Lukas’s eyes widened at the flippant heresy. He glanced around the hall to see if others were around. “Jules, you’re worrying about a handful of people while the rest of the silo grows uneasy. There are murmurs of dissent all through the Up Top. There are echoes of the last uprising you stirred, only now they’re aimed at us.”
Juliette felt her skin warm. Her hand fell from Lukas’s arm. “I wanted no part of that fight. I wasn’t even here for it.”
“But you’re here for this one.” His eyes were sad, not angry, and Juliette realized the days were as long for him in the Up Top as they were for her down in Mechanical. They’d spent less time talking in the past week than they had while she’d been in Silo 17. They were nearer to one another and in danger of growing apart.
“What would you have me do?” she asked.
“To start with, don’t dig. Please. Billings has fielded a dozen complaints from neighbors speculating about what will happen. Some of them are saying that the outside will come to us. A priest from the Mids is holding two Sundays a week now to warn of the dangers, of this vision of his where the dust fills the silo to the brim and thousands die—”
“Priests—” Juliette spat.
“Yes, priests, with people marching from the Top and the Deep both to attend his Sundays. When he finds it necessary to hold three of them a week, we’ll have a mob.”
Juliette ran her fingers through her hair, rock and rubble tumbling out. She looked at the cloud of fine dust guiltily. “What do people think happened to me outside the silo? My cleaning? What are they saying?”
“Some can scarcely believe it,” Lukas said. “It has the makings of legend. Oh, in IT we know what happened, but some wonder if you were sent to clean at all. I heard one rumor that it was an election stunt.”
Juliette cursed under her breath. “And news of the other silos?”
“I’ve been telling others for years that the stars are suns like our own. Some things are too big to comprehend. And I don’t think rescuing your friends will change that. You could march your radio friend up to the bazaar and say he came from another silo, and people would just as likely believe you.”
“Walker?” Juliette shook her head, but she knew he was right. “I’m not after my friends to prove what happened to me, Luke. This isn’t about me. They’re living with the dead over there. With ghosts.”
“Don’t we as well? Don’t we dine on our dead? I’m begging you, Jules. Hundreds will die for you to save a few. Maybe they’re better off over there.”
She took a deep breath and held it a pause, tried her best not to feel angry. “They’re not, Lukas. The man I aim to save is half mad from living on his own all these years. The kids over there are having kids of their own. They need our doctors and they need our help. Besides … I promised them.”
He rewarded her pleas with sad eyes. It was no use. How do you make a man care for those he’s never met? Juliette expected the impossible of him, and she was just as much to blame. Did she truly care for the people being poisoned twice on Sundays? Or any of the strangers she had been elected to lead but had never met?
“I didn’t want this job,” she told Lukas. It was hard to keep the blame out of her voice. Others had wanted her to be mayor, not her. Though not as many as before, it seemed.
“I didn’t know what I was shadowing for either,” Lukas countered. He started to say something else, but held his tongue as a group of miners exited the generator room, a cloud of dust kicked up from their boots.
“Were you going to say something?” she asked.
“I was going to ask that you dig in secret if you have to dig at all. Or leave these men to it and come—”
He bit off the thought.
“If you were about to say home, this is my home. And are we really no better than the last of them who were in charge? Lying to our people? Conspiring?”
“I fear we are worse,” he said. “All they did was keep us alive.”
Juliette laughed at that. “Us? They elected to send you and me to die.”
Lukas let out his breath. “I meant everyone else. They worked to keep everyone else alive.” But he couldn’t help it: he cracked a smile while Juliette continued to laugh. She smeared the tears on her cheeks into mud.
“Give me a few days down here,” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a concession. “Let me see if we even have the means to dig. Then I’ll come kiss your babies and bury your dead – though not in that order, of course.”
Lukas frowned at her morbidness. “And you’ll tamp down the heresies?”