Dust

Epilogue

Raph seemed unsure. He held a branch in his hand, weighed it purposefully, his pale face a dance of orange and gold from the flickering fire.

“Just throw the damn thing in,” Bobby yelled.

There was laughter, but Raph frowned in consternation. “It’s wood,” he said, weighing the branch.

“Look around you,” Bobby roared. He waved at the dark limbs hanging overhead, the wide trunks. “It’s more than we’ll ever need.”

“Do it, lad.” Erik kicked one of the logs, and a burst of sparks buzzed in the air as if startled from their slumber. Finally, Raph threw the branch in with the rest, and the wood began to crackle and spark.

Juliette watched from her bedroll. Somewhere in the woods, an animal made a sound, a sound unlike any she’d ever heard. It was like a crying child, but sonorous and mournful.

“What was that?” someone asked.

In the darkness, they exchanged guesses. They conjured animals from children’s books. They listened to Solo recount the many breeds from olden times that he had read about in the Legacy. They gathered around Elise with flashlights and pored through the stitched pages of her book. Everything was a mystery and a wonder.

Juliette lay back and listened to the crackle from the fire, the occasional loud pop from a log, enjoying the heat on her skin, the smell of meat cooking, the peculiar odor of grass and so much soil. And through the canopy overhead, stars twinkled. The bright clouds from before — the ones that had hidden the sun as it set behind the hills — were parted by the breeze. They revealed above her a hundred glittering pricks of light. A thousand. More of them everywhere the longer she looked. They glittered in her tear-filled eyes as she thought of Lukas and the love he had aroused in her. And something hardened in her chest, something that made her jaw clench tight to keep from crying, a renewed purpose in her life, a desire to reach the water on Elise’s map, to plant these seeds, to build a home above the ground and live there.

“Jewel? You asleep?”

Elise stood above her, blocking the stars. Puppy’s cold nose pressed into Juliette’s cheek.

“C’mere,” Juliette said. She scooted over and patted her bedroll, and Elise sat down and nestled against her.

“What’re you doing?” Elise asked.

Juliette pointed up through the canopy. “I’m looking at the stars,” she said. “Each of those is like our sun, but they’re a long way away.”

“I know the stars,” Elise said. “Some of them have names.”

“They do?”

“Yeah.” Elise rested her head back against Juliette’s shoulder and gazed up with her a moment. The unknown thing in the woods howled. “See those?” Elise asked. “Don’t those look like a puppy to you?”

Juliette squinted and searched the sky. “Could be,” she said. “Yeah, maybe they do.”

“We can call those ones Puppy.”

“That’s a good name,” Juliette agreed. She laughed and wiped at her eyes.

“And that one’s like a man.” Elise pointed at a wide spread of stars, tracing the features. “There’s his arms and legs. There’s his head.”

“I see him,” Juliette said.

“You can name him,” Elise told her, giving her permission. Deep in the woods, the hidden animal let out another howl, and Elise’s puppy made a similar sound. Juliette felt tears roll down her cheeks.

“Not that one,” she said quietly. “He already has a name.”

The fires settled down as the night wore on. Clouds swallowed stars and tents gobbled children. Juliette watched shadows move in one of the tents, other adults too jittery to sleep. Somewhere, someone was still cooking strips of meat from the animal Solo had shot with his rifle — the long-limbed deer. Juliette had marveled at Solo’s transformation these last three days. A man who grew up alone was now a leader of men, more prepared for surviving in this world than any of them. Juliette would ask for another vote soon. Her friend Solo would make an excellent mayor.

In the distance, a silhouette stood over a fire and prodded it with a stick, coaxing more heat from dying embers. Clouds and fire — these two things her people had only ever feared. Fire was death in the silo, and clouds consumed those who dared to leave. And yet, as the clouds closed in overhead and flames were agitated higher, there was comfort in both. The clouds were a roof of sorts, the fire warmth. There was less here to fear. And when a bright star revealed itself through a sudden gap, Juliette’s thoughts returned as ever to Lukas.

He had told her once, with his star chart spread across that bed in which they made love, that each of those stars could possibly hold worlds of their own, and Juliette remembered being unable to grasp the thought. It was audacious. Impossible. Even having seen another silo, even having seen dozens of depressions in the earth that stretched to the horizon, she could not imagine entire other worlds existing. And yet, she had returned from her cleaning and had expected others to believe her claims, equally bold—

A stick cracked behind her, a rustle of leaves, and Juliette expected to find Elise returning to complain that she couldn’t sleep. Or perhaps it was Charlotte, who had joined her by the fire earlier that night, had remained largely quiet while seeming to have much she wanted to say. But Juliette turned and found Courtnee there, white smoke steaming from something in her hand.

“Mind if I sit?” Courtnee asked.

Juliette made room, and her old friend joined her on the bedroll. She handed Juliette a hot mug of something that smelled vaguely of tea… but more pungent.

“Can’t sleep?” Courtnee asked.

Juliette shook her head. “Just sitting here thinking about Luke.”

Courtnee draped an arm across Juliette’s back. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay. Whenever I see the stars up there, it helps put things into perspective.”

“Yeah? Help me, then.”

Juliette thought how best to do that and realized she hardly had the language. She only had a sense of this vastness — of an infinite possible worlds — that somehow filled her with hope and not despair. Turning that into words wasn’t easy.

“All the land we’ve seen these past days,” she said, trying to grasp what she was feeling. “All that space. We don’t have a fraction of the time and people to fill it all.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Courtnee asked.

“I think so, yeah. And I’m starting to think that those we sent out to clean, they were the good ones. I think there were a lot of good people like them who just kept quiet, who were scared to act. And I doubt there was ever a mayor who didn’t want to make more room for her people, didn’t want to figure out what was wrong with the outside world, didn’t want to suspend the damn lottery. But what could they do, even those mayors? They weren’t in charge. Not really. The ones in charge kept a lid on our ambitions. Except for Luke. He didn’t stand in the way of me. He supported what I was doing, even when he knew it was dangerous. And so here we are.”

Courtnee squeezed her shoulder and took a noisy sip of tea, and Juliette lifted her mug to do the same. As soon as the warm water hit her lips, there was an explosion of flavor, a richness like the smell of the flower stalls in the bazaar and also the upturned loam of a productive grow plot. It was a first kiss. It was lemon and rose. There were sparks in her vision from the heady rush. Juliette’s mind shuddered.

“What is this?” she asked, gasping for air. “This is from the supplies we pulled?”

Courtnee laughed and leaned against Juliette. “It’s good, right?”

“It’s great. It’s… amazing.”

“Maybe we should go back for another load,” Courtnee said.

“If we do that, I might not carry anything else.”

The two women laughed quietly. They sat together, gazing up at the clouds and the occasional star for a while. The fire nearest them crackled and spat sparks, and a handful of quiet conversations drifted deep into the trees where bugs sang a chorus and some unseen beast howled.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” Courtnee asked after a long pause.

Juliette took another sip of the miraculous drink. She imagined the world they might build with time and resources, with no rules but what’s best and no one to pin down their dreams.

“I think we’ll make it,” she finally said. “I think we can make any damn thing we like.”