re going outside,” she said.

60

The food dwindled while they worked. It was a grim countdown, these disappearing cans and what had been rounded up from the farms. Not everyone in the silo participated; many never came to the Town Hall; many more simply wandered off, realizing they could grab more grow plots if they hurried. Several mechanics asked for permission to head back down to Mechanical and round up those who had refused to make the climb, to try and convince them to come, to see if Walker could be stirred. Juliette was overjoyed with the prospect of gathering more people to go. She also felt the pressure mount as everyone worked.

The server room became a massive workshop, something like you’d see down the halls of Supply. Nearly a hundred and fifty cleaning suits were laid out, all of them needing to be sized and adjusted. Juliette was sad to see that it was more than they needed, but also a little relieved. It would’ve been a problem the other way around.

She had shown a dozen mechanics how the valves went together like she and Nelson had used to breathe in the Suit Lab. There weren’t enough of the valves in IT, so porters were given samples and sent down to Supply, where Juliette was sure there would be more of these parts otherwise useless for survival. Gaskets, heat tape, and seals were needed. They were also told to secure and haul up the welding kits in both Supply and Mechanical. She showed them the difference between the acetylene bottles and the oxygen and said they wouldn’t need the acetylene.

Erik calculated the distance using the chart hanging on the wall and reckoned they could put a dozen people to a bottle. Juliette said to make it ten to be safe. With fifty or so people working on the suits — the fallen servers acting as workbenches as they knelt or sat on the floor — she took a small group up to the cafeteria for what she knew would be a grim job. Just her father, Raph, Dawson, and two of the older porters whom she figured had handled bodies before. On the way up, they stopped below the farms and went to the coroner’s office past the pump rooms. Juliette found a supply of folded black bags and pulled out five dozen. From there they climbed in silence.

There was no airlock attached to Silo 17, not anymore. The outer door remained cracked open from the fall of the silo decades before. Juliette remembered squeezing through that door twice before, her helmet getting stuck the first time. The only barriers between them and the outside air were the inner airlock door and the door to the sheriff’s office. Bare membranes between a dead world and a dying one.

Juliette helped the others remove a tangle of chairs and tables from around the office door. There was a narrow path between them where she had come and gone over a month ago, but they needed more room to work. She warned the others about the bodies inside, but they knew from collecting the bags what they were in for. A handful of flashlights converged on the door as Juliette prepared to open it. They all wore masks and rubber gloves at her father’s insistence. Juliette wondered if they should’ve donned cleaning suits instead.

The bodies inside were just as she remembered them: a tangle of gray and lifeless limbs. The stench of something both foul and metallic filled her mask, and Juliette had a memory of dumping fetid soup on herself to drown the outside air. This was the stench of death and something besides.

They hauled the bodies out one by one and placed them in the funeral bags. It was grisly work. Limp flesh sloughed off bones like a slow roast. “The joints,” Juliette cautioned, her voice hot and muffled by her mask. “Armpits and knees.”

The bodies held together barely and enough, the tendons and bone doing most of the work. Black zippers were pulled shut with relief. Coughing and gagging filled the air.

Most of the bodies inside the sheriff’s office had piled up by the door as if they’d crawled over one another in an attempt to get back inside, back into the cafeteria. Other bodies were in a state of more serene rest. A man slouched over on the tattered remnants of a cot in the open holding cell, just the rusted frame, the mattress long gone. A woman lay in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest as if sleeping. Juliette moved the last of the bodies with her father, and she saw how wide her father’s eyes were, how they were fixed on her. She glanced over his shoulder as she shuffled backwards out of the sheriff’s office, staring at the airlock door that awaited them all, its yellow skin flaking off in chips of paint.

“This isn’t right,” her father said, his voice muffled and his mask bobbing up and down with the movement of his jaw. They tucked the body into an open bag and zipped it up.

“We’ll give them a proper burial,” she assured him, assuming he meant it wasn’t right how the bodies were being handled — stacked like bags of dirty laundry.

He removed his gloves and his mask, rested back on his heels, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “No. It’s these people. I thought you said this place was practically empty when you got here.”

“It was. Just Solo and the kids. These people have been dead a long time.”

“That’s not possible,” her father said. “They’re too well preserved.” His eyes drifted across the bags, wrinkles of concern or confusion in his brow. “I’d say they’ve been dead for three weeks. Four or five at the most.”

“Dad, they were here when I arrived. I crawled over them. I asked Solo about them once, and he said he discovered them years ago.”

“That simply can’t be—”

“It’s probably because they weren’t buried. Or the gas outside kept the bugs away. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It matters plenty when something isn’t right like this. There’s something not right about this entire silo, I’m telling you.” He stood and headed toward the stairwell where Raph was ladling hauled water into scrounged cups and cans. Her father took one for himself and passed one to Juliette. He was lost in thought, she could tell. “Did you know Elise had a twin sister?” her father asked.

Juliette nodded. “Hannah told me. Died in childbirth. The mother passed as well. They don’t talk about it much, especially not with her.”

“And those two boys. Marcus and Miles. Another set of twins. The eldest boy Rickson says he thought he had a brother, but his father wouldn’t talk about it and he never knew his mother to ask her.” Her father took a sip of water and peered into the can. Juliette tried to drown the metallic taste on her tongue while Dawson helped with one of the bags. Dawson coughed and looked as though he were about to gag.

“It’s a lot of dying,” Juliette agreed, worried where her father’s thoughts were going. She thought of the brother she never knew. She looked for any sign on her father’s face, any indication that this reminded him of his wife and lost son. But he was piecing together some other puzzle.

“No, it’s a lot of living. Don’t you see? Three sets of twins in six births? And those kids are as fit as fiddles with no care. Your friend Jimmy doesn’t have a hole in his teeth and can’t remember the last time he was sick. None of them can. How do you explain that? How do you explain these bodies piled up like they fell over a few weeks ago?”

Juliette caught herself staring at her arm. She gulped the last of her water, handed the tin to her father, and began rolling up her sleeve. “Dad, do you remember me asking you about scars, about whether or not they go away?”

He nodded.

“A few of my scars have disappeared.” She showed him the crook of her arm as if he would know what was no longer there. “I didn’t believe Lukas when he told me. But I used to have a mark here. And another here. And you said it was a miracle I survived my burns, didn’t you?”

“You received good attention straight away—”

“And Fitz didn’t believe me when I told him about the dive I made to fix the pump. He said he’s worked flooded mineshafts and has seen men twice my size get sick from breathing air just ten meters deep, much less thirty or forty. He says I would’ve died if I’d done what I did.”

“I don’t know the first thing about mining,” her father said.

“Fitz does, and he thinks I should be dead. And you think these people should be rotted—”

“They should be bones. I’m telling you.”

Juliette turned and gazed at the blank wallscreen. She wondered if it was all a dream. This was what happened to the dying soul; it scrambled for some perch, some stairway to cling to, some way not to fall. She had cleaned and died on that hill outside her silo. She had never loved Lukas at all. Never gotten to know him properly. This was a land of ghosts and fiction, events held together with all the vacant solidarity of dreams, all the nonsense of a drunken mind. She was long dead and only just now realizing it—

“Maybe something in the water,” her father said.

Juliette turned away from the blank wall. She reached out to him, held his arms in her hands, then stepped closer. He wrapped his arms around her and she wrapped hers around him. His stubble scratched her cheek, and she fought hard not to cry.

“It’s okay,” her father said. “It’s okay.”

She wasn’t dead. But things weren’t right.

“Not in the water,” she said, though she’d swallowed her fair share in that silo. She released her father and watched the first of the bags head to the stairwell. Someone was rigging up spliced electrical cables for rope and running it over the rail to lower a body. Porters be damned, she saw. Even the porters were saying porters be damned.

“Maybe it’s in the air,” she said. “Maybe this is what happens when you don’t gas a place. I don’t know. But I think you’re right that there’s something wrong with this silo. And I think it’s high time we get out of here.”

Her father took a last swig of water. “How long before we leave?” he asked. “And are you sure this is a good idea?”

Juliette nodded. “I’d rather we died out there trying than in here killing each other.” And she realized she sounded like all those who had been sent to clean, all the dangerous dreamers and mad fools, those she had mocked and never understood. She sounded like a person who trusted a machine to work without peeking inside, without first tearing it completely apart.

61

Charlotte slapped the elevator door with her palm. She had jabbed the call button right as her brother disappeared, but it was too late. She hopped on one foot to keep her balance, her suit only half on. Down the aisle behind her, Darcy was struggling into his suit. “Will he do it?” Darcy called out.

Charlotte nodded. He would. He had pulled the other suit out for Darcy. This was his plan all along. Charlotte slapped the door again and cursed her brother.

“You need to get dressed,” Darcy said.

She turned and sank to the ground, hugged her shins. She didn’t want to move. She watched Darcy wriggle into his suit and get the collar over his head. He stood and tried to reach around for the zipper, finally gave up. “Was I supposed to put this backpack on first?” He grabbed one of the bundles her brother had packed and opened it up. He pulled out a can, put it back. Brought out a gun, kept this out. He worked his head and arms back out of the suit. “Charlotte, we’ve got half an hour. How’re we getting out of here?”

Charlotte wiped her cheeks and struggled to her feet. Darcy didn’t have the first clue about how to get suited up. She worked her legs into her suit and left the sleeves and collar off, hurried down the aisle toward him. There was a ding behind her. She stopped and turned, thinking Donald had come back, had changed his mind, forgetting that she had pressed the call button.

Two men in light blue coveralls gaped at her from inside the express lift. One of them peered at the buttons in confusion, looked back to Charlotte — this woman with a silver suit half on and half off — and then the doors slowly closed.

“Shit,” Darcy said. “We really need to go.”

A panic stirred in Charlotte, an internal countdown. She thought of the way her brother had looked at her from inside the lift, the way he had kissed her goodbye. Her chest felt as though it might implode, but she hurried to Darcy and helped him get his arms out and his pack on. Once he was in fully, she zipped up the back. He helped her do the same, then followed her to the end of the aisle. Charlotte pointed to the low hangar and handed him both helmets. The bin her brother had left was right where he’d said it would be. “Open that door up and jam the bin halfway inside. I’ll go start the lift.”

She threw open the barracks door and ran down the hall in an awkward waddle, the thick suit crowding her knees. Through the next door. The radio was still on and hissing. She thought of the waste that thing had been, all the time putting it together, collecting the parts, and now she was abandoning it. At the lift control station, she ripped the plastic off and flipped the main controls into the up position. She felt sure she’d given Darcy plenty of time to get it jammed. Another awkward waddle down the hall, past the barracks that’d been her home for these agonizing weeks, out into her armory hell, the last of her birds sulking beneath their tarps, a single chirp ringing out from somewhere. From the elevator. The sound of boots storming their way, Darcy yelling at her to get inside the drone lift.

Donald rode the elevator toward the sixty-second floor. When he passed sixty-one, he hit the emergency stop button. The elevator jerked to a stop and began buzzing. He steadied the bomb and pulled out the hammer, went ahead and removed the tag. He wasn’t sure how much damage it would cause if he detonated it inside the lift, but he would if anyone came for him. He wanted to give his sister enough time, but he was willing to risk everything to put an end to that place. He watched the clock on the lift panel and waited. It gave him plenty of time to think. Fifteen minutes passed without him needing to cough or clear his throat once. He laughed at this and wondered if he was getting better. Then he remembered how his grandfather and his aunt had both gotten better the day before they died. It was probably something like that.

The hammer grew heavy. It was incredible to stand beside something so destructive as that bomb, to lay a hand on a device that could kill so many, change so much. Another five minutes went by. He should go. It was too long. It would take him some time to get to the reactor. He waited another minute, some rational part of his brain aware of what the rest of him was about to do, some buried part that screamed for him to think about this, to be reasonable.

Donald slammed the hold switch before he lost his nerve. The elevator lurched. He hoped his sister and Darcy were well on their way.

Charlotte threw herself into the drone lift, her helmet banging on the ceiling, the bottle of air on her back causing her to tip over onto her side. Darcy threw his helmet inside the lift and began crawling in after her. Someone shouted from the armory. Charlotte began to shove at the plastic bin, which was the only thing keeping the lift from closing and heading up. Darcy pushed as well, but it was pinned tight. Another shout from beyond. Darcy fumbled for the pistol he’d taken from the pack. He turned on his side and fired out of the lift, deafening roars from inside that metal can. Charlotte saw men in silver coveralls duck and take cover behind the drones. Another shot rang out, a loud thwack inside the lift, the men out there returning fire. Charlotte turned to kick the bin with her feet, but the lid had buckled down where the door had pinched it. It had formed a wedge, wanted to come in with her, not go out. She tried to pull, but there was nothing to cling to.

Darcy yelled for her to stay put. He crawled on his elbows out the door, his gun firing pop pop pop, men taking cover, Charlotte cringing. He left the lift and began pushing the bin in from the other side. Charlotte yelled for him to stop, to get back inside. The door would slam shut with him out there. Another shot rang out, the zing of a miss. Darcy kicked the bin with his boot, and it moved several inches.

“Wait!” Charlotte yelled. She scampered to the door, didn’t want to go on by herself. “Wait!”

Darcy kicked the bin again. The lift lurched. It was almost free, just a few more inches. Another shot from beyond the drones and no sound of a miss. Just a grunt from Darcy, who fell to his knees, turned and fired wildly behind himself.

Charlotte reached out and tugged on his arm. “Come on!” she yelled.

Darcy reached down and pushed her hands inside the lift. He leaned his shoulder against the bin and smiled at her. And before he shoved the bin inside, he said, “It’s okay. I remember who I am, now.”

The elevator slowed on the reactor level, the doors opened, and Donald pressed a boot to the hand truck and tilted it back. He steered the bomb toward the security gates. The guard there watched him approach, eyebrows up with mild curiosity. Here was everything wrong with everything, Donald thought. Here was a guard not recognizing a murderer because he toted a bomb. Here was a man swiping an ID with Darcy’s name on it, a green light, and the ennui of an interminable job as he was waved through the gates. Here was everyone seeing what was coming and ushering hell right along anyway.

“Thank you,” Donald said, daring the man to recognize him.

“Good luck with that.”

Donald had never seen the reactors before. They were closed off behind large doors and spanned three levels. On any one shift, there were nearly as many men in red as half the others combined. Here was the heart of a soulless machine, which made it the only organ of consequence.

He followed a curving hall lined with thick pipes and heavy cables. He passed two others in reactor red, neither of them noting the holes in the shoulder of his coveralls, or that the bloodstains had begun to brown. Just nods and quick glances at his burden, even quicker glances away lest they be asked to help. One of the hand truck’s tires squeaked as if complaining about Donald’s plan, unhappy with that terrible load.

Donald stopped outside of the main reactor room. Far enough. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the hammer. He weighed this thing he was about to do. He thought of Helen, who had died the way people were supposed to die. This was how it worked. You lived. You did your best. You got out of the way. You let those who come after you choose. You let them decide for themselves, live their own lives. This was the way.

He raised the hammer with both hands, and a shot rang out. A shot, and a fire in his chest. Donald spun in a lazy circle, the hammer clattering to the ground, and then his legs went out. He clutched for the bomb, hoping to take it with him, to pull it down. His fingers found the cone, slipped off, caught the hand truck’s handle, and they both tumbled. Donald ended up on his back, the bomb slamming flat to the ground with a powerful clang felt through his back, and then rolling lazily and harmlessly toward the wall, out of reach.

The drone lift opened automatically at the end of its long and dark climb. Charlotte hesitated. She looked for some way to lower the lift, to go back down. But the controls were a mile beneath her. The large tank of air on her back knocked against the roof of the lift as she crawled out. Darcy was gone. Her brother was gone. This was not what she wanted.

Overhead, black clouds swirled. She crawled up a sloping ramp, all of it familiar. She had been here before, if not in person. It was the view from her drones, the sight she’d been rewarded with on four flights. With the push of a throttle, she would be up there in those clouds, banking hard and flying free.

But this time, it was with weary muscles that she crawled up the ramp. She reached the top and had to lower herself down to a concrete ledge below. A grounded bird, a flightless traveller, she shinnied down this ledge and dropped to the dirt, a chick plummeting from its nest.

She wasn’t sure at first which way to go. And she was thirsty, but her food and water were in a pack and trapped with her inside her suit. She turned and fought for her bearings, checked the map her brother had taped to her arm, and was angry at him for that. Angry and thankful. This was his plan all along.

She studied the map, was used to a digital display, a higher vantage, a flight plan, but the ramp leading down into the earth helped her establish north. Red lines on the map pointed the way. She plodded toward the hills and a better view.

And she remembered this place, remembered being here after a rain when the grass was slick and twin tracks of mud made a brown lacework of that gradual rise. Charlotte remembered being late from the airport. She had topped that very hill, and her brother had raced out to meet her. It was a time when the world was whole. You might look up and see vapor trails from passenger jets inching across the sky. You could drive to fast food. Call a loved one. A settled world existed here.

She passed through the spot where she’d hugged her brother, and any plan of escape wilted. She had little desire to carry on. Her brother was gone. The world was gone. Even if she lived to see green grass and eat one more MRE, cut her lip on one more can of water… why?

She trudged up the hill, taking a step only because her other foot had taken a step, tears streaming down her face, wondering why.

Donald’s chest was on fire. Warm blood pooled around his neck. He lifted his head and saw Thurman at the end of the hall, marching toward him. Two men from Security were on either side, guns drawn. Donald fumbled in his pocket for his pistol, but it was too late. Too late. Tears welled up, and they were for the people who would live under this system, the hundreds of thousands who would come and go and suffer. He managed to free the pistol but could only raise it a few inches off the ground. These men were coming for him. They would hunt down Charlotte and Darcy out there on the surface. They would swoop down on his sister with their drones. They would take down silo after silo until only one was left, this capricious judgment of souls, of lives run by pitiless servers and soulless code.

Their guns were trained on him, waiting for him to make a move, ready to end his life. Donald put every ounce of his strength into lifting that pistol. He watched Thurman come at him, this man he had shot and killed once before, and he lifted his gun, struggled to raise it, could lift it no more than six inches off the ground.

But it was enough.

Donald steered his arm wide, aimed at the cone of that great bomb designed to bring down monsters such as these, and pulled the trigger. He heard a bang, but he could not tell what from.

The earth lurched and Charlotte fell forward on her hands and knees. There was a thwump like a grenade tossed into a deep lake. The hillside shuddered.

Charlotte turned on her side and glanced down the hill. A crack opened along the flat earth. Another. The concrete tower at the center listed to one side, and then the earth yawned open. A crater formed, and then the center of the scooped-out earth between those hills sank and tugged at the land further out, clawed and grabbed at the soil and pulled it down as if it were a giant sinkhole, plumes of white powdered concrete jetting up through the cracks.

The hill rumbled. Sand and tiny rocks slid downward, racing each other toward the bottom as the land became something that moved. Charlotte scrambled backwards, up the hill and away from the widening pit, her heart racing and her mind awed.

She turned and rose to her feet and climbed as fast as she could, a hand on the earth in front of her, crouched over, the land slowly becoming solid again. She climbed until she reached the crest, her sobs swallowed by the shock of witnessing this scene of such powerful destruction, the wind strong against her, the suit cold and bulky.

At the top of the hill, she collapsed. “Donny,” she whispered. Charlotte turned and gazed down at the hole in the world her brother had left. She lay on her back while the dust peppered her suit and the wind screamed against her visor, her view of the world growing more and more blurred, the dust clouding all.

62

Juliette remembered a day meant for dying. She had been sent to clean, had been stuffed in a suit similar to this one, and had watched through a narrow visor as a world of green and blue was taken from her, color fading to gray as she crested a hill and saw the true world.

And now, laboring through the wind, the hiss of sand against her visor, the roar of her pulse and heavy breathing trapped in that dome, she watched as brown and gray relented and drained away.

The change was gradual at first. Hints of pale blue. Hard to be sure that’s even what it was. She was in the lead group with Raph and her father and the other seven suited figures tethered to the shared bottle of air they lugged between them. A gradual change, and then it became sudden, like stepping through a wall. The haze lifted; a light was thrown; the wind buffeting her from all sides halted as stabs of color erupted, shards of green and blue and pure white, and Juliette was in a world that was almost too vivid, too vibrant, to be believed. Brown grasses like withered rows of corn brushed against her boots, but these were the only dead things in sight. Further away, green grasses stirred and writhed. White clouds roamed the sky. And Juliette saw now that the bright picture books of her youth were in fact faded, the pages muted compared to this.

There was a hand on her back, and Juliette turned to see her father staring wide-eyed at the vista. Raph shielded his eyes against the bright sun, his exhalations fogging his helmet. Hannah smiled down her collar at the bulge cradled to her chest, the empty arms of her suit twisting in the breeze as she held her child. Rickson wrapped his arm around her shoulder and stared at the sky while Elise and Shaw threw their hands up as if they could gather the clouds. Bobby and Fitz set the oxygen bottle down for a moment and simply gaped.

Behind her group, another emerged from the wall of dust. Bodies pierced a veil — and labored and weary faces lit up with wonder and new energy. One figure was being helped along, practically carried, but the sight of color seemed to lend them new legs.

Looking up behind her, Juliette saw a wall of dust reaching into the sky. All along the base, the life that dared approach this choking barrier crumbled, grass turning to powder, occasional flowers becoming brown stalks. A bird turned circles in the open sky, seemed to study these bright intruders in their silvery suits, and then banked away, avoiding danger and gliding through the blue.

Juliette felt a similar tug pulling her toward those grasses and away from the dead land they had crawled out of. She waved to her group, mouthed for them to come on, and helped Bobby with the bottle. Together they lumbered down the slope. After them came others. Each group paused in much the way Juliette had heard cleaners were prone to staggering about. One of the groups carried a body, a limp suit, the looks on their faces sharing grim news. Everywhere else was euphoria, though. Juliette felt it in her fizzing brain, which had planned to die that day; she felt it across her skin, her scars forgotten; she felt it in her tired legs and feet, which now could march to the horizon and beyond.

She waved the other groups down the slope. When she saw a man fiddling with his helmet latches, Juliette motioned for those in his group to stop him, and word spread by hand signal from group to group. Juliette could still hear the hiss from the air bottle in her own helmet, but a new urgency seized her. This was more than hope at their feet, more than blind hope. This was a promise. The woman on the radio had been telling the truth. Donald had truly been trying to help them. Hope and faith and trust had won her people some reprieve, however short. She pulled the map out of a numbered pocket meant for cleaning and consulted the lines. She urged everyone along.

There was another rise ahead, a large and gentle hill. Juliette aimed for this. Elise ranged ahead of her, tugging at the limits of her air hose and kicking up startled insects from the tall grass that came up past her knees. Shaw chased after her, their hoses near to tangling. Juliette heard herself laugh and wondered when she’d last made such a noise.

They struggled up the hill, and the land to either side seemed to grow and widen with the altitude. It wasn’t just a hill, she saw as she reached the crest, but rather one more ring of mounded earth. Beyond the summit, the land swooped down into a bowl. Turning to take in the entire view around her, Juliette saw that this single depression was separate from the fifty. Back the way she had come, across a valley of verdant green, rose a wall of dark clouds. Not just a wall, she saw, but a giant dome, the silos at its center. And in the other direction, beyond the ringed hill, a forest like those from the Legacy books, a distant groundcover of giant broccoli heads whose scale was impossible to fathom.

Juliette turned to the others and tapped her helmet with her palm. She pointed to the black birds gliding on the air. Her father lifted a hand and asked her to wait. He understood what she was about to do. He reached for the latches of his own helmet instead.

Juliette felt the same fear he must’ve felt at the thought of a loved one going first, but agreed to let him. Raph helped with her father’s latches, which were nearly impossible to work with the thick gloves. Finally, the dome clicked free. Her father’s eyes widened as he took an exploratory breath. He smiled, took another, deeper one, his chest swelling, his hand relaxing, the helmet falling from his fingers and tumbling into the grass.

A frenzy broke, people groping at one another’s collars. Juliette set her heavy pack down in the grass and helped Raph, who helped her in turn. When her helmet clicked free, it was the sounds she noticed first. It was the laughter from her father and Bobby, the happy squeals from the children. The smells came next, the odor of the farms and the hydroponic gardens, the scent of healthy soil turned up to claim its seed. And the light, as bright and warm as the grow lights but at a diffused distance, wrapping all around them, an emptiness above her that stretched out into forever, nothing above their heads but far clouds.

Suit collars clanged together with hugs. The groups behind were scurrying faster now, people falling and being helped up, flashes of teeth through domes, wet eyes and trails of tears down cheeks, forgotten bottles of oxygen dragging at the end of taut hoses, one body being carried.

Gloves and suits were torn at, and Juliette realized they’d never hoped for any of this. There were no knives strapped to their chests to cut away at their suits. No plan of ever leaving those silver tombs. They had left the silo in cleaning suits as all cleaners do, because a life cooped up becomes intolerable, and to stagger over a hill, even to death, becomes a great longing.

Bobby managed to tear his glove with his teeth and get a hand free. Fitz did the same. Everyone was laughing and sweating as they managed to work zippers and velcro at each other’s backs, shake arms loose, work heads out of ringed collars, tug strenuously at boots. Barefoot and in a colorful array of grimy undersuits, the children squirmed free and tumbled in the grass after one another. Elise set down her dog — which she’d kept pinned to her chest like her own child — and squealed as the animal disappeared in the tall green fronds. She scooped him up again. Shaw laughed and dug her book out of his suit.

Juliette reached down and ran her hands through the grass. It was like weeds from the farms, but bunched together in a solid carpet. She thought of the fruits and vegetables some had packed away inside their suits. It would be important to save the seeds. Already, she was thinking they might last more than the day. More than the week. Her soul soared at the prospect.

Raph grabbed her once he was free of his suit and kissed her on the cheek.

“What the hell?” Bobby roared, spinning in circles with his great arms out and palms up. “What the hell!”

Her father stepped beside her and pointed down the slope, into the basin. “Do you see that?” he asked.

Juliette shielded her eyes and peered into the middle of the depression. There was a mound of green. No, not a mound; a tower. A tower with no antennas but rather some silvery flat roof jutting up and half covered in vines. Tall grass obscured much of the concrete.

The ridge grew crowded with people and laughter, and the grass was soon covered with boots and silver skins. Juliette studied this concrete tower, knowing what they would find inside. Here was the seed of a new beginning. She lifted her bag, heavy with dynamite. She weighed their salvation.

63

“No more than what we need,” Juliette cautioned. She saw how the ground outside the concrete tower would soon be littered with more than they could carry. There was clothing and tools, canned food, vacuum-sealed plastic bags of labeled seeds — many of them from plants she’d never heard of. Elise had consulted her book and had pages for only a few of them. Scattered among the supplies were blocks of concrete and rubble from blowing the door open, a door that was designed to be opened from within.

Away from the tower, Solo and Walker wrestled with some kind of fabric enclosure and a set of poles, sorting out how it was supposed to prop itself up. They scratched their beards and debated. Juliette was amazed at how much better Walker was doing. He hadn’t wanted out of his suit at first, had stayed in until the oxygen bottle went dry. And then he’d come out in a gasping hurry.

Elise was near them, screaming and chasing through the grass after her animal. Or maybe it was Shaw chasing Elise — it was hard to tell. Hannah sat on a large plastic bin with Rickson, nursing her child and gazing up at the clouds.

The smell of heating food wafted around the tower as Fitz managed to coax a fire from one of the oxygen bottles, a most dangerous method of cooking, Juliette thought. She turned to go back inside and sort through more of the gear, when Courtnee emerged from the bunker with her flashlight in hand and a smile on her face. Before Juliette could ask what she’d found, she saw that the power inside the tower was now on, the lights burning bright.

“What did you do?” Juliette asked. They had explored the bunker down to the bottom — it was only twenty levels deep, and the levels were so crazily packed together that it was more like seven levels tall. At the bottom they had found not a mechanical space but rather a large and empty cavern where twin stairwells bottomed out onto bare rock. It was a landing spot for a digger, someone had guessed. A place to welcome new arrivals. No generator, though. No power. Even though the stairwell and levels were rigged with lights.

“I traced the feed,” Courtnee said. “It goes up to those silver sheets of metal on the roof. I’m going to have the boys clear them off, see how they work.”

Before long, a moving platform sitting in the middle of the stairwell was made operational. It slid up and down by a series of cables and counterweights and a small motor. Those from Mechanical marveled at the device, and the kids wouldn’t get off the thing. They insisted on riding it just one more time. Moving supplies outside and into the grass became far less tiring, though Juliette kept thinking they should leave plenty for the next to arrive, if anyone ever did.

There were those who wanted to live right there, who were reticent to venture any further. They had seeds and more soil than reckoning, and the storerooms could be turned into apartments. It would be a good home. Juliette listened to them debate this.

It was Elise who settled the matter. She opened her book to a map, pointed to the sun and showed them which way was north, and said they should move toward water. She claimed to know how to gather wild fish, said there were worms in the ground and Solo knew how to put them on hooks. Pointing to a page in her memory book, she said they should walk to the sea.

Adults pored over these maps and this decision. There was another round of debates among those who thought they should shelter right there, but Juliette shook her head. “This isn’t a home,” she said. “It’s just a warehouse. Do we want to live in the shadow of that?” She nodded to the dark cloud on the horizon, that dome of dust.

“And what about when others show up?” someone pointed out.

“More reason not to be here,” Rickson offered.

More debate. There were just over a hundred of them. They could stay there and farm, get a crop up before the canned goods ran out. Or they could carry what they needed and see if the legends of unlimited fish and of water that stretched to the horizon were true. Juliette nearly pointed out that they could do both, that there were no rules, that there was plenty of land and space, that all the fighting came when things were running low and resources were scarce.

“What’s it going to be, Mayor?” Raph asked. “We bedding down here or moving on?”

“Look!”

Someone pointed up the hill, and a dozen heads turned to see. There, over the rise, a figure in a silver suit stumbled down the slope, the grass at their feet already trampled and slick. Someone from their silo who had changed their mind.

Juliette raced through the grass, feeling not fear but curiosity and concern. Someone they’d left behind, someone who had followed them. It could be anyone.

Before she could close the distance, the figure in the suit collapsed. Gloved hands groped to release the helmet, fumbled with the collar. Juliette ran. There was a large bottle strapped to the person’s back. She worried they were out of air, wondered what they had rigged up and how.

“Easy,” she yelled, dropping behind the struggling figure. She pressed her thumbs into the clasps. They clicked. She pulled the helmet free and heard someone gasping and coughing. They bent forward, wheezing, a spill of sweat-soaked hair, a woman. Juliette rested a hand on this woman’s shoulder, did not recognize her at all — thought it was perhaps someone from the congregation or the Mids.

“Breathe easy,” she said. She looked up as others arrived. They pulled up short at the sight of this stranger.

The woman wiped her mouth and nodded. Her chest heaved with a deep breath. Another. She brushed the hair off her face. “Thank you,” she gasped. She peered up at the sky and the clouds in something other than wonder. In relief. Her eyes focused on and tracked an object, and Juliette turned and gazed up to see another of the birds wheeling lazily in the sky. The crowd around her kept their distance. Someone asked who this was.

“You aren’t from our silo, are you?” Juliette asked. Her first thought was that this was a cleaner from a nearby silo who had witnessed their march, had followed them. Her second thought was impossible. It was also correct.

“No,” the woman said, “I’m not from your silo. I’m from… somewhere quite different. My name is Charlotte.”

A glove was offered, a glove and a weary smile. The warmth of that smile disarmed Juliette. To her surprise, she realized that she held no anger or resentment toward this woman, who had told her the truth of this place. Here, perhaps, was a kindred spirit. And more importantly, a fresh start. She regained her composure, smiled back, and shook the woman’s hand. “Juliette,” she said. “Let me help you out of that.”

“You’re her,” Charlotte said, smiling. She turned her attention to the crowd, to the tower and the piles of supplies. “What is this place?”

“A second chance,” Juliette said. “But we aren’t staying here. We’re heading to the water. You’ll come with us, I hope. But I have to warn you, it’s a long way.”

Charlotte rested her hand on Juliette’s shoulder. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ve already come a long way.”