Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

1

Marck stumbled down the great stairway, his hand sliding against the cool railing, a rifle tucked under his arm, his boots slipping in blood. He could barely hear the screams all around him: the wails from the wounded as they were half-dragged down the steps, the horrified cries from the curious crowds on every landing who witnessed their passage, or the shouts of promised violence from the men chasing him and the rest of his mechanics from level to level.

The ringing in his ears drowned out most of the noise. It was the blast, the god-awful blast. Not the one that had peeled open the doors of IT—he had been ready for that one, had hunkered down with the rest. And it wasn’t the second bomb, the one Knox had lobbed deep into the heart of their enemy’s den. It was the last one, the one he didn’t see coming, the one that spilled from the hands of that small gray woman from Supply.

McLain’s bomb. It had gone off right in front of him, had taken his hearing as it took her life.

And Knox, that stout and unmovable head of Mechanical—his boss, his good friend—gone.

Marck hurried down the steps, wounded and afraid. He was a long way from the safety of the down deep—and he desperately wanted to find his wife. He concentrated on this rather than the past, tried not to think of the explosion that had taken his friends, had wrecked their plans, had engulfed any chance at justice.

Muffled shots rang out from above, followed by the piercing zing of bullets striking steel—only steel, thank God. Marck stayed away from the outer railing, away from the aim of the shooters who hounded them from the landings above with their smoothly firing rifles. The good people of Mechanical and Supply had been running and fighting for over a dozen levels; Marck silently begged the men above to stop, to give them a chance to rest, but the boots and the bullets kept coming.

Half a level later, he caught up to three members of Supply, the one in the middle wounded and being ported, arms draped over shoulders, blood dotting the backs of their yellow coveralls. He yelled at them to keep moving, couldn’t hear his own voice, could just feel it in his chest. Some of the blood he was slipping in was his own.

With his injured arm tight against his chest, his rifle cradled in the crook of his elbow, Marck kept his other hand on the railing to keep from tumbling headfirst down the steep stairwell. There were no allies behind him, none still alive. After the last shootout, he had sent the others ahead, had barely gotten away himself. And yet they kept coming, tireless. Marck would pause now and then, fumble with the unreliable ammunition, chamber a shot, and fire wildly up the stairwell. Just to do something. To slow them down.

He stopped to take a breath, leaned out over the railing, and swung his rifle toward the sky. The next round was a dud. The bullets buzzing back at him weren’t.

Huddling against the stairwell’s central post, he took the time to reload. His rifle wasn’t like theirs. One shot at a time and difficult to aim. They had modern things he’d never heard of, shots coming as fast as a frightened pulse. He moved toward the railing and checked the landing below, could see curious faces through a cracked doorway, fingers curled around the edge of the steel jamb. This was it. Landing forty-two. The last place he’d seen his wife.

“Shirly!”

Calling her name, he staggered down a quarter turn until he was level with the landing. He kept close to the interior, out of sight from his pursuers, and searched the shadowed faces.

“My wife!” he yelled across the landing, a hand cupped to his cheeks, forgetting that the incredible ringing was only in his ears, not theirs. “Where is she?”

A mouth moved in the dark crowd. The voice was a dull and distant drone.

Someone else pointed down. The faces cringed; the cracked door twitched shut as another ricochet screamed out; the stairway shook with all the frightened boots below and the chasing ones above. Marck eyed the illicit power cables draped over the railing and remembered the farmers attempting to steal electricity from the level below. He hurried down the stairs, following the thick cords, desperate to find Shirly.

One level down, positive that his wife would be inside, Marck braved the open space of the landing and rushed across. He threw himself against the doors. Shots rang out. Marck grabbed the handle and tugged, shouting her name to ears as deaf as his own. The door budged, was being held fast with the sinewy restraint of unseen arms. He slapped the glass window, leaving a pink palm print, and yelled for them to open up, to let him in. Eager bullets rattled by his feet—one of them left a scar down the face of the door. Crouching and covering his head, he scurried back to the stairwell.

Marck forced himself to move downward. If Shirly was inside, she might be better off. She could strip herself of incriminating gear, blend in until things settled down. If she were below—he needed to hurry after her. Either way, down was the only direction.

At the next landing, he caught up with the same three members of Supply. The wounded man was sitting on the decking, eyes wide. The other two were tending to him, blood on their sides from supporting his weight. One of the Supply workers was a woman Marck vaguely recognized from the march up. There was a cold fire in her eyes as Marck paused to see if they needed help.

“I can carry him,” he shouted, kneeling by the wounded man.

The woman said something. Marck shook his head and pointed to his ears.

She repeated herself, lips moving in exaggeration, but Marck wasn’t able to piece it together. She gave up and shoved at his arm, pushing him away. The wounded man clutched his stomach, a red stain ballooning out from his abdomen all the way to his crotch. His hands clasped something protruding there, a small wheel spinning on the end of a steel post. The leg of a chair.

The woman pulled a bomb from her satchel, one of those pipes that promised so much violence. It was solemnly passed to the wounded man, who accepted it, his knuckles white, his hands trembling.

The two members of Supply pulled Marck away—away from the man with the large piece of office furniture sprouting from his oozing stomach. The shouts sounded distant, but he knew they were nearby. They were practically in his ear. He found himself yanked backwards, transfixed by the vacant stare on the face of this doomed and wounded man. His eyes locked onto Marck’s. The man held the bomb away from himself, fingers curled around that terrible cylinder of steel, a grim clench of teeth jutting along his jawline.

Marck glanced up the stairwell where the boots were finally gaining on them, coming into view, black and bloodless, this tireless and superior enemy. They came down the dripping trail Marck and the others had left behind, coming for them with their ammo that never failed.

He stumbled down the stairwell backwards, half-dragged by the others, one hand on the railing, eyes drifting to the swinging door opening behind the man they’d left behind.

A young face appeared there, a curious boy, rushing out to see. A tangle of adult hands scrambled to pull him back.

Marck was hauled down the stairs, too far down the curving stairs to see what happened next. But his ears, as deadened as they were, caught the popping and zinging of gunfire, and then a blast, a roaring explosion that shook the great stairwell, that knocked him and the others down, slamming him against the railing. His rifle clattered toward the edge—Marck lunged for it. He grabbed it before it could escape and go tumbling into space.

Shaking his head, stunned, he pushed himself up to his hands and knees and managed to rise slowly to his feet. Senseless, he staggered forward down the shuddering steps, the treads beneath his feet ringing and vibrating as the silo around them all continued its spiral into dark madness.

2

The first moment of true rest came hours later at Supply, on the upper edge of the down deep. There was talk of holding there, of setting up some kind of barrier, but it wasn’t clear how the entire stairway could be blocked to include the open space between the railing and the concrete cylinder beyond. This was the gap where the singing bullets lived, a place where jumpers were known to meet their ends, and where their enemy could surely find some way to scamper down.

Marck’s hearing had improved during the last leg of his run. Enough to grow weary of the rhythmic clomp of his own boots, the sound of his pained grunts, the noise of his exhausted pants for air. He heard someone say that the last explosion had wrecked the stairway, had impeded the chase. But for how long? What was the damage? No one knew.

Tensions ran high on the landing; the news of McLain’s death had unsettled the people of Supply. The wounded in yellow coveralls were taken inside, but it was suggested—and not gently—that Mechanical’s injured would be better off receiving treatment further below. Where they belonged.

Marck waded through these arguments, the voices still somewhat muffled and distant. He asked everyone about Shirly, several in yellow shrugging as if they didn’t know her. One guy said she’d already gone down with some of the other wounded. He said it a second time, louder, before Marck was sure he’d heard him.

It was good news, and he figured as much. He was about to leave when his wife emerged without warning from the anxious crowd, startling him.

Her eyes widened as she recognized him. And then her gaze fell to his wounded arm.

“Oh, God!”

She threw her arms around him, pressed her face against his neck. Marck hugged her with one arm, his rifle between them, the barrel cold against his quivering cheek.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

She latched to his neck, her forehead finding his shoulder, and said something he couldn’t hear but could feel against his skin. She made room to inspect his arm.

“I can’t hear,” he told her.

“I’m fine,” she said, louder. She shook her head, her eyes wide and wet. “I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for any of it. Is it true about Knox? What happened? How bad was it?”

She focused on his wound, and her hands felt good on his arm. Strong and confident. The crowd was thinning as members of Mechanical retreated further down the stairwell. Several in Supply yellow treated Marck to cold stares, eyeing his wound as if worried it would soon be their problem.

“Knox is dead,” he told her. “McLain, too. A few others. I was right there when the blast went off—”

He looked down at his arm, which she had exposed by tearing away his ripped and stained undershirt.

“Were you shot?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It happened so fast.” He looked over his shoulder. “Where’s everyone going? Why aren’t we holding up here?”

Shirly set her teeth and jerked her head at the door, which was two-deep with yellow coveralls. “Don’t think we’re wanted,” she said, her voice raised so he could hear. “I’ve got to clean this wound. I think some of the bomb is in you.”

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “I’ve just been looking for you. I’ve been worried sick.”

He saw that his wife was crying, unbroken tear tracks standing out amid the beads of sweat.

“I thought you were gone,” she said. He had to read her lips to make it out. “I thought they had—that you were—”

She bit her lip and stared at him with uncharacteristic fear. Marck had never seen his wife phased, not by a sprung casement leak, not by a cave-in deep in the mine that trapped several of their close friends, not even when Juliette was sent to cleaning. But heaps of dread were locked up in her expression now. And that scared him in a way the bombs and bullets couldn’t.

“Let’s hurry after the others,” he said, taking her hand. He could feel the exposed nerves on the landing, the gazes begging them to be off.

When shouts rang down from above once more and the members of Supply retreated to the safety of their doorway, Marck knew this brief moment of respite was over. But it was okay. He’d found his wife. She was unharmed. There was little anyone could do to him now.

When they reached one-thirty-nine together, Marck knew they’d made it. His legs had somehow held out. His blood loss hadn’t stopped him. With his wife helping him along, they passed the last landing before Mechanical, and all he could think about was holding the line against those bastards who were taking shots at them from above. Inside Mechanical, they would have power, safety in numbers, the advantage of home turf. More importantly, they would be able to bandage wounds and get some rest. That’s what he sorely needed: Rest.

He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to. As his knees buckled, and Shirly caught him, he finally noticed the jam of people at the security station leading into Mechanical.

The crew that had stayed behind while the rest marched up to fight had been busy. Steel plates had been welded solid across the wide security entrance. The diamond-studded sheeting stood from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Sparks hissed along one edge as someone worked to complete the job from the inside. The sudden flurry of refugees and wounded amassed in a crowd desperate to get in. Mechanics shoved and jostled against the barrier. They screamed and beat on the steel plates, mad with fear.

“What the hell?” Marck cried. He followed Shirly as she pressed into the back of the crowd. At the front, someone was crawling on the floor, wiggling on their belly through the tightest of gaps, a rectangle left open below the security turnstile wide enough to slide through, easy enough to defend.

“Easy! Wait your turn,” someone ahead of them shouted.

Yellow coveralls were mixed in with the others. Some were mechanics who had donned disguises—some seemed to be from Supply, helping the wounded, mixed up in the wrong crowd or not trusting their own level for safety.

As Marck attempted to usher Shirly toward the front, a shot rang out, the thwack and clatter of a hot ball of lead striking nearby. He changed directions and pulled her back toward the stairs. The crush around the impossibly small entrance grew frantic. There was a lot of yelling back and forth through the hole, people on this side shouting that they were being shot at, those on the other side yelling “One at a time!”

Several were on their bellies, scrambling for the tiny hole. One got his arms inside and was pulled through, sliding across the steel grating and disappearing into the dark space. Two others tried to be next, jostling for position. They were all exposed to the open stairwell above. Another shot rang out, and someone fell, clutching a shoulder and screaming “I’m hit!” The throng dispersed. Several ran back to the stairs where the overhang of the treads protected them from the gunfire. The rest were in chaos, all trying to fit through a space expressly designed to allow no more than one at a time.

Shirly screamed and squeezed Marck’s arm as another person was shot. A mechanic fell to the ground and doubled over in pain. She yelled at her husband, asking him what they should do.

Marck dropped his rucksack, kissed her cheek, and ran with his rifle back up the stairs. He tried to take them two at a time, but his legs were too sore. Another shot rang out, the ricochet of a miss. His body felt incredibly heavy, slow like in a bad dream. He approached the landing of one-thirty-nine with his gun level, but the shooters were further up, peppering the crowd from higher above.

He checked that he had a fresh round in the homebuilt gun, cocked it, and edged out onto the landing. Several men in the silver of security were leaning out over the railing above, barrels trained down toward the ground floor of Mechanical. One of the men tapped his neighbor and pointed toward Marck. Marck watched all this down the length of his own barrel.

He fired a shot, and a black rifle tumbled toward him from above, the arms of its wielder slumping over the railing before sagging down and disappearing.

Gunfire erupted, but he was already diving back toward the stairs. The shouting grew furious both above and below him. Marck went to the other side of the stairs, away from where he’d last been seen, and peered down. The crowd was thinning by the security barrier. More and more people were being pulled through. He could see Shirly looking up, shielding her eyes against the stairway lights above.

Boots rang out behind him. Marck reloaded, turned, and aimed at the highest step he could see along the upward spiral. He waited for whatever was heading down toward him.

When the first boot appeared, he steadied himself, allowed more of the man to sink before his barrel, and then he pulled the trigger.

Another black rifle clattered against the steps and bounced through the railing; another man sagged to his knees.

Marck turned and ran. He lost his grip on his own gun, felt it bang against his shins as it skittered away from him, and he didn’t stop to retrieve it. He slid down the steps, lost his footing, landed on his ass and bounced back up. He tried taking the steps two at a time, was running as if in a dream, not fast enough, legs like rusted steel—

There was a bang, a muffled roar behind him, and somehow, someone had caught up, had punched him in the back, had hit him.

Marck sprawled forward and bounced down the steps, his chin striking the steel treads. Blood was in his mouth. He tried to crawl, got his feet beneath him, and stumbled forward.

Another roar, another punch to the back, the feeling that he’d been bit and kicked at the same time.

This is what it feels like to be shot, he thought numbly. He spilled down the last few steps, lost sensation in his legs, crashed to the grating.

The bottom floor was nearly empty. One person stood beside the tiny hole. Another was half in and half out, boots kicking.

Marck saw that it was Shirly, on her belly, looking back at him. They were both lying on the floor. So comfortable on the floor. The steel was cool against his cheek. There were no more steps to run down, no bullets to load, nothing to shoot.

Shirly was screaming, not as happy as he was to be lying there.

One of her arms extended back out of that small black rectangle, reached for him past the rough cuts in the steel plates. Her body slid forward, pulled by some force beyond, pushed by this nice person in yellow still standing by the strange wall of steel where the entrance to his home used to be.

“Go,” Marck told her, wishing she wouldn’t scream. Blood flecked the floor before him, marking his words. “I love you—”

And as if by command, her feet slid into the darkness, her screams swallowed by that rectangular, shadowy maw.

And the person in yellow turned. The nice man’s eyes grew wide, his mouth fell open, and then his body jerked from the violence of gunfire.

It was the last thing Marck saw, this man’s deathly dance.

And he only distantly felt, but for a tremble of time, the end of him that came next.

3

Walker remained in his cot and listened to the sounds of distant violence. Shouts echoed down his hallway, emanating from the entrance to Mechanical. The familiar patter of gunfire came next, the pop pop pop of the good guys followed by the ratatatat of the bad.

There was an incredible bang, the roar of blasting powder against steel, and the back and forth crackle ended for a moment. More shouting. Boots clomping down his hallway, past his door. The boots were the constant beat to the music of this new world, music Walker could hear from his cot. He could hear everything from his cot, even with the blankets drawn over his head, even with his pillow on top, even as he begged, out loud, over and over, for it to please stop.

The boots in the hallway carried with them more shouting. Walker curled up into a tight ball, knees against his chest, wondering what time it was, dreading that it was morning, time to get up.

A brief respite of silence formed, that quiet of tending to the wounded, their groans too faint to penetrate his sealed door.

Walker tried to fall asleep before the music was turned back up. But as always: the quiet was worse. During the quiet, he grew anxious as he waited for the next patter to erupt. His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away. And he would grow terrified that the resistance was finally over, that the bad guys had won and were coming for him—

Someone banged on his door—a small and angry fist unmistakable to his expert ears. Four harsh knocks, and then she was gone.

Shirly. She would have left his breakfast rations in the usual place and taken away last night’s picked-over and mostly uneaten dinner. Walker grunted and rolled his old bones over to the other side. Boots clomped. Always rushing, always anxious, forever warring. And his once quiet hallway, so far from the machines and pumps that really needed tending to, was now a busy thoroughfare. It was the entrance hall that mattered now, the funnel into which all the hate was poured. Screw the silo, the people above and the machines below, just fight over this worthless patch of ground, pile the bodies on either side until one gives, do it because it was yesterday’s cause, and because nobody wanted to remember back any further than yesterday.

But Walker did. He remembered—

The door to his workshop burst open. Through a gap in his filthy cocoon, Walker could see Jenkins, a boy in his twenties but with a beard that made him appear older, a boy who had inherited this mess the moment Knox died. The lad stormed through the maze of workbenches and scattered parts, aiming straight for Walker’s cot.

“I’m up,” Walker groaned, hoping Jenkins would go away.

“No you’re not.” Jenkins reached the cot and prodded Walker in the ribs with the barrel of his gun. “C’mon, old man, up!”

Walker tensed away from him. He wiggled an arm loose to wave the boy away.

Jenkins peered down gravely, a frown buried in his beard, his young eyes wrinkled with worry. “We need that radio fixed, Walk. We’re getting battered out there. And if I can’t listen in, I don’t think I can defend this place.”

Walker tried to push himself upright. Jenkins grabbed the strap of his coveralls and gave him some rough assistance.

“I was up all night on it,” Walker told him. He rubbed his face. His breath was awful.

“Is it fixed? We need that radio, Walk. You do know Hank risked his life to get that thing to us, right?”

“Well, he should’ve risked a bit more and sent a manual,” Walker complained. He pressed his hands to his knees, and with much complaint from his joints, he stood and staggered toward the workbench, his blankets spilling to the floor in a heap. His legs were still half asleep, his hands tingling with the weak sensation of not being able to form a proper fist.

“I got the battery sorted,” he told Jenkins. “Turns out that wasn’t the problem.” Walker glanced toward his open door and saw Harper, a refinery worker turned soldier, standing in the hallway. Harper had become Jenk’s number two when Pieter was killed. Now he was peering down at Walker’s breakfast, practically salivating into it.

“Help yourself,” Walker called out. He waved dismissively at the steaming bowl.

Harper glanced up, eyes wide, but that was as long as he hesitated. He leaned his rifle against the wall and sat down in the workshop doorway, shoveling food into his mouth.

Jenkins grunted disapprovingly but didn’t say anything.

“So, see here?” Walker showed him the arrangement on the workbench where various pieces of the small radio unit had been separated and were now wired together so everything was accessible. “I’ve got constant power.” He patted the transformer he had built to bypass the battery. “And the speakers work.” He keyed the transmit button, and there was a pop and hiss of static from his bench speakers. “But nothing comes through. They aren’t saying anything.” He turned to Jenkins. “I’ve had it on all night, and I’m not a deep sleeper.”

Jenkins studied him.

“I would’ve heard,” he insisted. “They aren’t talking.”

Jenkins rubbed his face, made a fist. He kept his eyes closed, his forehead resting in one palm, a weariness in his voice. “You think maybe something broke when you tore it apart?”

“Disassembled,” Walker said with a sigh. “I didn’t tear it apart.”

Jenkins gazed up at the ceiling and relaxed his fist. “So you think they aren’t using them anymore, is that it? Do you reckon they know we have one? I swear, I think this damn priest they sent is a spy. Shit’s been fallin’ apart since we let him in here to give last rites.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing,” Walker admitted. “I think they’re still using the radios, they’ve just excluded this one somehow. Look, I made another antenna, a stronger one.”

He showed him the wires snaking up from the workbench and spiraling around the steel beam rafters overhead.

Jenkins followed his finger, then snapped his head toward the door. There was more shouting down the hallway. Harper stopped eating for a moment and listened. But only for a moment. He dug his spoon back into the cornmush.

“I just need to know when I’ll be able to listen in again.” Jenkins tapped the workbench with his finger, then picked his rifle back up. “I don’t need to know about all this—” He waved a hand at Walker’s work. “—all this wizardry.”

Walker plopped down on his favorite stool and peered at the myriad circuits that once had been jammed into the radio’s cramped innards. “It’s not wizardry,” he said. “It’s electrics.” He pointed at two of the boards, connected by wires he had lengthened and re-soldered so he could analyze all the bits more closely. “I know what most of these do, but you’ve gotta remember that nothing about these devices are known, not outside of IT, anyway. I’m havin’ to theorize while I tinker.”

Jenkins rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Just let me know when you’ve got something. All your other work orders can wait. This is the only thing that matters. Got that?”

Walker nodded. Jenkins turned and barked at Harper to get the hell off the floor.

They left Walker on his stool, their boots picking up the beat of the music again.

Alone, he stared down at the machine strung out across his workbench, its little green lights on its mysterious boards lit up and taunting him. His hand drifted to his magnifiers as if by their own accord, as if by decades of habit, when all Walker really wanted was to crawl back into his cot, to wrap his cocoon around himself, to disappear.

He needed help, he thought. He looked around at all that required doing and as ever, his thoughts turned to Scottie, his little shadow. There had been a slice of time, somewhere sliding away from him now and fading into the slippery past, where Walker had been a happy man. Where his life should’ve ended to keep him from enduring any of the suffering beyond. But he had made it through that brief bliss and now could hardly recall it. He couldn’t imagine what it felt like to rise with anticipation in the morning, to fall asleep with contentment at the end of every day.

It was only fear and dread anymore. And between: regret.

He had started all of this, all the noise and violence. Walker was convinced of that. Every life lost was on his wrinkled hands. Every tear shed was by his actions. Nobody said it, but he could feel them thinking it. One little message to Supply, one favor for Juliette, just a chance at dignity, an opportunity to test her wild and horrible theory, to bury herself out of sight—and now look at the cascade of events, the eruption of anger, the senseless violence.

It wasn’t worth it, he decided. This was how the math always added up: not worth it. Nothing seemed worth it anymore.

He bent over his workbench and set his old hands to tinkering. This was what he did, what he had always done. There was no escaping it now, no stopping those fingers with their papery skin, those palms with their deep lines that seemed to never end, not when they should. He followed those lines down to his bony wrists where weak little veins ran like buried wire with blue insulation.

One snip, and off he goes to see Scottie, to see Juliette.

It was tempting.

Especially since Walker figured, wherever they were, whether the priests were onto something or simply ratshit mad, he figured both of his old friends were in far better places than he…

4

A tiny strand of copper wire stood at right angles to the rest. It was like a silo landing shooting off the great stairway, a bit of flat amid the twisted spiral. As Juliette wrapped the pads of her fingers around the wire and worked the splice into place, this jutting barb sank into her finger, stinging her like some angry insect.

Juliette cursed and shook her hand. She very nearly dropped the other end of the wire, which would’ve sent it tumbling several levels down.

She wiped the welling spot of blood onto her gray coveralls, then finished the splice and secured the wires to the railing to keep the strain off. She still didn’t see how they had come loose, but everything in this cursed and dilapidated silo seemed to be coming apart. Her senses were the least of it.

She leaned far out over the railing and placed her hand on the hodgepodge of pipes and tubing fastened to the concrete wall of the stairwell. She tried to discern, with hands chilled by the cool air of the deep, any vibration from water gurgling through the pipe.

“Anything?” she called down to Solo. There seemed to be the slightest tremor in the plastic tubing, but it could’ve been her pulse rather than its.

“I think so!”

Solo’s thin voice echoed from far below.

Juliette frowned and peered down the dimly lit shaft, down that gap between steel step and thick concrete. She would have to go see for herself.

Leaving her small tool bag on the steps—no danger of anyone coming along to trip over it—she took the treads two at a time and spiraled her way deeper into the silo. The electrical wiring and the long snake of pipes spun into view with each rotation, drips of purple adhesive marking every laborious joint she’d cut and fastened by hand.

Other wiring ran alongside hers, electrical cables snaking from IT far above to power the grow lights of the lower farms. Juliette wondered who had rigged this stuff up. It hadn’t been Solo; this wiring had been strung during the early days of silo 17’s downfall. Solo had simply become the lucky beneficiary of someone else’s hard and desperate work. Grow lights now obeyed their timers, the greenery obeyed the urge to blossom, and beyond the stale stench of oil and gas, of floods and unmoving air, the ripe tinge of plants growing out of control could be nosed from several landings away.

Juliette stopped at the landing of one-thirty-six, the last dry landing before the flood. Solo had tried to warn her, had tried to tell her even as she lusted over the image of the massive diggers on the wall-sized schematic. Hell, she should’ve known about the flood without being told. Groundwater was forever seeping into her own silo, a hazard of living below the water table. Without power to the pumps, the water would naturally make its way in and rise.

Out on the landing, she leaned on the steel railing and caught her breath. A dozen steps below, Solo stood on the single dry tread their efforts had exposed. Nearly three weeks of wiring and plumbing, of scrapping a good section of the lower hydroponics farm, of finding a pump and routing the overflow to the water treatment facility tanks, and they had uncovered a single step.

Solo turned and smiled up at her. “It’s working, right?” He scratched his head, his wild hair jutting at all angles, his beard flecked with gray that his youthful jubilance denied. The hopeful question hung in the air, a cloud visible from the cold of the down deep.

“It’s not working enough,” Juliette told him, annoyed with the progress. She peered over the railing, past the jutting toes of borrowed boots and to the colorful slick of water below. The mirrored surface of oil and gas stood perfectly still. Beneath this coat of slime, the emergency lights of the stairwell glowed eerily green, lending the depths a haunting look that matched the rest of the empty silo.

In that silence, Juliette heard a faint gurgle in the pipe beside her. She even thought she could hear the distant buzz of the submerged pump a dozen or so feet below the oil and gas. She tried to will the water up that tube, up twenty levels and hundreds of joints to the vast and empty treatment tanks above.

Solo coughed into his fist. “What if we install another—?”

Juliette raised her hand to quiet him. She was doing the math.

The volume of the eight levels of Mechanical were difficult to figure, so many corridors and rooms that may or may not be flooded, but she could guess the height of the cylindrical shaft from Solo’s feet to the security station. The lone pump had moved the level of the flood a little less than a foot in two weeks. Eighty or ninety feet to go. With another pump, say a year to get to the entrance of Mechanical. Depending on how watertight the intervening levels were, it could be much more. Mechanical itself could take three or four times as long to clear.

“What about another pump?” Solo insisted.

Juliette felt nauseous. Even with three more of the small pumps from the hydroponic farms, and with three more runs of pipe and wiring to go with them, she was looking at a year, possibly two, before the silo was perfectly dry. She wasn’t sure if she had a year. Just a few weeks of being in that abandoned place, alone with a half-sane man, and she was already starting to hear whispers, to forget where she was leaving things, finding lights on she swore she’d turned off. Either she was going crazy, or Solo found humor in making her feel that way. Two years of this life, of her home so close but so impossibly far away—

She leaned over the railing, feeling like she really might be sick. As she gazed down at the water and through her reflection cast in that film of oil, she suddenly considered risks even crazier than two years of near-solitude.

“Two years,” she told Solo. It felt like voicing a death sentence. “Two years. That’s how long this’ll take if we add three more pumps. Six months at least on the stairwell, but the rest will go slower.”

“Two years!” Solo sung. “Two years two years!” He tapped his boot twice against the water on the step below, sending her reflection into sickening waves of distortion. He spun in place, peering up at her. “That’s no time!”

Juliette fought to control her frustration. Two years would feel like forever. And what would they find down there, anyway? What condition would the main generator be in? Or the diggers? A machine submerged under fresh water might be preserved as long as air didn’t get to it, but as soon as any of it was exposed by the pumps, the corrosion would begin. It was the nastiness of oxygen working on wet metal that spelled doom for anything useful down there. Machines and tools would need to be dried immediately and then oiled. And with only two of them—

Juliette watched, horrified, as Solo bent down, waved away the film of grease at his feet, and scooped up two palms of the brackish filth below. He slurped noisily and happily.

—okay, with only one of them working diligently at salvaging the machines, it wouldn’t be enough.

Maybe she’d be able to salvage the backup generator. It would require less work and still provide plenty of power.

“What to do for two years?” Solo asked, wiping his beard with the back of his hand and looking up at her.

Juliette shook her head. “We’re not waiting two years,” she told him. The last three weeks in silo 17 had been too much. This, she didn’t say.

“Okay,” he said, shrugging. He clomped up the stairwell in his too-big boots. His gray coveralls were also baggy, like he was still trying to wear clothing tailored for his father. He joined Juliette on the landing, smiled at her through his glistening beard. “You look like you have more projects,” he said happily.

She nodded silently. Anything the two of them worked on, whether it was fixing the sloppy wiring of the long-ago dead, or improving the farms, or repairing a light fixture’s ballast, Solo referred to as a “project.” And he professed to love projects. She decided it was something from his youth, some sort of survival mechanism he’d concocted over the years that allowed him to tackle whatever needed doing with a smile instead of horror or loneliness.

“Oh, we’ve got quite a project ahead of us,” Juliette told him, already dreading the job. She started making a mental list of all the tools and spares they’d need to scrounge on their way back up.

Solo laughed and clapped his hands. “Good,” he said. “Back to the workshop!” He twirled his finger over his head, pointing up at the long climb ahead of them.

“Not yet,” she said. “First, some lunch at the farms. Then we need to stop by Supply for some more things. And then I need some time alone in the server room.” Juliette turned away from the railing and that deep shaft of silver-green water below. “Before we get started in the workshop,” she said, “I’d like to make a call—”

“A call!” Solo pouted. “Not a call. You spend all your time on that stupid thing—”

Juliette ignored him and hit the stairs. She began the long slog up, her fifth in three weeks. And she knew Solo was right: she was spending too much time making calls, too much time with those headphones pulled down over her ears, listening to them beep. She knew it was crazy, that she was going slowly mad in that place, but sitting at the back of that empty server with her microphone close to her lips and the world made quiet by the cups over her ears—just having that wire linking her from a dead world to one that harbored life—it was the closest she could get in silo 17 to making herself feel sane.

5

The pages of the book flashed crimson just as Lukas was getting to the descriptions of the battlefields. He stopped reading and glanced up at the overhead lights. Their steady white had been replaced with the throbbing red, which meant someone was in the server room above him. He retrieved the loose silver thread curled up on the knee of his coveralls and laid it carefully into the spine of the book. Closing the old tome, he returned it to its tin case with care, then slid it into the gap on the bookshelf, completing the vast wall of silvery spines. Padding silently across the room, he bent down in front of the computer and shook the mouse to wake the screen.

A window popped up with live views of the servers, only distorted from such wide angles. It was another secret in a room overflowing with them, this ability to see distant places. Lukas searched through the cameras, wondering if it was Sammi or another tech coming to make a repair. His grumbling stomach, meanwhile, hoped it was someone bringing him lunch.

In camera four, he finally spotted his visitor: A short figure in gray coveralls sporting a mustache and glasses. He was slightly stooped, a tray in his hands dancing with silverware, a sloshing glass of water, and a covered plate, all of it partly supported by his protruding belly. Bernard glanced up at the camera as he walked by, his eyes piercing Lukas from a level away, a tight smile curling below his mustache.

Lukas left the computer and hurried down the hallway to get the hatch for him, his bare feet slapping softly on the cool steel grating. He scrambled up the ladder with practiced ease and slid the worn red locking handle to the side. Just as he lifted the grate, Bernard’s shadow threw the ladderway into darkness. The tray came to a clattering rest as Lukas shifted the section of flooring out of the way.

“I’m spoiling you today,” Bernard said. He sniffed and uncovered the plate. A fog of trapped steam billowed out of the metal hood—two stacks of pork ribs revealing themselves underneath.

“Wow.” Lukas felt his stomach rumble at the sight of the meat. He lifted himself out of the hatch and sat on the floor, feet dangling down by the ladder. He pulled the tray into his lap and picked up the silverware. “I thought we had the silo on strict rations, at least until the resistance was over.”

He cut a piece of tender meat free and popped it in his mouth. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.” He chewed and savored the rush of proteins, reminded himself to be thankful for the animal’s sacrifice.

“The rations haven’t been lifted,” Bernard said. He crouched down and waved at the plate. “We had a pocket of resistance flare up in the bazaar, and this poor guy found himself in the crossfire. I wasn’t about to let him go to waste. Most of the meat, of course, went to the wives and husbands of those we’ve lost—”

“Mmm?” Lukas swallowed. “How many?”

“Five, plus the three from that first attack.”

Lukas shook his head.

“It’s not bad, considering.” Bernard brushed his mustache with his hand and watched Lukas eat. Lukas gestured with his fork while he chewed, offering him some, but Bernard waved him away. The older man leaned back on the empty server that housed the uplink and the locking handle for the ladderway. Lukas tried not to react.

“So how long will I need to stay in here?” He tried to sound calm, like any answer would do. “It’s been three weeks, right?” He cut off another bite, ignoring the vegetables. “You think a few more days?”

Bernard rubbed his cheeks and ran his fingers up through his thinning hair. “I hope, but I don’t know. I’ve left it up to Sims, who’s convinced the threat isn’t over. Mechanical has themselves barricaded pretty good down there. They’ve threatened to cut the power, but I don’t think they will. I think they finally get that they don’t control the juice up here on our levels. They probably tried to cut it before they stormed in, and then were surprised to see us all lit up.”

“You don’t think they’ll cut the power to the farms, do you?” He was thinking of the rations, his fear of the silo being starved.

Bernard frowned. “Eventually. Maybe. If they get desperate enough. But that’ll just erode whatever support those greasers have up here. Don’t worry, they’ll get hungry enough and give in. It’s all going by the book.”

Lukas nodded and took a sip of water. The pork was the best he thought he’d ever had.

“Speaking of the book,” Bernard asked, “are you catching up with your studies?”

“Yeah,” Lukas lied. He nodded. In truth, he had hardly touched the book of Order. The more interesting details were found elsewhere.

“Good. When this annoyance is over, we’ll schedule you some extra shifts in the server room. You can spend that time shadowing. Once we reschedule the election, and I don’t think anyone else will run, especially not after all this, I’ll be up-top a lot more. IT will be yours to run.”

Lukas set down the glass and picked up the cloth napkin. He wiped his mouth and thought about this. “Well, I hope you’re not talking weeks from now. I feel like I’ve got years of—”

A buzzing noise cut him off. Lukas froze, the napkin falling out of his hand and flopping to the tray.

Bernard startled away from the server like it had physically shocked him, or as if its black metallic skin had grown suddenly warm.

“Goddammit!” he said, banging the server with his fist. He fumbled inside his coveralls for his master key.

Lukas forced himself to take a bite of food, to act normal. Bernard had grown more and more agitated by the constant ringing of the server. It made him irrational. It was like living with his father again, back before the tub-gin finally bore him a hole beneath the potatoes.

“I fucking swear,” Bernard grumbled, working the series of locks in sequence. He glanced over at Lukas, who slowly chewed a piece of meat, unable suddenly to even taste it.

“I’ve got a project for you,” he said, wiggling the last lock free—which Lukas knew could stick a bit. “I want you to add a panel on the back here, just a simple LED array. Figure out some code so we can see who’s calling us. I wanna know if it’s important or if we can safely ignore it.”

He yanked the back panel off the server and set it noisily against the front of server forty, behind him. Lukas took another sip of water while Bernard peered into the machine’s dark and cavernous interior, studying the blinking lights above the little communication jacks. The black guts of the server tower and its frantic buzzing drowned out Bernard’s whispered curses.

He pulled his head out, which was bright red with anger, and turned to Lukas, who set his cup on his tray. “In fact, what I want right here is two lights.” Bernard pointed to the side of the tower. “A red light if it’s silo 17 calling. Green if it’s anyone else. You got that?”

Lukas nodded. He looked down at his tray and started cutting a potato in half, thinking suddenly of his father. Bernard turned and grabbed the server’s rear panel.

“I can pop that back on.” Lukas mumbled this around a hot mouthful of potatoes; he breathed out steam to keep his tongue from burning, swallowed, and chased it with water.

Bernard left the panel where it was. He turned and glared angrily into the pit of the machine, which continued to buzz and buzz, the overhead lights winking in alarm. “Good idea,” he said. “Maybe you can knock this project out first thing.”

Finally, the server quit its frantic calls, and the room fell silent save for the clinking of Lukas’s fork on his plate. This was like the moments of rye-stench quiet from his youth. Soon—just like his father passing out on the kitchen floor or in the bathroom—Bernard would leave.

As if on cue, his caster and boss stood, the head of IT again throwing Lukas into darkness as he blocked the overhead lights.

“Enjoy your dinner,” he said. “I’ll have Peter come by later for the dishes.”

Lukas jabbed a row of beans with his fork. “Seriously? I thought this was lunch.” He popped them into his mouth.

“It’s after eight,” Bernard said. He adjusted his coveralls. “Oh, and I spoke with your mother today.”

Lukas set his fork down. “Yeah?”

“I reminded her that you were doing important work for the silo, but she really wants to see you. I’ve talked with Sims about allowing her in here—”

“Into the server room?”

“Just inside. So she can see that you’re okay. I’d set it up elsewhere, but Sims thinks it’s a bad idea. He’s not so sure how strong the allegiance is among the techs. He’s still trying to ferret out any source of leaks—”

Lukas scoffed. “Sims is paranoid. None of our techs are gonna side with those greasers. They’re not going to betray the silo, much less you.” He picked up a bone and picked the remaining meat with his teeth.

“Still, he has me convinced to keep you as safe as possible. I’ll let you know if I can set something up so you can see her.”

Bernard leaned forward and squeezed Lukas’s shoulder. “Thanks for being patient. I’m glad to have someone under me who understands how important this job is.”

“Oh, I understand completely,” Lukas said. “Anything for the silo.”

“Good.” Another squeeze of his hand, and Bernard stood. “Keep reading the Order. Especially the sections on insurrections and uprisings. I want you to learn from this one just in case, God forbid, it ever happens on your watch.”

“I will,” Lukas said. He set down the clean bone and wiped his fingers on the napkin. Bernard turned to go.

“Oh—” Bernard stopped and turned back to him. “I know you don’t need me to remind you, but under no circumstances are you to answer this server.” He jabbed his finger at the front of the machine. If his hand had been a gun like Peter Billings carried, Lukas could imagine him emptying it into the thing. “I haven’t cleared you with the other IT heads yet, so your position could be in… well, grave danger if you were to speak with any of them before the induction.”

“Are you kidding?” Lukas shook his head. “Like I want to talk with anyone who makes you nervous. No frickin’ thanks.”

Bernard smiled and wiped at his forehead. “You’re a good man, Lukas. I’m glad I’ve got you.”

“And I’m glad to serve,” Lukas said. He reached for another rib and smiled up at his caster while Bernard beamed down at him. Finally, the older man turned to go, his boots ringing across the steel grates and fading toward that massive door that held Lukas prisoner among the machines and all their secrets.

Lukas ate and listened as Bernard’s new code was keyed into the lock, a cadence of familiar but unknown beeps—a code Lukas no longer possessed.

For your own good, Bernard had told him. He chewed a piece of fat as the heavy door clanged shut, the red lights below his feet and down the ladderway blinking off.

Lukas dropped the bone onto his plate. He pushed the potatoes aside, fighting the urge to gag at the sight of them. Setting the tray on the grating, he pulled his feet out of the ladderway and moved to the back of the open and quiet server.

The headphones slid easily out of their pouch. He pulled them down over his ears, his palms brushing the three-week growth of beard on his face. Grabbing the cord, he slotted it into the jack labeled “17.”

There was a series of beeps as the call was placed. He imagined the buzzing on the other side, the flashing lights.

Lukas waited, unable to breathe.

“Hello?”

The voice sang in his earphones. Lukas smiled.

“Hey,” he said.

He sat down, leaned back against server 40, and got more comfortable.

“How’s everything going over there?”

6

Walker waved his arms over his head as he attempted to explain his new theory for how the radio probably worked.

“So the sound, these transmissions, they’re like ripples in the air, you see?” He chased the invisible voices with his fingers. Above him, the third large antenna he’d built in two days hung suspended from the rafters. “These ripples run up and down the wire, up and down—” He gesticulated the length of antenna. “—which is why longer is better. It snags more of them out of the air.”

But if these ripples are everywhere, then why aren’t we catching any?

Walker bobbed his head and wagged his finger in appreciation. It was a good question. A damn good question. “We’ll catch them this time,” he said. “We’re getting close.” He adjusted the new amplifier he’d built, one much more powerful than the tiny thing in Hank’s old hip radio. “Listen,” he said.

A crackling hiss filled the room, like someone twisting fistfuls of plastic sheeting.

I don’t hear it.

“That’s because you aren’t being quiet. Listen.”

There. It was faint, but a crunch of transmitted noise emerged from the hiss.

I heard it!

Walker nodded with pride. Less from the thing he was building and more for his bright understudy. He glanced at the door, made sure it was still closed. He only spoke with Scottie when it was closed.

“What I don’t get is why I can’t make it clearer.” He scratched his chin. “Unless it’s because we’re too deep in the earth—”

We’ve always been this deep, Scottie pointed out. That sheriff we met years ago, he was always talking on his radio just fine.

Walker scratched the stubble on his cheek. His little shadow, as usual, had a good point.

“Well, there is this one little circuit board I can’t figure out. I think it’s supposed to clean up the signal. Everything seems to pass through it.” Walker spun around on his stool to face the workbench, which had become dominated by all the green boards and colorful tangles of wires needed for this most singular project. He lowered his magnifier and peered at the board in question. He imagined Scottie leaning in for a closer inspection.

What’s this sticker?

Scottie pointed to the tiny dot of a white sticker with the number “18” printed on it. Walker was the one who had taught Scottie that it’s always okay to admit when you didn’t know something. If you couldn’t do this, you would never truly know anything.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But you see how this little board slotted into the radio with ribbon cables?”

Scottie nodded.

“It’s like it was meant to be swapped out. Like maybe it burns up easy. I’m thinking this is the part that’s holding us up, like a blown fuse.”

Can we bypass it?

“Bypass it?” Walker wasn’t sure what he meant.

Go around it. In case it’s burned out. Short it.

“We might blow something else. I mean, it wouldn’t be in here if it weren’t truly needed.” Walker thought for a minute. He wanted to add that the same could be said of Scottie, of the boy’s calming voice. But then, he never was good at telling his shadow how he felt. Only what he knew.

Well, that’s what I would try—

There was a knock at the door followed by the squeal of hinges left purposefully loud. Scottie melted into the shadows beneath the workbench, his voice trailing off in the hiss of static from the speakers.

“Walk, what the hell’s going on here?”

He swiveled around on his stool, the lovely voice and harsh words soldered together as only Shirly could fuse them. She came into his workshop with a covered tray, a thin-lipped frown of disappointment on her face.

Walker lowered the volume on the static. “I’m trying to fix the—”

“No, what’s this nonsense I hear about you not eating?” She set the tray in front of him and pulled off the cover, releasing the steam off a plate of corn. “Did you eat your breakfast this morning, or did you give it to someone else?”

“That’s too much,” he said, looking down at three or four rations of food.

“Not when you’ve been giving yours away it isn’t.” She slapped a fork into his hand. “Eat. You’re about to fall out of your coveralls.”

Walker stared at the corn. He stirred the food with his fork, but his stomach was cramped beyond hunger. He felt like he’d gone long enough that he’d never be hungry again. The cramp would just tighten and tighten into a little fist and then he’d be just fine forever—

“Eat, dammit.”

He blew on a bite of the stuff, had no desire to consume it, but put some in his mouth to make Shirly happy.

“And I don’t want to hear that any of my men are hanging around your door sweet-talking you, okay? You are not to give them your rations. Got that? Take another bite.”

Walker swallowed. He had to admit, the burn of the food felt good going down. He gathered up another small bite. “I’ll be sick if I eat all this,” he said.

“And I’ll murder you if you don’t.”

He glanced over at her, expecting to see her smiling. But Shirly didn’t smile anymore. Nobody did.

“What the hell is that noise?” She turned and surveyed the workshop, hunting for the source of it.

Walker set down his fork and adjusted the volume. The knob was soldered onto a series of resistors; the knob itself was called a potentiometer. He had a sudden impulse to explain all of this, anything to keep from eating. He could explain how he had figured out the amplifier, how the potentiometer was really just an adjustable resistor, how each little twist of the dial could hone the volume to whatever he—

Walker stopped. He picked up his fork and stirred his corn. He could hear Scottie whispering from the shadows.

“That’s better,” Shirly said, referring to the reduced hiss. “That’s a worse sound than the old generator used to make. Hell, if you can turn that down, why ever have it up so loud?”

Walker took a bite. While he chewed, he set down his fork and grabbed his soldering iron from its stand. He rummaged in a small parts bin for another scrap potentiometer.

“Hold these,” he told Shirly around his food. He showed her the wires hanging off the potentiometer and lined them up with the sharp silver prods from his multimeter.

“If it means you’ll keep eating.” She pinched the wires and the prods together between her fingers and thumbs.

Walker scooped up another bite, forgetting to blow on it. The corn burned his tongue. He swallowed without chewing, the fire melting its way through his chest. Shirly told him to slow down, to take it easy. He ignored her and twisted the knob of the potentiometer. The needle on his multimeter danced, letting him know the part was good.

“Why don’t you take a break from this stuff and eat while I’m here to watch?” Shirly slid a stool away from the workbench and plopped down on it.

“Because it’s too hot,” he said, waving his hand at his mouth. He grabbed a spool of solder and touched it to the tip of the hot soldering iron, coating it with bright silver. “I need you to hold the black wire to this.” He lightly touched the iron to the tiny leg of a resistor on the board labeled “18.” Shirly leaned over the bench and squinted at the one he was indicating.

“And then you’ll finish your dinner?”

“Swear.”

She narrowed her eyes at him as if to say that she took this promise seriously, then did as he had shown her.

Her hands weren’t as steady as Scottie’s, but he lowered his magnifier and made quick work of the connection. He showed her where the red wire went and tacked that one on as well. Even if none of this worked, he could always remove it and tinker with something else.

“Now don’t let it get cold,” Shirly told him. “I know you won’t eat it if it cools, and I’m not going back to the mess hall to warm it up for you.”

Walker stared at the little board with the numbered sticker on it. He grudgingly took up the fork and scooped a sizable bite.

“How’re things out there?” he asked, blowing on the corn.

“Things are shit,” Shirly said. “Jenkins and Harper are arguing over whether or not they should kill the power to the entire silo. But then some of the guys who were there, you know, when Knox and—”

She looked away, left the sentence unfinished.

Walker nodded and chewed his food.

“Some of them say the power in IT was on to the max that morning, even though we had it shut down from here.”

“Maybe it was rerouted,” Walker said. “Or battery backups. They have those, you know.” He took another bite, but was dying to spin the potentiometer. He was pretty sure the static had changed when he’d made the second connection.

“I keep telling them it’ll do us more harm than good to screw with the silo like that. It’ll just turn the rest of them against us.”

“Yeah. Hey, can you adjust this? You know, while I eat?”

He turned the volume up on the static, needing two hands to work the loose knob as it dangled from its bright wires. Shirly seemed to shrink from the noise crackling out of his homebuilt speakers. She reached for the volume knob as if to turn it down—

“No, I want you to spin the one we just installed.”

“What the hell, Walk? Just eat your damn food already.”

He took another bite. And for all her cussing and protests, Shirly began adjusting the knob.

“Slowly,” he said around his food.

And sure enough, the static from the speakers modulated. It was as if the crunching plastic had begun to move and bounce around the room.

“What am I even doing?”

“Helping an old man—”

“—yeah, I might need you up here on this one—”

Walker dropped his fork and held out his hand for her to stop. She had gone past it though, into the static once more. Shirly seemed to intuit this. She bit her lip and wiggled the knob the other way until the voices returned.

“Sounds good. It’s quiet down here anyway. You need me to bring my kit?”

“You did it,” Shirly whispered to Walker, as if these people could hear her if she spoke too loudly. “You fixed—”

Walker held up his hand. The chatter continued.

“Negative. You can leave the kit. Deputy Roberts is already here with hers. She’s sweeping for clues as I speak—”

“What I’m doing is working while he does nothing!” a faint voice called out in the background.

Walker turned to Shirly while laughter rolled through the radio, more than one person enjoying the joke. It had been a long time since he’d heard anyone laugh. But he wasn’t laughing. Walker felt his brows furrow in confusion.

“What’s wrong?” Shirly asked. “We did it! We fixed it!” She got off her stool and turned as if to run and tell Jenkins.

“Wait!” Walker wiped his beard with his palm and jabbed his fork toward the strewn collection of radio parts. Shirly stood a pace away, looking back at him, smiling.

“Deputy Roberts?” Walker asked. “Who in all the levels is that?”

7

Juliette flicked the lights on in the Suit Lab as she hauled in her latest load from Supply. Unlike Solo, she didn’t take the constant source of power for granted. Not knowing where it came from made her nervous that it wouldn’t last. So while he had the habit, the compulsion even, of turning every light on to full and leaving it there, she tried to conserve the mysterious energy as much as possible.

She dropped her recent scavenges on her cot, thinking of Walker as she did so. Is this how he ended up living amongst his work? Was it the obsession, the drive, the need to keep hammering away at a series of never-ending problems until he couldn’t sleep more than a few paces from them?

The more she understood the old man, the farther away from him she felt, the lonelier. She sat down and rubbed her legs, her thighs and calves tight from the most recent hike up. She may’ve been gaining her porter legs these last weeks, but they were still sore all the time, the ache in them a constant new sensation. Squeezing the muscles transformed that ache into pain, which she somehow preferred. The sharp and definable sensations were better than the dull and nameless kind. She liked feelings she could understand.

Juliette kicked her boots off—strange to think of these scavenged things as hers—and stood up. That was enough rest. It was as much rest as she could allow herself to have. She carried her canvas sacks to one of the fancy workbenches, everything in the Suit Lab nicer than what she’d had in Mechanical. Even the parts engineered to fail were constructed with a level of chemical and engineering sophistication she could only begin to appreciate now that she understood their evil intent. She had amassed piles of washers and seals, the good from Supply and the leftover bad from the Lab, to see how the system worked. They sat along the back of her main workbench, a reminder of the diabolical murderousness with which she’d been sent away.

She dumped out the parts from Supply and thought about how strange it was to have access to, to live in this forbidden heart of some other silo. It was stranger still to appreciate these workbenches, these immaculate tools, all arranged for the purpose of sending people like her to their death.

Looking around at the walls, at the dozen or so cleaning suits hanging from racks in various states of repair, it was like living and working in a room full of ghostly apparitions. If one of those suits jumped down and started moving about on its own, it wouldn’t surprise her. The arms and legs on each one was puffy as if full, the mirrored visors easily concealing curious faces. It was like having company, these hanging forms. They watched her impassively while she sorted her finds into two piles: one of items she needed for her next big project, the other of useful tidbits she had snagged with no specific idea of what she might use them for.

A valuable rechargeable battery went in this second group, some blood still on it that she hadn’t been able to wipe off. Images flashed through her mind of some of the scenes she’d found while scrounging for materials: like the two men who had committed suicide in the head office of Supply, their hands interlocked, opposite wrists slit, a rust-colored stain all around them. This was one of the worst scenes, a memory she couldn’t shake. There were other evidences of violence scattered about the silo. The entire place was haunted and marred. She completely understood why Solo limited his rounds to the gardens. She also empathized with his habit of blocking off the server room every night with the filing cabinet, even though he had been alone for years. If someone hadn’t long ago fried the electronic keypad that activated the locks on that door, he would probably be employing it to come and go. Juliette didn’t blame him. She slid the deadbolts on the Suit Lab every night before she went to sleep. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but that conviction was being sorely tested by the constant feeling of being watched by—if not actual people—the silo itself.

She began her work on the air compressor, and as always, it felt good to be doing something with her hands. Fixing something. Staying distracted. The first few nights, after surviving the horrible ordeal of being sent to clean, of fighting her way inside this carcass of a silo, she had searched long and hard for some place that she could actually sleep. It was never going to be below the server room, not with the stench of Solo’s debris piles pervading the place. She tried the apartment for IT’s head, but thoughts of Bernard made it impossible to even sit still. The couches in the various offices weren’t long enough. The pad she’d tried to put together on the warm server room floor was nice, but the clicking and whirring of all those tall cabinets nearly drove her insane.

The Suit Lab, strangely enough, with the specters and ghouls hanging about, was the only spot where she’d won a decent night of sleep. It was probably the tools everywhere, the welders and wrenches, the walls of drawers full of every socket and driver imaginable. If she was going to fix anything, even herself, it was there in that room. The only other place she’d felt at home in silo 17 was in the two jail cells she sometimes slept in on trips up and down. There, and sitting behind that empty server, talking to Lukas.

She thought about him as she crossed the room to grab the right size tap from one of the expansive metal tool chests. She pocketed this and pulled down one of the complete cleaning suits, admiring the heft of the outfit, remembering how bulky it had felt when she’d worn one just like it. She lifted it onto a clear workbench and pulled off the helmet’s locking collar, took this to the drill press and carefully bored a starter hole. With the collar in a vise, she began working the tap into the hole, creating new threads for the air hose. She was wrestling with this and thinking about her last conversation with Lukas when the smell of fresh bread preceded Solo into the lab.

“Hello!” he called from the doorway. Juliette looked up and jerked her chin for him to enter. Turning the tap required effort, the metal handle digging into her palms, sweat forming on her brow.

“I baked more bread.”

“Smells great,” she grunted.

Ever since she’d taught Solo how to bake flatbread, she couldn’t get him to stop. The large tins of flour that had been holding up his canned goods shelves were being removed one at a time while he experimented with recipes. She reminded herself to teach him more things to cook, to put this industriousness of his to good use by having him mix it up a little.

“And I sliced cucumbers,” he said, proud as if it were a feast beyond compare. In so many ways, Solo was stuck with the mind of a teenager. Culinary habits included.

“I’ll have some in a bit,” she told him. With effort, she finally got the tap all the way through the pilot hole, creating a threaded connection as neat as if it had come from Supply. The tap backed out easily, just like a fitted bolt would.

Solo placed the plate of bread and vegetables on the workbench and grabbed a stool. “Whatcha working on? Another pump?” He peered at the large wheeled air compressor with the hoses trailing off it.

“No. That was going to take too long. I’m working on a way to breathe underwater.”

Solo laughed. He started munching on a piece of bread until he realized she was serious.

“You’re serious.”

“I am. The pumps we really need are in the sump basins at the very bottom of the silo. I just need to get some of this electricity from IT down to them. We’ll have the place dry in weeks or months instead of years.”

“Breathe underwater,” he said. He looked at her like she was the one losing her mind.

“It’s no different than how I got here from my silo.” She wrapped the male end of the air hose coupler with silicone tape, then began threading it into the collar. “These suits are airtight, which makes them watertight. All I need is a constant supply of air to breathe, and I can work down there as long as I like. Long enough to get the pumps going, anyway.”

“You think they’ll still work?”

“They should.” She grabbed a wrench and tightened the coupler as hard as she dared. “They’re designed to be submerged, and they’re simple. They just need power, which we’ve got plenty of up here.”

“What will I do?” Solo wiped his hands, sprinkling breadcrumbs on her workbench. He reached for another piece.

“You’ll be watching the compressor. I’ll show you how to crank it, how to top it up with fuel. I’m going to install one of the portable deputy radios in the helmet here so we can talk back and forth. There’ll be a whole mess of hose and electrical wire to play out.” She smiled up at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you busy.”

“I’m not worried,” Solo said. He puffed out his chest and crunched on a cucumber, his eyes drifting to the compressor.

And Juliette saw—just like a teenager with little practice but great need—that Solo had not yet mastered the art of lying convincingly.

8

Lukas couldn’t read any more. He closed the book and leaned back against the tall shelves. He smelled something foul, brought the spine of the old book to his nose and sniffed. It was him, he finally decided. When was the last time he’d showered? His routine was all out of whack. There were no screaming kids to wake him in the morning, no evenings hunting for stars, no dimmed stairwell to guide him back to his bed so he could repeat it all the following day. Instead, it was fitful periods of tossing and turning in the hidden bunkroom of level thirty-five. A dozen bunks, but him all alone. It was flashing red lights to signal that he had company, conversations with Bernard and Peter Billings when they brought him food, long talks with Juliette whenever she called and he was free to answer. Between it all, the books. Books of history out of order, of billions of people, of even more stars. Stories of violence, of the madness of crowds, of the staggering timeline of life, of orbited suns that would one day burn out, of weapons that could end it all, of diseases that nearly had.

How long could he go on like this? Reading and sleeping and eating? The weeks already felt like months. There was no keeping track of the days, no way to remember how long he’d had on this pair of coveralls, if it was time to change out of them and into the pair in the dryer. Sometimes he felt like he changed and washed his clothes three times a day. It could easily have been twice a week. It smelled like longer.

He leaned his head back against the tins of books and closed his eyes. The things he was reading couldn’t all be true. It made no sense, a world so crowded and strange. When he considered the scale of it all, the idea of this life burrowed beneath the earth, sending people to clean, getting worked up over who stole what from whom—he sometimes felt a sort of mental vertigo, this frightening terror of standing over some abyss, seeing a dark truth far below, but unable to make it out before his senses returned and reality snatched him back from the edge.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat like that, dreaming of a different time and place, before he realized the throbbing red lights had returned.

Lukas returned the book to its tin and struggled to his feet. The computer screen showed Peter Billings at the server door, as deep as he was allowed into the room. A tray with Lukas’s dinner sat on top of the work log filing cabinet inside the door.

He turned away from the computer, hurried down the corridor, and scrambled up the ladder. After removing the grate, he carefully dropped it back into place and picked a circuitous path through the tall humming servers.

“Ah, here’s our little protégé.” Peter smiled, but his eyes narrowed at the sight of Lukas.

Lukas dipped his chin. “Sheriff,” he said. He always had this sense that Peter was silently mocking him, looking down on him, even though they were about the same age. Whenever he showed up with Bernard, especially the day Bernard had explained the need to keep Lukas safe, there had seemed some sort of competitive tension between them. A tension Lukas was aware of, even if he didn’t share. In private, Bernard had committed Lukas to secrecy and told him that he was grooming Peter for the eventual job of Mayor, that he and Lukas would one day work hand in hand. Lukas tried to remember this as he slid the tray off the cabinet. Peter watched him, his brow lowered in thought.

Lukas turned to go.

“Why don’t you sit and eat here?” Peter asked, not budging from where he leaned against the thick server room door.

Lukas froze.

“I see you sitting here with Bernard while you eat, but you’re always in a hurry to scurry off when I come by.” Peter leaned out and peered into the stacks of servers. “What is it you do in here all day, anyway?”

Lukas felt trapped. In truth, he wasn’t even all that hungry, had thought about saving it for later, but eating his food to completion was usually the fastest way out of these conversations. He shrugged and sat down on the floor, leaned against the work log cabinet, and stretched his legs out in front of him. Uncovering the tray revealed a bowl of unidentifiable soup, two slices of tomato, and a piece of cornbread.

“I work on the servers mostly, just like before.” He started with a bite of the bread, something bland. “Only difference is I don’t have to walk home at the end of the day.” He smiled at Peter while he chewed the dry bread.

“That’s right, you live down in the mids, don’t you?” Peter crossed his arms and seemed to get even more comfortable against the thick door. Lukas leaned to the side and gazed past him and down the hallway. Voices could be heard around the corner. He had a sudden impulse to get up and run, just for the sake of running.

“Barely,” he answered. “My apartment’s practically in the up-top.”

“All the mids are,” Peter laughed, “to those who live there.”

Lukas worked on the cornbread to keep his mouth occupied. He eyed the soup warily while he chewed.

“Did Bernard tell you about the big assault we’ve got planned? I was thinking of going down to take part.”

Lukas shook his head. He dipped his spoon into the soup.

“You know that wall Mechanical built, how those idiots boxed themselves in? Well, Sims and his boys are gonna blast it to smithereens. They’ve had all the time in the world to work on it from our side, so this little rebellion nonsense should be over in a few days, max.”

Slurping the hot soup, all Lukas could think about was the men and women of Mechanical trapped behind that wall of steel, and how he knew precisely what they were going through.

“Does that mean I’ll be out of here soon?” He pressed the edge of his spoon into an underripe tomato rather than use the knife and fork. “There can’t be any threat out there for me, can there? Nobody even knows who I am.”

“That’s up to Bernard. He’s been acting strange lately. A lot of stress, I suppose.” Peter slid down the door and rested on his heels. It was nice for Lukas to not have to crane his neck to look up at him.

“He did say something about bringing your mother up for a visit. I took that to mean you might be in here at least a week longer.”

“Great.” Lukas pushed his food around some more. When the distant server started buzzing, his body practically jerked as if tugged by some string. The overhead lights winked faintly, meaningful to those in the know.

“What’s that?” Peter peered into the server room, rising on his toes a little.

“That means I need to get back to work.” Lukas handed him the tray. “Thanks for bringing this.” He turned to go.

“Hey, the Mayor said to make sure you ate everything—”

Lukas waved over his shoulder. He disappeared around the first tall server and began to jog toward the back of the room, wiping his mouth with his hand, knowing Peter couldn’t follow.

“Lukas—!”

But he was gone. He hurried toward the far wall, digging his keys out of his collar as he went.

While he worked on the locks, he saw the overhead lights stop their flashing. Peter had closed the door. He removed the back panel and dug the headphones out of their pouch, plugged them in.

“Hello?” He adjusted his microphone, made sure it wasn’t too close.

“Hey.” Her voice filled him up in a way mere food couldn’t. “Did I make you run?”

Lukas took a deep breath. He was getting out of shape living in such confinement, not walking to and from work every day. “No,” he lied. “But maybe you should go easy with the calling. At least during the day. You-know-who is in here all the time. Yesterday, when you let it ring so long, we were sitting right beside the server while it buzzed and buzzed. It really pissed him off—”

“You think I care if he gets angry?” Juliette laughed. “And I want him to answer. I’d love to talk to him some more. Besides, what would you suggest? I want to talk to you, I need to talk to someone. And you’re always right there. It’s not like you can call me and expect me to be here waiting. Hell, I’m all over the damn place over here. You know how many times I’ve been from the thirties to Supply in the last week? Guess.”

“I don’t want to guess.” Lukas rubbed his eyelids.

“Probably a half dozen times. And you know, if he’s in there all the time, you could just do me a favor and kill him for me. Save me all this trouble—”

“Kill him?” Lukas waved his arm. “What, just bludgeon him to death?”

“Do you really want some pointers? Because I’ve dreamt up a number of—”

“No, I don’t want pointers. And I don’t want to kill anybody! I never did—”

Lukas dug his index finger into his temple and rubbed in tiny, forceful circles. These headaches were forever popping up. They had been ever since—

“Forget it,” Juliette said, the disgust in her voice zipping through the wires at the speed of light.

“Look—” Lukas readjusted his mic. He hated these conversations. He preferred it when they just talked about nothing. “I’m sorry, it’s just that… things are crazy over here. I don’t know who’s doing what. I’m in this box with all this information, I’ve got this radio that just blares people fighting all the time, and yet I seem to know ratshit compared to everyone else.”

“But you know you can trust me, right? That I’m one of the good guys? I didn’t do anything wrong to be sent away, Lukas. I need you to know that.”

He listened as Juliette took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. He imagined her sitting over there, alone in that silo with a crazy man, the mic pressed close to her lips, her chest heaving with exasperation, her mind full of all these expectations of him—

“Lukas, you do know that I’m on the right side here, don’t you? And that you’re working for an insane man?”

“Everything’s crazy,” he said. “Everyone is. I do know this: We were sitting here in IT, hoping nothing bad would happen, and the worst things we could think of came to us.”

Juliette released another deep breath, and Lukas thought about what he had told her of the uprising, the things he had omitted.

“I know what you say my people did, but do you understand why they came? Do you? Something needed to be done, Luke. It still needs doing—”

Lukas shrugged, forgetting she couldn’t see him. As often as they chatted, he still wasn’t used to conversing with someone like this.

“You’re in a position to help,” she told him.

“I didn’t ask to be here.” He felt himself growing frustrated. Why did their conversations have to drift off to bad places? Why couldn’t they go back to talking about the best meals they’d ever had, their favorite books as kids, the likes and annoyances they had in common?

“None of us asked to be where we are,” she reminded him coolly.

This gave Lukas pause, thinking of where she was, what she’d been through to get there.

“What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.”

“I probably need to get off.” Lukas took a shallow breath. He didn’t want to think of actions and fate. He didn’t want to have this conversation. “Pete’ll be bringing me my dinner soon,” he lied.

There was silence. He could hear her breathing. It was almost like listening to someone think.

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I need to go test this suit anyway. And hey, I might be gone a while if this thing works. So if you don’t hear from me for a day or so—”

“Just be careful,” Lukas said.

“I will. And remember what I said, Luke. What we do going forward defines who we are. You aren’t one of them. You don’t belong there. Please don’t forget this.”

Lukas mumbled his agreement, and Juliette said goodbye, her voice still in his ears as he reached in and unplugged the jack.

Rather than slot the headphones into their pouch, he slumped back against the server behind him, wringing the ear pads in his hands, thinking about what he had done, about who he was.

He felt like curling up into a ball and crying, just closing his eyes and making the world go away. But he knew if he closed them, if he allowed himself to sink into darkness, all he would see there is her. That small woman with the gray hair, her body jumping from the impacts of the bullets, Lukas’s bullets. He would feel his finger on the trigger, his cheeks wet with salt, the stench of spent powder, the table ringing with the clink of empty brass and with the jubilant and victorious cries of the men and women he had aligned himself with.

9

Shirly held the sides of her head, her fingers tangled in her hair, elbows digging into Walker’s workbench. “What in the depths is going on?” she asked him. “Walk, what is this? Who are these people?”

Walker peered through his magnifiers. He dipped the single bristle plucked from the cleaning brush into the white paint on the wet lid of primer. With utmost care, his other hand steadying his wrist, he dragged the bristle across the outside of the potentiometer directly opposite the fixed mark he’d painted on the knob itself. Satisfied, he counted the ticks he’d made so far, each one marking the position of another strong signal.

“Eleven,” he said. He turned to Shirly, who had been saying something, he wasn’t sure what. “And I don’t think we’ve found ours yet.”

“Ours? Walk, this is freaking me out. Where are these voices coming from?”

He shrugged. “The city? Over the hills? How should I know?” He started spinning the knob slowly, listening for more chatter. “Eleven besides us. What if there’s more? There has to be more, right? What’re the chances we’ve found them all already?”

“That last one was talking about a cleaning. Do you think they meant? Like—?”

Walker nodded, sending his magnifiers out of whack. He readjusted them, then went back to tuning the dial.

“So they’re in silos. Like us.”

He pointed to the tiny green board she’d helped him wire the potentiometer to. “It must be what this circuit does, modulates the wave frequency, maybe.” Shirly was freaking out over the voices; he was more fascinated in these other mysteries. There was a crackle of static; he paused in turning the knob, scrubbed back and forth across it, but found nothing. He moved on.

“You mean the little board with the number eighteen on it?”

Walker looked at her dumbly. His fingers stopped their searching. He nodded.

“So there’s at least that many,” she said, putting it together quicker than he had. “I’ve got to find Jenkins. We’ve got to tell him about this.” Shirly left her stool and headed for the door. Walker bobbed his head. The implications made him dizzy, the bench and walls seeming to slide sideways. The idea of people beyond these walls—

A violent roar rattled his teeth and shook the thought loose. His feet slipped out from underneath him as the ground trembled, decades of dust raining down from the tangle of pipes and wires crisscrossing overhead.

Walker rolled to his side, coughing, breathing the musky mildew drifting in the air. His ears were ringing from the blast. He patted his head, groped for his magnifiers, when he saw the frame lying on the steel decking before him, the lens broken into gravel-sized shards.

“Oh, no. I need—” He tried to get his hands underneath him, felt a twinge in his hip, a powerful ache where bone had smacked steel. He couldn’t think. He waved his hand, begging Scottie to come out of the shadows and help him.

A heavy boot crunched what remained of his magnifiers. Strong, young hands gripped his coveralls, pulling him to his feet. There was shouting everywhere. The pop and rattle of gunfire.

“Walk! You okay?”

Jenkins held him by his coveralls. Walker was pretty sure he would collapse if the boy let go.

“My magni—”

“Sir! We’ve gotta go! They’re inside!”

Walker turned toward the door, saw Harper helping Shirly to her feet. Her eyes were wide, stunned, a film of gray dust on her shoulders and in her dark hair. She was looking toward Walker, appearing as senseless as he felt.

“Get your things,” Jenkins said. “We’re falling back.” He scanned the room, his eyes drifting to the workbench.

“I fixed it,” Walker said, coughing into his fist. “It works.”

“A little too late, I think.”

Jenkins let go of his coveralls, and Walker had to catch himself on his stool to not go tumbling back to the ground. The gunfire outside drew nearer. Boots thundered by, more shouting, another loud blast that could be felt through the floor. Jenkins and Harper were at the doorway shouting orders and waving their arms at the people running past. Shirly joined Walker at his workbench. Her eyes were on the radio.

“We need this,” she said, breathing hard.

Walker looked down at the glittering jewels on the floor. Two month’s wages for those magnifiers—

“Walk! What do I grab? Help me.”

He turned to find Shirly gathering up the radio parts, the wires between the boards folded up, tangled. There was a single loud pop from one of the good guns right outside his door, causing him to cower, his mind to wander.

“Walk!”

“The antenna,” he whispered, pointing to where the dust was still drifting from the rafters. Shirly nodded and jumped up on his workbench. Walker looked around the room, a room he promised himself he would never leave again, a promise he really had meant to keep this time. What to grab? Stupid mementos. Junk. Dirty clothes. A pile of schematics. He grabbed his parts bin and dumped it out on the floor. The radio components were swept in, the transformer unplugged from its outlet and added. Shirly was yanking down the antenna, the wires and metal rods bundled against her chest. He snatched his soldering iron, a few tools; Harper yelled that it was now or never.

Shirly grabbed Walker by the arm and pulled him along, toward the door.

And Walker realized it wasn’t going to be never.

10

The panic she felt from donning the suit was unexpected.

Juliette had anticipated some degree of fear from slipping into the water, but it was the simple act of putting on the cleaning suit that filled her with a hollow dread, that gave her a cold and empty ache in the pit of her stomach. She fought to control her breathing while Solo zipped up the back and pressed the layers of velcro into place.

“Where’s my knife?” she asked him, patting the pockets on the front and searching among her tools.

“It’s over here,” he said. He bent down and fished it out of her gear bag, out from under a towel and change of clothes. He passed her the knife handle first, and Juliette slotted it into the thick pocket she’d added on the suit’s belly. It was easier to breathe, just having it within reach. This tool from the upper café was like a security blanket of sorts. She found herself checking for it the way she used to check her wrist for that old watch.

“Let’s wait on the helmet,” she told Solo as he lifted the clear dome from the landing. “Grab that rope first.” She pointed with her puffy mitts. The thick material and the two layers of undersuit were making her warm. She hoped that boded well for not freezing to death in the deep water.

Solo lifted the coils of spliced rope, a large adjustable wrench the length of his forearm knotted at the end.

“Which side?” he asked.

She pointed to where the gracefully curving steps plunged into the green-lit water. “Lower it over steady. And hold it out so it doesn’t get caught on the steps below.”

He nodded. Juliette checked her tools while he dropped the wrench into the water, the weight of the hunk of metal tugging the rope straight down to the very bottom of the great stairwell. In one pocket, she had a range of drivers. Each one was tied off with a few feet of string. She had a spanner in another pocket, cutters behind pocket number 4. Looking down at herself, more memories flooded back from her walk outside. She could hear the sound of fine grit pelting her helmet, could sense her air supply running thin, could feel the clomp of her heavy boots on the packed earth—

She gripped the railing ahead of her and tried to think of something else. Anything else. Wire for power and hose for air. Concentrate. She would need a lot of both. She took a deep breath and checked the tall coils of tubing and electrical wire laid out on the deck. She had flaked them in figure-eights so they would be impossible to tangle. Good. The compressor was ready; all Solo had to do was make sure everything fed down to her, didn’t get caught up—

“It’s on the bottom,” Solo said. She watched him knot the line to the stairway railing. He was in good spirits today. Lucid and energetic. This would be a good time to get it over with. Shifting the flood to the treatment plant would’ve been an inelegant, temporary solution. It was time to get those big pumps down below churning through that water properly, pumping it through the concrete walls and back into the earth beyond.

Juliette shuffled to the edge of the landing and looked down at the silvery surface of the foul water. Was this plan of hers crazy? Shouldn’t she be afraid? Or was it the years of waiting and doing this safely that was more terrifying to her? The prospect of going mad, inch by inch, seemed the greater risk. This would be just like going outside, she reminded herself, which she had already done and had survived. Except—this was safer. She was taking an unlimited supply of air, and there was nothing toxic down there, nothing to eat away at her.

She gazed at her reflection in the still water, the bulky suit making her look enormous. If Lukas were standing there with her, if he could see what she was about to do, would he try to talk her out of it? She thought he might. How well did they really know each other? They had what, two, three encounters in person?

But then there were the dozens of talks since. Could she know someone from just their voice? From stories about his childhood? From his intoxicating laughter when everything else in her day made her want to cry? Was this why wires and emails were made expensive, to prevent this kind of life, this kind of relationship? How could she be standing there, thinking of a man she hardly knew rather than the insanity of the task before her?

Maybe Lukas had become her lifeline, some slender thread of hope connecting her to home. Or was he more like a tiny spot of light seen occasionally through the murk, a beacon guiding her return?

“Helmet?” Solo stood beside her, watching her, the clear plastic dome in his hands, a single flashlight strapped to its top.

Juliette reached for it. She made sure the flashlight was securely fastened and tried to clear her head of pointless ruminations.

“Hook up my air first,” she said. “And turn on the radio.”

He nodded. She held the dome while he clicked the air hose into the adapter she’d threaded through the collar. There was a hiss and spit of residual air from the line as it locked into place. His hand brushed the back of her neck as he reached in to flick on the radio. Juliette dipped her chin, squeezing the handmade switch sewn into her undersuit. “Hello, hello,” she said. There was a strange squeal from the unit on Solo’s hip as her voice blared out of it.

“Little loud,” he said, adjusting his volume.

She lifted the dome into place. It had been stripped of its screen and all the plastic linings. Once she’d scraped the paint off the exterior, she was left with an almost completely transparent half sphere of tough plastic. It felt good to know, clicking it into the collar, that whatever she saw out of it was really there.

“You good?”

Solo’s voice was deadened by the airtight connection between the helmet and the suit. She lifted her glove and gave him a thumbs up. She pointed to the compressor.

He nodded, knelt down by the unit, and scratched his beard. She watched him flick the portable unit’s main power, push the priming bulb five times, then yank the starting cord. The little unit spat out a breath of smoke and whirred to life. Even with its rubber tires, it danced and rattled the landing, sending vibrations up through her boots. Juliette could hear the awful acoustics through her helmet, could imagine the violent racket echoing up through the abandoned silo.

Solo held the choke an extra second, just like she’d shown him, and then pushed it all the way in. While the machine pattered and chugged, he looked up at her, smiling through his beard, looking like one of the dogs in Supply staring up at its faithful owner.

She pointed to the red can of extra gas and gave him another thumbs up. He returned the gesture. Juliette shuffled toward the steps, her gloved hand on the railing for balance. Solo squeezed past and went to the railing and the knotted rope. He held out a hand to steady her while she lumbered down the slippery treads in the suit’s clunky boots.

Her hope was that it would be easier to move once she was in the water, but she had no way of knowing, just an intuitive feel for the physics of it all, the way she could gauge a machine’s intent simply by poring over it. She took the last dry steps, and then her boots broke the oily surface of the water and found the step below. She waded down two more, anticipating the frigid cold to seep through, but it never came. The suit and her undergarments kept her toasty. Almost too warm, in fact—she could see a humid mist forming on the inside of her helmet. She dipped her chin into the radio switch and told Solo to open her valve to let the air in.

He fumbled at her collar and twisted the lever to allow the flow of air. It hissed by her ear, quite noisily, and she could feel the suit puff out around her. The overflow valve she’d screwed into the other side of the collar squealed as it opened and let out the excess pressure, preventing her suit—and her head, she suspected—from bursting.

“Weights,” she said, clicking the radio.

He ran back to the landing and returned with the round exercise weights. Kneeling on the last dry step, he strapped these below her knees with heavy velcro, then looked up to see what was next.

Juliette struggled to lift one foot, then the other, making sure that the weights were secure.

“Wire,” she said, getting the hang of working the radio.

This was the most important part: the power from IT would run the lifeless pumps below. Twenty four volts of juice. She had installed a switch on the landing so Solo could test it while she was down there. She didn’t want to travel with the wires live.

Solo unspooled a dozen feet of the two-connector wire and tied a loop around her wrist. His knots were good, both with the rope and the wire. Her confidence in the endeavor was growing by the minute, her discomfort in the suit lessening.

Solo smiled down through her clear plastic dome from two steps above, yellow teeth flashing in his scraggly beard. Juliette returned the smile. She stood still while he fumbled with the flashlight strapped to her helmet, clicking it on. The battery was freshly charged and would last a full day, much longer than she possibly needed.

“Okay,” she said. “Help me over.”

Releasing the radio contact with her chin, she turned and leaned against the railing, worked her belly up onto it, then eased her head over. It was an incredible sensation, throwing herself over that rail. It felt suicidal. This was the great stairwell; this was her silo; she was four levels up from Mechanical; all that space below her, that long plummet only madmen dove into, and she was going just as willingly.

Solo helped with her weighted feet. He splashed down onto the first wet step to assist her. Juliette threw her leg over the railing as he lifted. Suddenly, she was straddling that narrow bar of slippery steel, wondering if the water would truly hold her, if it would catch and slow her fall. And there was a moment of raw panic, the taste of metal in her mouth, the sinking of her stomach and the dire need to urinate, all while Solo heaved her other foot over the railing, her gloved hands clawing madly for the rope he’d tied, her boots splashing noisily and violently into the silvery skin of the flooded waters.

“Shit!”

She blew her breath out into the helmet, gasping from the shock of splashing in so quickly, her hands and knees wrapping around the twisting rope, her body moving inside the puffy suit like a layer of too-large skin had become detached.

“You okay?” Solo shouted, his hands cupped around his beard.

She nodded, her helmet unmoving. She could feel the tug of the weights on her shins, trying to drag her down. There were a dozen things she wanted to say to Solo, reminders and tips, words of luck, but her mind was racing too fast to think of using the radio. Instead, she loosened her grip with her gloves and knees, felt the rope slide against her body with a distant squeak, and she began her long plummet down.

11

Lukas sat at the little desk constructed from an embarrassment of wood and stared down at a book stuffed with a fortune in crisp paper. The chair beneath him was probably worth more than he’d make in a lifetime, and he was sitting on it. If he moved, the joints of the dainty thing twisted and squeaked, like it could come apart at any moment.

He kept his boots firmly planted on either side, his weight on his toes, just in case.

Lukas flipped a page, pretending to read. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reading, he just didn’t want to be reading this. Entire shelves of more interesting works seemed to mock him from within their tin boxes. They sang out to be perused, for him to put away the Order with its rigid writing, bulleted lists, and internal labyrinth of page references that lead in more circles than the great stairwell itself.

Each entry in the Order pointed to another page, every page another entry. Lukas flipped through a few and wondered if Bernard was keeping tabs on him. The head of IT sat on the other side of the small study, just one room of many in the well-stocked hideaway beneath the servers. While Lukas pretended to shadow for his new job, Bernard alternated between fiddling with the small computer on the other desk and going over to the radio mounted on the wall to give instructions to the security forces in the down deep.

Lukas pinched a thick chunk of the Order and flopped it to the side. He skipped past all the recipes for averting silo disasters and checked out some of the more academic reference material toward the back. This stuff was even more frightening: chapters on group persuasion, on mind-control, on the effects of fear on upbringing, graphs and tables dealing with population growth—

He couldn’t take it. He adjusted his chair and watched Bernard for a while as the head of IT and acting Mayor scrolled through screen after screen of text, his head notching back and forth as he scanned the words there.

After a moment, Lukas dared to break the silence:

“Hey, Bernard?”

“Hm?”

“Hey, why isn’t there anything in here about how all this came to be?”

Bernard’s office chair squealed as he swiveled it around to face Lukas. “I’m sorry, what?”

“The people who made all this, the people who wrote these books. Why isn’t there anything in the Order about them? Like how they built all this stuff in the first place.”

“Why would there be?” Bernard half turned back to his computer.

“So we would know. I dunno, like all the stuff in the other books—”

“I don’t want you reading those other books. Not yet.” Bernard pointed to the wooden desk. “Learn the Order first. If you can’t keep the silo together, the Legacy books are pulp. They’re as good as processed wood if no one’s around to read them.”

“Nobody can read them but the two of us if they stay locked up down here—”

“No one alive. Not today. But one day, there’ll be plenty of people who’ll read them. But only if you study.” Bernard nodded toward the thick and dreadful book before turning back to his keyboard and reaching for his mouse.

Lukas sat there a while, staring at Bernard’s back, the knotted cord of his master keys sticking out of the top of his undershirt.

“I figure they must’ve known it was coming,” Lukas said, unable to stop himself from perseverating about it. He had always wondered about these things, had suppressed them, had found his thrills in piecing together the distant stars that were so far away as to be immune to the hillside taboos. And now he lived in this vacuum, this hollow of the silo no one knew about where forbidden topics didn’t dare tread and he had access to a man who seemed to know the precious truth.

“You aren’t studying,” Bernard said. His head remained bent over his keyboard, but he seemed to know Lukas was watching him.

“But they had to’ve seen it coming, right?” Lukas lifted his chair and turned it around a little more. “I mean, to have built all these silos before it got so bad out there—”

Bernard turned his head to the side, his jaw clenching and unclenching. His hand fell away from the mouse and came up to smooth his mustache. “These are the things you want to know? How it happened?”

“Yes.” Lukas nodded. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I want to know.”

“Do you think it matters? What happened out there?” Bernard turned and looked up at the schematics on the wall, then at Lukas. “Why would it matter?”

“Because it happened. And it only happened one way, and it kills me not to know. I mean, they saw it coming, right? It would take years to build all—”

“Decades,” Bernard said.

“And then move all this stuff in, all the people—”

“That took much less time.”

“So you know?”

Bernard nodded. “The information is stored here, but not in any of the books. And you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. That’s the past, and the past is not the same thing as our legacy. You’ll need to learn the difference.”

“The difference between our past and our legacy.”

“Hm.” Bernard nodded. He seemed to be waiting on something.

Lukas thought about the difference. For some reason, a conversation with Juliette sprang to mind, something she was forever telling him—

“I think I know,” he said.

“Oh?” Bernard pushed his glasses up his nose and stared at him. “Tell me what you think you know.”

“All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world can be like, that’s our Legacy.”

Bernard’s lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand to continue.

“And the bad things that can’t be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that’s the past.”

“And what does this difference mean? What do you think it means?”

“It means we can’t change what’s already happened, but we can have an impact on what happens next.”

Bernard clapped his small hands together. “Very good.”

“And this—” Lukas turned and rested one hand on the thick book. He continued, unbidden, “—the Order. This is a roadmap for how to get through all the bad that’s piled up between our past and the future’s hope. This is the stuff we can prevent, that we can fix.”

Bernard raised his eyebrows at this last, as if it were a new way of looking at an old truth. Finally, he smiled, his mustache curling up, his glasses rising on the wrinkled bridge of his nose.

“I think you’re almost ready,” he said. “Soon.” Bernard turned back to his computer, his hand falling to his mouse. “Very soon.”

12

The descent to Mechanical was oddly tranquil, almost mesmerizing. Juliette slid through the green flood, fending herself off the curved railing each time the staircase spiraled around beneath her feet. The only sounds anywhere were the hiss of air entering her helmet and the excess gurgling out the other side. A never-ending stream of bubbles rolled up her visor like beads of solder, drifting up in defiance of gravity.

Juliette watched these silver spheres chase one another and play like children through the metal stairs. They broke up where they touched the railing, leaving just minuscule dots of gas stuck to the surface, rolling and colliding. Others marched in wavy lines inside the stairway. They gathered in crowds beneath the hollow steps, bubbles becoming pockets of air that wobbled and caught the light radiating from the top of her helmet.

It was easy to forget where she was, what she was doing. The familiar had become distorted and strange. Everything seemed magnified by the plastic dome of her visor, and it was easy to imagine that she wasn’t sinking at all, but that the great stairway was rising, pushing up through the deep earth and heading toward the clouds. Even the sensation of the rope sliding through her gloved hands and across her padded belly felt more like something tugged inexorably from above rather than a line she was descending.

It wasn’t until she arched her back and looked straight up that Juliette remembered how much water was stacking up above her. The green glow of the emergency lights faded to an eerie black in the space of a landing or two. The light from her flashlight barely dented it. Juliette inhaled sharply and reminded herself that she had all the air in the silo. She tried to ignore the sensation of so much liquid piled up on her shoulders, of being buried alive. If she had to, if she panicked, she could just cut the weights free. One flick with the chef’s knife and she would bob right back to the surface. She told herself this as she continued to sink. Letting go of the rope with one hand, she patted for the knife, making sure it was still there.

“SLOWER!” her radio barked.

Juliette grabbed the rope with both hands and squeezed until she came to a stop. She reminded herself that Solo was up there, watching the air hose and electrical wires as they spooled off their neat coils. She imagined him tangled up in the lines, hopping around on one foot. Bubbles raced out of her overflow valve and jiggled through the lime water back toward the surface. She leaned her head back and watched them swirl around the taut rope, wondering what was taking him so long. In the undersides of the helical steps, the air pockets danced mercury silver, wavering in the turbulence of her passing—

“OKAY.” The radio speaker behind her neck crackled. “GOOD HERE.”

Juliette cringed from the volume of Solo’s voice and wished she’d checked that before closing up her helmet. There was no fixing it now.

With ears ringing and the silence and majesty of the tranquil descent broken, she slid down another level, keeping her pace steady and slow as she studied the slack in the wire and the air hose for any sign of their pulling taut. As she passed close to the landing of one-thirty-nine, she saw that one of the doors was missing; the other door had been wrenched violently on its hinges. The entire level must be flooded, which meant more water for the pumps to move. Just before the landing rose out of sight, she saw dark forms down the corridor, shadows floating in the water. The flashlight on her helmet barely illuminated a pale and bloated face before she drifted past, leaving the long dead to rise out of sight.

It hadn’t occurred to Juliette that she might come across more bodies. Not the drowned of course—the flood would’ve risen too slowly to take anyone by surprise—but any violence that occurred in the down deep would now be preserved in its icy depths. The chill of the water around her seemed to finally penetrate the layers of her suit. Or perhaps it was just her imagination.

Her boots thumped to the lowermost floor of the stairwell while she was still looking up, keeping an eye on the slack in the lines. Her knees were jarred by the startling end to her descent. It had taken her far less time than a dry hike would have.

With a grip on the rope for balance, Juliette let go with her other hand and waved it through the thick atmosphere of green groundwater. She dipped her chin against the radio switch. “I’m down,” she transmitted to Solo.

She took a few lumbering and tentative steps, waving her arms and half-swimming toward the entrance to Mechanical. The light from the stairwell barely penetrated past the security gates. Beyond, the oily depths of a home both foreign and familiar awaited her.

“I HEAR YOU,” Solo answered after some delay.

Juliette felt her muscles tense up as his voice rattled around inside her helmet. Not being able to adjust the volume was going to drive her mad.

After a dozen halting steps, she eventually got the hang of the awkward wading motion and learned to drag her weighted boots across the steel decking. With the suit inflated and her arms and legs brushing around on the inside, it was like guiding a bubble by throwing oneself against its skin. She paused once to look back at her air hose, making sure it wasn’t getting caught on the stairs, and she gave the rope she had descended one last glance. Even from this distance it appeared as an impossibly slender thread, a thread hanging in that submerged straw of a stairwell. It wavered slightly in the wake she was causing, almost as if saying goodbye.

Juliette tried not to read anything into it; she turned back to the entrance to Mechanical. You don’t have to do this, she reminded herself. She could hook up two, maybe three more small pumps plus a few additional runs of hydroponic piping. The work might take a few months, the water level would recede for years, but eventually these levels would be dry and she could investigate those buried diggers Solo had told her about. It could be done with minimal risk—other than to her sanity.

And if her only reason for getting back home was vengeance, if that was her only motivation, she might have chosen to wait, to take that safe route. She could feel the temptation even then to yank the weights off her boots and float up through the stairwell, to fly past the levels like she used to dream she could, arms out, buoyant and free—

But Lukas had kept her apprised of the horrible mess her friends were in, the mess her leaving had caused. There was a radio mounted to his wall below the servers that leaked violence day and night. Solo’s underground apartment was equipped with an identical radio, but it could only communicate with silo 17’s portables. Juliette had given up fiddling with it.

A part of her was glad she couldn’t hear. She didn’t want to have to listen to the fighting—she just wanted to get home and make it stop. This had become a desperate compulsion: returning to her silo. It was maddening to think that she was only a short walk away, but those doors were only ever opened to kill people. And what good would her return do, anyway? Would her surviving a cleaning and revealing the truth be enough to expose Bernard and all of IT?

As it happened, she had other, less sane plans. It was a fantasy, maybe, but it gave her hope. She dreamed of fixing up one of the diggers that built this place, a machine buried and hidden at the long end of its vertical toil, and driving it through the earth itself to 18‘s down deep. She dreamed of breaking that blockade, of leading her people back to these dry corridors and getting this dead place working again. She dreamed of operating a silo without all the lies and deceptions.

Juliette waded through the heavy water toward the security gate, dreaming these childish dreams, discovering that they somehow steeled her resolve. She approached the security turnstile, and saw that the lifeless and unguarded gate would pose the first true obstacle of her descent. Getting over it wouldn’t be easy. Turning her back to the machine, she placed her hands on either side and pushed, squirming and kicking her heavy heels against the low wall, until she was just barely sitting on the control box.

Her legs were too heavy to lift… not high enough to swing over, anyway. The weights had ended up being more than she’d needed to counter the suit’s buoyancy. She wiggled backwards until her butt was more secure and tried to turn sideways. With a thick glove under her knee, she strained and leaned back until her boot was on the edge of the wall. She rested a moment, breathing hard and filling her helmet with muffled laughter. It felt ridiculous, all this effort to do something so outrageously simple, so benign. With one boot already up, the other was easier to lift. She felt the muscles in her abdomen and thighs, muscles sore from weeks of a porter’s hustle, finally help her lift her own damn foot up.

She shook her head in relief, sweat trickling down the back of her neck, already dreading repeating the maneuver on the return trip. Dropping to the other side was easy: the weights did all the work. She took a moment to make sure the wires knotted around her wrist and the air hose attached to her collar weren’t getting tangled, and then started down the main corridor, the flashlight on the top of her helmet her only illumination.

“YOU OKAY?” Solo asked, his voice startling her again.

“I’m fine,” she said. She held her chin down against her chest, leaving the contact open. “I’ll check in if I need you. The volume is a little high down here. Scares the hell out of me.”

She released the contact and turned to see how her lifeline was doing. All along the ceiling, her overflow bubbles danced in the glow of her flashlight like tiny jewels—

“OKAY. GOTCHA.”

“Goddammit,” she muttered, wishing she could reach inside her helmet to adjust the thing or to dig a finger in her ear. It felt like his voice was still lodged in there, tickling her.

With her boots hardly leaving the floor, pushing forward on them one at a time, she slowly made her way across the main intersection and past the mess hall. To her left, if she made her way down the hallway and took two turns, she could reach Walker’s workshop. Had it always been a workshop? She had no idea. In this place, it might be a storeroom. Or an apartment.

Her small apartment would be in the opposite direction. She turned to peer down that hallway, her cone of light brushing away the darkness to reveal a body pressed up against the ceiling, tangled in the runs of pipe and conduit. She looked away. It was easy to imagine that being George or Scottie or someone else she had cared about and lost. It was easy to imagine it being herself.

She shuffled toward the access stairs, her body wavering in the thick but crystal clear water, the weight of her boots and the buoyancy of her torso keeping her upright even though she felt on the verge of toppling. She paused at the top of the square steps leading down.

“I’m about to descend,” she said, chin down. “Make sure you keep everything feeding. And please don’t respond unless there’s a problem. My ears are still ringing from the last time.”

Juliette lifted her chin from the contact switch and took the first few steps, waiting for Solo to blare something in her ear, but it never came. She kept a firm grip on the wire and hose, dragging it around the sharp corners of the square stairwell as she descended into the darkness. The black water all around was disturbed only by her rising bubbles and the feeble cone of her sweeping, flash-lit gaze.

Six floors down, the hose and wire became difficult to pull, too much friction from the steps. She stopped and gathered more and more of it around herself, letting the slack coil and drift in the weightlessness of the water. Several of her careful splices in both the wire and tubing slid through her gloves. She paused and checked the taped and adhesed joints of the latter to see how they were holding up. Minuscule bubbles were trailing out of one joint—they left a perforated and wavy line of tiny dots in the dark water. It was hardly anything.

Once she had enough slack at the bottom of the stairs to reach the sump basin, she turned and marched purposefully toward her work. The hardest part was over. The air was flowing in, cool and fresh and hissing by her ear. The excess streamed out through the other valve, the bubbles shooting up in a curtain whenever she turned her head. She had enough wire and hose to reach her goal, and all of her tools intact. It felt like she could finally relax now that she knew she wouldn’t be going any deeper. All she had to do was hook up the power lines, two easy connections, and make her way out.

Being so close, she dared to think of getting free, of rescuing this silo’s Mechanical spaces, resuscitating one of its generators and then one of its hidden and buried diggers. They were making progress. She was on her way to rescuing her friends. It all seemed perfectly attainable, practically in her grasp, after weeks of frustrating setbacks.

Juliette found the sump room just where it was supposed to be. She slid her boots to the edge of the pit in the center. Leaning forward, her flashlight shone down on the numbers signifying how deep the waters had risen. They seemed comical under so many hundreds of feet of water. Comical and sad. This silo had failed its people.

But then Juliette corrected herself: These people had failed their silo.

“Solo, I’m at the pump. Gonna hook up the power.”

She peered down at the bottom of the pit to make sure the pump’s pickup was clear of debris. The water down there was amazingly clear. All the oil and grime she’d worked hip-deep in at the bottom of her own basin had been made diffuse, spread out into who knew how many gallons of groundwater seepage. The result was crystal clear stuff she could probably drink.

She shivered, suddenly aware that the chill of the deep water was making its way through her layers and wicking away her body heat. Halfway there, she told herself. She moved toward the massive pump mounted on the wall. Pipes as thick as her waist bent to the ground and snaked over the edge of the pit. The outflow ran up the wall in a similarly sized pipe and joined the jumble of mechanical runs above. As she stood by the large pump and worked the knotted wires off her wrist, she remembered the last job she’d ever performed as a mechanic. She had pulled the shaft on an identical pump and had discovered a worn and broken impeller. As she selected a Phillips driver from her pocket and began loosening the positive power terminal, she took the time to pray that this pump had not been in a similar condition when the power had blown. She didn’t want to have to come down and service it again. Not until she could do it while keeping her boots dry.

The positive power line came free easier than she had hoped. Juliette twisted the new one into place. The sound of her own breathing rattled in the confines of her helmet and provided her only company. As she was tightening the terminal around the new wire, she realized she could hear her breathing because the air was no longer hissing by her cheek.

Juliette froze. She tapped the plastic dome by her ear and saw that the overflow bubbles were still leaking out, but slower now. The pressure was still inside her suit, there just wasn’t any more air being forced inside.

She dipped her chin against the switch, could feel the sweat form around her collar and drip down the side of her jaw. Her feet were somehow freezing while from the neck up she was beginning to sweat.

“Solo? This is Juliette. Can you hear me? What’s going on up there?”

She waited, turned to aim her flashlight down the air hose, and looked for any sign of a kink. She still had air, the air in her suit. Why wasn’t he responding?

“Hello? Solo? Please say something.”

The flashlight on her helmet needed to be adjusted, but she could feel the ticking of some silent clock in her head. How much air would she have starting right then? It had probably taken her an hour to get down there. Solo would fix the compressor before her air ran out. She had plenty of time. Maybe he was gassing it up. Plenty of time, she told herself as the driver slipped off the negative terminal. The damn thing was stuck.

This, she didn’t have time for, not for anything to be corroded. The positive wire was already spliced and locked tight. She tried to adjust the flashlight strapped to her helmet; it was aimed too high, good for walking, horrible for working. She was able to twist it a little and aim it at the large pump.

The ground wire could be connected to any part of the main housing, right? She tried to remember. The entire case was the ground, wasn’t it? Or was it? Why couldn’t she remember? Why was it suddenly difficult to think?

She straightened the end of the black wire and tried to give the loose copper strands a twist with her heavily padded fingers. She jabbed this bundle of raw copper into a cowling vent on the back, a piece of conducting metal that appeared connected to the rest of the pump. She twisted the wire around a small bolt, knotted the slack so it would hold, and tried to convince herself that this would work, that it would be enough to run the damn thing. Walker would know. Where the hell was he when she needed him?

The radio by her neck squawked—a burst and pop of static—what sounded like part of her name in a faraway distance—a dead hiss—and then nothing.

Juliette wavered in the dark, cold water. Her ears were ringing from the outburst. She dipped her chin to tell Solo to hold the radio away from his mouth, when she noticed through the glass window of her helmet’s visor that there were no more bubbles spilling from the overflow valve and rising in that gentle curtain across her vision. The pressure in her suit was gone.

A different sort of pressure quickly took its place.

13

Walker found himself shoved down the square stairs, past a crew of mechanics working to weld another set of steel plates across the narrow passage. He had most of the homebuilt radio in a spare parts tub, which he desperately clutched with two hands. He watched the electrical components rattle together as he jostled through the crowd of mechanics fleeing from the attack above. In front of him, Shirly carried the rest of the radio gear against her chest, the antenna wires trailing behind her. Walker skipped and danced on his old legs so he wouldn’t get tangled up.

“Go! Go! Go!” someone yelled. Everyone was pushing and shoving. The rattle of gunfire seemed to grow louder behind him, while a golden shower of fizzling sparks rained through the air and peppered Walker’s face. He squinted and stormed through the glowing hail as a team of miners in striped coveralls fought their way up from the next landing with another large sheet of steel.

“This way,” Shirly yelled, tugging him along. At the next level, she pulled him aside. His poor legs struggled to keep up with the running others. A duffle bag was dropped; a young man with a gun spun and hurried back for it.

“The generator room,” Shirly told him, pointing.

There was already a stream of people moving through the double doors. Jenkins was there, managing the traffic. Some of those with rifles took up position near an oil pump, the counterweighted head sitting perfectly still like it had already succumbed to the looming battle.

“What is that?” Jenkins asked as they approached the door. He jerked his chin at the bundle of wires in Shirly’s arms. “Is that—?”

“The radio, sir.” She nodded.

“Fat lot of good it does us now.” Jenkins waved two other people inside. Shirly and Walker pressed themselves out of the way.

“Sir—”

“Get him inside,” Jenkins barked, referring to Walker. “I don’t need him getting in the way.”

“But sir, I think you’re gonna want to hear—”

“C’mon, go!” Jenkins yelled to the stragglers bringing up the rear. He twirled his arm at the elbow for them to hurry. Only the mechanics who had traded their wrenches for guns remained. They formed up like they were used to this game, arms propped on railings, long steel barrels trained the same direction.

“In or out,” Jenkins told Shirly, starting to close the door.

“Go,” she told Walker, letting out a deep breath. “Let’s get inside.”

Walker numbly obeyed, thinking all the while of the parts and tools he should have grabbed, things a few levels overhead now that were lost to him, maybe for good.

“Hey, get those people out of the control room!”

Shirly ran across the generator room as soon as they were inside, wires trailing behind her, bits of rigid aluminum antenna bouncing across the floor. “Out!”

A mixed group of mechanics and a few people wearing the yellow of Supply sheepishly filed out of the small control room. They joined the others around a railing that cordoned off the mighty machine that dominated the cavernous facility and gave the room its name. At least the noise was tolerable. Shirly imagined all those people being stuck down there in the days when the roar of the rattling shaft and loose engine mounts could deafen a person.

“All of you, out of my control room.” She waved the last few out. Shirly knew why Jenkins had sealed off this floor. The only power they had left was the literal kind. She waved the last man out of the small room studded with sensitive knobs, dials, and readouts and immediately checked the fuel levels.

Both tanks were topped up, so they had at least planned that properly. They would have a few weeks of power, if nothing else. She looked over all the other knobs and dials, the jumble of cords still held tightly against her chest.

“Where should I—?”

Walker held his box out. The only flat surfaces in the room were covered with switches and the sorts of things one didn’t want to bump. He seemed to understand that.

“On the floor, I guess.” She set her load down and moved to shut the door. The people she’d hurried outside gazed longingly through the window at the few tall stools in the climate controlled space. Shirly ignored them.

“Do we have everything? Is it all here?”

Walker pulled pieces of the radio out of the box, tsking his tongue at the twisted wires and jumbled components. “Do we have power?” he asked, holding up the plug of a transformer.

Shirly laughed. “Walk, you do know where you are right now, right? Of course we have power.” She took the cord and plugged it into one of the feeds on the main panel. “Do we have everything? Can we get it up and running again? Walk, we need to let Jenkins hear what we heard.”

“I know.” He bobbed his head and sorted the gear, twisting some loose wires together as he went. “We need to string that out.” He jerked his head at the tangled antenna in her arms.

Shirly looked up. There were no rafters.

“Hang it from the railing out there,” he told her. “Straight line, make sure that end reaches back in here.”

She moved toward the door, trailing the loops out behind her.

“Oh, and don’t let the metal bits touch the railing!” Walker called after her.

Shirly recruited a few mechanics from her work shift to help out. Once they saw what needed doing, they took over, coordinating as a team to undo the knots while she went back to Walker.

“It’ll just be a minute,” she told him, shutting the door behind her, the wire fitting easily between it and the padded jamb.

“I think we’re good,” he said. He looked up at her, his eyes sagging, his hair a mess, sweat glistening in his white beard. “Shit,” he said. He slapped his forehead. “We don’t have speakers.”

Shirly felt her heart drop to hear Walker cuss, thinking they’d forgotten something crucial. “Wait here,” she told him, running back out and to the ear muff station. She picked one of the sets with a dangling cord, the kind used to talk between the control room and anyone working on the primary or secondary generators. She jogged past the curious and frightened-looking crowd to the control room. It occurred to her that she should be more afraid like they were, that a real war was grinding closer to them. But all she could think about were the voices that war had interrupted. Her curiosity was much stronger than her fear. It’s how she’d always been.

“How about these?”

She shut the door behind herself and showed him the headphones.

“Perfect,” he said, his eyes wide with surprise. Before she could complain, he snipped the jack off with his multi-tool and began stripping wires. “Good thing it’s quiet in here,” he said, laughing.

Shirly laughed as well, and it made her wonder what the hell was going on. What were they going to do, sit in there and fiddle with wires while the deputies and the security people from IT came and dragged them away?

Walker got the ear cones wired in, and a faint hiss of static leaked out of them. Shirly hurried over to join him; she sat down and held his wrist to steady his hand. The earphones trembled in them.

“You might have to—” He showed her the knob with the white marks he’d painted on.

Shirly nodded and realized they’d forgotten to grab the paint. She held the dial and studied the various ticks. “Which one?” she asked.

“No.” He stopped her as she began dialing back toward one of the voices they’d found. “The other way. I need to see how many—” He coughed into his fist. “We need to see how many there are.”

She nodded and turned the knob gradually toward the black unpainted portion. The two of them held their breath, the hum of the main generator barely audible through the thick door and double paned glass.

Shirly studied Walker while she spun the dial. She wondered what would become of him when they were rounded up. Would they all be put to cleaning? Or could he and a few of the others claim to be bystanders? It made her sad, thinking what had been wrought of their anger, their thirst for revenge. She thought how things could’ve gone so differently, how they’d had all these dreams, unrealistic perhaps, of a real change in power, an easy fix to impossible and intractable problems.

“A little faster,” Walker said, growing impatient with the silence. They’d heard a few hits of crackling static, but no one talking. Shirly very slightly increased the rate she spun the knob.

“You think the antenna—?” she started to ask.

Walker raised his hand. The little speakers in his lap had popped. He jerked his thumb to the side, telling her to go back. Shirly did. She tried to remember about how far she had gone since the sound, using a lot of the same skills she’d learned in that very room to adjust the previously noisy generator—

“—Solo? This is Juliette. Can you hear me? What’s going on up there?”

Shirly dropped the knob. She watched it swing on its soldered wire and crash to the floor.

Her hands felt numb. Her fingertips tingled. She turned, gaped at Walker’s lap where the ghostly voice had risen, and found him looking dumbly down at his own hands.

Neither of them moved. The voice, the name, they were unmistakable.

Tears of confused joy winked past Walker’s beard and fell into his lap.

14

Juliette grabbed the limp air hose with both hands and squeezed. Her reward was a few weak bubbles rolling up her visor—the pressure inside the tube was gone.

She whispered a curse, tilted her chin against the radio, and called Solo’s name. Something had happened to the compressor. He was probably working on it, maybe topping up the fuel. She told him not to turn it off for that. He wouldn’t know what to do, wouldn’t be able to restart it. She hadn’t thought this through clearly at all; she was an impossible distance from breathable air, from any hope of survival.

She took a tentative breath. She had what was trapped in the suit and the air that remained in the hose. How much of the air in the hose could she suck with just the power of her lungs? She didn’t think it would be much, but she didn’t know.

She took one last look at the large sump pump, her hasty wiring job, the loose trail of wires streaming through the water that she’d hoped to have time to secure against vibration and accidental tugs. None of it likely mattered anymore, not for her. She kicked away from the pump and waved her arms through the water, wading through the viscous fluid that seemed to both impede her while giving her nothing to push or pull against.

The weights were holding her back. Juliette bent to release them, and found she couldn’t. The buoyancy of her arms, the stiffness of the suit… she groped for the velcro straps, but watched her fingers through the magnified view of helmet and water as they waved inches from the blasted things.

She took a deep breath, sweat dripping from her nose and splattering the inside of her dome. She tried again and came close, her fingertips nearly brushing the black straps, both hands outstretched, grunting and throwing her shoulders into the simple act of reaching her damned shins—

But she couldn’t. She gave up and shuffled a few more steps down the hallway, following the wire and hose, both visible in the faint cone of white light emanating from above her head. She tried not to bump the wire, thinking of what one accidental pull might do, how tenuous the connection was that she’d made to the pump’s ground. Even as she struggled for a deep breath, her mind was ever playing the mechanic. She cursed herself for not taking longer to prepare.

Her knife! She remembered her knife and stopped dragging her feet. It slid out of its homemade sheath sewn across her belly and gleamed in the glow from her flashlight.

Juliette bent down and used the extra reach of the blade; she slid the point of the knife between her suit and one of the straps. The water was dark and thick all around her. With the limited amount of light from her helmet, and being at the bottom of Mechanical under all that heap of flood, she felt more remote and alone, more afraid, than she had in all her life.

She gripped the knife, terrified of what dropping it could mean, and bobbed up and down, using her stomach muscles. It was like doing sit-ups while standing. She attacked the strap with a labored sawing motion, cursed in her helmet from the effort, the strain, the pain in her abdomen from lurching forward, from throwing her head down—when finally the exercise weight popped free. Her calf felt suddenly naked and light as the round hunk of iron clanged mutely to the plate steel flooring.

Juliette tilted to the side, held down by one leg, the other trying to rise up. She worked the knife carefully beneath the second strap, fearful of cutting her suit and seeing a stream of precious bubbles leak out. With desperate force, she shoved and pulled the blade against the black webbing just like before. Nylon threads popped in her magnified vision; sweat spattered her helmet; the knife burst through the fabric; the weight was free.

Juliette screamed as her boots flew up behind her, rising above her head. She twisted her torso and waved her arms as much as she could, but her helmet slammed into the runs of pipes at the top of the hallway.

There was a bang—and the water all around her went black. She fumbled for her flashlight, to turn it back on, but it wasn’t there. Something bumped her arm in the darkness. She fumbled for the object with one hand, knife in the other, felt it spill through her gloved fingers, and then it was gone. While she struggled to put the knife away, her only source of light tumbled invisible to the ground below.

Juliette heard nothing but her rapid breathing. She was going to die like this, pinned to the ceiling, another bloated body in these corridors. It was as if she were destined to perish in one of those suits, one way or another. She kicked against the pipes and tried to wiggle free. Which way had she been going? Where was she facing? The pitch black was absolute. She couldn’t even see her own arms in front of her. It was worse than being blind, it was some new ability to see the nothingness, to know her eyes were working but somehow taking nothing in. It heightened her panic, even as the air in her suit seemed to grow more and more stale.

The air.

She reached for her collar and found the hose, could just barely feel it through her gloves. Juliette began to gather it in, hand over hand, like pulling a mining bucket up a deep shaft.

It felt like miles of it went through her hands. The slack gathered around her like knotted noodles, bumping and sliding against her. Juliette’s breathing began to sound more and more desperate. She was panicking. How much of her shallow breaths were coming from the adrenaline, the fear? How much because she was using up all her precious air? She had a sudden terror that the hose she was pulling had been cut, that it had been sawn through on the stairwell, that the free end would at any moment slip through her fingers, that her next frantic reach for more of the lifeline would result in a fistful of inky water and nothing else—

But then she grabbed a length of hose with tension, with life. A stiff line that held no air, but led the way out.

Juliette cried out in her helmet and reached forward to grab another handhold. She pulled herself, her helmet bumping against a pipe and bouncing her away from the ceiling. She kept reaching, lunging one hand forward in the black to where the line should be, finding it, grasping, yanking, hauling herself through the midnight soup of the drowned and the dead, wondering how far she’d get before she joined them and breathed her very last.

15

Lukas sat with his mother on the thick jamb of the open server room door. He looked down at her hands, both of them wrapped around one of his. She let go with one of them and picked a piece of lint off his shoulder, then cast the offending knot of string away from her precious son.

“And you say there’ll be a promotion in this?” she asked, smoothing the shoulder of his undershirt.

Lukas nodded. “A pretty big one, yeah.” He looked past her to where Bernard and Sheriff Billings were standing in the hallway, talking in low voices. Bernard had his hands tucked inside the stretched belly of his coveralls. Billings looked down and inspected his gun.

“Well, that’s great, sweetheart. It makes it easier to bear you being away.”

“It won’t be for much longer, I don’t think.”

“Will you be able to vote? I can’t believe my boy is doing such important things!”

Lukas turned to her. “Vote? I thought the election was put off.”

She shook her head. Her face seemed more wrinkled than it had a month ago, her hair whiter. Lukas wondered if that were possible in so brief a time.

“It’s back on,” she said. “This nasty business with those rebels is supposed to be just about over.”

Lukas glanced toward Bernard and the Sheriff. “I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to let me vote,” he told his mother.

“Well, that’s nice. I like to think I raised you proper.” She cleared her throat into her fist, then returned it to the back of his hand. “And they’re feeding you? With the rationing, I mean.”

“More than I can eat.”

Her eyes widened. “So I suppose there’ll be some sort of a raise—?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’d think so. And look, you’ll be taken care of—”

“Me?” She pressed her hand to her chest, her voice high. “Don’t you worry about me.”

“You know I do. Hey, look, Ma—I think our time’s up.” He nodded down the hallway. Bernard and Peter were heading toward them. “Looks like I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Oh. Well, of course.” She smoothed the front of her red coveralls and allowed Lukas to help her to her feet. She puckered her lips, and he presented his cheek.

“My little boy,” she said, kissing him noisily and squeezing his arm. She stepped back and gazed up at him with pride. “You take good care of yourself.”

“I will, Ma.”

“Make sure you get plenty of exercise.”

“Ma, I will.”

Bernard stopped by their side, smiling at the exchange. Lukas’s mother turned and looked the silo’s acting Mayor up and down. She reached out and patted Bernard on his chest. “Thank you,” she said, her voice cracking.

“It’s been great to meet you, Mrs. Kyle.” Bernard took her hand and gestured toward Peter. “The sheriff here will see you out.”

“Of course.” She turned one last time and waved at Lukas. He felt a little embarrassed but waved back.

“Sweet lady,” Bernard said, watching them go. “She reminds me of my mother.” He turned to Lukas. “You ready?”

Lukas felt like voicing his reluctance, his hesitation. He felt like saying, “I suppose,” but he straightened his back instead, rubbed his damp palms together and dipped his chin. “Absolutely,” he managed, feigning a confidence he didn’t feel.

“Great. Let’s go make this official.” He squeezed Lukas’s shoulder before heading into the server room. Lukas walked around the edge of the thick door and leaned into it, slowly sealing himself in as the fat hinges groaned shut. The electric locks engaged automatically, thumping into the jamb. The security panel beeped, its happy green light flicking over to the menacing red eye of a sentry.

Lukas took a deep breath and picked his way through the servers. He tried not to go the same way as Bernard, tried never to go the same way twice. He chose a longer route just to break the monotony, to have one less routine in that prison.

Bernard had the back of the server open by the time he arrived. He held the familiar headphones out to Lukas.

Lukas accepted them and put them on backwards, the microphone snaking around the rear of his neck.

“Like this?”

Bernard laughed at him and twirled his finger. “Other way around,” he said, lifting his voice so Lukas could hear through the muffs.

Lukas fumbled with the headphones, tangling his arm in the cord. Bernard waited patiently.

“Are you ready?” Bernard asked, once they were in place. He held the loose jack in one hand. Lukas nodded. He watched Bernard turn and aim the plug at the banks of receptacles. He pictured Bernard’s hand swinging down and to the right, slamming the plug home into number 17, then turning and confronting Lukas about his favorite pastime, his secret crush—

But his boss’s small hand never wavered; it clicked into place, Lukas knowing exactly how that felt, how the receptacle hugged the plug tightly, seemed to welcome it in, the pads of one’s fingers getting a jolt from the flicking of that spring-loaded plastic retainer—

The light above the jack started blinking. A familiar buzzing throbbed in Lukas’s ears. He waited for her voice, for Juliette to answer.

A click.

“Name.”

A trill of fear ran up Lukas’s back, bumps erupting across his arms. The voice, deep and hollow, impatient and aloof, came and went like the glimpse of a star. Lukas licked his lips.

“Lukas Kyle,” he said, trying not to stammer.

There was a pause. He imagined someone, somewhere, writing this down or flipping through files or doing something awful with the information. The temperature behind the server soared. Bernard was smiling at him, oblivious to the silence on his end.

“You shadowed in IT.”

It felt like a statement, but Lukas nodded and answered. “Yessir.”

He wiped his palm across his forehead and then the seat of his coveralls. He desperately wanted to sit down, to lean back against server number 40, to relax. But Bernard was smiling at him, his mustache lifting, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

“What is your primary duty to the silo?”

Bernard had prepped him on likely questions.

“To maintain the Order.”

Silence. No feedback, no sense if he was right or wrong.

“What do you protect above all?”

The voice was flat and yet powerfully serious. Dire and somehow calm. Lukas felt his mouth go dry.

“Life and Legacy,” he recited. But it felt wrong, this rote façade of knowledge. He wanted to go into detail, to let this voice, like a strong and sober father, understand that he knew why this was important. He wasn’t dumb. He had more to say than memorized facts—

“What does it take to protect these things we hold so dear?”

He paused.

“It takes sacrifice,” Lukas whispered. He thought of Juliette—and the calm demeanor he was projecting for Bernard nearly crumbled. There were some things he wasn’t sure about, things he didn’t understand. This was one of them. It felt like a lie, his answer. He wasn’t sure the sacrifice was worth it, the danger so great that they had to let people, good people, go to their—

“How much time have you had in the suit labs?”

The voice had changed, relaxed somewhat. Lukas wondered if the ceremony was over. Was that it? Had he passed? He blew out his held breath, hoping the microphone didn’t pick it up, and tried to relax.

“Not much, sir. Bernar— Uh, my boss, he’s wanting me to schedule time in the labs after, you know—”

He looked to Bernard, who was pinching one side of his glasses and watching him.

“Yes. I do know. How is that problem in your lower levels going?”

“Um, well, I’m only kept apprised of the overall progress, and it sounds good—” He cleared his throat and thought of all the sounds of gunfire and violence he’d heard through the radio in the room below. “That is, it sounds like progress is being made, that it won’t be much longer.”

A long pause. Lukas forced himself to breathe deeply, to smile at Bernard.

“Would you have done anything differently, Lukas? From the beginning?”

Lukas felt his body sway, his knees go a little numb. He was back on that conference table, black steel pressed against his cheek, a line from his eye extending through a small cross, through a tiny hole, pointing like a laser at a small woman with gray hair and a bomb in her hand. Bullets were flying down that line. His bullets.

“Nossir,” he finally said. “It was all by the Order, sir. Everything’s under control.”

He waited. Somewhere, he felt, his measure was being taken.

“You are next in line for the control and operation of silo eighteen,” the voice intoned.

“Thank you sir.”

Lukas reached for the headphones, was preparing to take them off and hand them to Bernard in case he needed to say something, to hear that it was official.

“Do you know the worst part of my job?” the hollow voice asked.

Lukas dropped his hands.

“What’s that, sir?”

“Standing here, looking at a silo on this map, and drawing a red cross through it. Can you imagine what that feels like?”

Lukas shook his head. “I can’t, sir.”

“It feels like a parent losing thousands of children, all at once.”

A pause.

“You will have to be cruel to your children to not lose them.”

Lukas thought of his father.

“Yessir.”

“Welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order, Lukas Kyle. Now, if you have a question or two, I have the time to answer, but briefly.”

Lukas wanted to say that he had no questions; he wanted to get off the line; he wanted to call and speak with Juliette, to feel a puff of sanity breathed into this crazy and suffocating room. But he remembered what Bernard had taught him about admitting ignorance, how this was the key to knowledge.

“Just one, sir. And I’ve been told it isn’t important, and I understand why that’s true, but I believe it will make my job here easier if I know.”

He paused for a response, but the voice seemed to be waiting for him to get to the question.

Lukas cleared his throat. “Is there—?” He pinched the mic and moved it closer to his lips, glanced at Bernard. “How did this all begin?”

He wasn’t sure—it could have been a fan on the server whirring to life—but he thought he heard the man with the deep voice sigh.

“How badly do you wish to know?”

Lukas feared answering this question honestly. “It isn’t crucial,” he said, “but I would appreciate a sense of what we’re accomplishing, what we survived. It feels like it gives me—gives us a purpose, you know?”

“The reason is the purpose,” the man said cryptically. “Before I tell you, I’d like to hear what you think.”

Lukas swallowed. “What I think?”

“Everyone has ideas. Are you suggesting you don’t?”

A hint of humor could be heard in that hollow voice.

“I think it was something we saw coming,” Lukas said. He watched Bernard, who frowned and looked away.

“That’s one possibility.”

Bernard removed his glasses and began wiping them on the sleeve of his undershirt, his eyes at his feet.

“Consider this—” The deep voice paused. “What if I told you that there were only fifty silos in all the world, and that here we are in this infinitely small corner of it.”

Lukas thought about this. It felt like another test.

“I would say that we were the only ones—” He almost said that they were the only ones with the resources, but he’d seen enough in the Legacy to know this wasn’t true. Many parts of the world had buildings rising above their hills. Many more could have been prepared. “I’d say we were the only ones who knew,” Lukas suggested.

“Very good. And why might that be?”

He hated this. He didn’t want to puzzle it out, he just wanted to be told.

And then, like a cable splicing together, like electricity zipping through connections for the very first time, the truth hit him.

“It’s because—” He tried to make sense of this answer in his head, tried to imagine that such an idea could possibly verge on truth.

“It’s not because we knew,” Lukas said, sucking in a gasp of air. “It’s because we did it.”

“Yes,” the voice said. “And now you know.”

He said something else, just barely audible, like it was being said to someone else. “Our time is up, Lukas Kyle. Congratulations on your assignment.”

The headphones were sticky against his head, his face clammy with sweat.

“Thank you,” he managed.

“Oh, and Lukas?”

“Yessir?”

“Going forward, I suggest you concentrate on what’s beneath your feet. No more of this business with the stars, okay son? We know where most of them are.”

16

“Hello? Solo? Please say something.”

There was no mistaking that voice, even through the small speakers in the dismantled headset. It echoed bodiless in the control room, the same control room that had housed that very voice for so many years. The location was what nailed it for Shirly; she stared at the tiny speakers spliced into the magical radio, knowing it could be no one else.

Neither she nor Walker dared breathe. They waited what felt like forever before she finally broke the silence.

“That was Juliette,” she whispered. “How can we—? Is her voice trapped down here? In the air? How long ago would that have been?”

Shirly didn’t understand how any of the science worked; it was all beyond her pay grade. Walker continued to stare at the headset, unmoving, not saying a word, tears shining in his beard.

“Are these… these ripples we’re grabbing with the antenna, are they just bouncing around down here?”

She wondered if the same was true of all the voices they’d heard. Maybe they were simply picking up conversations from the past. Was that possible? Like some kind of electrical echo? Somehow, this seemed far less shocking than the alternative.

Walker turned to her, a strange expression on his face. His mouth hung partway open, but there was a curl at the edges of his lips, a curl that began to rise.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. The curl transformed into a smile. “This is now. This is happening.” He grabbed Shirly’s arm. “You heard it too, didn’t you? I’m not crazy. That really was her, wasn’t it? She’s alive. She made it.”

“No—” Shirly shook her head. “Walk, what’re you saying? That Juliette’s alive? Made it where?”

“You heard.” He pointed at the radio. “Before. The conversations. The cleaning. There’s more of them out there. More of us. She’s with them, Shirly. This is happeningrightnow.”

“Alive.”

Shirly stared at the radio, processing this. Her friend was still somewhere. Still breathing. It had been so solid in her head, this vision of Juliette’s body just over the hills, lying in silent repose, the wind flecking away at her. And now she was picturing her moving, breathing, talking into a radio somewhere.

“Can we talk to her?” she asked.

She knew it was a dumb question. But Walker seemed to startle, his old limbs jumping.

“Oh, God. God, yes.” He set the mish-mash of components down on the floor, his hands trembling, but with what Shirly now read as excitement. The fear in both of them was gone, drained from the room, the rest of the world beyond that small space fading to meaninglessness.

Walker dug into the parts bin. He dumped some tools out and pawed into the bottom of the container.

“No,” he said. He turned and scanned the parts on the ground. “No no no.”

“What is it?” Shirly slid away from the string of components so he could better see. “What’re we missing? There’s a microphone right there.” She pointed to the partially disassembled headphones.

“The transmitter. It’s a little board. I think it’s on my workbench.”

“I swiped everything into the bin.” Her voice was high and tense. She moved toward the plastic bucket.

“My other workbench. It wasn’t needed. All Jenks wanted was to listen in.” He waved at the radio. “I did what he wanted. How could I have known I’d need to transmit—?”

“You couldn’t,” Shirly said. She rested her hand on his arm. She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time. “Is there anything in here we can use? Think, Walk. Concentrate.”

He shook his head, wagged his finger at the headphones. “This mic is dumb. It just passes the sound through. Little membranes vibrating—”

He turned and looked at her. “Wait—there is something.”

“Down here? Where?”

“The mining storehouse would have them. A transmitter.” He pretended to hold a box and twist a switch. “For the blasting caps. I repaired one just a month ago. It would work.”

Shirly rose to her feet. “I’ll go get it,” she said. “You stay here.”

“But the stairwell—”

“I’ll be safe. I’m going down, not up.”

He bobbed his head.

“Don’t change anything with that.” She pointed to the radio. “No looking for more voices. Just hers. Leave it there.”

“Of course.”

Shirly bent down and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

Outside, she found dozens of faces turning her way, frightened and questioning looks in their wide eyes, their slack mouths. She felt like shouting over the hum of the generator that Juliette was alive, that they weren’t alone, that other people lived and breathed in the forbidden outside. She wanted to, but she didn’t have the time. She hurried to the rail and found Courtnee.

“Hey—”

“Everything okay in there?” Courtnee asked.

“Yeah, fine. Do me a favor, will you? Keep an eye on Walker for me.”

Courtnee nodded. “Where are you—?”

But Shirly was already gone, running to the main door. She squeezed through a group huddled in the entranceway. Jenkins was outside with Harper. They stopped talking as she hurried past.

“Hey!” Jenkins seized her arm. “Where the hell’re you going?”

“Mine storeroom.” She twisted her arm out of his grasp. “I won’t be long—”

“You won’t be going. We’re about to blow that stairwell. These idiots are falling right into our hands.”

“You’re what?”

“The stairwell,” Harper repeated. “It’s rigged to blow. Once they get down there and start working their way through—” He put his hands together in a ball, then expanded the sphere in a mock explosion.

“You don’t understand—” She faced Jenkins. “It’s for the radio.”

He frowned. “Walk had his chance.”

“We’re picking up a lot of chatter,” she told him. “He needs this one piece. I’ll be right back, swear.”

Jenkins looked to Harper. “How long before we do this?”

“Five minutes, sir.” His chin moved back and forth, almost imperceptibly.

“You’ve got four,” he said to Shirly. “But make sure—”

She didn’t hear the rest. Her boots were already pounding the steel, carrying her toward the stairwell. She flew past the oil rig with its sad and lowered head, past the row of confused and twitching men, their guns all pointing the way.

She hit the top of the steps and slid around the corner. Someone half a flight up yelled in alarm. Shirly caught a glimpse of two miners with sticks of TNT before she skipped down the flight of stairs.

At the next level, she turned and headed for the mineshaft. The hallways were silent, just her panting and the clop, clop, clop of her boots.

Juliette. Alive.

A person sent to cleaning, alive.

She turned down the next hallway and ran past the apartments for the deep workers, the miners and the oil men, men who now bore guns instead of holes in the earth, who wielded weapons rather than tools.

And this new knowledge, this impossible bit of news, this secret, it made the fighting seem surreal. Petty. How could anyone fight if there were places to go beyond these walls? If her friend was still out there? Shouldn’t they be going as well?

She made it to the storeroom. Probably been two minutes. Her heart was racing. Surely Jenkins wouldn’t do anything to that stairway until she got back. She moved down the shelves, peering in the bins and drawers. She knew what the thing looked like. There should be several of them floating about. Where were they?

She checked the lockers, threw the dingy coveralls hanging inside them to the ground, tossed work helmets out of the way. She didn’t see anything. How much time did she have?

She tried the small foreman’s office next, throwing the door open and storming to the desk. Nothing in the drawers. Nothing on the shelves mounted to the wall. One of the big drawers on the bottom was stuck. Locked.

Shirly stepped back and kicked the front of the metal drawer with her boot. She slammed the steel toe into it once, twice. The lip curled down, away from the drawer above. She reached in, yanked the flimsy lock off its lip, and the warped drawer opened with a groan.

Explosives. Sticks of dynamite. There were a few small relays that she knew went into the sticks to ignite them. Beneath these, she found three of the transmitters Walker was looking for.

Shirly grabbed two of them, a few relays, and put them all in her pocket. She took two sticks of the dynamite—just because they were there and went with everything else—and ran out of the office, through the storeroom, back toward the stairs.

She had used up too much time. Her chest felt cool and empty, raspy, as she labored to breathe. She ran as fast as she could, concentrating on throwing her boots forward, lunging for more floor, gobbling it up.

Turning at the end of the hall, she again thought about how ridiculous this fighting was. It was hard to remember why it had begun. Knox was gone, so was McLain. Would their people be fighting if these great leaders were still around? Would they have done something different long ago? Something more sane?

She cursed the folly of it all as she reached the stairs. Surely it had been five minutes. She waited for a blast to ring out above her, to deafen her with the concussive ferocity trapped in that stairwell. Leaping up two treads at a time, she made the turn at the top and saw that the miners were gone. Anxious eyes peered at her over homemade barrels.

“Go!” someone yelled, waving their arms to the side, hurrying her along.

Shirly focused on Jenkins, who crouched down with his own rifle, Harper by his side. She nearly tripped over the wires leading away from the stairwell as she ran toward the two men.

“Now!” Jenkins yelled.

Someone threw a switch.

The ground lurched and buckled beneath Shirly’s feet, sending her sprawling. She landed hard on the steel floor, her chin grazing the diamond plating, the dynamite nearly flying from her hands.

Her ears were still ringing as she got to her knees. Men were moving behind the railing, guns popping into the bank of smoke leaking from a new maw of twisted and jagged steel. The screams of the distant wounded could be heard on the other side.

While men fought, Shirly patted her pockets, fished inside for the transmitters.

And again, the noise of war seemed to fade, to become insignificant. She hurried through the door to the generator room, back to Walker, her lip bleeding, her mind on more important things.

17

Juliette pulled herself through the cold, dark waters, bumping blindly against the ceiling, a wall, no way to tell which. She gathered the limp air hose with blind and desperate lunges, no idea how fast she was going—until she crashed into the stairs. Her nose crunched against the inside of her helmet, and the darkness was momentarily shouldered aside by a flash of light. She floated, dazed, the air hose drifting from her hands.

Juliette groped for the precious line as her senses gradually returned. She hit something with her glove, grabbed it, and was about to pull herself along when she realized it was the smaller power line. She let go and swept her arms in the blind murk, her boots bumping against something. It was impossible to know top from bottom. She began to feel turned around, dizzy, disoriented.

A rigid surface pressed against her; she decided she must be floating up, away from the hose.

She kicked off what she assumed was the ceiling and swam in the direction that she hoped was down. Her arms tangled in something—she felt it across her padded chest—she found it with her hands, expecting the power cord, but was rewarded with the spongy nothingness of the empty air tube. It no longer offered her air, but it did lead the way out.

Pulling one direction gathered slack, so she tried the other way. The hose went taut. She pulled herself into the stairs again, bounced away with a grunt, and kept gathering line. The hose led up and around the corner—and she found herself pulling, reaching out an arm to fend off the blind assaults from walls, ceiling, steps—bumping and floating up six flights, a battle for every inch, a struggle that seemed to take forever.

By the time she reached the top, she was out of breath and panting. And then she realized she wasn’t out of breath, she was out of air. She had burned through whatever remained in the suit. Hundreds of feet of exhausted hose lay invisible behind her, sucked dry.

She tried the radio again as she pulled herself through the corridor, her suit rising slowly toward the ceiling, not nearly as buoyant as before.

“Solo! Can you hear me?”

The thought of how much water still lay above her, all those levels of it pressing down, hundreds of feet of solid flood—it was suffocating. What did she have left in the suit? Minutes? How long would it take to swim or float to the top of the stairwell? Much, much longer. There were probably oxygen bottles down one of those pitch black hallways, but how would she find them? This wasn’t her home. She didn’t have time to look. All she had was a mad drive to reach the stairwell, to race to the surface.

She pulled and kicked her way around the last corner and into the main hallway, her muscles screaming from being used in new ways, from fighting the stiff and bulky suit, the viscous atmosphere, when she realized the inky water had lightened to something nearer charcoal instead of pitch black. There was a green tint to her blindness.

Juliette scissored her legs and gathered in the tubing, bumping along the ceiling, sensing the security station and stairwell ahead. She had travelled corridors like these thousands of times, twice in utter darkness when main breakers had failed. She remembered staggering through hallways just like this, telling coworkers it would be okay, to just stay still, she’d handle it.

Now she tried to do the same for herself, to lie and say it would all be okay, to just keep moving, don’t panic.

The dizziness began to set in as she reached the security gate. The water ahead glowed lime green and looked so inviting, an end to the blind scrambling, no more of her helmet bumping into what she couldn’t see.

Her arm briefly tangled with the power cord; she shook it free and hauled herself toward that tall column of water ahead, that flooded straw, that sunken stairway.

Before she got there, she had her first spasm, like a hiccup, a violent and automatic gasp for air. She lost her grip on the line and felt her chest nearly burst from the effort of breathing. The temptation to shed her helmet and take a deep inhalation of water overpowered her. Something in her mind insisted she could breathe the stuff. Just give her a chance, it said. One lungful of the water. Anything other than the toxins she had exhaled into her suit, a suit designed to keep such things out.

Her throat spasmed again, and she started coughing in her helmet as she pulled her way into the stairwell. The rope was there, held down by the wrench. She swam for it, knowing it was too late. As she yanked down, she felt the slack coming—the loose end of the rope spiraled in sinking knots toward her.

She drifted slowly toward the surface, very little of the built-up pressure inside her suit, no quick ride to the top. Another throat spasm, and the helmet had to come off. She was getting dizzy, would soon pass out.

Juliette fumbled for the clasps on her metal collar. The sense of deja vu was overpowering. Only this time, she wasn’t thinking clearly. She remembered the soup, the fetid smell, crawling out of the dark walk-in. She remembered the knife.

Patting her chest, she felt the handle sticking out from its sheath. Some of the other tools had wiggled out of their pockets; they dangled from lines meant to keep them from getting lost, lines that now just made them a nuisance, turned them into more weights holding her down.

She rose gently up the stairwell, her body shivering from the cold and convulsing from the absence of breathable air. Forgetting all reason, all sense of where she was, she became singularly aware of the noxious fog hanging all around her head, trapped by that dome, killing her. She aimed the blade into the first latch in her collar and pressed hard.

There was a click and a fine spray of cold water against her neck. A feeble bubble lurched out of her suit and tumbled up her visor. Groping for the other latch, she shoved the knife into it, and the helmet popped off, water flooding over her face, filling her suit, shocking her with the numbing cold and dragging her, sinking, back down to where she’d come from.

The freezing cold jolted Juliette to her senses. She blinked her lids against the sting of the green water and saw the knife in her hands, the dome of her helmet spinning through the murk like a bubble heading in the wrong direction. She was slowly sinking after it, no air in her lungs, hundreds of feet of water pressing down.

She jabbed the knife into the wrong pocket on her chest, saw drivers and spanners hanging by their cords from her struggle through the blackness, and kicked toward the hose that still led through four levels of water toward the surface.

Bubbles of air leaked out of her collar and across her neck, up through her hair. Juliette seized the hose and stopped her plummet, pulled upward, her throat screaming for an intake of air, of water, of anything. The urge to swallow was overpowering. She started to pull herself up, when she saw, in the undersides of the steps, a shimmering flash of hope.

Trapped bubbles. Maybe from her descent. They moved like liquid solder in the hollow undersides of the spiral staircase.

Juliette made a noise in her throat, a raw cry of desperation, of effort. She pawed through the water, fighting the sinking of the suit, and grasped the railing of the submerged stairway. Pulling herself up and kicking off of the railing, she made it to the nearest shimmer of bubbles, grabbed the edge of the stairs, and pushed her mouth right up to the metal underside of the step.

She inhaled a desperate gasp of air and sucked in a lot of water in the process. She dove her head below the surface and coughed into the water, which brought the burn of fluids invading her nose. She nearly sucked in a lungful of water, felt her heart racing and ready to burst out of her chest, stuck her face back up against the wet rusty underside of the step, and with her lips pursed and trembling, managed to take in a gentle sip of air.

The tiny flashes of light in her vision subsided. She lowered her head and blew out, away from the step, watching the bubbles of her exhalation rise, and then pressed her face close for another taste.

Air.

She blinked away underwater tears of effort, of frustration, of relief. Peering up the twisted maze of metal steps, many of them moving like flexible mirrors where the trapped air was stirred by her mad gyrations, she saw a pathway like no other. She kicked off and took a few steps at a time, pulling herself hand over hand in the gaps between, drinking tiny bubbles of air out of the several-inch hollow beneath each tread, praising the tight welds where the diamond plate steps had been joined many hundreds of years ago. The steps had been boxed in for strength, to handle the traffic of a million impacts of boots, and now they held the gaseous overflow from her descent. Her lips brushed each one, tasting metal and rust, kissing her salvation.

The green emergency lights all around her remained steady, so Juliette never noticed the landings drifting past. She just concentrated on taking five steps with each breath, six steps, a long stretch with hardly any air, another mouthful of water where the bubble was too thin to breathe, a lifetime of rising against the tug of her flooded suit and dangling tools, no thought for stopping and cutting things free, just kick and pull, hand over hand, up the undersides of the steps, a deep and steady pull of air, suck this shallow step dry, don’t exhale into the steps above, easy now. Five more steps. It was a game, like Hop, five squares in a leap, don’t cheat, mind the chalk, she was good at this, getting better.

And then a foul burn on her lips, the taste of water growing toxic, her head coming up into the underside of a step and breaking through a film of gas-stench and slimy oil.

Juliette blew out her last breath and coughed, wiping at her face, her head still trapped below the next step. She wheezed and laughed and pushed herself away, banging her head on the sharp steel edge of the stairs. She was free. She briefly bobbed below the surface as she swam around the railing, her eyes burning from the oil and gas floating on top. Splashing loudly, crying for Solo, she made it over the railing. With her padded and shivering knees, she finally found the steps.

She’d made it. Clinging to the dry treads above her, neck bent, gasping and wheezing, her legs numb, she tried to cry out that she made it, but it escaped as a whimper. She was cold. She was freezing. Her arms shivered as she pulled herself up the quiet steps, no rattle from the compressor, no arms reaching to assist her.

“Solo—?”

She crawled the half dozen treads to the landing and rolled onto her back. Some of her tools were caught on steps below, tugging at her where they were tied off to her pockets. Water drained out of her suit and splashed down her neck, pooled by her head, ran into her ears. She turned her head—she needed to get the freezing suit off—and found Solo.

He was lying on his side, eyes shut, blood running down his face, some of it already caked dry.

“Solo?”

Her hand was a shivering blur as she reached and shook him. What had he done to himself?

“Hey. Wakethefuckup.”

Her teeth were chattering. She grabbed his shoulder and gave him a violent shake. “Solo! I need help!”

One of his eyes parted a little. He blinked a few times, then bent double and coughed, blood flecking the landing by his face.

“Help,” she said. She fumbled for the zipper at her back, not realizing it was Solo who needed her.

Solo coughed into his hand, then rolled over and settled once again to his back. The blood on his head was still flowing from somewhere, fresh tracks trickling across what had dried some time before.

“Solo?”

He groaned. Juliette pulled herself closer, could barely feel her body. He whispered something, his voice a rasp on the edge of silence.

“Hey—” She brought her face close to his, could feel her lips swollen and numb, could still taste the gasoline.

“Not my name—”

He coughed a mist of red. One arm lifted from the landing a few inches as if to cover his mouth, but it never had a chance of getting there.

“Not my name,” he said again. His head lolled side to side, and Juliette finally realized that he was badly injured. Her mind began to clear enough to see what state he was in.

“Hold still,” she groaned. “Solo, I need you to be still.”

She tried to push herself up, to will herself the strength to move. Solo blinked and looked at her, his eyes glassy, blood tinting the gray in his beard the color crimson.

“Not Solo,” he said, his voice straining. “My name’s Jimmy—”

More coughing, his eyes rolling up into the back of his head—

“—and I don’t think—”

His eyelids sagged shut, and then squinted in pain.

“—don’t think I was—”

“Stay with me,” Juliette said, hot tears cutting down her frozen face.

“—don’t think I ever was alone,” he whispered, the lines on his face relaxing, his head sagging to the cold steel landing.

18

The pot on the stove bubbled noisily, steam rising off the surface, tiny drops of water leaping to their hissing freedom over the edge. Lukas shook a pinch of tea leaves out of the resealable tin and into the tiny strainer. His hands were shaking as he lowered the little basket into his mug. As he lifted the pot, some water spilled directly on the burner; the drops made spitting sounds and gave off a burnt odor. He watched Bernard out of the corner of his eye as he tilted the boiling water through the leaves.

“I just don’t understand,” he said, holding the mug with both hands, allowing the heat to penetrate his palms. “How could anybody—? How could you do something like this on purpose?” He shook his head and peered into his mug where a few intrepid shreds of leaf had already gotten free and swam outside the basket. He looked up at Bernard. “And you knew about this? How—? How could you know about this?”

Bernard frowned. He rubbed his mustache with one hand, the other resting in the belly of his coveralls. “I wish I didn’t know it,” he told Lukas. “And now you see why some facts, some bits of knowledge have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground.” He looked down at his boots. “I pieced it together much as you did, just knowing what we have to know to do this job. This is why I chose you, Lukas. You and a few others have some idea what’s stored on these servers. You’re already prepped for learning more. Can you imagine if you told any of this to someone who wears red or green to work every day?”

Lukas shook his head.

“It’s happened before, you know. Silo ten went down like that. I sat back there—” He pointed toward the small study with the books, the computer, the hissing radio. “—and I listened to it happen. I listened to a colleague’s shadow broadcast his insanity to anyone who would listen—”

Lukas studied his steeping tea. A handful of leaves swam about on hot currents of darkening water; the rest remained in the grip of the imprisoning basket. “That’s why the radio controls are locked up,” he said.

“And it’s why you are locked up.”

Lukas nodded. He’d already suspected as much.

“How long were you kept in here?” He glanced up at Bernard, and an image flashed in his mind, one of Sheriff Billings inspecting his gun while he visited with his mother. Had they been listening in? Would he have been shot, his mother too, if he’d said anything?

“I spent just over two months down here until my caster knew I was ready, that I had accepted and understood everything I’d learned.” He crossed his arms over his belly. “I really wish you hadn’t asked the question, hadn’t put it together so soon. It’s much better to find out when you’re older.”

Lukas pursed his lips and nodded. It was strange to talk like this with someone his senior, someone who knew so much more, was so much wiser. He imagined this was the sort of conversation a man had with his father—only not about the planned and carried out destruction of the entire world.

Lukas bent his head and breathed in the smell of the steeping leaves. The mint was like a direct line through the trembling stress, a strike to the calm pleasure center in the deep regions of his brain. He inhaled and held it, finally let it out. Bernard crossed to the small stove in the corner of the storeroom and started making his own mug.

“How did they do it?” Lukas asked. “To kill so many. Do you know how they did it?”

Bernard shrugged. He tapped the tin with one finger, shaking out a precise amount of tea into another basket. “They might still be doing it for all I know. Nobody talks about how long it’s supposed to go on. There’s fear that small pockets of survivors might be holed up elsewhere around the globe. Operation fifty is completely pointless if anyone else survives. The population has to be homogenous—”

“The man I spoke to, he said we were it. Just the fifty silos—”

“Forty-seven,” Bernard said. “And we are it, as far as we know. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else being so well prepared. But there’s always a chance. It’s only been a few hundred years.”

“A few hundred?” Lukas leaned back against the counter. He lifted his tea, but the mint was losing its power to reach him. “So hundreds of years ago, we decided—”

“They.” Bernard filled his mug with the still-steaming water. “They decided. Don’t include yourself. Certainly don’t include me.”

“Okay, they decided to destroy the world. Wipe everything out. Why?”

Bernard set his mug down on the stove to let it steep. He pulled off his glasses, wiped the steam off them, then pointed them toward the study, toward the wall with the massive shelves of books. “Because of the worst parts of our Legacy, that’s why. At least, that’s what I think they would say if they were still alive.” He lowered his voice and muttered: “Which they aren’t, thank God.”

Lukas shuddered. He still didn’t believe anyone would make that decision, no matter what the conditions were like. He thought of the billions of people who supposedly lived beneath the stars all those hundreds of years ago. Nobody could kill so many. How could anyone take that much life for granted?

“And now we work for them,” Lukas spat. He crossed to the sink and pulled the basket out of his mug, set it on the stainless steel to drain. He cautioned a sip, slurping lest it burn him. “You tell me not to include us, but we’re a part of this now.”

“No.” Bernard walked away from the stove and stood in front of the small map of the world hanging above the dinette. “We weren’t any part of what those crazy fucks did. If I had those guys, the men who did this, if I had them in a room with me, I’d kill every last goddamned one of them.” Bernard smacked the map with his palm. “I’d kill them with my bare hands.”

Lukas didn’t say anything. He didn’t move.

“They didn’t give us a chance. That’s not what this is.” He waved at the room around him. “These are prisons. Cages, not homes. Not meant to protect us, but meant to force us, by pain of death, to bring about their vision.”

“Their vision for what?”

“For a world where we’re too much the same, where we’re too tightly invested in each other to waste our time fighting, to waste our resources guarding those same limited resources.” He lifted his mug and took a noisy sip. “That’s my theory, at least. From decades of reading. The people who did this, they were in charge of a powerful country that was beginning to crumble. They could see the end, their end, and it scared them suicidal. As the time began to run out—over decades keep in mind—they figured they had one chance to preserve themselves, to preserve what they saw as their way of life. And so, before they lost the only opportunity they might ever have, they put a plan into motion.”

“Without anybody knowing? How?”

Bernard took another sip. He smacked his lips and wiped his mustache. “Who knows? Maybe nobody could believe it anyway. Maybe the reward for secrecy was inclusion. They built other things in factories bigger than you can imagine that nobody knew about. They built bombs in factories like these that I suspect played a part in all this. All without anyone knowing. And there are stories in the Legacy about men from a long time ago in a land with great kings, like mayors but with many more people to rule. When these men died, elaborate chambers were built below the earth and filled with treasure. It required the work of hundreds of men. Do you know how they kept the locations of these chambers a secret?”

Lukas lifted his shoulders. “They paid the workers a ton of chits?”

Bernard laughed. He pinched a stray tea leaf off his tongue. “They didn’t have chits. And no, they made perfectly sure these men would keep quiet. They killed them.”

“Their own men?” Lukas glanced toward the room with the books, wondering which tin this story was in.

“It is not beyond us to kill to keep secrets.” Bernard’s face hardened as he said this. “It’ll be a part of your job one day, when you take over.”

Lukas felt a sharp pain in his gut as the truth of this hit. He caught the first glimmer of what he’d truly signed on for. It made shooting people with rifles seem an honest affair.

“We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it’s up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.”

“We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”

“Wise words.” Bernard took another sip of tea.

“Yeah. I’m just beginning to appreciate them.”

Bernard set his cup in the sink and tucked a hand in the round belly of his coveralls. He stared at Lukas a moment, then looked again to the small map of the world.

“Evil men did this, but they’re gone. Forget them. Just know this: They locked up their brood as a fucked-up form of their own survival. They put us in this game, a game where breaking the rules means we all die, every single one of us. But living by those rules, obeying them, means we all suffer.”

He adjusted his glasses and walked over to Lukas, patted him on the shoulder as he went past. “I’m proud of you, son. You’re absorbing this much better than I ever did. Now get some rest. Make some room in your head and heart. Tomorrow, more studies.” He headed toward the study, the corridor, the distant ladder.

Lukas nodded and remained silent. He waited until Bernard was gone, the muted clang of distant metal telling him that the grate was back in place, before walking through to the study to gaze up at the big schematic, the one with the silos crossed out. He peered at the roof of silo 1, wondering just who in the hell was in charge of all this and whether they too could rationalize their actions as having been foisted upon them, as not really being culpable but just going along with something they’d inherited, a crooked game with ratshit rules and most everyone kept ignorant and locked up.

Who the fuck were these people? Could he see himself being one of them?

How did Bernard not see that he was one of them?

19

The door to the generator room slammed shut behind her, dulling the patter of gunfire to a distant hammering. Shirly ran toward the control room on sore legs, ignoring her friends and coworkers asking her what was going on outside. They cowered along the walls and behind the railing from the loud blast and the sporadic gunfire. Just before she reached the control room, she noticed some workers from second shift on top of the main generator toying with the rumbling machine’s massive exhaust system.

“I got it,” Shirly wheezed, slamming the control room door shut behind her. Courtnee and Walker looked up from the floor. The wide eyes and slack jaw on Courtnee’s face told Shirly she’d missed something.

“What?” she asked. She handed the two transmitters to Walker. “Did you hear? Walk, does she know?”

“How is this possible?” Courtnee asked. “How did she survive? And what happened to your face?”

Shirly touched her lip, her sore chin. Her fingers came away wet with blood. She used the sleeve of her undershirt to dab at her mouth.

“If this works,” Walker grumbled, fiddling with one of the transmitters, “we can ask Jules herself.”

Shirly turned and peered through the control room’s observation window. She lowered her sleeve away from her face. “What’s Karl and them doing with the exhaust feed?” she asked.

“They’ve got some plan to reroute it,” Courtnee said. She got up from the floor while Walker started soldering something, the smell reminding her of his workshop. He grumbled about his eyesight while Courtnee joined her by the glass.

“Reroute it where?”

“IT. That’s what Heline said, anyway. The cooling feed for their server room runs through the ceiling here before shooting up the mechanical shaft. Someone spotted the proximity on a schematic, thought of a way to fight back from here.”

“So, we choke them out with our fumes?” Shirly felt uneasy with the plan. She wondered what Knox would say if he were still alive, still in charge. Surely all the men and women riding desks up there weren’t the problem. “Walk, how long before we can talk? Before we can try and contact her?”

“Almost there. Blasted magnifiers—”

Courtnee rested her hand on Shirly’s arm. “Are you okay? How’re you holding up?”

“Me?” Shirly laughed and shook her head. She checked the bloodstains on her sleeve, felt the sweat trickling down her chest. “I’m walking around in shock. I have no idea what the hell’s going on anymore. My ears are still ringing from whatever they did to the stairwell. I think I screwed up my ankle. And I’m starving. Oh, and did I mention my friend isn’t as dead as I thought she was?”

She took a deep breath.

Courtnee continued to stare at her worryingly. Shirly knew none of this was what her friend was asking her about.

“And yeah, I miss Marck,” she said quietly.

Courtnee put her arm around her friend and pulled her close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

Shirly waved her off. The two of them stood quietly and watched through the window as a small crew from second shift worked on the generator, trying to reroute the outpouring of noxious fumes from the apartment-sized machine to the floors of the thirties high above.

“You know what, though? There are times when I’m glad he’s not here. Times when I know I won’t be around much longer either, not once they get to us, and I’m glad he’s not here to stress about it, to worry about what they’ll do to us. To me. And I’m glad I haven’t had to watch him do all this fighting, living on rations, this sort of craziness.” She dipped her chin at the crew outside. She knew Marck would either be up there leading that terrible work or outside with a gun pressed to his cheek.

“Hello. Testing. Hello, hello.”

The two women turned around to see Walker clicking the red detonate switch, the microphone from the headset held beneath his chin, furrows of concentration across his brow.

“Juliette?” he asked. “Can you hear me? Hello?”

Shirly moved to Walker’s side, squatted down, rested a hand on his shoulder. The three of them stared at the headphones, waiting for a reply.

“Hello?”

A quiet voice leaked out of the tiny speakers. Shirly clapped a hand to her chest, her breath stolen from the miracle of a reply. It was a fraction of a second later, after this surge of desperate hope, that she realized this wasn’t Juliette. The voice was different.

“That’s not her,” Courtnee whispered, dejected. Walker waved his hand to silence her. The red switch clicked noisily as he prepared to transmit.

“Hello. My name is Walker. We received a transmission from a friend. Is there anyone else there?”

“Ask them where they are,” Courtnee hissed.

“Where exactly are you?” Walker added, before releasing the switch.

The tiny speakers popped.

“We are nowhere. You’ll never find us. Stay away.”

There was a pause, a hiss of static.

“And your friend is dead. We killed him.”

20

The water inside the suit was freezing, the air cold, the combination lethal. Juliette’s teeth chattered noisily while she worked the knife. She slid the blade into the soggy skin of the suit, the feeling of having been here before, having done all this once, unmistakable.

The gloves came off first, the suit destroyed, water pouring out of every cut. Juliette rubbed her hands together, could barely feel them. She hacked away at the material over her chest, her eyes falling to Solo, who had gone deathly still. His large wrench was missing, she saw. Their supply bag was gone as well. The compressor was on its side, the hose kinked beneath it, fuel leaking from the loose filling cap.

Juliette was freezing. She could hardly breathe. Once the chest of the suit was cut open, she wiggled her knees and feet through the hole, spun the material around in front of herself, then tried to pry the velcro apart.

Her fingers were too senseless to do even this. She ran the knife down the joint instead, sawing the velcro apart until she could find the zipper.

Finally, squeezing her fingers until they were white, she pulled the small tab until it was free of the collar. The collar off, she threw the suit away from herself. The thing weighed double with all the water in it. She was left in two layers of black undersuit, still soaking wet and shivering, a knife in her trembling hand, the body of a good man lying beside her, a man who had survived everything this nasty world could throw at him except for her arrival.

Juliette moved to Solo’s side and reached for his neck. Her hands were icy; she couldn’t feel a pulse, wasn’t sure if she would be able to. She could barely feel his neck with her frozen fingers.

She struggled to her feet, nearly collapsed, hugged the landing’s railing. She teetered toward the compressor, knowing she needed to warm up. She felt the powerful urge to go to sleep but knew she’d never wake up if she did.

The gas can was still full. She tried to work the cap, but her hands were useless. They were numb and vibrating from the cold. Her breath fogged in front of her, a chilly reminder of the heat she was losing, what little heat she had left.

She grabbed the knife. Holding it in both hands, she pressed the tip into the cap. The flat handle was easier to grasp than the plastic cap; she spun the knife and cracked the lid on the jug of gas. Once the cap was loose, she pulled the blade out and did the rest with her palms, the knife resting in her lap.

She tilted the can over the compressor, soaking the large rubber wheels, the carriage, the entire motor. She would never want to use it again anyway, never rely on it or anything else for her air. She put the can down, still half full, and slid it away from the compressor with her foot. Gas dripped through the metal grating and made musical impacts in the water below, drips that echoed off the concrete walls of the stairwell, that added to the flood’s toxic and colorful slick.

Wielding the knife with the blade down, the dull side away from her, she smacked it against the metal fins of the heat exchanger. She yanked her arm back with each strike, expecting the whoosh of an immediate flame. But there was no spark. She hit it harder, hating to abuse her precious tool, her only defense. Solo’s stillness nearby was a reminder that she might need it if she were able to survive the deadly cold—

The knife struck with a snick, there was a pop, heat traveling up her arm, a wash of it against her face.

Juliette dropped the knife and waved her hand, but it wasn’t on fire. The compressor was. Part of the grating, too.

As it began to die down, she grabbed the can and sloshed some more, large balls of orange flame rewarding her, leaping up in the air with a hiss. The wheels crackled as they burned. Juliette collapsed close to the fire, felt the heat from the dancing flame as it burned all across the metal machine. She began to strip, her eyes returning now and then to Solo, promising herself that she wouldn’t leave his body there, that she would come back for him.

Feeling slowly returned to her extremities. Gradually, but then with a tingling pain. Naked, she curled into a ball next to the small and feeble fire and rubbed her hands together, breathing her warm and visible breath into her palms. Twice, she had to feed the hungry and stingy fire. Only the wheels burned reliably, but they kept her from needing another spark. The glorious heat traveled somewhat through the landing’s grated decking, warming her bare skin where it touched the metal.

Her teeth chattered violently. Juliette eyed the stairs, this new fear coursing through her that boots could rumble down at any moment, that she was trapped between these other survivors and the freezing water. She retrieved her knife, held it in front of her with both hands, tried to will herself to not shiver so violently.

Glimpses of her face in the blade caused her to worry more. She looked as pale as a ghost. Lips purple, eyes ringed dark and seeming hollow. She nearly laughed at the sight of her lips vibrating, the clacking blur of her teeth. She scooted closer to the fire. The orange light danced on the blade. The unburnt fuel dripped and formed silvery splashes of color below.

As the last of the gas burned and the flames dwindled, Juliette decided to move. She was still shaking, but it was cold in the depths of the shaft so far from the electricity of IT. She patted the black underlinings she’d stripped off. One of them had been left balled up and was still soaked. The other she’d been lucky to have dropped flat, hadn’t been thinking clearly or she would’ve hung it up. It was damp, but better to wear it and heat it up than allow the cold air to wick her body temperature away. She worked her legs in, struggled to get her arms through the sleeves, zipped up the front.

On bare, numb, and unsteady feet, she returned to Solo. She could feel his neck this time. He felt warm. She couldn’t remember how long a body stayed that way. And then she felt a weak and slow thrumming in his neck. A beat.

“Solo!” She shook his shoulders. “Hey—” What name had he whispered? She remembered: “Jimmy!”

His head lolled from side to side while she shook his shoulder. She checked his scalp beneath all that crazy hair, saw lots of blood. Most of it was dry. She looked around again for her bag—they had brought food, water, and dry clothes for when she got back up—but the satchel was gone. She grabbed her other undersuit instead. She wasn’t sure about the quality of the water in the fabric, but it had to be better than nothing. Wrenching the material in a tight ball, she dripped what she could against his lips. She squeezed more on his head, brushed his hair back to inspect the wound, probed the nasty cut with her fingers. As soon as the water hit the open gash, it was like pushing a button. Solo lurched to the side, away from her hand and the drip from the undersuit. His teeth flashed yellow in his beard as he hissed in pain, his hands rising from the landing and hovering there, arms tensed, still senseless.

“Solo. Hey, it’s okay.”

She held him as he came to, his eyes rolling around, lids blinking.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re gonna be okay.”

She used the balled-up undersuit to dab at his wound. Solo grunted and held her wrist but didn’t pull away.

“Stings,” he said. He blinked and looked around. “Where am I?”

“The down deep,” she reminded him, happy to hear him talking. She felt like crying with relief. “I think you were attacked—”

He tried to sit up, hissing between his teeth, a powerful grip pinching her wrist.

“Easy,” she said, trying to hold him down. “You’ve got a nasty cut on your head. A lot of swelling.”

His body relaxed.

“Where are they?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Juliette said. “What do you remember? How many were there?”

He closed his eyes. She continued to dab at his wound.

“Just one. I think.” He opened his eyes wide as if shocked by the memory of the attack. “He was my age.”

“We need to get up top,” she told him. “We need to get where it’s warm, get you cleaned up, get me dry. Do you think you can move?”

“I’m not crazy,” Solo said.

“I know you’re not.”

“The things that moved, the lights, it wasn’t me. I’m not crazy.”

“No,” Juliette agreed. She remembered all the times she had thought the same thing of herself, always in the down deep of this place, usually while rummaging around Supply. “You aren’t crazy,” she said, comforting him. “You aren’t crazy at all.”

21

Lukas couldn’t force himself to study, not what he was supposed to be studying. The Order sat flopped open on the wooden desk, the little lamp on its thousand-jointed-neck bent over and warming it in a pool of light.

But Lukas stood before the wall schematics instead. He stared at the arrangement of silos, spaced out like the servers in the room above him, and listened to the radio crackle with the sounds of distant warring.

The final push was being made. Sims’s team had lost a few men in an awful explosion, something about a stairwell—but not the great stairwell—and now they were in a fight they hoped would be the last. The little speakers by the radio hissed with static as the men coordinated themselves, as Bernard shouted orders from his office one level up, always with the crackle of gunfire erupting behind the voices.

Lukas knew he shouldn’t listen, and yet he couldn’t stop. Juliette would call him anytime now and ask him for an update. She would want to know what had happened, how the end had come, and the only thing worse than telling her would be admitting he didn’t know, that he couldn’t bear to listen.

He reached out and touched the round roof of silo 17. It was as though he were a god surveying the structures from up high. He pictured his hand piercing the dark clouds above Juliette and spanning a roof built for thousands. He rubbed his fingers over the red X drawn across the silo, those two slashes that admitted to such a great loss. The marks felt waxy beneath his fingers like they’d been drawn with crayon or something similar. He tried to imagine getting the news one day that an entire people were gone, wiped out. He would have to dig in Bernard’s desk—his desk—and find the red stick, lash out another chance at their Legacy, another pod of buried hope.

Lukas looked up at the overhead lights, steady and constant, unblinking. Why hadn’t she called?

His fingernail caught on one of the red marks and flaked a piece of it away. The wax stuck under his fingernail, the paper beneath still stained blood red. There was no taking it back, no cleaning it off, no making it whole again—

Gunfire erupted from the radio. Lukas went to the shelf where the little unit was mounted and listened to orders being barked, men being killed. His forehead went clammy with sweat. He knew how that felt, to pull that trigger, to end a life. He felt an emptiness in his chest and a weakness in his knees. Lukas steadied himself with the shelf, palms slick, and looked at the transmitter hanging there inside its locked cage. How he longed to call those men and tell them not to do it, to stop all the insanity, the violence, the pointless killing. There could be a red X on them all. This was what they should fear, not each other.

He touched the metal cage that kept the radio controls locked away from him, feeling the truth of this and the silliness of broadcasting it to everyone else. It was naive. It wouldn’t change anything. The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.

His hand drifted across the metal grating. He peered inside at one of the dials, the arrow pointing to the number “18.” There were fifty numbers in a dizzying circle, one for each silo. Lukas gave the cage a futile tug, wishing he could listen to something else. What was going on in all those other distant lands? Harmless things, probably. Jokes and chatter. Gossip. He could imagine the thrill of breaking in on one of those conversations and introducing himself to people who weren’t in the know. “I am Lukas from silo eighteen,” he might say. And they would want to know why silos had numbers. And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.

He left the radio alone, left it to its war, and walked past the desk and its eager pool of light spilling across that dreary book. He checked the tins for something that might hold his attention. He felt restless, pacing like a pig in its pen. He should go for another jog among the servers, but that would mean showering, and somehow showering had begun to feel like an insufferable chore.

Crouching down at the far end of the shelves, he sorted through the loose, un-tinned stacks of paper there. Here was where the handwritten notes and the additions to the Legacy had amassed over the years. Notes to future silo leaders, instructions, manuals, mementos. He pulled out the generator control room manual, the one Juliette had written. He had watched Bernard shelve the papers weeks ago, saying it might come in handy if the problems in the down deep went from bad to worse.

And the radio was blasting the worse.

Lukas went to his desk and bent the neck of the lamp so he could read the handwriting inside. There were days that he dreaded her calling, dreaded getting caught or Bernard answering or her asking him to do things he couldn’t, things he would never do again. And now, with the lights steady overhead and nothing buzzing, all he wanted was a call. His chest ached for it. Some part of him knew that what she was doing was dangerous, that something bad could’ve happened. She was living beneath a red X, after all, a mark that meant death for anyone below it.

The pages of the manual were full of notes she’d made with sharp lead. He rubbed one of them, feeling the grooves with his fingers. The actual content was inscrutable. Settings for dials in every conceivable order, valve positions, electrical diagrams. Riffling the pages, he saw the manual as a project not unlike his star charts, created by a mind not unlike his own. This awareness made the distance between them worse. Why couldn’t they go back? Back to before the cleaning, before the string of burials. She would get off work every night and come sit with him while he gazed into the darkness, thinking and watching, chatting and waiting.

He turned the manual around and read some of the printed words from the play, which were nearly as indecipherable. In the margins sat notes from a different hand. Lukas assumed Juliette’s mother, or maybe one of the actors. There were diagrams on some pages, little arrows showing movement. An actor’s notes, he decided. Directions on a stage. The play must’ve been a souvenir to Juliette, this woman he had feelings for whose name was in the title.

He scanned the lines, looking for something poetic to capture his dark mood. As the text went by, his eyes caught a brief flash of familiar scrawl, not the actor’s. He flipped back, looking for it a page at a time until he found it.

It was Juliette’s hand, no mistaking. He moved the play into the light so he could read the faded marks:

Lukas felt a cold rod pierce his chest. He felt his longing replaced by a flash of temper. Who was this George? A childhood fling? Juliette was never in a sanctioned relationship; he had checked the official records the day after they’d met. Access to the servers afforded certain guilty powers. A crush, perhaps? Some man in Mechanical who was already in love with another? To Lukas, this would be even worse. A man she longed for in a way she never would feel for him. Was that why she’d taken a job so far from home? To get away from the sight of this George she couldn’t have, these feelings she’d hidden in the margins of a play about forbidden love?

He turned and plopped down in front of Bernard’s computer. Shaking the mouse, he logged into the upstairs servers remotely, his cheeks feeling flush with this sick feeling, this new feeling, knowing it was called jealousy but unfamiliar with the heady rush that came with it. He navigated to the personnel files and searched the down deep for “George.” There were four hits. He copied the ID numbers of each and put them in a text file, then fed them to the ID department. While the pictures of each popped up, he skimmed their records, feeling a little guilty for the abuse of power, a little worried about this discovery, and a lot less agonizingly bored having found something to do.

Only one of the Georges worked in Mechanical. Older guy. As the radio crackled behind him, Lukas wondered what would become of this man if he was still down there. There was a chance that he was no longer alive, that the records were a few weeks out of date, the blockade a barrier to the truth.

A couple of the hits were too young. One wasn’t even a year old yet. The other was shadowing with a porter. It left one man, thirty two years old. He worked in the bazaar, occupation listed as “other,” married with two kids. Lukas studied the blurry image of him from the ID office. Mustache. Receding hair. A sideways smirk. His eyes were too far apart, Lukas decided, his brows too dark and much too bushy.

Lukas held up the manual and read the poem again.

The man was dead, he decided. Bury these words.

He did another search, this time a global one that included the closed records. Hundreds of hits throughout the silo popped up, names from all the way back to the uprising. This did not dissuade Lukas. He knew Juliette was thirty six, and so he gave her a twenty year window, figured if she were younger than sixteen when she’d had this crush, he wouldn’t stress, he would let the envious and shameful burn inside him go.

From the list of Georges, there were only three deaths in the down deep for the twenty year period. One was in his fifties, the other in his sixties. Both died of natural causes. Lukas thought to cross reference them with Juliette, see if there had been any work relations, if they shared a family tree perhaps.

And then he saw the third file. This was his George. Her George. Lukas knew it. Doing the math, Lukas saw he would be thirty eight if he were still alive. He had died just over three years earlier, had worked in Mechanical, had never married.

He ran the ID search, and the picture confirmed his fears. He was a handsome man, a square jaw, a wide nose, dark eyes. He was smiling at the camera, calm, relaxed. It was hard to hate the man. Difficult, especially, since he was dead.

Lukas checked the cause and saw that it was investigated and then listed as an industrial accident. Investigated. He remembered hearing something about Jules when the up top got its new sheriff. Her qualifications had been a source of debate and tension, a wind of whispers. Especially around IT. But there had been chatter that she’d helped out on a case a long time ago, that this was why she’d been chosen.

This was the case. Was she in love with him before he died? Or did she fall for the memory of the man after? He decided it had to be the former. Lukas searched the desk for a charcoal, found one, and jotted down the man’s ID and case number. Here was something to occupy his time, some way of getting to know her better. It would distract him, at least, until she finally got around to calling him back. He relaxed, pulled the keyboard into his lap, and started digging.

22

Juliette shivered from the cold as she helped Solo to his feet. He wobbled and steadied himself, both hands on the railing.

“Do you think you can walk?” she asked. She kept an eye on the empty stairs spiraling down toward them, wary of whoever else was out there, whoever had attacked him and nearly gotten her killed.

“I think so,” he said. He dabbed at his forehead with his palm, studied the smear of blood he came away with. “Don’t know how far.”

She guided him toward the stairs, the smell of melted rubber and gasoline stinging her nose. The black undersuit was still damp against her skin; her breath billowed out before her; and whenever she stopped talking, her teeth chattered uncontrollably. She bent to retrieve her knife while Solo clutched the curved outer railing. Looking up, she considered the task before them. A straight run to IT seemed impossible. Her lungs were exhausted from the swim, her muscles cramped from the shivering and cold. And Solo looked even worse. His mouth was slack, his eyes drifting to and fro. He seemed barely cognizant of where he was.

“Can you make it to the deputy station?” she asked. Juliette had spent nights there on supply runs. The holding cell made for an oddly comfortable place to sleep. The keys were still in the box—maybe they could rest easy if they locked themselves inside and kept the key with them.

“That’s how many levels?” Solo asked.

He didn’t know the down deep of his own silo as well as Jules. He rarely risked venturing so far.

“A dozen or so. Can you make it?”

He lifted his boot to the first step, leaned into it. “I can try.”

They set off with only a knife between them, which Juliette was lucky to have at all. How it had survived her dark pull through Mechanical was a mystery. She held it tightly, the handle cold, her hand colder. The simple cooking utensil had become her security totem, had replaced her watch as a necessary thing she must always have with her. As they made their way up the stairs, its handle clinked against the inner railing each time she reached over to steady herself. She kept her other arm around Solo, who struggled up each step with grunts and groans.

“How many of them do you think there are?” she asked, watching his footing and then glancing nervously up the stairway.

Solo grunted. “Shouldn’t be any.” He wobbled a little, but Juliette steadied him. “All dead. Everyone.”

They stopped to rest at the next landing. “You made it,” she pointed out. “All these years, and you survived.”

He frowned, wiped his beard with the back of his hand. He was breathing hard. “But I’m Solo,” he said. He shook his head sadly. “They were all gone. All of them.”

Juliette peered up the shaft, up the gap between the stairs and the concrete. The dim green straw of the stairwell rose into a tight darkness. She pinned her teeth together to keep them from chattering while she listened for a sound, for any sign of life. Solo staggered ahead for the next flight of stairs. Juliette hurried beside him.

“How well did you see him? What do you remember?”

“I remember— I remember thinking he was just like me.”

Juliette thought she heard him sob, but maybe it was the exertion from tackling more of the steps. She looked back at the door they were passing, the interior dark, no power being leached from IT. Were they passing Solo’s assailant? Were they leaving some living ghost behind?

She powerfully hoped so. They had so much further to go, even to the deputy station, much less to anyplace she might call home.

They trudged in silence for a level and a half, Juliette shivering and Solo grunting and wincing. She rubbed her arms now and then, could feel the sweat from the climb and from helping to steady Solo. It was nearly enough to warm her but for the damp undersuit, and she was so hungry by the time they cleared three levels that she thought her body was going to simply give out. It needed fuel, something to burn and keep itself warm.

“One more level and I’m going to need to stop,” she told Solo. He grumbled his agreement. It felt good to have the reward of a rest to climb toward—the steps went easier knowing they were countable, finite. At the landing of one-thirty-two, Solo used the railing to lower himself to the ground, hand over hand like the bars of a ladder. When his butt hit the decking, he laid out supine and folded his hands over his face.

Juliette hoped it was nothing more than a concussion. She’d seen her fair share of them working around men who were too tough to wear helmets—but not so tough when a tool or a steel beam caught them on the head. There was nothing for Solo but to rest.

The problem with resting was that it made her colder. Juliette stomped her feet to keep the blood circulating. The slight sweat she’d worked up from the hike was working against her. She could feel a draft cycling through the stairwell, cold air from below passing over the chilled waters like a natural air conditioning unit. Her shoulders shook, the knife vibrating in her hand until her reflection became a silvery blur. Moving was difficult—staying in one place would kill her. And she still didn’t know where this attacker was, could only hope he was below them.

“We should get going,” she told Solo. She looked to the doors beyond him, the windows dark. What would she do if someone burst out at that very moment and attacked them? What kind of fight could she hope to put up?

Solo lifted his arm and waved it at her. “Go,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

“No, you’re coming with me.” She rubbed her hands together, blew on them, summoned the strength to continue. She went to Solo and tried to grab his hand, but he withdrew it.

“More rest,” he said. “I’ll catch up.”

“I’ll be damned if I’m—” Her teeth clacked uncontrollably. She shivered and turned the involuntary spasm into an excuse to shake her arms, waggling them and forcing the blood to her extremities. “—damned if I’m leaving you alone,” she finished.

“So thirsty,” he told her.

Despite seeing quite enough water for a lifetime, Juliette was as well. She glanced up. “One more level and we’re at the lower farms. C’mon. That’ll be far enough for today. Food and water, find me something dry. C’mon Solo, up. I don’t care if it takes us a week to get home, we aren’t giving up right here.”

She grabbed his wrist. This time he didn’t pull away.

The next flight took forever to climb. Solo stopped several times to lean on the railing and gaze senselessly at the next step. There was fresh blood trickling down his neck. Juliette stomped her frozen feet some more and cursed to herself. This was all stupid. She’d been so damned stupid.

A few steps from the next landing, she left Solo behind and went to check the doors to the farms. The jury-rigged power cables descending from IT and snaking their way inside were a legacy from decades ago, a time when the survivors, like Solo, were cobbling together what they could to stave off their demise. Juliette peeked inside and saw that the grow lights were off.

“Solo? I’m gonna go hit the timers. You rest here.”

He didn’t answer. Juliette held the door open and tried to slot her knife into the metal grating by her feet, leaving the handle to prop it open. Her arm shook so violently, it took her considerable effort just to aim it into a gap. Her undersuit, she noticed, smelled like burning rubber, like the smoke from the fire.

“Here,” Solo said. He held the door open and slumped down against it, pinning it to the railing.

Juliette clutched the knife against her chest. “Thanks.”

He nodded and waved his hand. His eyes drooped shut. “Water,” he said, licking his lips.

She patted his shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

The farm’s entrance hall gobbled up the emergency lights from the stairway, the dim green quickly fading to pitch black. A circulating pump whirred in the distance, the same noise that had greeted her in the upper farms so many weeks ago. But now she knew what the sound was, knew there would be water available. Water and food, perhaps a change of clothes. She just needed to get the lights on so she could see. She cursed herself for not bringing a spare flashlight, for the loss of her pack and their gear.

The darkness accepted her as she climbed over the security gate. She knew her way. These farms had been nourishing Solo and her for weeks while they worked on the pathetic hydroponics pump and all that plumbing. Juliette thought of the new pump she’d wired; the mechanic in her was curious about the connection, wondered whether the thing would work, if she should’ve thrown the switch on the landing before they left. It was a crazy thought, but even if she didn’t live to see it, some part of her wanted that silo dry, that flood removed. Her ordeal in its depths already seemed so oddly distant, like something she had seen in a dream but hadn’t really gone through, and yet she wanted it to have mattered for something. She wanted Solo’s wounds to have mattered for something.

Her undersuit swished noisily while she walked, her legs rubbing together, her damp feet squeaking as she lifted them from the floor. She kept one hand on the wall, her knife comforting her in the other. Already, she could feel the residual warmth in the air from the last burn of the grow lights. She was thankful to be out of that frigid stairwell. In fact, she felt better. Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. She would get some food, some water, find them a safe place to sleep. Tomorrow, they would aim for the mids deputy station. They could arm themselves, gather their strength. Solo would be stronger by then. She would need him to be.

At the end of the hall, Juliette groped for the doorway to the control room. Her hand habitually went to the switch inside, but it was already up. It hadn’t worked in over three decades.

She fumbled blindly through the room, arms out in front of her, expecting to hit the wall long before she did. The tip of the knife scraped one of the control boxes. Juliette reached up to find the wire hanging from the ceiling, tacked up by someone long ago. She traced the wire to the timer it had been rigged to, felt for the programmable knob and slowly turned it until it clicked.

A series of loud pops from the relays outside rattled down the growing halls. A dim glow appeared. It would take a few minutes for them to warm all the way up.

Juliette left the control room and headed down one of the overgrown walkways railed off between the long plots of dirt. The nearest plots were picked clean. She pushed through the greenery, plants from either side of the hall shaking hands in the middle, and made her way to the circulation pump.

Water for Solo, warmth for herself. She repeated this mantra, begging the lights to heat up faster. The air around her remained dim and hazy like the view of an outside morning beneath the heavy clouds.

She made her way through the pea plants, long neglected. Popping a few pods off their vines, she gave her stomach something to do besides ache. The pump whirred louder as it worked to push water through the drip pipes. Juliette chewed a pea, swallowed, slipped through the railing and made her way to the small clearing around the pump.

The soil beneath the pump was dark and packed flat from weeks of her and Solo drinking there and refilling their containers. A few cups were scattered on the ground. Juliette knelt beside the pump and chose a tall glass. The lights above her were slowly brightening. She already imagined she could feel their warmth.

With a bit of effort, she managed to loosen the drain plug at the bottom of the pump a few turns. The water was under pressure and jetted out in a fine spray. She held the cup tightly against the pump to minimize the spillage. The cup hissed as it was filled.

She drank out of one cup while filling another, some loose dirt crunching between her teeth.

Once both were full, she screwed them into the wet dirt so they wouldn’t tip over, and then twisted the plug until the spray stopped. Juliette tucked the knife under her arm and grabbed the two cups. She went to the railing, passed everything through, then threw her leg over the lowermost bar and scrambled out.

Now she needed warmth. She left the cups where they were and grabbed the knife. There were offices around the corner, a dining room. She remembered her first outfit in silo 17: a tablecloth with a slit in the middle. She laughed to herself as she turned the corner, feeling like she was regressing, like her weeks of working to make things better were taking her back to where she’d started.

The long hallway between the two grow stations was dark. A handful of wires hung from the pipes overhead, drooping between the spots where they’d been hastily attached. They marched in these upside-down leaps toward the hum and glow of the growing plots in the distance.

Juliette checked the offices and found nothing for warmth. No coveralls, no curtains. She moved toward the dining hall, was turning to enter, when she thought she heard something beyond the next plot of plants. A click. A crackle. More relays for the lights? Stuck, perhaps?

She peered down the hall and into the grow station beyond. The lights were brighter there, warming up. Maybe they had come on sooner. She crept down the hallway toward them, drawn like a shivering fly to a flame, her arms bursting with goosebumps at the thought of drying out, of getting truly warm.

At the edge of the station, she heard something else. A squeal, maybe metal on metal, possibly another circulation pump trying to kick over. She and Solo hadn’t checked the other pumps on this level. There was more than two people could eat or drink in the first patches.

Juliette froze and turned around to look behind herself.

Where would she set up camp if she were trying to survive in this place? In IT, for the power? Or here, for the food and water. She imagined another man like Solo squeezing through the cracks in the violence, laying low and surviving the long years. Maybe he’d heard the air compressor earlier, had come down to investigate, got scared, hit Solo over the head and ran. Maybe he grabbed their gear bag just because it was there, or maybe it had been knocked under the railing by accident and had sunk to the pits of Mechanical.

She held the knife out in front of herself and slid down the hallway between the burgeoning plants. The wall of green before her parted with a rustle as she pushed through. Things were more overgrown here. Unwelcoming. Not picked over. This filled her with a mix of emotions. She was probably wrong, was probably hearing things again just as she had for weeks, but part of her wanted to be right. She wanted to find this man who was like Solo. She wanted to make contact. Better that than living in fear of someone in every shadow, behind every corner.

But what if there was more than one of them? Could a group of people have survived this long? How many could there be and go undetected? The silo was a massive place, but she and Solo had spent weeks in the down deep, had been in and out of these farms several times. Two people, an old couple, no more. Solo had said they were his age. They would have to be.

These calculations and more ran through her mind, convincing her that she had nothing to be afraid of. She was shivering, but her adrenaline was pumping. She was armed. The leaves of wild and unkempt plants brushed against her face; Juliette pushed through this dense outer barrier and knew she’d found something on the other side.

The farms here were different. Groomed. Tamed. Recently guided by the hand of man. Juliette felt a wash of fear and relief, those two opposites twisting together like staircase and rail. She didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want this silo to be so desolate and empty, but she didn’t want to be attacked. The first part of her felt an urge to call out, to tell whoever was in there that she meant no harm. The second part tightened its grip on the knife, clenched chattering teeth together, and begged her to turn and run.

At the end of the groomed grow station, the hallway took a dark turn. She peered around the corner into more unexplored territory. A long patch of darkness wrapped toward the other side of the silo, a distant glow of light emanating from what was probably yet another crop station sucking juice from IT.

Someone was here. She knew it. She could feel the same eyes she’d felt for weeks, could sense the whispers on her skin, but this time she wasn’t imagining it; she didn’t have to fight the awareness or think she was going crazy. With her knife at the ready and the welcomed thought that she was between this someone and defenseless Solo, she moved slowly but bravely into the dark hall, passing open offices and tasting rooms to either side, one hand on the wall to guide and steady herself—

Juliette stopped. Something wasn’t right. Had she heard something? A person crying? She backed up to the previous door, could barely see it in front of herself, and realized it was closed. The only one she could see along the hall that was closed.

She stepped away from the door and knelt down. There had been a noise inside. She was sure of it. Almost like a faint wail. Looking up, she saw in the wan light that some of the overhead wires diverted perpendicular to the rest and snaked through the wall above the door.

Juliette moved closer. She crouched down and put her ear to the door. Nothing. She reached up and tried the knob, felt that it was locked. How could it be locked, unless—?

The door flew open—her hand still on the knob—it yanked her into the darkened room. There was a flash of light, and then a man over her, swinging something at her head.

Juliette fell onto her ass. A silver blur moved past her face, the crunch of a heavy wrench slamming into her shoulder, knocking her flat.

There was a high pitched scream from the back of the room. It drowned out Juliette’s cry of pain. She swung the knife out in front of her, felt it hit the man’s leg. The wrench clattered to the ground, more screams, people shouting. Juliette kicked away from the door and stood, clutching her shoulder. She was ready for the man to pounce, but her attacker was backing away, limping on one foot, a boy no more than fourteen, maybe fifteen.

“Stay where you are!” Juliette aimed the knife at him. The boy’s eyes were wide with fear. A group of kids huddled against the back wall on a scattering of mattresses and blankets. They clung to one another, their wide eyes aimed at Juliette.

The confusion was overwhelming. She was seized by the sensation of wrongness. Where were the others? The adults? She could feel people with bad intentions sliding down the dark hallway behind her, ready to pounce. Here were their kids, locked away for safety. Soon, the mother rats would be back to punish her for disturbing their nest.

“Where are the others?” she asked, her hand trembling from the cold, the confusion, the fear. She scanned the room and saw that the boy standing, the one who had attacked her, was the oldest. A girl in her teens sat frozen on the tangle of blankets, two young boys and a young girl clinging to her.

The eldest boy glanced down at his leg. A stain of blood was spreading across his green coveralls.

“How many are there?” She took a step closer. These kids were obviously more afraid of her than she was of them.

“Leave us alone!” the older girl screamed. She clutched something to her chest. The young girl beside her pressed her face into the older girl’s lap, trying to disappear, to not be seen by not seeing. The two young boys glared like cornered dogs, but didn’t move.

“How did you get here?” she asked them. She aimed the knife at the tall boy, but started to feel silly for wielding it. He looked at her in confusion, not comprehending the question, and Juliette knew. Of course. How would there be decades of fighting in this silo without that second human passion?

“You were born down here, weren’t you?”

Nobody answered. The boy’s face screwed up in confusion, as if the question were mad. She peeked back over her shoulder.

“Where are your parents? When will they be back? How long?”

“Never!” the girl screeched, her head straining forward from the effort. “They’re dead!”

Her mouth remained open, her chin trembling. The tendons stood out on her young neck.

The older boy turned and glared at the girl, seemed to want her to remain quiet. Juliette was still trying to comprehend that these were mere kids. She knew they couldn’t be alone. Someone had attacked Solo.

As if to answer, her eyes were drawn to the wrench on the decking. It was Solo’s wrench. The rust stains were distinctive. How was that possible? Solo had said—

And Juliette remembered what he’d said. She realized these kids, this young man, was the same age that he still saw himself. The same age he’d been when he’d been left alone. Had the last survivors of the down deep perished in recent years, but not before leaving something behind?

“What’s your name?” Juliette asked the boy. She lowered her knife and showed him her other palm. “My name’s Juliette,” she said. She wanted to add that she came from another silo, a saner world, but didn’t want to confuse or freak them out.

“Rickson,” the boy snarled. He puffed out his chest. “My father was Rick the Plumber.”

“Rick the Plumber.” Juliette nodded. She saw along one wall, at the end of a tall dune of supplies and scavenges, the gear bag they’d stolen. Her change of clothes spilled out the gaping mouth of the bag. Her towel would be in there. She slid toward the bag, an eye on the kids huddled together on the makeshift bed, the group nest, wary of the older boy.

“Well, Rickson, I want you to gather your things.” Kneeling by her bag, she dug inside and searched for the towel. She found it, pulled it out and rubbed it over her damp hair, an indescribable luxury. There was no way she was leaving them here, these kids. She turned to face the other children, the towel draped across the back of her neck, their eyes all locked on hers.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Get your things together. You’re not going to live like this—”

“Just leave us,” the older girl said. The two boys had moved off the bed, though, and were going through piles of things. They looked to the girl, then to Juliette. Unsure.

“Go back to where you’re from,” Rickson said. The two eldest children seemed to be gaining strength from each other. “Take your noisy machines and go.”

That’s what this was about. Juliette remembered the sight of the compressor on its side, more heavily attacked maybe than Solo had been. She nodded to the two boys, had their ages pegged for ten or eleven. “Go on,” she told them. “You’re gonna help me and my friend get home. We have good food there. Real electricity. Hot water. Get your things—”

The youngest girl cried out at this, a horrible peal, the same cry Juliette had heard from the dark hallway. Rickson paced back and forth, eyeing her and the wrench on the floor. Juliette slid away from him and toward the bed to comfort the young girl, when she realized it wasn’t her squealing.

Something moved in the older girl’s arms.

Juliette froze at the edge of the bed.

“No,” she whispered.

Rickson took a step toward her.

“Stay!” She aimed the point of the knife at him. He glanced down at the wound on his leg, thought better of it. The two boys froze in the act of stuffing their bags. Nothing in the room moved save the baby squealing and fidgeting in the girl’s arms.

“Is that a child?”

The girl turned her shoulders. It was a motherly gesture, but the girl couldn’t be more than fifteen. Juliette didn’t know that was possible. She wondered if that was why the implants went in so early. Her hand slid toward her hip almost as if to touch the place, to rub the bump beneath her skin.

“Just go,” the teenager whimpered. “We’ve been fine without you.”

Juliette put down the knife. It felt strange to relinquish it but more wrong to have it in her hand as she approached the bed. “I can help you,” she said. She turned and made sure the boy heard her. “I used to work in a place that cared for newborns. Let me—” She reached out her hands. The girl turned more toward the wall, shielding the child from her.

“Okay.” Juliette held up her hands, showed her palms. “But you’re not going to live like this anymore.” She nodded to the young boys, turned to Rickson, who hadn’t moved. “None of you are. This isn’t how anyone should have to live their days, not even their last ones.”

She nodded to herself, her mind made up. “Rickson? Get your things together. Only the necessities. We’ll come back for anything else.” She dipped her chin at the younger boys, saw how their coveralls had been chopped at the knees, their legs covered in grime from the farms. They took it as permission to return to packing. These two seemed eager to have someone else in charge, maybe anybody other than their brother, if that’s what he was.

“Tell me your name.” Juliette sat down on the bed with the two girls while the others rummaged through their things. She fought to remain calm, to not succumb to the nausea of kids having kids.

The baby let out a hungry cry.

“I’m here to help you,” Juliette told the girl. “Can I see? Is it a girl or a boy?”

The young mother relaxed her arms. A blanket was folded away, revealing the squinting eyes and pursed red lips of a baby no more than a few months old. A tiny arm waved at its mother.

“Girl,” she said softly.

The younger girl clinging to her side peeked around the mother’s ribs at Juliette.

“Have you given her a name?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

Rickson said something behind her to the two boys, trying to get them not to fight over something—

“My name’s Elise,” the younger girl said, her head emerging from behind the other girl’s side. Elise pointed at her mouth. “I have a loose tooth.”

Juliette laughed. “I can help you with that if you like.” She took a chance and reached out to squeeze the young girl’s arm. Flashes of her childhood in her father’s nursery flooded back, the memories of worried parents, of precious children, of all the hopes and dreams created and dashed around that lottery. Juliette’s thoughts swerved to her brother, the one who was not meant to be, and she felt the tears well up in her eyes. What had these kids been through? Solo at least had normal experiences from before. He knew what it meant to live in a world where one could be safe. What had these five kids, six, grown up in? Seen? She felt such intense pity that there was this sick, wrong, sad desire for none of them to have ever been born—

This was just as soon washed over with a wave of guilt for even considering it.

“We’re going to get you out of here,” she told the two girls. “Gather your things.”

One of the young boys came over and dropped her bag nearby. He was putting things back into it, apologizing to her, when Juliette heard another strange squeak.

What now?

She dabbed her mouth on the towel, watching as the girls reluctantly did an adult’s bidding, finding their things and eyeing one another to make sure this was okay. Juliette heard a rustling in her gear bag. She used the handle to separate the zippered mouth, wary of what could be living in the rat’s nest these kids had created, when she heard a tiny voice.

Calling her name.

She dropped the towel and clawed through the bag, past tools and bottles of water, under her spare coveralls and loose socks, until she found the radio. She wondered how Solo could possibly be calling her. The other set had been ruined in her suit—

“—please say something,” the radio hissed. “Juliette, are you there? It’s Walker. Please, for God’s sake, answer me—”

23

“What happened? Why aren’t they responding?” Courtnee looked from Walker to Shirly, as if either of them could know.

“Is it broken?” Shirly picked up the small dial with the painted marks and tried to tell if it had accidentally moved. “Walk, did we break it?”

“No, it’s still on,” he said. He held the headphones up by his cheek, his eyes drifting over the various components.

“Guys, I don’t know how much longer we have.” Courtnee was watching the scene in the generator room through the observation window. Shirly stood up and peered out over the control panel toward the main entrance. Jenks and some of his men were inside, rifles pinned against their shoulders, yelling at the others. The soundproofing made it impossible to hear what was going on.

“Hello?”

A voice crackled from Walker’s hands. The words seemed to tumble through his fingers.

“Who’s there?” he called, flicking the switch. “Who is this?”

Shirly rushed to Walker’s side. She wrapped her hands around his arm, disbelieving. “Juliette!” she screamed.

Walker held up his hand, tried to quiet her and Courtnee both. His hands were trembling as he fumbled with the detonator and finally clicked the red switch.

“Jules?” His old voice cracked. Shirly squeezed his arm. “Is that you?”

There was a pause, and then a cry from the speakers, a sob. “Walk? Walk, is that you? What’s going on? Where are you? I thought—”

“Where is she?” Shirly whispered.

Courtnee watched them both, her cheeks in her palms, mouth open.

Walker hit the switch. “Jules, where are you?”

A deep sigh hissed through the tiny speakers. Her voice was tiny and far away. “Walk, I’m in another silo. There’s more of them. You wouldn’t believe—”

Her voice drifted off to static. Shirly leaned against Walker while Courtnee paced in front of them, looking from the radio to the window.

“We know about the others,” Walker said, holding the mic below his beard. “We can hear them, Jules. All of them.”

He let go of the switch. Juliette’s voice returned.

“How are you—? Mechanical— I heard about the fighting. Are you in the middle of that?” Before she signed off, Juliette said something to someone else, her voice barely audible.

Walker raised his eyebrows at the mention of the fighting.

“How would she have heard?” Shirly asked.

“I wish she were here,” Courtnee said. “Jules would know what to do.”

“Tell her about the exhaust. About the plan.” Shirly waved for the microphone. “Here, let me.”

Walker nodded. He handed Shirly the headset and the detonator.

Shirly worked the switch. It was stiffer than she thought it’d be. “Jules? Can you hear me? It’s Shirly.”

“Shirly—” Juliette’s voice wavered. “Hey you. You hanging in there?”

The emotion in her friend’s voice brought tears to Shirly’s eyes. “Yeah—” She bobbed her head and swallowed. “Hey, listen, some of the others are routing the exhaust feed to IT’s cooling vents. But remember that time we lost back pressure? I’m worried the motor might—”

“No.” Juliette cut her off. “You have to stop them. Shirly, can you hear me? You have to stop them. It won’t do anything. The cooling is for the servers. The only people up there who—” She cleared her throat. “Listen to me. Make them stop—”

Shirly fumbled with the red switch. Walker reached over as if to help, but she finally got the device under control. “Wait,” she transmitted. “How do you know where the vents lead—?”

“I just do. This place is laid out the same. Goddammit, let me talk to them. You can’t let them—”

Shirly hit the switch again. There was a blast of sound from the generator room as Courtnee threw open the door and ran outside. “Courtnee’s going,” she said. “She’s going right now. Jules— How did you—? Who are you with? Can they help us? It’s not looking good over here.”

They tiny speakers crackled again. Shirly could hear Juliette take a deep breath, could hear other voices in the background, heard her give commands or orders to some other person. Shirly thought her friend sounded exhausted. Weary. Sad.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Juliette said. “There’s no one here. One man. Some kids. Everyone’s gone. The people who lived here, they couldn’t even help themselves.” The line went silent, and then she clicked through again. “You have to stop the fighting,” she said. “Whatever it takes. Please— Don’t let it be because of me. Please stop—”

The door opened again, Courtnee returning. Shirly heard shouts in the generator room. Gunfire.

“What is that?” Juliette asked. “Where are you guys?”

“In the control room.” Shirly looked up at Courtnee, whose eyes were wide with fear. “Jules, I don’t think we have much time. I—” There was so much she wanted to say. She wanted to tell her about Marck. She needed more time. “They’re coming for us,” was all she could think to relate. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

The radio crackled. “Oh God, make them stop. No more fighting! Shirly, listen to me—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Shirly said, holding the button and wiping at her cheeks. “They won’t stop.” The gunfire was getting closer, the pops audible through the thick door. Her people were dying while she cowered in the control room, talking to a ghost. Her people were dying.

“You take care of yourself,” Shirly said.

“Wait!”

Shirly handed the headset to Walker. She joined Courtnee by the window and watched the crush of people cower on the other side of the generator, the flash and shudder of barrels leaning against the railing, someone in Mechanical blue lying still on the ground. More faded pops. More distant and muted rattles.

“Jules!” Walker fumbled with the radio. He shouted her name, was still trying to talk to her.

“Let me talk to them!” Juliette yelled, her voice impossibly far away. “Walk, why can I hear you and not them? I need to talk to the deputies, to Peter and Hank. Walk, how did you call me? I need to talk to them!”

Walker blubbered about soldering irons, about his magnifiers. The old man was crying, cradling his boards and wires and electrics as if they were a broken child, whispering to them and rocking back and forth, saltwater dripping dangerously onto this thing he’d built.

He babbled to Juliette while more men in blue fell, arms draped over railings, inadequate rifles dropping noiselessly to the ground. The men they had lived in terror of for a month were inside. It was over. Shirly groped for Courtnee, their arms entangling, while they watched, helpless. Behind them, the sobs and mad ravings of Old Walk mixed with the jitter of deadened gunfire, a popping noise like the grumble of a machine losing its balance, sliding out of control—

24

Lukas teetered on the upturned trashcan, the toes of his boots denting the soft plastic, feeling as if it could go flying out from under him or collapse under his weight at any moment. He steadied himself by holding the top of server twelve, the thick layer of dust up there telling him it had been years since anyone had been in there with a ladder and a rag. He pressed his nose up to the AC vent and took another whiff.

The nearby door beeped, the locks clanking as they withdrew into the jamb. With a soft squeal, the massive hinges budged and the heavy door swung inward.

Lukas nearly lost his grip on the dusty server top as Bernard pushed his way inside. The head of IT looked up at him quizzically.

“You’ll never fit,” Bernard said. He laughed as he turned to push the door shut. The locking pins clunked, the panel beeped, and a red light resumed its watch over the room.

Lukas pushed away from the dusty server and leapt from the trashcan, the plastic bucket flipping over and scooting across the floor. He wiped his hands together, brushed them on the seat of his pants, and forced a laugh.

“I thought I smelled something,” he explained. “Does it look smoky in here to you?”

Bernard squinted at the air. “It always seems hazy in here to me. And I don’t smell anything. Just hot servers.” He reached into his breast pocket and brought out a few folded pieces of paper. “Here. Letters from your mother. I told her to porter them to me and I’d pass them along.”

Lukas smiled, embarrassed, and accepted them. “I still think you should ask about—” He glanced up at the AC vent and realized there was no one in Mechanical to ask. The last that he’d heard from the radio below was that Sims and the others were mopping up. Dozens were dead. Three to four times that many were in custody. Apartment wings were being prepped in the mids to hold them all. It sounded like there would be enough people to clean for years.

“I’ll have one of the replacement mechanics look into it,” Bernard promised. “Which reminds me, I’d like to go over some of that with you. There’s going to be a massive shift from green to blue as we push farmers into Mechanical. I was wondering what you’d think of Sammi heading up the entire division down there.”

Lukas nodded as he skimmed one of the letters from his mother. “Sammi as head of Mechanical? I think he’s overqualified but perfect. I’ve learned a lot from him.” He glanced up as Bernard opened the filing cabinet by the door and flipped through work orders. “He’s a great teacher, but would it be permanent?”

“Nothing’s permanent.” Bernard found what he was looking for and tucked it into his breast pocket. “You need anything else?” He pressed his glasses up his nose. Lukas thought he looked older from the past month. Older and worn down. “Dinner’ll be sent over in a few hours—”

Lukas did have something he wanted. He wanted to say that he was ready, that he had sufficiently absorbed the horror of his future job, had learned what he needed without going insane. Now could he please go home?

But that wasn’t the way out of there. Lukas had sorted this out for himself.

“Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind some more reading material—”

The things he had discovered in server 18 burned in his brain. He feared Bernard would be able to read them there. Lukas thought he knew, but he needed to ask for that folder in order to be sure.

Bernard smiled. “Don’t you have enough to read?”

Lukas fanned the letters from his mother. “These? They’ll keep me busy for the walk to the ladder—”

“I meant what you have below. The Order. Your studies.” Bernard tilted his head.

Lukas let out a sigh. “Yeah, I do, but I can't be expected to read that twelve hours a day. I’m talking about something less dense.” He shook his head. “Hey, forget it. If you can't—”

Bernard waved his hand. “What do you need? I'm just giving you a hard time.” He leaned against the filing cabinet and interlocked his fingers across his belly. He peered at Lukas through the bottoms of his glasses.

“Well, this might sound weird, but it's this case. An old case. The server says it's filed away in your office with all the closed investigations—”

“An investigation?” Bernard’s voice rose quizzically.

Lukas nodded. “Yeah. A friend of a friend thing. I'm just curious how it was resolved. There aren't any digital copies on the serv—”

“This isn't about Holston is it?”

“Who? Oh, the old Sheriff? No, no. Why?”

Bernard waved his hand to dismiss the thought.

“The file is under Wilkins,” Lukas said, watching Bernard closely. “George Wilkins.”

Bernard's face hardened. His mustache dropped down over his lips like a lowered curtain.

Lukas cleared his throat. What he’d seen on Bernard’s face was nearly enough. “George died a few years ago down in Mech—” he started to say.

“I know how he died.” Bernard dipped his chin. “Why would you want to see that file?”

“Just curious. I have a friend who—”

“What's this friend's name?” Bernard’s small hands slid off his belly and were tucked into his coveralls. He moved away from the filing cabinet and took a step closer.

“What?”

“This friend, was he involved with George in any way? How close of a friend was he?”

“No. Not that I know of. Look, if it's a big deal, don’t worry about—” Lukas wanted to simply ask, to ask why he’d done it. But Bernard seemed intent on telling him with no prompting at all.

“It's a very big deal,” Bernard said. “George Wilkins was a dangerous man. A man of ideas. The kind we catch in whispers, the kind who poisons the people around him—”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Section thirteen of the Order. Study it. All insurrections would start right there if we let them, start with men like him.”

Bernard’s chin had lowered to his chest, his eyes peering over the rims of his glasses, the truth coming freely without all the deceit Lukas had planned.

Lukas never needed that folder; he had found the travel logs that coincided with George’s death, the dozens of wires asking Holston to wrap things up. But now he saw he never even needed to ask for the folder at all. There was no shame in Bernard. George Wilkins hadn't died; he'd been murdered. And Bernard was willing to tell him why.

“What did he do?” Lukas asked quietly.

“I’ll tell you what he did. He was a mechanic, a greaser. We started hearing chatter from the porters about these plans circulating, ideas for expanding the mine, doing a lateral dig. As you know, lateral digs are forbidden—”

“Yeah, obviously.” Lukas had a mental image of miners from silo 18 pushing through and meeting miners from silo 19. It would be awkward, to say the least.

“A long chat with the old head of Mechanical put an end to that nonsense, and then George Wilkins came up with the idea of expanding downward. He and some others drew up schematics for a level one-fifty. And then a level one-sixty.”

“Twelve more levels?”

“To begin with. That was the talk, anyway. Just whispers and sketches. But some of these whispers landed in a porter's ear, and then ours perked up.”

“So you killed him?”

“Someone did, yes. It doesn't matter who.” Bernard adjusted his glasses with one hand. The other stayed in the belly of his coveralls. “You'll have to do these things one day, son. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but—”

“No buts.” Bernard shook his head slowly. “Some men are like a virus. Unless you want to see a plague break out, you inoculate the silo against them. You remove them.”

Lukas remained silent.

“We've removed fourteen threats this year, Lukas. Do you have any idea what the average life expectancy would be if we weren't proactive about these things?”

“But the cleanings—”

“Useful for dealing with the people who want out. Who dream of a better world. This uprising we’re having right now is full of people like that, but it’s just one sort of sickness we deal with. The cleaning is one sort of cure. I'm not sure if someone with a different illness would even clean if we sent them out there. They have to want to see what we show them for it to work.”

This reminded Lukas of what he'd learned of the helmets, the visors. He had assumed this was the only kind of sickness there was. He was beginning to wish he'd read more of the Order and less of the Legacy.

“You’ve heard this latest outbreak on the radio. All of this could have been prevented if we’d caught the sickness earlier. Tell me that wouldn’t have been better.”

Lukas looked down at his boots. The trashcan lay nearby, on its side. It looked sad like that. No longer useful for holding things.

“Ideas are contagious, Lukas. This is basic Order material. You know this stuff.”

He nodded. He thought of Juliette, wondered why she hadn’t called in forever. She was one of these viruses Bernard was talking about, her words creeping in his mind and infecting him with outlandish dreams. He felt his entire body flush with heat as he realized he’d caught some of it too. He wanted to touch his breast pocket, feel the lumps of her personal effects there, the watch, the ring, the ID. He had taken them to remember her in death, but they had become even more precious knowing that she was still alive.

“This uprising hasn’t been nearly as bad as the last one,” Bernard told him. “And even after that one, things were eventually smoothed over, the damage welded back together, the people made to forget. The same thing will happen here. Are we clear?”

“Yessir.”

“Excellent. Now, was that all you wished to know from this folder?”

Lukas nodded.

“Good. It sounds like you need to be reading something else, anyway.” His mustache twitched with half a smile. Bernard turned to go.

“It was you, wasn’t it?”

Bernard stopped, but didn't turn to face him.

“That killed George Wilkins. It was you, right?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah. It matters to— To me— It means—”

“Or to your friend?” Bernard turned to face him. Lukas felt the temperature in the room go up yet another notch.

“Are you having second thoughts, Son? About this job? Was I wrong about you? Because I’ve been wrong before.”

Lukas swallowed. “I just want to know if it’s something I’d ever have to— I mean, since I’m shadowing for—”

Bernard took a few steps toward him. Lukas felt himself back up half a step in response.

“I didn't think I was wrong about you. But I was, wasn't I?” Bernard shook his head. He looked disgusted. “Goddammit,” he spat.

“Nossir. You weren’t. I think I've just been in here too long.” Lukas brushed his hair off his forehead. His scalp was itchy. He needed to use the bathroom. “Maybe I just need some air, you know? Go home for a while? Sleep in my bed. What's it been, a month? How long do I need—?”

“You want out of here?”

Lukas nodded.

Bernard peered down at his boots and seemed to consider this a while. When he looked up, there was sadness in his eyes, in the droop of his mustache, across the wet film of his eyes.

“Is that what you want? To get out of here?”

He adjusted his hands inside his coveralls.

“Yessir.” Lukas nodded.

“Say it.”

“I want out of here.” Lukas glanced at the heavy steel door behind Bernard. “Please. I want you to let me out.”

“Out.”

Lukas bobbed his head, exasperated, sweat tickling his cheek as it followed the line of his jaw. He was suddenly very afraid of this man, this man who all of a sudden reminded him even more of his father.

“Please,” Lukas said. “It’s just… I’m starting to feel cooped up. Please let me out.”

Bernard nodded. His cheeks twitched. He looked as if he were about to cry. Lukas had never seen this expression on the man’s face.

“Sheriff Billings, are you there?”

His small hand emerged from his coveralls and raised the radio to his sad, quivering mustache.

Peter's voice crackled back. “I'm here, sir.”

Bernard clicked the transmitter. “You heard the man,” he said, tears welling up in the bottoms of his eyes. “Lukas Kyle, IT engineer first class, says he wants out—”

25

“Hello? Walk? Shirly?”

Juliette shouted into the radio, the orphans and Solo watching her from several steps below. She had hurried the kids through the farms, made hasty introductions, checking the radio all the while. Several levels had gone by, the others trudging up behind her, and still no word from them, nothing since she’d been cut off, the sound of gunfire sprinkled among Walker’s words. She kept thinking if she just got higher, if she tried one more time. She checked the light by the power knob and made sure the battery wasn’t dead, turned the volume up until she could hear the static, could know the thing was working.

She clicked the button. The static fell silent, the radio waiting for her to speak. “Please say something, guys. This is Juliette. Can you hear me? Say anything.”

She looked to Solo, who was being supported by the very man who had dazed him. “We need to go higher, I think. C’mon. Double-time.”

There were groans; these poor refugees of silo 17 acted like she was the one who’d lost her mind. But they stomped up the stairs after her, their pace dictated by Solo, who had seemed to rally with some fruit and water but had slowed as the levels wore on.

“Where are these friends of yours we talked to?” Rickson asked. “Can they come help?” He grunted as Solo lurched to one side. “He’s heavy.”

“They aren’t coming to help us,” Juliette said. “There’s no getting from there to here.” Or vice-versa, she told herself.

Her stomach lurched with worry. She needed to get to IT and call Lukas, find out what was going on. She needed to tell him how horribly awry her plans had gone, how she was failing at every turn. There was no going back, she realized. No saving her friends. No saving this silo. She glanced back over her shoulder. Her life was now going to be one of a mother to these orphaned children, kids who had survived merely because the people who were left, who were committing the violence on each other, didn’t have the stomach to kill them. Or the heart, she thought.

And now it would fall to her. And to Solo, but to a lesser degree. Often, he would probably be just one more child for her to attend to.

They made their gradual way up another flight, Solo seeming to regain his senses a little, progress being made. But still a long way to go.

Each step, each moment that went by without a reply from silo 17 took her that many more paces into her new future. She thought of the work they’d need to perform in IT to make it ready. The kids were already adept at tending the farms, which was good. There’d be plenty of that to do. And she was alive. She reminded herself how lucky she was to be alive. She’d been sent to clean and had not perished. This was something—no matter the life she’d found on the other side. It was a life. It would be.

They stopped in the mids for bathroom breaks, filling more empty toilets that wouldn’t flush. Juliette helped the young ones. They didn’t like going like this, preferred to do it in the dirt. She told them that was right, that they only did this when they were on the move. She didn’t tell them about the years Solo had spent destroying entire levels of apartments. She didn’t tell them about the clouds of flies she’d seen.

The last of their food was consumed, but they had plenty of water. Juliette wanted to get to the hydroponics on sixty-two before they stopped for the night. There was enough food and water there for the rest of the trip. She tried the radio repeatedly, aware that she was running down the battery. There was no reply. She didn’t understand how she’d heard them to begin with; all the silos must use something different, some way of not hearing each other. It had to be Walker, something he’d engineered. When she got back to IT, would she be able to figure it out? Would she be able to contact him or Shirly? She wasn’t sure, and Lukas had no way of talking to Mechanical from where he was, no way of patching her through. She’d asked a dozen times.

Lukas—

And Juliette remembered.

The radio in Solo’s hovel. What had Lukas said one night—they were talking late and he’d said he wished they could chat from down below where it was more comfortable. Wasn’t that where he was getting his updates about the uprising? It was over the radio. Just like the one in Solo’s place, beneath the servers, locked behind that steel cage for which he’d never found the key.

Juliette turned and faced the group; they stopped climbing and gripped the rails, stared up at her. Helena, the young mother who didn’t even know her own age, tried to comfort her baby as it began to squeal. The nameless infant preferred the sway of the climb.

“I need to go up,” she told them. She looked to Solo. “How’re you feeling?”

“Me? I’m fine.”

He didn’t look fine.

“Can you get them up?” She nodded to Rickson. “Are you okay?”

The boy dipped his chin. His resistance had seemed to crumble during the climb, especially during the bathroom break. The younger children, meanwhile, had been nothing but excited to see new parts of the silo, to feel that they could raise their voices without bad things happening to them. They were coming to grips with there being only two adults left, and neither seemed all that bad.

“There’s food on sixty-two,” she said.

“Numbers—” Rickson shook his head. “I don’t—”

Of course. Why would he need to count numbers he’d never live to see, and in more ways than one?

“Solo will show you where,” she told him. “We’ve stayed there before. Good food. Canned stuff as well. Solo?” She waited until he looked up at her, the glazed expression partly melting away. “I have to get back to your place. I have people I need to call, okay? My friends. I need to find out if they’re okay.”

He nodded.

“You guys will be fine?” She hated to leave them but needed to. “I’ll try and make it back down to you tomorrow. Take your time getting all the way up, okay? No need to rush home.”

Home. Was she already resigned to that?

There were nods in the group. One of the young boys pulled a water bottle out of the other’s bag and unscrewed the cap. Juliette turned and began taking the stairs two at a time, her legs begging her not to.

This was her home. It was a sickening realization. A horrible new awareness. She clutched her shoulder bag and set a porter’s pace, the change in clothing becoming damp with her sweat, the air growing less frigid as she put distance between herself and that flood below. A level up, and she could hear the kids behind her already getting back to their games, their shouts and their laughter. This terrible trip of hers, this dreadful sprint up on dead legs, it was for them the most exciting and uplifting experience of their young and tragic lives.

Juliette was in the forties when it occurred to her that she might not make it. The sweat she’d worked up was chilling her skin; her legs were beyond the ache, beyond the pain; they were numb with fatigue. She found her arms doing a lot of the work as she lunged ahead, gripped the railing with clammy hands and hauled herself up another two steps.

Her breathing was ragged. It had been for half a dozen levels. She wondered if she’d done damage to her lungs from the underwater ordeal. Was that possible? She had no idea. Her father would know. She thought of spending the rest of her life without a doctor, of teeth as yellow as Solo’s, of caring for a growing child and the challenge of seeing that more weren’t made.

At the next landing, she again touched her hip where her birth control rode under her skin. Such things made more sense in light of silo 17. So much about her previous life made sense. Things that once seemed twisted now had a sort of pattern. A logic about them. The expense of sending a wire, the spacing of the levels, the single and cramped stairway, the bright colors for particular jobs, dividing the silo into sections, breeding mistrust… it was all designed. She’d seen hints of this before, but never knew why. Now this empty silo told her, the presence of these kids told her. It turned out some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.

Her mind wandered while she climbed, wandered in order to avoid the aches in her muscles, to escape the day’s ordeals. When she finally hit the thirties it gave her, if not an end to the suffering, a renewed focus. She stopped trying the portable radio as often. The static never changed, and she had a different idea for contacting Walker, something she should have pieced together sooner, a way to bypass the servers and communicate with other silos. It was there all along, staring her and Solo in the face. There was a small sliver of doubt that she might be wrong, but why else lock up a radio that was already locked up two other ways? It only made sense if that device was supremely dangerous. Which is what she hoped it would be.

She stomped up to thirty-five dead on her feet. Her body had never been pushed this hard, not even while plumbing the small pump, not during her trek through the outside. Will alone helped her lift each foot, plant it, straighten her leg, pull with her arm, lunge forward for another grab. One step at a time, now. Her toe banged on the next step as she could barely lift her boot high enough. The green emergency lights gave her no sense of the passing of time, no idea if night had come, when morning would be. She desperately missed her watch. All she had these days was her knife. She laughed at the switch, at having gone from counting the seconds in her life to fending for each and every one of them.

Thirty-four. It was tempting to collapse to the steel grating, to sleep, to curl up like her first night in that place, just thankful to be alive. Instead, she pulled the door open, amazed at the effort this required, and stepped back into civilization. Light. Power. Heat.

She staggered down the hallway with her vision so constricted it was as if she could only see through some straw at her center, everything else out of focus and spinning.

Her shoulder brushed the wall. Walking required effort. All she wanted was to go call Lukas, to hear his voice. She imagined falling asleep behind that server, warm air blowing over her from its fans, the headphones tight against her ears. He could murmur to her about the faraway stars while she slept for days and days—

But Lukas would wait. Lukas was locked up and safe. She had all the time in the world to call him.

She turned instead into the suit lab, shuffled toward the tool wall, didn’t dare look at her cot. A glance at her cot, and she’d wake up the next day. Whatever day that was.

Grabbing the bolt cutters, she was about to leave, but went back for the small sledge as well. The tools were heavy, but they felt good in her hands, one tool in each, pulling down on her arms, stretching her muscles and grounding her, keeping her stable.

At the end of the hall, she pressed her shoulder against the heavy door to the server room. She leaned until it squeaked open. Just a crack. Just wide enough for her. Juliette hurried as much as her numb muscles would allow toward the ladder. Shuffling. Fast as she could go.

The grate was in place; she tugged it out of the way and dropped the tools down. Big noise. She didn’t care—they couldn’t break. Down she went, hands slick, chin catching a rung, floor coming up faster than she’d anticipated.

Juliette sank to her butt, sprawled out, shin banging the sledge. It took a force of will, an act of God, to get up. But she did.

Down the hall and past the small desk. There was a steel cage there, a radio, a big one. She remembered her days as sheriff. They had a radio just like it in her office, used it to call Marnes when he was on patrol, to call Hank and Deputy Marsh. This one was different. She remembered something Lukas said once, about listening in, about wishing he could talk to her down below where it was comfortable.

He meant this radio.

She set the sledge down and pinched the jaws of the cutter on one of the hinges. Squeezing was too hard. Her arms shook. They trembled.

Juliette adjusted herself, put one of the handles against her neck, cradled it with her collarbone and shoulder. She grabbed the other handle with both hands and pulled toward herself, hugging the cutters. Squeezing. She felt them move.

There was a loud crack, the twang of splitting steel. She moved to the other hinge and did it again. Her collarbone hurt where the handle dug in, felt like it might be the thing to crack, not the hinge.

Another violent burst of metal.

Juliette grabbed the steel cage and pulled. The hinges came away from the mounting plate. She tore hungrily at the box, trying to get to the prize inside, thinking of Walker and all her family, all her friends, the sound of people screaming in the background. She had to get them to stop fighting. Get everyone to stop fighting.

Once she had enough gap between the bent steel and the wall, she wrapped her fingers around this and tugged, bending the protective cage on its front edge, tilting the box away from the wall, the shelf, revealing the entire radio unit beneath. Who needed keys? Screw keys. She wrenched the cage flat, then bent her weight on it, making a new hinge of its front, warping it out of the way.

The dial on the front seemed familiar. She turned it to power the unit on and found that it clicked instead of spinning. Juliette knelt down, panting and exhausted, sweat running down her neck. There was another switch for power; she turned this one instead, static rising in the speakers, a buzz filling the room.

The other knob. This was what she wanted, what she expected to find. She thought it might be patch cables like the back of the server, or dip switches like a pump control, but it was tiny numbers arranged around the edge of a knob. Juliette smiled, exhausted, and dialed the pointer to 18. Home. She grabbed the mic and squeezed the button.

“Walker? Are you there?”

Juliette slumped down to the ground and rested her back against the desk. With her eyes shut, mic by her face, she could imagine going to sleep like that. She saw what Lukas meant. This was comfortable.

She squeezed again. “Walk? Shirly? Please answer me.”

The radio crackled to life.

Juliette opened her eyes. She stared up at the unit, her hands trembling.

A voice:

“Is this who I think it is?”

The voice was too high, too high to be Walker. She knew this voice. Where did she know it from? She was tired and confused. She squeezed the button on the mic.

“This is Juliette. Who is this?”

Was it Hank? She thought it might be Hank. He had a radio. Maybe she had the wrong silo completely. Maybe she’d screwed up.

“I need radio silence,” the voice demanded. “All of them off. Now.”

Was this directed at her? Juliette’s mind spun in circles. A handful of voices chimed in, one after the other. There were pops of static. Was she supposed to say something? She was confused.

“You shouldn’t be transmitting on this frequency,” the voice said. “You could be put to cleaning for such things.”

Juliette’s hand fell to her lap. She slumped against the wooden desk, dejected. She recognized the voice.

Bernard.

For weeks, she had been hoping to speak to this man, had been silently begging for him to answer. But not now. Now, she had nothing to say. She wanted to talk to her friends, to make things okay.

She squeezed the radio.

“No more fighting,” she said. All the will was drained from her. All desire for vengeance. She just wanted the world to quiet itself, for people to live and grow old and feed the roots one day—

“Speaking of cleanings,” the voice squeaked. “Tomorrow will be the first of many more to come. Your friends are lined up and ready to go. And I believe you know the lucky one who’s going first.”

There was a click, followed by the hiss and crinkle of static. Juliette didn’t move. She felt dead. Numb. The will was drained from her body.

“Imagine my surprise,” the voice said. “Imagine when I found out a decent man, a man I trusted, had been poisoned by you.”

She clicked the microphone with her fist but didn’t raise it to her mouth. She simply raised her voice instead.

“You’ll burn in hell,” she told him.

“Undoubtedly,” Bernard said. “Until then, I’m holding some things in my hand that I think belong to you. An ID with your picture on it, a pretty little bracelet, and this wedding ring that doesn’t look official at all. I wonder about that… ”

Juliette groaned. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. She could barely hear her thoughts. She managed to squeeze the mic, but it required every ounce of effort that she had left.

“What are you going on about, you twisted fuck?”

She spat the last, her head drifting to the side, her body craving sleep.

“I’m talking about Lukas, who betrayed me. We found some of your things on him just now. Exactly how long has he been talking to you? Well before the servers, right? Well guess what? I’m sending him your way. And I finally figured out what you did last time, what those idiots in Supply helped you do, and I want you to be assured, be very assured that your friend won’t have the same help. I’m going to build his suit personally. Me. I’ll stay up all night if I have to. So when he goes out in the morning, I can be sure that he gets nowhere near those blasted hills.”

26

A group of kids thundered down the staircase as Lukas was escorted to his death. One of them squealed in delighted horror as if being chased. They spiraled closer, coming into view, and Lukas and Peter had to squeeze to one side to let them pass.

Peter played the sheriff role and yelled at the kids to slow down, to be careful. They giggled and continued their mad descent. School was out for the day, no more listening to adults.

While Lukas was pressed against the outer railing, he took a moment to consider the temptation. Freedom was just a jump away. A death of his own choosing, one he had considered in the past when moods turned dark.

Peter pulled him along, hand on his elbow, before Lukas could act. He was left admiring that graceful bar of steel, watching the way it curved and curved, always spinning the same amount, never ending. He pictured it corkscrewing through the earth, could sense its vibrations like some cosmic string, like a single strand of DNA at the silo’s core with all of life clinging to it.

Thoughts like these swirled as they gained another level on his death. He watched the welds go by, some of them neater than others. A few puckered up like scars; several had been polished so smoothly he almost missed them. Each was a signature by its creator, a work of pride here, a rushed job at the end of a long day there, a shadow learning for the first time, a seasoned pro who with decades of practice making it look all too easy.

He brushed his shackled hands over the rough paint, the bumps and puckers, the missing chips that revealed centuries of layers, of colors that changed with the times or with the supply of dyes or cost of paint. The layers reminded him of the wooden desk he’d stared down at for almost a month. Each little groove marked the passage of time, just as each name scratched into its surface marked a man’s mad desire to have more of it, to not let that time whisk his poor soul away.

For a long while, they marched in silence, a porter passing with a bulky load, a young couple looking guilty. Exiting the server vault had not been the stroll to freedom Lukas had longed for the past weeks. It had been an ambush, a march of shame, faces in doorways, faces on landings, faces on the stairway. Blank, unblinking faces. Faces of friends wondering if he was their enemy.

And maybe he was.

They would say he had broken down and uttered fateful taboo, but Lukas now knew why people were put out. He was the virus. If he sneezed the wrong words, it would kill everyone he knew. This was the path Juliette had walked and for the same absence of reason. He believed her, always had, always knew she’d done nothing wrong, but now he really understood. She was like him in so many ways. Except he would not survive, he knew that. Bernard had told him so.

They were ten levels up from IT when Peter’s radio buzzed with chatter. He took his hand off Lukas’s elbow to turn up the volume, see if it was for him.

“This is Juliette. Who is this?”

That voice.

Lukas’s heart leapt up a little before plummeting a very long way. He fixed his gaze on the railing and listened.

Bernard responded, asked for silence. Peter reached for his radio, turned it down but not off. The voices climbed with them, back and forth. Each step and each word ground down on Lukas, chipped away at him. He studied the railing and again considered true freedom.

A grab and a short leap up; a long flight.

He could feel himself going through the motions, bending his knees, throwing his feet over.

The voices in the radio argued. They said forbidden things. They were sloppy with secrets, thinking other ears were off.

Lukas watched his death play out over and over. His fate awaited him over that rail. The visual was so powerful, it wrecked his climbing pace, it affected his legs.

He slowed, Peter slowing with him. Each of them began to falter, to waver in their convictions. The strength in Lukas drained away, and he decided not to jump.

Both men were having second thoughts.

27

Juliette woke up on a floor, someone shaking her. A man with a beard. It was Solo, and she was passed out in his room, by his desk.

“We made it,” he said, flashing his yellow teeth. He looked better than she remembered him looking. More alive. She felt as though she were dead.

Dead.

“What time is it?” she asked. “What day?”

She tried to sit up. Every muscle felt torn in half, disconnected, floating beneath her skin.

Solo went to the computer and turned on the monitor. “The others are picking out rooms and then going to the upper farms.” He turned to look at her. Juliette rubbed her temples. “There are others,” he said solemnly, like this was still news.

Juliette nodded. There was only one other that she could think of right then. Dreams came back to her, dreams of Lukas, of all her friends in holding cells, a room of suits being prepped for each of them, no care for whether they cleaned or not. It would be a mass slaughter, a symbol to those who remained. She thought of all the bodies outside of this silo, silo 17. It was easy to imagine what came next.

“Friday,” Solo said, looking at the computer. “Or Thursday night, depending on how you like it. Two in the morning.” He scratched his beard. “Felt like we slept longer than that.”

“What day was it yesterday?” She shook her head. That didn’t make sense. “What day did I dive down? With the compressor?” Her brain wasn’t working.

Lukas looked at her like he was having similar thoughts. “The dive was Thursday. Today is tomorrow.” He rubbed his head. “Let’s start over—”

“No time.” Juliette groaned and tried to stand up. Solo rushed to her and put his hands under her arms, helped lift her. “Suit Lab,” she said. He nodded. She could tell he was exhausted, maybe half as much as she was, but he was still willing to do anything for her. It made her sad, someone being this loyal to her.

She led him down the narrow passage, and the climb up the ladder brought back a legion of aches. Juliette crawled out to the server room floor; Solo followed up the ladder and helped her to her feet. They made their way to the Suit Lab together.

“I need all the heat tape we’ve got,” she told him, prepping him while he escorted her. She staggered through the servers, bumped into one of them. “It needs to be the kind on the yellow spool, the stuff from Supply. Not the red kind.”

He nodded. “The good kind. Like we used on the compressor.”

“Right.”

They left the server room and shuffled down the hallway. Juliette could hear the kids squealing around the bend, the patter of their feet. It was a strange sound, like the echoes of ghosts. But something normal. Something normal had returned to silo 17.

In the suit lab, she got Solo busy with the tape. He stretched out long strips on one of the workbenches, overlapping the edges, using the torch to cauterize and seal the joints.

“At least an inch of overlap,” she told him, when it looked like he was being shy with the stuff. He nodded. Juliette glanced at her cot and considered collapsing into it. But there was no time. She grabbed the smallest suit in the room, one with a collar she knew might be a tight fit. She remembered the difficult squeeze to get into silo 17 and didn’t want to repeat it.

“I’m not gonna have time to make another switch for the suit, so I won’t have a radio.” She went through the cleaning outfit, piece by piece, pulling out the parts engineered to fail and hunting through her hauls from Supply for a better version of each. Some she’d have to seal over with the good tape. It wouldn’t be as nice as the one Walker had helped arrange, but it would be a world different than what Lukas was getting. She grabbed all the parts she’d spent weeks puzzling over, marveling at the engineering it took to make something weaker than it appeared. She tested a gasket from a pile she wasn’t sure about by pinching her fingernails together. The gasket parted easily. She dug for another.

“How long?” Solo asked, noisily stretching another piece of tape out. “You’ll be gone a day? A week?”

Juliette looked up from her workbench to the one Solo was working over. She didn’t want to tell him she might not make it. This was a dark thought she would keep to herself. “We’ll figure out a way to come for you,” she said. “First, I have to try and save someone.” It felt like a lie. She wanted to tell him she might be gone for good.

“With this?” Solo rustled the blanket of heat tape.

She nodded. “The doors to my home never open,” she told him. “Not unless they are sending someone to clean—”

Solo nodded. “It was the same here, back when this place was crazy.”

Juliette looked up at him, puzzled, and saw that he was smiling. Solo had told a joke. She laughed, even though she didn’t feel like it, and then found that it helped.

“We’ve got six or seven hours until those doors open,” she told him. “And when they do, I want to be there.”

“And then what?” Solo shut down the torch and inspected his work. He looked up at her.

“Then I want to see how they explain my being alive. I think—” She changed out a seal and flipped the suit around to get to the other sleeve. “I think my friends are fighting on one side of this fence, and the people who sent me here are fighting on the other. Everyone else is watching, the vast majority of my people. They are too scared to take sides, which basically means they’ve checked out.”

She paused while she used one of the small extractors to remove the seal that linked the wrist to the glove. Once she had it out, she reached for a good one.

“You think this will change that? Saving your friend?”

Juliette looked up and studied Solo, who was almost done with the tape.

“Saving my friend is all about saving my friend,” she said. “What I think will happen, when all those people on that fence see that a cleaner has come home, I think it’ll make them come down on the right side of things, and with that much support, the guns and the fighting are meaningless.”

Solo nodded. He began to fold up the blanket without even being asked. This bit of initiative, of knowing what needed to happen next, filled Juliette with hope. Maybe he needed these kids, someone to take care of. He seemed to have aged a dozen years already.

“I’ll come back for you and the others,” she told him.

He dipped his head, kept his eyes on her a while, his brain seeming to whir. He came to her workbench and set the neatly folded blanket down, patted it twice. A quick smile flashed in his beard, and then he had to turn away, had to scratch his cheek as if he had an itch there.

He was still a teenager like that, Juliette saw. Still ashamed to cry.

Nearly four of Lukas’s final hours were burned hiking the heavy gear up to level three. The kids had helped, but she made them stop one level down, worried about the air up top. Solo assisted her in suiting up for the second time in as many days. He studied her somberly.

“You’re sure about this?”

She nodded and accepted the blanket of heat tape. Rickson could be heard a level below, commanding one of the boys to settle down.

“Try not to worry,” she told him. “What happens, happens. But I have to try.”

Solo frowned and scratched his chin. He nodded. “You’re used to being around your people,” he said. “Probably happier there anyway.”

Juliette reached out and squeezed his arm with one of her thick gloves. “It’s not that I would be miserable here, it’s that I would be miserable knowing I let him go out without trying something.”

“And I was just starting to get used to having you here.” He turned his head to the side, bent over and grabbed her helmet from the decking.

Juliette checked her gloves, made sure everything was wrapped tightly, and looked up. The climb to the top would be brutal with the suit on. She dreaded it. And then navigating the remains of all those people in the sheriff’s office and getting through the airlock doors. She accepted the helmet, scared of what she was about to do despite her convictions.

“Thanks for everything,” she said. She felt like she was doing more than saying goodbye. She knew there was a very good chance that she was doing willingly what Bernard had attempted so many weeks ago. Her cleaning had been delayed, but now she was going back to it.

Solo nodded and stepped around her to check her back. He patted the velcro, tugged on her collar. “You’re good,” he said, his voice cracking.

“You take care of yourself, Solo.” She reached out and patted his shoulder. She had decided to carry the helmet one more flight up before putting it on, just to conserve her air.

“Jimmy,” he said. “I think I’m going back to being called Jimmy, now.”

He smiled at Juliette. Shook his head sadly, but smiled.

“I’m not going to be alone anymore,” he told her.

28

Juliette made her way through the airlock doors and up the ramp, ignoring the dead around her, just focusing on each step, and the hardest part was over. The rest was open space and the scattered remains she wished she could pretend were boulders. Finding her way was easy. She simply turned her back on that crumbling metropolis in the distance, the one she had set off for so very long ago, and began to walk away from it.

As she picked her way across the landscape, the sight of the occasional dead seemed sadder now than during that previous hike, more tragic for having shared their home for a while. Juliette was careful not to disturb them, passed them with the solemnity they deserved, wishing she could do more than feel sorry for them.

Eventually, they thinned, and she and the landscape were left alone. Trudging up that windswept hill, the sound of fine soil peppering her helmet became oddly familiar and strangely comforting. This was the world in which she lived, in which they all lived. Through the clear dome of her helmet, she saw it all as clearly as it could be seen. The speeding clouds hung angry and gray; sheets of dust whipped sideways and low to the ground; jagged rocks looked like they’d been sheared from some larger piece, perhaps by the machines that had crafted these hills.

When she reached the crest, she paused to take in the vista around her. The wind was fierce up there, her body exposed. She planted her boots wide so she wouldn’t topple over and peered down into the inverted dome before her, at the flattened roof of her home. There was a mix of excitement and dread. The low sun had only barely cleared the distant hills, and the sensor tower below was still in shadow, still in nighttime. She would make it. But before she started down the hill, she found herself gazing, amazed, at the scattering of depressions marching toward the horizon. They were just like the silo schematic, evenly spaced depressions, fifty of them.

And it occurred to her, suddenly and with a violent force, that countless others were going about their days nearby. People alive. More silos than just hers and Solo’s. Silos unaware, packed with people waking up for work, to go to school, maybe even to cleaning.

She turned in place and took it all in, wondering if maybe there was someone else out on that landscape at the exact same time as her wearing a similar suit, a completely different set of fears racing through their mind. If she could call out to them, she would. If she could wave to all the hidden sensors, she would.

The world took on a different scope, a new scale from this height. Her life had been cast away weeks ago, likely should have ended. If not on the slope of that hill in front of her home, then surely in the flooded deeps of silo 17. But it hadn’t ended like that. It would probably end here, instead, this morning with Lukas. They might burn in that airlock together if her hunch was wrong. Or they could lie in the crook of that hill and waste away as a couple, a couple whose kinship had been formed by desperate talks lingering into the night, an intense bond between two stranded souls that was never spoken nor admitted to.

Juliette had promised herself never to love in secret again, never to love at all. And somehow this time was worse: she had kept it a secret even from him. Even from herself.

Maybe it was the proximity of death talking, the reaper buffeting her clear helmet with sand and toxins. What did any of it matter, seeing how wide and full the world was? Her silo would probably go on. Other silos surely would. And the things that she thought mattered—suddenly shrank. It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.

A mighty gust of wind struck her, nearly ripping the folded blanket out of her hands. Juliette steadied herself, gathered her wits, and began the much easier descent toward her home. She ducked down below the crest with its sobering views and saddening heights, out of the harsh and caustic winds. She followed that crook where two hills met, winding her way toward the sad sight of a couple buried in plain view, who marked her fateful, desperate, and weary way home.

She arrived at the ramp early. There was no one on the landscape, the sun still hidden behind the hills. As she hurried down the slope, she wondered what anyone would think if they saw her on the sensors, stumbling toward the silo.

At the bottom of the ramp, she stood close to the heavy steel doors and waited. She checked the heat tape blanket, ran through the procedure in her mind. Every scenario had been thought of either during her climb, in her mad dreams, or during the walk through the wild outside. This would work, she told herself. The mechanics were sound. The only reason no one survived a cleaning was because they never had help; they couldn’t bring tools or resources. But she had.

Time seemed to pass not at all. It was like her delicate and precious watch when she forgot to wind it. The trapped soil along the edge of the ramp shifted about impatiently with her, and Juliette wondered if maybe the cleaning had been called off, if she would die alone. That would be better, she told herself. She took a deep breath, wishing she would’ve brought more air, enough for a return trip, just in case. But she had been too worried about the cleaning going through to consider that it might not.

After a long wait, her nerves swelling and heart racing, she heard a noise inside, a metallic scraping of gears.

Juliette tensed, her arms rippling with chills, her throat constricting. This was it. She shifted in place, listening to the great grind of those heavy doors as they prepared to disgorge poor Lukas. She unfolded part of the heat blanket and waited. It would all go so quickly. She knew. But she would be in control. No one could come in and stop her.

With a terrible screech, the doors to silo 18 parted, and a hiss of argon blasted out at her. Juliette leaned into it. The fog consumed her. She pushed blindly forward, groping ahead of herself, the blanket flapping noisily against her chest. She expected to run into him, to find herself wrestling a startled and frightened man, had prepared herself to need to wrestle him, hold him down, get him wrapped up tightly in the blanket—

But there was no one in the doorway, no body struggling to get out, to get away from the coming purge of flames.

Juliette practically fell into the airlock; her body expected resistance like a boot at the top of a darkened stairway and found instead empty space.

As the argon cleared and the door began to grind shut, she had a brief hope, a tiny fantasy, that there was no cleaning. That the doors had simply been opened for her, welcoming her back. Maybe someone had seen her on the hillside and had taken a chance, had forgiven her, and all would be okay—

But as soon as she could see through the billowing gas, she saw that this was not the case. A man in a cleaning suit was kneeling in the center of the airlock, hands on his thighs, facing the inner door.

Lukas.

Juliette raced to him as a halo of light bloomed in the room, the fire nozzles spitting on and reflecting off the shimmering plastic. The door thunked shut behind her, locking them both inside.

Juliette shook the blanket loose and shuffled around so he could see her, so he would know he wasn’t alone.

The suit couldn’t hide the shock. Lukas startled, his arms leaping up in alarm, even as the flames began to lance out.

She nodded, knowing he could see her through her clear dome, even if she couldn’t see him. With a sweeping twirl she had practiced in her mind a thousand times, she spread the blanket over his head and knelt down swiftly, covering herself as well.

It was dark under the heat tape. The temperature outside was rising. She tried to shout to Lukas that it was going to be okay, but her voice sounded muffled even inside her own helmet. Tucking the edges of the blanket down beneath her knees and feet, she wiggled until it was tightly pinned. She reached forward and tried to tuck the material under him as well, making sure his back was fully protected.

Lukas seemed to know what she was doing. His gloved hands fell to her arms and rested there. She could feel how still he was, how calm. She couldn’t believe he was going to wait, had chosen to burn rather than clean. She couldn’t remember anyone ever making that choice. This worried her as they huddled together in the darkness, everything growing warm.

The flames licked against the heat tape, striking the blanket with enough force to be felt, like a buffeting wind. The temperature shot up, sweat leaping out on her lip and forehead, even with all the superior lining of her suit. The blanket wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t keep Lukas alive in his suit. The fear in her heart was only for him, even as her skin began to heat up.

Her panic seemed to leach into him, or maybe he was feeling the burns even worse. His hands trembled against her. And then she literally felt him go mad, felt him change his mind, begin to burn, something.

Lukas pushed her away from himself. Bright light entered their protective dome as he began to crawl out from under it, kicking away.

Juliette screamed for him to stop. She scrambled after him, clutching his arm, his leg, his boot, but he stomped her, kicked at her, beat her with his fists, frantically tried to get away.

The blanket fell off her head, and the light nearly blinded her. She felt the intense heat, could hear her dome pop and make noises, saw the clear bubble dip in above her and warp. She couldn’t see Lukas, couldn’t feel him, just saw blinding light and felt searing heat, scorching her wherever her suit crinkled against her body. She screamed in pain and yanked the blanket back over her head, covering the clear plastic.

And the flames raged on.

She couldn’t feel him. Couldn’t see him. There would be no way to find him. A thousand burns erupted across her body like so many knives gouging her flesh. Juliette sat alone under that thin film of protection, burning up, enduring the raging flames, and wept hot tears. Her body convulsed with sobs and anger, cursing the fire, the pain, the silo, the entire world.

Until eventually—she had no more tears and the fuel ran its course. The boiling temperature dropped to a mere scalding, and Juliette could safely shrug off the steaming blanket. Her skin felt as if it were on fire. It burned wherever it touched the interior of her suit. She looked for Lukas and found she didn’t have to look far.

He was lying against the door, his suit charred and flaking in the few places it remained intact. His helmet was still in place, saving her the horror of seeing his young face, but it had melted and deformed far worse than hers. She crawled closer, aware that the door behind her was opening, that they were coming for her, that it was all over. She had failed.

Juliette whimpered when she saw the places his body had been exposed, the suit and charcoal liners boiled away. There was his arm, charred black. His stomach, oddly distended. His tiny hands, so small and thin and burned to a—

No.

She didn’t understand. She wept anew. She threw her gloved and steaming hands against her bubbled dome and cried out in shock, in a mix of anger and blessed relief.

This was not Lukas dead before her.

This was a man who deserved none of her tears.

29

Awareness, like sporadic jolts of pain from her burns, came and went.

Juliette remembered a billowing fog, boots stomping all around her, lying on her side in the oven of an airlock. She watched the way the world warped out of shape as her helmet, a viscous thing, continued to sag toward her, melting. A bright silver star hovered in her vision, waving as it settled beyond her dome. Peter Billings peered through her helmet at her, shook her scalded shoulders, cried out to the people stomping around, telling them to help.

They lifted her up and out of that steaming place, sweat dripping from faces, a melted suit cut from her body.

Juliette floated through her old office like a ghost. Flat on her back, the squeal of a fussy wheel below her, past the rows and rows of steel bars, an empty bench in an empty cell.

They carried her in circles.

Down.

She woke to the beeping of her heart, these machines checking in on her, a man dressed like her father.

He was the first to notice her awake. His eyebrows lifted, a smile, a nod to someone over her shoulder.

And Lukas was there, his face—so familiar, so strange—was in her blurry vision. She felt his hand in hers. She knew that hand had been there a while, that he had been there a while. He was crying and laughing, brushing her cheek. Jules wanted to know what was so funny. What was so sad. He just shook his head as she drifted back to sleep.

It wasn’t just that the burns were bad—it’s that they were everywhere.

The days of recovery were spent sliding in and out of painkiller fogs.

Every time she saw Lukas, she apologized. Everyone was making a fuss. Peter came. There were piles of notes from down deep, but nobody was allowed up. Nobody else to see her but the man dressed like her father and women who reminded her of her mom.

Her head cleared quickly once they let it.

Juliette came out of what felt like a deep dream, weeks of haze, nightmares of drowning and burning, of being outside, of dozens of silos just like hers. The drugs had kept the pain at bay—but her consciousness, too. She didn’t mind the stings and aches if it meant winning back her mind. It was an easy trade.

“Hey.”

She flopped her head to the side—and Lukas was there. Was he ever not? A blanket fell from his chest as he leaned forward, held her hand. He smiled.

“You’re looking better.”

Juliette licked her lips. Her mouth was dry.

“Where am I?”

“The infirmary on thirty-three. Just take it easy. Do you want me to get you anything?”

She shook her head. It felt amazing to be able to move, to respond to words. She tried to squeeze his hand.

“I’m sore,” she said weakly.

Lukas laughed. He looked relieved to hear this. “I bet.”

She blinked and looked at him. “There’s an infirmary on thirty-three?” His words were on a delay.

He nodded gravely. “I’m sorry, but it’s the best in the silo. And we could keep you safe. But forget that. Rest. I’ll go grab the nurse.”

He stood, a thick book spilling from his lap and tumbling into the chair, burying itself in the blanket and pillows.

“Do you think you can eat?”

She nodded, turned her head back to face the ceiling and the bright lights, everything coming back to her, memories popping up like the tingle of pain on her skin.

She read folded notes for days and cried. Lukas sat by her side, collecting the ones that spilled to the floor like paper planes tossed from landings. He apologized over and over, blubbering like he was the one who’d done it. Juliette read all of them a dozen times, trying to keep straight who was gone and who was still signing their names. She couldn’t believe it about Knox. Some things seemed immutable, like the great stairway. She wept for him and for Marck, wanted desperately to see Shirly, was told that she couldn’t.

Ghosts visited her when the lights were out. Juliette would wake up, eyes crusted over, pillow wet, Lukas rubbing her forehead and telling her it would be okay.

Peter came often. Juliette thanked him over and over. It was all Peter, all Peter. He had made the choice. Lukas told her of the stairway, his march to cleaning, hearing her voice on Peter’s radio, the implications of her being alive.

Peter had taken the risk, had listened. That had led to him and Lukas talking. Lukas had said forbidden things, was in no danger of being sent anyplace worse, said something that confused her about being a bad virus, a catching cold. The radio barked with reports from Mechanical of people surrendering. Bernard sentenced them to death anyway.

And Peter had a decision to make. Was he the final law, or did he owe something to those who put him in place? Did he do what was right, or what was expected of him? It was so easy to do the latter, but Peter Billings was a good man.

Lukas told him so on that stairwell. He told him that this was where they’d been put by fate, but what they did going forward defined them. That was who they were.

He told Peter that Bernard had killed a man. That he had proof. Lukas had done nothing to deserve this.

Peter pointed out that every ounce of IT security was a hundred levels away. There was only one gun up-top. Only one law.

His.

30

The three of them sat around the conference table, Juliette adjusting the gauze bandage on her hand to cover the raised lace of scar tissue peeking out. The coveralls they’d given her were loose to minimize the pain, but the undershirt itched everywhere it touched. She sat in one of the plush chairs and rolled back and forth with the push of her toes, impatient, ready to get out of there. But Lukas and Peter had things to discuss. They had escorted her this close to the exit, this close to the great stairwell, only to sit her down in that room. To get some privacy, they had said. The looks on their faces made her nervous.

Nobody said anything for a while. Peter used the excuse of sending a tech for some water, but when the pitcher came and the glasses were filled, nobody reached for a drink. Lukas and Peter exchanged nervous glances. Juliette grew tired of waiting.

“What is it?” she asked. “Can I go? I feel like you’ve been delaying this for days.” She glanced at her watch, wiggled her arm so it would fall from the bandage on her wrist and she could see the tiny face. She stared across the table at Lukas and had to laugh at the worry on his face. “Are you trying to keep me here forever? Because I told everyone in the deep that I’d be seeing them tomorrow tonight.”

Lukas turned to Peter.

“C’mon, guys. Spit it out. What’s troubling you? The doc said I was fine for the trip down and I told you I’d check in with Marsh and Hank if I had any problems. I’m gonna be late enough as it is if I don’t get a move on.”

“Okay,” Lukas said, letting out a sigh. It was as though he’d given up on Peter being the one. “It’s been a few weeks—”

“And you two’ve made it feel like months.” She twisted the dial on the side of her watch, an ancient tic returning like it had never left.

“It’s just that—” Lukas coughed into his fist, clearing his throat. “—we couldn’t give you all the notes that were sent to you.” He frowned at her, looked guilty.

Juliette’s heart dropped. She sagged forward, waiting for it. More names would be coming to move from one sad list to another—

Lukas held up his palms. “Nothing like that,” he said quickly, recognizing the worry on her face. “God, sorry, nothing like that—”

“Good news,” Peter said. “Congratulatory notes.”

Lukas shot him a look that told Juliette she might think otherwise.

“Well… it is news.” He looked across the table at her. His hands were folded in front of him, resting on the marred wood, just like hers. It felt as though they might both move them several inches until they met, until fingers interlocked. It would be so natural after weeks of practice. But that was something worried friends did in hospitals, right? Juliette pondered this while Lukas and Peter went on about elections.

“Wait. What?” She blinked and looked up from his hands, the last part coming back to her.

“It was the timing,” Lukas explained.

“You were all anyone was talking about,” Peter said.

“Go back,” she said. “What did you say?”

Lukas took a deep breath. “Bernard was running unopposed. When we sent him out to cleaning, the election was called off. But then news got around about your miraculous return, and people showed up to vote anyway—”

“A lot of people,” Peter added.

Lukas nodded. “It was quite a turnout. More than half the silo.”

“Yeah, but… Mayor?” She laughed and looked around the scratched up conference table, bare except for the untouched glasses of water. “Isn’t there something I need to sign? Some official way to turn this nonsense down?”

The two men exchanged glances.

“That’s sorta the thing,” Peter said.

Lukas shook his head. “I told you—”

“We were hoping you’d accept.”

“Me? Mayor?” Juliette crossed her arms and sat back, painfully, against the chair. She laughed. “You’ve gotta be kidding. I wouldn’t know the first thing about—”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Peter said, leaning forward. “You have an office, you shake some hands, sign some things, make people feel better—”

Lukas tapped him on the arm and shook his head. Juliette felt a flush of heat across her skin, which just made her scars and wounds itch more.

“Here’s the thing,” Lukas said as Peter sat back in his chair. “We need you. There’s a power vacuum at the top. Peter’s been in his post longer than anyone, and you know how long that’s been.”

She was listening.

“Remember our conversations all those nights? Remember you telling me what that other silo was like? Do you understand how close to that we got?”

She chewed her lip, reached for one of the glasses, and took a long drink of water. Peering over the lip of the glass, she waited for him to continue.

“We have a chance, Jules. To hold this place together. To put it back to—”

She set the glass down and lifted her palm for him to stop.

“If we were to do this,” she told them coolly, looking from one of their expectant faces to the other. “If we do it, we do it my way.”

Peter frowned.

“No more lying,” she said. “We give truth a chance.”

Lukas laughed nervously. Peter shook his head.

“Now listen to me,” she said. “This isn’t crazy. It’s not the first time I’ve thought this through. Hell, I’ve had weeks of nothing but thinking.”

“The truth?” Peter asked.

She nodded. “I know what you two are thinking. You think we need lies, fear—”

Peter nodded.

“But what could we invent that’s scarier than what’s really out there?” She pointed toward the roof and waited for that to sink in.

“When these places were built, the idea was that we were all in this together. Together but separate, ignorant of one another, so we didn’t infect the others if one of us got sick. But I don’t want to play for that team. I don’t agree with their cause. I refuse.”

Lukas tilted his head. “Yeah, but—”

“So it’s us against them. And not the people in the silos, not the people working day to day who don’t know, but those at the top who do. Silo eighteen will be different. Full of knowledge, of purpose. Think about it. Instead of manipulating people, why not empower them? Let them know what we’re up against. And have that drive our collective will.”

Lukas raised his eyebrows. Peter ran his hands up through his hair.

“You guys should think about it.” She pushed away from the table. “Take your time. I’m going to go see my family and friends. But I’m either in, or I’ll be working against you. I’ll be spreading the truth one way or the other.”

She smiled at Lukas. It was a dare, but he would know she wasn’t joking.

Peter stood and showed her his palms. “Can we at least agree not to do anything rash until we meet again?”

Juliette crossed her arms. She dipped her chin.

“Good,” Peter said, letting out his breath and dropping his arms.

She turned to Lukas. He was studying her, his lips pursed, and she could tell he knew. There was only one way this was going forward, and it scared the hell out of him.

Peter turned and opened the door. He looked back at Lukas.

“Can you give us a second?” Lukas asked, standing up and walking toward the door.

Peter nodded. He turned and shook Juliette’s hand as she thanked him for the millionth time. He checked his star, which hung askew on his chest, and then left the conference room.

Lukas crossed out of sight of the window, grabbed Juliette’s hand and pulled her toward the door.

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “Did you really think I would just accept that job and—?”

Lukas pressed his palm against the door and forced it shut. Juliette faced him, confused, then felt his arms slide gently around her waist, mindful of her wounds.

“You were right,” he whispered. He leaned close, put his head by her shoulder. “I’m stalling. I don’t want you to go.”

His breath was warm against her neck. Juliette relaxed. She forgot what she was about to say. She wrapped an arm around his back, held his neck with her other hand. “It’s okay,” she said, relieved to hear him say it, to finally admit it. And she could feel him trembling, could hear his broken and stuttered exhalations.

“It’s okay,” she whispered again, pressing her cheek against his, trying to comfort him. “I’m not going anywhere for good—”

Lukas pulled away to look at her. She felt him searching her face, tears welling up in his eyes. His body had started shaking. She could feel it in his arms, his back.

And then she realized, as he pulled her close and pressed his lips against hers, that it wasn’t fear or panic she was sensing in him. It was nerves.

She whimpered into their kiss, the rush to her head better than the doctor’s drugs. It washed away any pain caused by his hands clutching her back. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt lips move against her own. She kissed him back, and it was over too soon. He stepped away and held her hands, glanced nervously at the window.

“It’s a… uh—”

“That was nice,” she told him, squeezing his hands.

“We should probably—” He jerked his chin toward the door.

Juliette smiled. “Yeah. Probably so.”

He walked her through the entrance hall of IT and to the landing. A tech was waiting with her shoulder bag. Juliette saw that Lukas had padded the strap with rags, worried about her wounds.

“And you’re sure you don’t need an escort?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ears. She shrugged the bag higher up her neck. “I’ll see you in a week or so.”

“You can radio me,” he told her.

Juliette laughed. “I know.”

She grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze, then turned to the great stairwell. Someone in the passing crowd nodded at her. She was sure she didn’t know him, but nodded back. Other chins were turning to follow her. She passed through them and grabbed that great curved bar of steel that wound its way through the heart of things, that held those pouting and worn treads together as life after life was ground away on them. And Juliette lifted her boot to that first step on a journey far too long in coming—

“Hey!”

Lukas called after her. He ran across the landing, his brows lowered in confusion. “I thought you were heading down, going to see your friends—”

Juliette smiled at him. A porter passed by, loaded down with his burdens. Juliette thought of how many of her own had recently slipped away.

“Family first,” she told Lukas. She glanced up that great shaft in the center of the humming silo and lifted her boot to the next tread. “I’ve got to go see my father, first.”