Wool-Omnibus Edition

24
? Silo 18 ?
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
? Silo 17 ?
“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 f*ck?”
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
? Silo 18 ?
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
? Silo 17 ?
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.