“She went to see what was out there, apparently,” Walker said. He grumbled something and eyed the open door to his workshop with a scrunched-up nose. He apparently didn’t believe this was a valid reason for going anywhere. After an uncomfortable pause, he dropped his gaze to his desk. His old hands deftly lifted an unusual-looking radio, one bristling with knobs and dials. “Let’s see if we can raise her,” he said.
He called for Juliette, and someone else answered. They said to wait a moment. Walker held the radio out to Jimmy, who took it from him, familiar enough with how they worked.
A voice crackled out of the air: “Yes? Hello—?”
It was Juliette’s voice. Jimmy squeezed the button.
“Jules?” He glanced at the ceiling and realized that for the first time in forever, she was above him somewhere, the two of them back under the same top. “Are you there?”
“Solo!” And he didn’t correct her. “You’re with Walker. Is Courtnee there?”
“Yes.”
“Great. That’s great. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I’ll be down as soon as I can. They’re making up a place for the kids near the farms, more like home. I’ve just got this … one little project to finish first. It should only be a few days.”
“It’s okay,” Jimmy said. He smiled nervously at Courtnee and felt very young all of a sudden. In truth, a few days felt like a very long time. He wanted to see Jules or go home. Or both. “I want to see you soon,” he added, changing his mind. “Don’t let it be too long.”
A burst of static. The sound of radio waves thinking. “It won’t be. I promise. Did you see my dad? He’s a doctor. I sent him down to check on you and the kids.”
“We saw him. He’s here.” Jimmy glanced down at Elise, who was tugging him toward the door, probably thinking of sweetcorn.
“Good. You said Courtnee was there. Can you put her on?”
Jimmy handed the radio over and saw that his hand was trembling. Courtnee took it. She listened to Juliette say something about the great stairway, and Courtnee updated her on the dig. There was talk of bringing the radio up so Jules could have it, an argument between them on why her father wasn’t up top to make sure she and someone named Nelson were okay, a lot that Jimmy didn’t understand. He tried to follow along, but his mind wandered. And then he realized Elise was nowhere to be seen.
“Where did that child get off to?” he asked. He ducked down and peered beneath the tool bench, saw nothing but a pile of parts and broken machines. He stood and checked behind one of the tall counters. It was a bad time for playing Hide and Find. He checked the far corner, and a cool taste of panic rose in his throat. Elise was quick to disappear back in his silo, was prone to distraction, just wandered off toward anything shiny or the slightest waft of fruit-smells. But here … with strangers and places he didn’t know. Jimmy lumbered across the room and peeked between the benches and behind the cluttered shelves, every second cranking up the sound of his heartbeat in his ears.
“She was just—” Walker started to say.
“I’m right here,” Elise called. She waved from the hallway, was standing just outside the door. “Can we get back to Rickson? I’m hungry.”
“And I promised you sweetcorn,” Courtnee said, smiling. Her conversation with Juliette was done. She had missed Jimmy’s minute or two of complete and utter panic. On the way to the door, she handed him the strange radio. “Jules wants you to take this with you.”
Jimmy accepted it gingerly.
“She said it might be a day or two, but she’ll see you at your new place by the lower farms.”
“I’m really hungry,” Elise called out impatiently. Jimmy laughed and told her to be polite, but his stomach was grumbling too. He joined her in the hallway and saw that she had her large memory book out of her shoulder bag. She clutched it tightly to her chest. Loose and colorful pages she had yet to sew in jutted out at odd angles.
“Follow me,” Courtnee said, leading them down the hall. “You are going to love Mama Jean’s sweetcorn.”
Jimmy felt certain this was true. He hurried along after Courtnee, eager to eat and then see Jules. Behind him, little Elise trailed along at her own pace. She cradled her large book in both arms – humming quietly to herself because she didn’t know how to whistle – her shoulder bag kicking and squirming and making noises of its own.
24
Juliette entered the airlock to retrieve the samples; she could feel the heat from the earlier fire – or else she was imagining it. It could’ve been her temperature going up inside the suit. Or it may simply have been the sight of that sealed container on the ready bench, its lid now discolored from the lick of flames.
She checked the container with the flat of her glove. The material on her palm didn’t grow tacky and stick to the metal; it felt cool to the touch. Over an hour of scrubbing down, changing into new suits, cleaning both airlocks, and now there was a box of clues. A box of outside air, of soil and other samples. Clues, perhaps, to all that was wrong with the world.
She retrieved the box and joined the others beyond the second airlock. A large lead-lined trunk was waiting, its joints sealed, the interior padded. The welded sample box was nestled inside. After the lid was shut, Nelson added a ring of caulk, and Lukas helped Juliette with her helmet. With it off, she realized how labored her breathing had become. Wearing that suit was starting to get to her.
She wiggled out of it while Peter Billings sealed all of the airlocks. His office adjacent to the cafeteria had been a construction site for the past week, and she could tell he would be glad for everyone to be gone. Juliette had promised to remove the inner lock as soon as possible, but that there would most likely be more excursions before that happened. First, she wanted to see about the small pockets of outside air she’d brought into the silo. And it was a long way down to the Suit Lab on thirty-four.
Nelson and Sophia went ahead of them to clear the stairwell. Juliette and Lukas followed after, one hand each on either side of the trunk like porters on a tandem. Another violation of the Pact, Juliette thought. People in silver, porting. How many laws could she break now that she was in a position to uphold them all? How clever could she be in justifying her actions?
Her thoughts drifted from her many hypocrisies to the dig far below, to the news that Courtnee had punched through, that Solo and the kids were safe. She hated that she couldn’t be down there with them, but at least her father was. Initially reluctant to play any role in her voyage outside, her father had then resisted leaving her to see to the kids instead. Juliette had convinced him they had taken enough precautions that a check-up of her health was unnecessary.
The trunk swayed and banged against the rail with a jarring clang, and she tried to concentrate on the task at hand.
“You okay back there?” Lukas called.
“How do porters do this?” she asked, switching hands. The weight of the lead-lined trunk pulled down, and its bulk was in the way of her legs. Lukas was lower down and able to walk in the center of the stairway with his arm straight by his side – much more comfortable-looking. She couldn’t manage anything similar from higher up. At the next landing, she made Lukas wait while she removed the belt threaded through the waist of her coveralls and tied this to the handle, looping it over her shoulder the way she’d seen a porter do. This allowed her to walk to the side, the weight of the box leaning against her hip, just how they carried those black bags with bodies to be buried. After a level, it almost grew comfortable, and Juliette could see the appeal of porting. It gave one time to think. The mind grew still while the body moved. But then the thought of black bags and what she and Lukas were porting, and her thoughts found a dark shadow to lie still in.
“How’re you doing?” she asked Lukas after two turns of complete silence.
“Fine,” he said. “Just wondering what we’re carrying here, you know? What’s inside the box.”
His mind had found similar shadows.
“You think this was a bad idea?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. It was hard to tell if that was a shrug, or if he was adjusting his grip.
They passed another landing. Nelson and Sophia had taped the doors off, but faces watched from behind dirty glass. Juliette spotted an elderly woman holding a bright cross against the glass. As she turned, the woman rubbed the cross and kissed it, and Juliette thought of Father Wendel and the idea that she was bringing fear, not hope, to the silo. Hope was what he and the church offered, some place to exist after death. Fear came from the chance that changing the world for the better could possibly make it worse.
She waited until they were beneath the landing. “Hey, Luke?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever wonder what happens to us after we’re gone?”
“I know what happens to us,” he said. “We get slathered in butter and chewed off the cob.”
He laughed at his own joke.
“I’m serious. Do you think our souls join the clouds and find some better place?”
His laughter stopped. “No,” he said after a long pause. “I think we simply stop being.”
They descended a turn and passed another landing, another door taped off and sealed as a precaution. Juliette realized their voices were drifting up and down a quiet and empty stairwell.
“It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be around one day,” Lukas said after a while. “I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”
Again, he adjusted his grip or shrugged. It was impossible to say.
“I’ll tell you what does last forever.” He turned his head to make sure she could hear, and Juliette braced for something corny like “love” or something unfunny like “your casseroles”.
“What lasts forever?” she obliged, sure to regret it but sensing that he was waiting for her to ask.
“Our decisions,” he said.
“Can we stop a moment?” Juliette asked. There was a burn where the strap rubbed across her neck. She set her end down on a step, and Lukas held his half to keep the trunk level. She checked the knot and stepped around to switch shoulders. “I’m sorry – ‘our decisions’?” She had lost him.
Lukas turned to face her. “Yeah. Our actions, you know? They last forever. Whatever we do, it’ll always be what we did. There’s no taking them back.”
This wasn’t the answer she was expecting. There was sadness in his voice as he said these things, that box resting against his knee, and Juliette was moved by the utter simplicity of his answer. Something resonated, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “Tell me more,” she said. She looped the strap around her other shoulder and readied to lift it again. Lukas held the rail with one hand and seemed content to rest there a moment longer.
“I mean, the world goes around the sun, right?”
“According to you.” She laughed.
“Well, it does. The Legacy and the man from Silo 1 confirm it.”
Juliette scoffed as if neither could be trusted. Lukas ignored her and continued.
“That means we don’t exist in one place. Instead, everything we do is left in … like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take—”
“And mistake.”
He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”
“Makes you not want to fuck up,” Juliette said, thinking on all the times she had, wondering if this box between them was one more mistake. She saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot.
And the stains would never wash out. That’s what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed. Always have had a brother die and a mother take her own life. Always have had taken that damn job as sheriff.
There was no going back. Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.
“You okay?” Lukas asked. “Ready to go on?”
But she knew he was asking more than if her arm was tired. He had this ability to spot her secret worries. He had a keen vision that allowed him to glimpse the smallest pinprick of hurt through heavy clouds.
“I’m fine,” she lied. And she searched her past for some noble deed, for a bloodless tread, for any touch on the world that had left it a brighter place. But when she had been sent to clean, she had refused. Always have had refused. She had turned her back and walked off, and there was no chance of going back and doing it any other way.
••••
Nelson was waiting for them in the Suit Lab. He was already prepped and in his second suit, but with his helmet off. The suit Juliette wore outside and the two used to scrub her down had been left in the airlock. Only the radios installed in the collars had been saved. They were as precious as people, Juliette had joked. Nelson and Sophia had already installed them in this pair of suits; Lukas would have a third radio in the hall.
The trunk went on the floor by a cleared workbench; Juliette and Lukas both shook sensation and blood back into their arms. “You’ve got the door?” she asked Lukas.