Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

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The walk was long, and longer still for her young mind. Though Juliette took few of the steps with her own small feet, it felt as though she and her parents had traveled for weeks. All things took forever in impatient youth, and any kind of waiting was torture.

She rode on her father’s shoulders, clutched his chin, her legs wrapped choking around his neck. Riding so high, she had to stoop her head to avoid the undersides of the steps. Clangs from strangers’ boots rang out on the treads above her, and sprinkles of rust-dust drifted into her eyes.

Juliette blinked and rubbed her face into her father’s hair. As excited as she was, the rise and fall of his shoulders made it impossible to stay awake. When he complained of a sore back, she rode a few levels on her mother’s hip, fingers interlocked around her neck, her young head lolling as she drifted off to sleep.

She enjoyed the sounds of the traveling, the footfalls and the rhythmic song of her mother and father chatting adult things, their voices drifting back and forth as she faded in and out.

The journey became a haze of foggy recollections. She awoke to the squealing of pigs through an open door, was vaguely aware of a garden they toured, woke fully to the smell of something sweet and ate a meal—lunch or dinner, she wasn’t sure. She hardly stirred that night as she slid from her father’s arms into a dark bed. She awoke the next morning beside a cousin she didn’t know in an apartment nearly identical to her own. It was a weekend. She could tell by the older kids playing loudly in the hallway instead of getting ready for school. After a cold breakfast, she returned to the stairs with her parents and the sensation that they’d been traveling all their lives instead of just one day. And then the naps returned with their gentle erasure of time.

What took two days and felt like a week or a month to young Juliette, finally brought them to the hundredth landing of the silo’s unfathomable depths. She took the last steps herself, her mom and dad holding a hand each, telling her the significance. She was now in a place called the “down deep,” they told her. The bottom third. They steadied her sleepy legs as she wobbled from the last tread of the ninety-ninth stairway to the landing of the hundredth. Her father pointed above the open and busy doors to a large painted number with an incredible third digit:

The two circles captivated Juliette. They were like wide open eyes peering out at the world for the first time. She told her father that she could already count that high.

“I know you can,” he said. “It’s because you’re so smart.”

She followed her mother into the bazaar while clutching one of her father’s strong and rough hands with both of her own. There were people everywhere. It was loud, but in a good way. A happy noise filled the air as people lifted their voices to be heard—just like a classroom once the teacher was gone.

Juliette felt afraid of getting lost, and so she clung to her father. They waited while her mom bartered for lunch. It required stopping at what felt like a dozen stalls to get the handful of things she needed. Her dad talked a man into letting her lean through a fence to touch a rabbit. The fur was so soft it was like it wasn’t there. Juliette snapped her hand back in fear when the animal turned its head, but it just chewed something invisible and looked at her like it was bored.

The bazaar seemed to go on forever. It wound around and out of sight, even when all the many-colored adult legs were clear enough for her to see to the end. Off to the sides, narrower passages full of more stalls and tents twisted in a maze of colors and sounds, but Juliette wasn’t allowed to go down any of these. She stuck with her parents until they arrived at the first set of square steps she’d ever seen in her young life.

“Easy now,” her mother told her, helping her up the steps.

“I can do it,” she said stubbornly, but took her mom’s hand anyway.

“Two and one child,” her father said to someone at the top of the steps. She heard the clatter of chits going into a box that sounded full of them. As her father passed through the gate, she saw the man by the box was dressed in all colors, a funny hat on his head that flopped much too big. She tried to get a better look as her mom guided her through the gates, a hand on her back and whispers in her ear to keep up with her father. The gentleman turned his head, bells jangling on his hat, and made a funny face at her, his tongue poking out to the side.

Juliette laughed, but still felt half afraid of the strange man as they found a spot to sit and eat. Her dad dug a thin bed sheet out of his pack and spread it across one of the wide benches. Juliette’s mom made her take her shoes off before she stood on the sheet. She held her father’s shoulder and looked down the slope of benches and seats toward the wide open room below. Her father told her the open room was called a “stage.” Everything in the down deep had different names.

“What’re they doing?” she asked her father. Several men on the stage, dressed as colorful as the gatesman, were throwing balls up into the air—an impossible number of them—keeping them all from hitting the ground.

Her father laughed. “They’re juggling. They’re here to entertain us until the play starts.”

Juliette wasn’t sure she wanted the play to start. This was it, the thing she wanted to see. The jugglers tossed balls and hoops between each other, and Juliette could feel her own arms windmilling as she watched. She tried counting the hoops, but they wouldn’t stay in one place long enough.

“Eat your lunch,” her mother reminded her, passing her bites of a fruit sandwich.

Juliette was mesmerized. When the jugglers put the balls and hoops away and started chasing one another, falling down and acting silly, she laughed as loudly as the other kids. She looked constantly to her mom and dad to see if they were watching. She tugged on their sleeves, but they just nodded and continued to talk, eat, and drink. When another family sat close and a boy older than her laughed at the jugglers as well, Juliette felt suddenly like she had company. She began to squeal even louder. The jugglers were the brightest things she had ever seen. She could’ve watched them forever.

But then the lights were dimmed and the play began, and it was boring by comparison. It started off nice with a rousing sword fight, but then it was a lot of strange words and a man and woman looking at each other the way her parents did, talking in some funny language.

Juliette fell asleep. She dreamed of flying through the silo with one hundred colorful balls and hoops soaring all around her, always out of reach, the hoops round like the numbers at the end of the bazaar’s level—and then she woke up to whistles and applause.

Her parents were standing and yelling while the people on the stage in the funny costumes took several bows. Juliette yawned and looked over at the boy on the bench beside her. He was sleeping with his mouth open, his head in his mom’s lap, his shoulders shaking while she clapped and clapped.

They gathered up the sheet and her father carried her down to the stage where the swordfighters and strange talkers were speaking to the audience and shaking hands. Juliette wanted to meet the jugglers. She wanted to learn how to make the hoops float in the air. But her parents waited instead until they could speak to one of the ladies, the one who had her hair braided and twisted into drooping curves.

“Juliette,” her father told her, lifting her onto the stage. “I want you to meet… Juliette.” He gestured to the woman in the fluffy dress with the strange hair.

“Is that your real name?” the lady asked, kneeling down and reaching for Juliette’s hand.

Juliette pulled it back like it was another rabbit about to bite her, but nodded.

“You were wonderful,” her mom told the lady. They shook hands and introduced themselves.

“Did you like the play?” the lady with the funny hair asked.

Juliette nodded. She could sense that she was supposed to and that this made it okay to lie.

“Her father and I came to this show years ago when we first started dating,” her mother said. She rubbed Juliette’s hair. “We were going to name our first child either Romeus or Juliette.”

“Well, be glad you had a girl, then,” the lady said, smiling.

Her parents laughed, and Juliette was beginning to be less afraid of this woman with the same name as her.

“Do you think we could get your autograph?” Her father let go of her shoulder and rummaged in his pack. “I have a program in here somewhere.”

“Why not a script for this young Juliette?” The lady smiled at her. “Are you learning your letters?”

“I can count to a hundred,” Juliette said proudly.

The woman paused, then smiled. Juliette watched her as she stood and crossed the stage, her dress flowing in a way that coveralls never could. The lady returned from behind a curtain with a tiny book of papers held fast with brass pins. She accepted a charcoal from Juliette’s father and wrote her name large and curly across the cover.

The woman pressed the collection of papers into her small hands. “I want you to have this, Juliette of the silo.”

Her mother protested. “Oh, we couldn’t. That’s too much paper—“

“She’s only five,” her father said.

“I have another,” the lady assured them. “We make our own. I want her to have it.”

She reached out and touched Juliette’s cheek, and this time Juliette didn’t pull away. She was too busy flipping through the papers, looking at all the curly notes handwritten along the sides beside the printed words. One word, she noticed, was circled over and over among all the others. She couldn’t make out many of them, but this one she could read. It was her name. It was at the beginning of so many sentences:

Juliette. Juliette.

This was her. She looked up at the lady, understanding at once why her parents had brought her there, why they had walked so far and for so long.

“Thank you,” she said, remembering her manners.

And then, after some consideration:

“I’m sorry I fell asleep.

1

It was the morning of the worst cleaning of Lukas’s life—and for once he considered going into work, to ignore the paid holiday, to pretend it was a day like any other. He sat at the foot of his bed as he worked up the courage to move, one of his many star charts in his lap. Lightly with his fingers, so as to not smear the marks away, he caressed the charcoal outline of one star in particular.

It wasn’t a star like the others. Those were simple dots on a meticulous grid with details of date sighted, location, and intensity. This wasn’t that kind of star—not one that lasted nearly so long. It was the five pointed kind, the outline of a sheriff’s badge. He remembered drawing the shape while she was talking to him one night, the steel on her chest glowing faintly as it caught the weak light from the stairwell. He remembered her voice being magical, the way she carried herself mesmerizing, and her arrival into his boring routine had been as unexpected as the parting of clouds.

He also remembered how she had turned away from him in her cell two nights ago, had tried to save his feelings by pushing him away—

Lukas had no more tears. He had spent most of the night shedding them for this woman he hardly knew. And now he wondered what he would do with his day, with his life. The thought of her out there, doing anything for them—cleaning—made him sick. He wondered if that was why he’d had no appetite for two days. Some deep part of his gut must know he’d never keep anything down, even if he forced himself to eat.

He set the star chart aside and dropped his face into his palms. He rested there, so tired, trying to convince himself to just get up and go to work. If he went to work, at least he’d be distracted. He tried to remember where he’d left off in the server room last week. Was it the number eight tower that had gone down again? Sammi had suggested he swap out the control board, but Lukas had suspected a bad cable. That’s what he’d been doing—he remembered now—toning out the Ethernet runs. It’s what he should be doing right then, that very day. Anything but sitting around on a holiday, feeling like he could be physically ill over a woman he’d done little more than tell his mother about.

Lukas stood and shrugged on the same pair of coveralls he’d worn the day before. He remained there a moment, staring at his bare feet, wondering why he’d gotten up. Where was he going? His mind was completely blank, his body numb. He wondered if he could stand there, unmoving, his stomach twisted in knots, for the rest of his life. Someone would eventually find him, wouldn’t they? Dead and stiff, standing upright, a statue of a corpse.

He shook his head and these black thoughts loose and looked for his boots.

He found them; it was an accomplishment. Lukas had done something by getting himself dressed.

He left his room and ambled toward the landing, weaving around kids squealing from another day off school, parents trying to corral them and get their boots and coveralls on. The commotion was little more than background noise for Lukas. It was a hum, like the aches in his legs from gathering signatures the days before. He stepped out onto the apartment’s landing and felt a habitual tug upwards toward the cafeteria. All he could think about was all he had thought of for the past week: making it through another day so he could go up-top for the chance to see her.

It suddenly occurred to Lukas that he still could. He wasn’t one for sunrises—he much preferred the twilight and the stars—but if he wanted to see her, all he had to do was climb to the cafeteria and scan the landscape. There would be a new body there, a new suit with the shine still on it glimmering in whatever weak rays the sun dribbled through those blasted clouds.

He could see the image clearly in his head: her uncomfortable sprawl—legs twisted, arm pinned, helmet turned to the side, gazing back at the silo. Sadder still, he saw himself decades later, a lonely old man sitting in front of that gray wallscreen and drawing not star charts but landscapes. The same landscapes over and over, looking up at a wasting might-have-been, sketching that same still pose while weeping old-man tears that dripped and turned charcoal to mud.

He would be like Marnes, that poor man. And thinking of the Deputy, who died with no one to bury him, it reminded Lukas of the last thing Juliette had told him. She had begged him to find someone, to not be like her, to never be alone.

He gripped landing fifty’s cool steel railing and leaned over. Looking down, he could watch the stairwell drill its way deep into the earth. The landing for fifty-six was visible below, the several landings between jutting off in unseen angles. It was hard to gauge the distance—Lukas was used to the much larger scale of stars—but he figured it was more than enough. No need to walk down to eighty-two, which most jumpers preferred for its long clear path down to ninety-nine.

Suddenly, he saw himself in flight, tumbling down, arms and legs splayed. He reckoned he would just miss the landing. One of the railings would catch him and saw him near in half. Or maybe if he jumped out a little further, maybe if he aimed his head, he could make it quick.

He straightened, feeling a twinge of fear and a rush of adrenaline from picturing the fall, the end, so vividly. He glanced around and checked the morning traffic to see if anyone was watching him. He had seen other adults peer over railings after things they’d lost. He’d always assumed bad thoughts were going through their heads. Because he knew, growing up in the silo, that only children dropped physical things from the landings. By the time you got older, you knew to keep a grip on all that you could. Eventually, it was something else that slipped away, something else you lost that tumbled down through the heart of the silo, that made you ponder leaping after—

The landing shivered with the beat of a hurrying porter; the sound of bare feet slapping against steel treads came next and spiraled closer. Lukas slid away from the railing and tried to focus on what he was doing that day. Maybe he should just crawl back in bed and sleep, kill some hours with unconsciousness.

As he attempted to summon some sliver of motivation, the speeding porter flew past, and Lukas caught a glimpse of the boy’s face twisted in consternation. Even as he sped out of sight—his pace swift and reckless—the image of his worry remained vividly lodged in Lukas’s mind.

And Lukas knew. As the rapid patter of the boy’s feet wound deeper into the earth, he knew something had happened that morning, something up-top, something newsworthy about the cleaning.

A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout. Maybe the cleaning never happened. Was it possible his petition had been reconsidered? Had the weight of all those signatures gathered over a spread of a hundred levels finally worn the judges down? What if Bernard had actually come through for him, had swayed the presiding judge to lower Juliette’s offense?

Lukas recalled his appeals to Bernard, begging him as a friend, as his boss, to intervene on her behalf. He had asked him to add his own signature to the petition, which he finally had. But Bernard had warned him that her fate was out of his hands, that the judges would decide, that his authority as interim mayor made him practically powerless.

And yet, if a porter had dire news on a day of cleaning, could it be that his friend had kept at it all night and had finally come through?

That tiny seed of hope sprang roots. It grew vine-like through Lukas’s chest, filling him with an urgency to run up and see for himself. He left the railing, and the dream of leaping after his worries, and pushed his way through the morning crowd. Whispers, he noticed, were already foaming in the porter’s wake. He wasn’t the only one who had noticed.

As he joined the upbound traffic, he realized the aches in his legs from the days before had vanished. He prepared to pass the slow-moving family in front of him—when he heard the loud squawk of a radio behind.

Lukas turned to find Deputy Marsh a few treads back fumbling for the radio on his hip, a small cardboard box clutched to his chest, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Lukas stopped and held the railing, waiting for the mids deputy to reach him.

“Marsh!”

The deputy finally got the volume down on his radio and glanced up. He nodded to Lukas. The both of them squeezed against the railing as a worker and his shadow passed heading upbound.

“What’s the news?” Lukas asked. He knew the deputy well, and he knew he might spill it for free.

Marsh swiped his forehead and moved the box into the crook of his other arm. “That Bernard is whoopin’ my ass this mornin’,” he complained. “Done climbed enough this week!”

“No, what of the cleaning?” Lukas asked. “A porter just hurried by like he’d seen a ghost—”

Deputy Marsh glanced up the steps. “I was told to bring her things to thirty-four as quick as grease. Hank nearly killed himself bringing ‘em partway up to me—” He started up the stairs around Lukas as if he couldn’t afford to stay. “Look, I’ve gotta keep movin’ if I wanna keep my job—”

Lukas held his arm, and traffic swelled below them as annoyed climbers squeezed past and against the occasional traveler heading down. “Did the cleaning go through or not?” Lukas demanded to know.

Marsh sagged against the railing. Quiet chatter popped through his radio.

“No,” he whispered, and Lukas felt as though he could fly. He could fly straight up the space between the stairs and the concrete heart of the silo, could soar around the landings, could go fifty levels at a leap—

“She went out, but she didn’t clean,” Marsh said, his voice low but laced with words sharp enough to pierce Lukas’s dreams. “She wandered over them hills—”

“Wait. What?”

Marsh nodded, and sweat dripped from the Deputy’s nose. “Plum out of sight,” he hissed, like a radio turned down low. “Now I’ve got to get her things up to Bernar—”

“I’ll do it,” Lukas said, reaching out his hands. “I’m going to thirty-four anyway.”

Marsh shifted the box. The poor Deputy seemed liable to collapse at any moment. Lukas begged him, just as he had two days earlier in order to see Juliette in her cell. “Let me take them up for you,” he said. “You know Bernard won’t mind. He and I are good friends, just like you and me have always been—”

Deputy Marsh wiped his lip and nodded ever so slightly, thinking on this.

“Look, I’m going up anyway,” Lukas said. He found himself slowly taking the box from an exhausted Marsh, even though the waves of emotion surging through his own body made it difficult to focus. The traffic on the stairs had become background noise. The idea that Juliette may still be in the silo had slipped away, but the news that she hadn’t cleaned, that she had made it over the hills—this filled him with something else. It touched the part of him that yearned to map the stars. It meant no one would ever have to watch her waste away—

“You’ll be careful with that,” Marsh said. His eyes were on the box, now tucked into Lukas’s arms.

“I’ll guard it with my life,” Lukas told him. “Trust me.”

Marsh nodded to let him know he did. And Lukas hurried up the stairs, ahead of those rising to celebrate the cleaning, the weight of Juliette’s belongings rattling softly in a box tucked tightly against his chest.

2

Walker the electrician bent over a cluttered workbench and adjusted his magnifier. The great bulbous lens was attached to his head with a hoop that might’ve been uncomfortable had he not been wearing it for most of his sixty two years. As he pushed the glass into position, the small black chip on the green electronics board came into crystal focus. He could see each of the silver metal legs bent out from its body like knees on a spider, the tiny feet seemingly trapped in silver puddles of frozen steel.

With the tip of his finest soldering iron, Walker prodded a spot of silver while he worked the suction bulb with his foot. The metal around the chip’s tiny foot melted and was pulled through a straw, one little leg of sixteen free.

He was about to move to the other—he had stayed up all night pulling fried chips to occupy his mind from other things—when he heard the recognizable patter of that new porter skittering down his hall.

Walker dropped the board and hot iron to the workbench and hurried to his door. He held the jamb and leaned out as the kid ran past.

“Porter!” he yelled, and the boy reluctantly stopped. “What news, boy?”

The kid smiled, revealing the whites of youth. “I’ve got big news,” he said. “Cost you a chit, though.”

Walker grunted with disgust, but dug into his coveralls. He waved the kid over. “You’re that Sampson boy, right?”

He bobbed his head, his hair dancing around his youthful face.

“Shadowed under Gloria, didn’t you?”

The kid nodded again as his eyes followed the silver chit drawn from Walker’s rattling pockets.

“You know, Gloria used to take pity on an old man with no family and no life. Trusted me with news, she did.”

“Gloria’s dead,” the boy said, lifting his palm.

“That she is,” Walker said with a sigh. He dropped the chit into the child’s outstretched and youthful palm, then waved his aged and spotted own for the news. He was dying to know everything and would have gladly payed ten chits. “The details, child. Don’t skip a one.”

“No cleaning, Mr. Walker!”

Walker’s heart missed a beat. The boy turned his shoulder to run on.

“Stay, boy! What do you mean, no cleaning? She’s been set free?”

The porter shook his head. His hair was long, wild, and seemingly built for flying up and down the staircase. “Nossir. She refused!”

The child’s eyes were electric, his grin huge with the possession of such knowledge. No one had ever refused to clean in his lifetime. In Walker’s, neither. Maybe not ever. Walker felt a surge of pride in his Juliette.

The boy waited a moment. He seemed eager to run off.

“Anything else?” Walker asked.

Samson nodded and glanced at Walker’s pockets.

Walker let out a long sigh of disgust for what had become of this generation. He dug into his pocket with one hand and waved impatiently with the other.

“She’s gone, Mr. Walker!”

He snatched the chit from Walker’s palm.

“Gone? As in dead? Speak up, son!”

Samson’s teeth flashed as the chit disappeared into his coveralls. “Nossir. Gone as in over the hill. No cleaning, Mr. Walker, just strode right over and out of view. Gone to the city, and Mr. Bernard witnessed the whole thing!”

The young porter slapped Walker on the arm, needing, obviously, to strike something with his enthusiasm. He swiped his hair off his face, smiled large, and turned to run along his route, his feet lighter and pockets heavier from the tale.

Walker was left, stunned, in the doorway. He gripped the jamb with an iron claw lest he tumble out into the world. He stood there, swaying, looking down at the pile of dishes he’d slipped outside the night before. He glanced over his shoulder at the disheveled cot that had been calling his name all night. Smoke still rose from the soldering iron. He turned away from the hall, which would soon be pattering and clinking with the sounds of first shift, and unplugged the iron before he started another fire.

He remained there a moment, thinking on Jules, thinking on this news. He wondered if she’d gotten his note in time, if it had lessened the awful fear he’d felt in his gut for her.

Walker returned to the doorway. The down deep was stirring. He felt a powerful tug to go out there, to cross that threshold, to be a part of the unprecedented.

Shirly would probably be by soon with his breakfast and to take away his dishes. He could wait for her, maybe talk a bit. Perhaps this spell of insanity would pass.

But the thought of waiting, of the minutes stacking up like work orders, of not knowing how far Juliette had gotten or what reaction the others might be having to her not cleaning—

Walker lifted his foot and leaned it out past his doorway, his boot hovering over untrammeled ground.

He took a deep breath, fell forward, and caught himself on it. And suddenly, he felt like some intrepid explorer himself. There he was, forty something years later, teetering down a familiar hallway, one hand brushing the steel walls, a corner coming up around which his eyes could remember nothing.

And Walker became one more old soul pushing into the great unknown—his brain dizzy with what he might find out there.

3

The heavy steel doors of the silo parted, and a great cloud of argon billowed out with an angry hiss. The cloud seemed to materialize from nowhere, the compressed gas blossoming into a whipped froth as it met the warmer, less dense air beyond.

Juliette Nichols stuck one boot through that narrow gap. The doors only opened partway to hold back the deadly toxins, to force the argon through with pent-up pressure, so she had to turn sideways to squeeze through, her bulky suit rubbing against the thick doors. All she could think of was the raging fire that would soon fill the airlock. Its flames seemed to lick at her back, forcing her to flee.

She pulled her other boot through—and Juliette was suddenly outside.

Outside.

There was nothing above her helmeted head but clouds, sky, and the unseen stars.

She lumbered forward, emerging through the fog of hissing argon to find herself on a sloping ramp, the corners by the walls caked high with wind-trapped dirt. It was easy to forget that the top floor of the silo was belowground. The view from her old office and the cafeteria created an illusion of standing on the surface of the earth, head up in the wild air, but that was because the sensors were located there.

Juliette looked down at the numbers on her chest and remembered what she was supposed to be doing. She trudged up the ramp, head down, focusing on her boots. She wasn’t sure how she even moved, if it was the numbness one succumbed to in the face of execution—or if it was just automated self-preservation, simply a move away from the coming inferno in the airlock, her body delaying the inevitable because it couldn’t think or plan beyond the next fistful of seconds.

As Juliette reached the top of the ramp, her head emerged into a lie, a grand and gorgeous untruth. Green grass covered the hills like newly painted carpet. The skies were intoxicatingly blue, the clouds bleached white like fancy linen, the air peppered with soaring things.

She spun in place and took in the spectacular fabrication. It was as if she’d been dropped into a book from her youth, a book where animals talked and children flew and grays were never found.

Even knowing it wasn’t real, knowing that she was looking through an eight by two inch fib, the temptation was overwhelming to believe. She wanted to. She wanted to forget what she knew of IT’s devious program, to forget everything she and Walker had discussed, and to fall instead to the soft grasses that weren’t there, to roll around in the life that wasn’t, to strip off the ridiculous suit and go screaming happily across the lying landscape.

She looked down at her hands, clenched and unclenched them as much as the thick gloves would allow. This was her coffin. Her thoughts scattered as she fought to remember what was real. Her death was real. The ugly world she had always known was real. And then, for just a moment, she remembered that she was supposed to be doing something. She was supposed to be cleaning.

She turned and gazed at the sensor tower, seeing it for the first time. It was a sturdy block of steel and concrete with a rusted and pitted ladder running up one side. The bulge of sensor pods were stuck like warts on the faces of the tower. Juliette reached for her chest, grabbed one of the scrubbing pads, and tore it loose. The note from Walker continued to stream through her mind: Don’t be afraid.

She took the course wool pad and rubbed it against the arm of her suit. The heat tape wrapping did not peel, did not flake away like the stuff she had once stolen from IT, the tape they had engineered to fail. This was the brand of heat tape Juliette was used to working with, Mechanical’s design.

They are good in Supply, Walker’s note had said. The good had referred to the people of Supply. After years of helping Juliette score spares when she needed them most, they had done something extraordinary for her. While she had spent three days climbing stairs and three lonely nights in three different holding cells on her way to banishment, they had replaced IT’s materials with those from Mechanical. They had fulfilled their orders for parts in a most devious way, and it must’ve been at Walker’s behest. IT had then—unwittingly and for once—built a suit designed to last, not disintegrate.

Juliette smiled. Her death, however certain, was delayed. She took a long look at the sensors, relaxed her fingers, and dropped the wool pad into the fake grass. Turning for the nearest hill, she tried her best to ignore the false colors and the layers of life projected on top of what was truly there. Rather than give in to the euphoria, she concentrated on the way her boots clomped to packed earth, noted the feel of the angry wind buffeting against her suit, listened for the faint hiss as grains of sand pelted her helmet from all sides. There was a terrifying world around her, one she could be dimly aware of if she concentrated hard enough, a world she knew but could no longer see.

She started up the steep slope and headed vaguely toward the gleaming metropolis over the horizon. There was little thought of making it there. All she wanted was to die beyond the hills where no one would have to watch her rot away, so that Lukas the starhunter would not be afraid to come up at twilight for fear of seeing her still form.

And suddenly, it felt good to simply be walking, to have some purpose. She would take herself out of sight. It was a more solid goal than that false city, which she knew to be crumbling.

Partway up the hill, she came to a pair of large rocks. Juliette started to dodge around them before she realized where she was, that she had followed the most gentle path up the crook of two colliding slopes, and here lay the most horrible lie of them all.

Holston and Allison. Hidden from her by the magic of the visor. Covered in a mirage of stone.

There were no words. Nothing to see, nothing to say. She glanced down the hill and spotted sporadic other boulders resting in the grasses, their arrangement not random at all but where cleaners of old had collapsed.

She turned away, leaving such sad things behind. It was impossible to know how much time she had, how long in order to hide her body from those who might gloat—and the few who might mourn.

Climbing toward the crest of the hill, her legs still sore from ascending the silo, Juliette witnessed the first rips in IT’s deceitful veil. New portions of the sky and the distant city came into view, parts that had been obscured by the hill from down below. There seemed to be a break in the program, a limit to its lies. While the upper levels of the distant monoliths appeared whole and gleamed in the false sunlight, below these sharp panes of glass and bright steel lay the rotted dinginess of an abandoned world. She could see straight through the bottom levels of many of the buildings, and with their heavy tops projected onto them, they seemed liable to topple at any moment.

To the side, the extra and unfamiliar buildings had no supports at all, no foundations. They hung in the air with dark sky beneath them. This same dark vista of gray clouds and lifeless hills stretched out across the low horizon, a hard line of painted blue where the visor’s program met its end.

Juliette puzzled over the incompleteness of IT’s deceit. Was it because they themselves had no idea what lay beyond the hills, and so couldn’t guess what to modify? Or did they deem it not worth the effort, knowing nobody would ever make it this far? Whatever the reason, the jarring and illogical nature of the view left her dizzy if she studied it too closely. She concentrated instead on her feet, taking those last dozen steps up the painted green hill until she reached the crest.

At the top, she paused while heavy gusts of wind buffeting against her, causing her to lean into their turbulence. She scanned the horizon and saw that she stood on the divide between two worlds. Down the slope before her, on a landscape her eyes had never before seen, lay a bare world of dust and parched earth, of wind flurries and small tornadoes, of air that could kill. Here was new land, and yet it looked more familiar to her than anything she’d encountered thus far.

She turned and peered back along the path she had just climbed, at the tall grasses blowing in the gentle breeze, at occasional flowers dipping their heads at her, at the bright blue and brilliant white overhead. It was an evil concoction, inviting but false.

Juliette took one last admiring gaze at this illusion. She noted how the round depression in the center of the hills seemed to mark the outline of her silo’s flat roof, the rest of her habitable home nestled deep in the belly of the soil. The way the land rose up all around made it look as though a hungry God had spooned out a large bite of the earth. With a heavy heart, she realized that the world she had grown up in was now closed off to her, that her home and her people were safe behind bolted doors, and she must be resigned to her fate. She had been cast off. Her time was short. And so she turned her back on the alluring view and bright colors to face the dusty, the dead, and the real.

As she started down the hill, Juliette pulled cautiously on the air in her suit. She knew Walker had given her the gift of time, time no cleaner before her ever had, but how much? And for what? She had already reached her goal, had managed to haul herself out of the sensors’ sight, so why was she was still walking, still staggering down this foreign hill? Was it inertia? The pull of gravity? The sight of the unknown?

She was barely down the slope, heading in the general direction of the crumbling city, when she stopped to survey the foreign landscape before her. The elevation made it possible to choose a path for her final walk, this maiden walk, across the tall dunes of dry earth. And that’s when she saw, gazing out toward the rusting city beyond, that the hollow in which her silo resided was no accident. The hills bore a clear pattern as they stretched into the distance. It was one circular bowl after another, the earth rising up between them as if to shield each spooned-out bite from the caustic wind.

Juliette descended into the next bowl, pondering this, watching her footing as she went. She kicked aside the larger rocks and controlled her breathing. She knew from working deep in the flooded basins, swimming beneath the muck that burly men cringed from as she unclogged the drains, that air could be conserved through calmness. She glanced up, wondering if she had enough in the suit to cross this bowl and make it up the next great hill.

And that’s when she saw the slender tower rising from the center of the bowl, its exposed metal glinting in the sparse sunlight. The landscape here was untouched by the program in her visor; reality passed through her helmet untarnished. And seeing this, the familiar sensor tower, she wondered if perhaps she’d gotten turned around, if she had surveyed the world once too many times from the crest of the hill, if she was in fact trudging back toward her silo, crossing ground already crossed once before.

The sight of a dead cleaner wasting away in the dirt seemed to confirm this. It was a bare outline, ribbons of an old suit, the husk of a helmet.

She stopped and touched the dome of the helmet with the toe of her boot, and the shell crumbled and caved in. Whatever flesh and bone had been inside had long ago drifted off on the winds.

Juliette looked down the hill for the sleeping couple, but the crook of those two dunes was nowhere in sight. She suddenly felt bewildered and lost. She wondered if the air had finally worked past the seals and heat tape, if her brain was succumbing to noxious fumes, but no. She was nearer the city, still walking toward that skyline, the tops of which were still rendered whole and gleaming, the sky above them blue and spotted with bright clouds.

It meant this tower below her… was not hers. And these dunes, these great mounds of dead earth, were not meant to block out the winds or hold back the air. They were meant to shield curious eyes. To block this sight, this view, of some other.

4

Lukas held the small box tightly against his chest as he hiked up to the landing on thirty-eight. Here was a mixed-use level of offices, shops, a plastics factory, and one of the small water treatment plants. He pushed through the doors and hurried down corridors quiet from the day’s cleaning until he reached the main pump control room. His IT master key allowed him inside. The room housed a tall and familiar computer cabinet from his Tuesday maintenance schedule. Lukas left the overhead light off to keep the small window in the door darkened to passersby. He slid behind the tall server rack and the wall, scooted to the ground, and fished his flashlight out of his coveralls.

In the soft red glow of his night light, Lukas gently peeled the flaps of the box apart, revealing the contents inside.

The guilt was immediate. It punctured the anticipation, the thrill of discovery, of intimacy. It wasn’t guilt from defying his boss or lying to Deputy Marsh, nor of delaying the delivery of items he had been told were important. It was the violation of her things. The reminder of her fate. Here were Juliette’s remains. Not her body, which was lost and gone, but the remnants of the life she had lived.

He took a heavy breath, considered closing the flaps and forgetting the contents, and then thought of what would become of them anyway. His friends in IT would probably be the ones to paw through them. They would tear open the box and trade items like kids swapping candy. They would desecrate her.

He bent the flaps open further and decided to honor her instead.

He adjusted his light and saw a stack of silo vouchers on top, wrapped in a piece of wire. He pulled these out and flipped through them. They were vacation vouchers. Dozens of them. He lifted them to his nose and puzzled over the tangy scent of grease emanating from the box.

A few expired meal cards lay underneath these vouchers, the corner of an ID badge poking out. Lukas reached for the badge, coded silver from her job as sheriff. He searched for another ID among the various scattered cards, but it appeared it had not yet been replaced with whatever color Mechanical used. There hadn’t been that much time between her being fired for one offense and being put to death for another.

He took a moment to study the picture on the badge. It looked recent, just as he remembered her. Her hair was tied back tight, leaving it flat on her head. He could see loose curls sticking out to either side of her neck and remembered the first night he had watched her work, how she had braided her long hair herself while she sat alone in a pool of light, peering at page after page in those folders of hers.

He ran his finger over the picture and laughed when he saw her expression. Her forehead was wrinkled, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to determine what the photographer was attempting or why in the heavens it was taking so long. He covered his mouth to prevent the laugh from becoming a sob.

The vouchers went back into the box, but the ID slid into the breast pocket of his coveralls as if by Juliette’s own stubborn accord. The next thing that caught his eye was a silver multi-tool, new-looking, a slightly different model from his own. He grabbed this and leaned forward to pull his own tool out of his back pocket. He compared the two, opening a few of the tools on hers and admiring the smooth motion and neat click as each attachment locked into place. Taking a moment to first clean his, wiping his prints off and removing a bit of melted rubber wire casing, he switched the tools out. He decided he would rather carry this reminder of her and have his own tool disappear into storage or be pawned off to a stranger who wouldn’t appreciate—

Lukas froze at the sound of footsteps and laughter. He held his breath and waited for someone to come in, for the overhead lights to burst on. The server clicked and whirred beside him. The noise in the hallway receded, the laughter fading.

He was pushing his luck, he knew, but there was more in the box to see. He rummaged inside again and found an ornate wooden box, a valuable antique. It was just slightly bigger than his palm and took a moment to figure out how to open. The first thing he saw as the top slid away was a ring, a woman’s wedding ring. It could’ve been solid gold, but it was difficult to tell. The red glow from his flashlight tended to wash out colors, causing everything to appear dull and lifeless.

He checked for an inscription, but found none. It was a curious artifact, this ring. He was certain Juliette hadn’t been wearing it when he’d known her and wondered if it was a relative’s, or a thing passed down from before the uprising. He placed it back in the wooden box and reached for the other item inside, a bracelet of some sort. No, not a bracelet. As he pulled it out, he realized it was a watch, the face so tiny it melded with the design of the jeweled strap. Lukas studied the face, and after a moment he realized his eyes or the red flashlight were playing tricks on him. Or were they? He looked closely to be sure—and saw that one of the impossibly thin hands was ticking away the time. The thing worked.

Before he could contemplate the challenge of concealing such an item or the consequences of being discovered with it, Lukas slid the watch into his chest pocket. He looked at the ring sitting alone in the box, and after a moment’s hesitation, palmed this and stashed it away as well. He fished through the cardboard box and gathered some of the loose chits at the bottom and placed these into the antique before sealing it shut and returning it.

What was he doing? He could feel a trickle of sweat work its way from his scalp and run the length of his jawline. The heat from the rear of the busy computer seemed to intensify. He dipped his head and lifted his shoulder to dab the itchy run of sweat away. There was more in the box, and he couldn’t help himself: he had to keep looking.

He found a small notepad and flipped through it. It contained one to-do list after another, all of the items neatly crossed out. He replaced this and reached for a folded piece of paper at the bottom of the box, then realized it was more than a piece. He pulled out a thick collection of papers held together with brass fasteners. Across the top, in handwriting similar to that in the notebook, was printed:

He flipped it open and found inscrutable diagrams and bulleted notes lining the margins. It looked like something she’d put together herself, either as a reminder from piecing the room’s operation together over time, or perhaps a helpful guide for others. The paper was recycled without being pulped, he saw. She had just written on the back. He flipped the manual over and checked the lines and lines of printed text on the opposite side. There were notes in the margins and a name circled over and over:

Juliette. Juliette. Juliette.

He flipped the manual over and surveyed the rear, only to find it was the original front. “The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliette,” it said. It was a play. One Lukas had heard of. In front of him, a fan kicked on in the heart of the server, blowing air over warm chips of silicone and wire. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and tucked the bound play back into the box. He neatly arranged the other items on top and folded the cardboard flaps together. Wiggling back to his feet, Lukas doused his light and shoved it back into his pocket where it nestled against Juliette’s multi-tool. With the box secured under one arm, he patted his chest with his other hand and felt her watch, her ring, and her ID there with its picture of her. All tight against his bosom.

Lukas shook his head. He wondered what the hell he was thinking as he stole out the small and dark room, a tall panel of winking and blinking lights watching him go.

5

The bodies were everywhere. Covered in dust and dirt, suits worn down by the toxic eaters that lived in the winds, Juliette found herself stumbling over more and more of them. And then, they were constant, a mass of boulders jumbled together. A few were in suits similar to her own, but most wore rags that had been eaten away into streamers. When the wind blew past her boots and across the bodies, strips of clothing waved like kelp in the down deep’s fish farms. Unable to pick her way around them all, she found herself stepping over the remains, working her way closer and closer to the sensor tower, the bodies easily in the hundreds, possibly the thousands.

These weren’t people from her silo, she realized. However obvious, the sensation was startling. Other people. That they were dead did nothing to diminish the soul-shattering reality that people had lived so close and she had never known. Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.

She made her way through dead bodies thick as crumbling rock, the forms becoming indistinguishable from one another. They were piled high in places, and she had to choose her path carefully. As she neared the ramp leading down to this other silo, she found herself needing to step on a body or two in order to pass. It looked as though they’d been trying to get away and had scampered over one another, creating their own small hills in a mad attempt to reach the real ones. But then, when she reached the ramp leading down, she saw the crush of bodies at the steel airlock door and realized they had been trying to get back in.

Her own imminent death loomed large—a constant awareness, a new sense worn on her skin and felt keenly in every pore. She would soon join these bodies, and somehow she was not afraid. She had passed through that fear on the crest of the hill and was now in new lands, seeing new things, a terrible gift for which she had to be grateful. Curiosity drove her forward, or maybe it was the mentality of this frozen crowd, all in scrambling repose, bodies swimming over each other and reaching toward the doors below.

She swam among them. Waded, where she had to. She stepped through broken and hollow bodies, kicked aside bones and tattered remains, and fought her way to the partly cracked doors. There was a figure there frozen between its iron teeth, one arm in, one out, a scream trapped on a gray and withered face, two eye sockets empty and staring.

Juliette was one of them, one of these others. She was dead, or nearly so. But while they were frozen in motion, she was still pushing ahead. Shown the way. She tugged the body out of the gap, her breathing loud in her helmet, her exhalations misting on the screen before her nose. Half the body pulled free—the other half collapsed inside the door. A mist of powdered flesh drifted down in-between.

She wiggled one of her arms inside and tried to push through sideways. Her shoulder slipped through, then her leg, but her helmet caught. She turned her head and tried again—and the helmet wedging tightly between the doors. There was a moment of panic as she could feel the steel jaws gripping her head, supporting the weight of her helmet, leaving her semi-dangling from its grasp. She swam her arm all the way through, trying to reach around the door for purchase, to pull herself the rest of the way, but her torso was stuck. One leg was in, the other out. There was nothing to push against or pull in order to go the rest of the way. She was trapped, an arm useless on the inside, waving frantically, her rapid breathing using up what remained of her air.

Juliette tried to fit her other arm through. She couldn’t turn her waist, but she could bend her elbow and slide her fingers across her belly through the tight space between her stomach and the door. She curled her fingers around the edge of the steel and pulled. There was no leverage in those confines. It was just the strength in her fingers, in her grip. Juliette suddenly didn’t want to die, not there. She curled her hand as if to make a fist, her fingers bent around the edge of those steel jaws, her knuckles singing out from the strain. Jerking her head against her helmet, trying to bang her face against the damned screen, twisting and shoving and yanking—she suddenly popped free.

She stumbled forward, a boot catching briefly on the gap behind her, arms windmilling for balance as she kicked through a pile of charred bones and sent a cloud of black ash into the air. It was the remains of those who had been caught in the cleansing fire of the airlock. Juliette found herself in a burnt room eerily similar to the one she had recently left. Her exhausted and bewildered mind spun with outrageous delusions. Perhaps she was already dead, and these were the ghosts awaiting her. Maybe she had burned alive inside the airlock of her own silo, and these were her mad dreams, her escape from the pain, and now she would haunt this place forever.

She stumbled through the scattered remains toward the inner door and pressed her head against the thick glass porthole. She looked for Peter Billings beyond, sitting at his desk. Or perhaps a glimpse of Holston wandering the hallways, a specter searching for his ghostly wife.

But this was not the same airlock. She tried to calm herself. She wondered if her air was running low, if sucking on her own exhaust was like breathing the fumes of a hot motor, choking off her brain.

The door was sealed. It was real. The thousands were dead, but she wasn’t. Not yet.

She tried to spin the large wheel, but it was either frozen in place or locked from the inside. Juliette banged on the glass, hoping the silo sheriff would hear her, or maybe a cafeteria worker. It was dark inside, but the thought lingered that someone must be there. People lived inside silos. They didn’t belong piled up around them.

There was no answer. No light flicked on. She leaned on the large wheel that secured the door, remembered Marnes’s instructions, how all the mechanisms worked, but those lessons felt like so long ago and she hadn’t thought them important at the time. But she remembered something: After the argon bath and the fire, didn’t the inner door unlock? Automatically? So the airlock could be scrubbed? This seemed like something she remembered Marnes saying. He had joked that it wasn’t as if anyone could come back inside once the fire had run its course. Was she remembering this or making it up? Was it the wishful thinking of an oxygen-starved mind?

Either way, the wheel on the door wouldn’t budge. Juliette pushed down with all her weight—and it felt locked to her. She stepped back. The bench hanging from the wall where cleaners got suited up before their deaths looked inviting. She was tired from the walk, from the struggle to get inside. And why was she trying to get inside? She spun in place, indecisive. What was she doing?

She needed air. For some reason, she thought the silo might have some. She looked around at all the scattered bones of an uncountable number of bodies. How many dead? They were too jumbled to know. The skulls, she thought. She could count those and know. She shook this nonsense from her head. She was definitely losing her senses.

“The wheel on the door is a stuck nut,” some receding part of her said. “It’s a frozen bolt.”

And hadn’t she made a reputation as a young shadow for working them free?

Juliette told herself that this could be done. Grease, heat, leverage. Those were the secrets to a piece of metal that wouldn’t budge. She didn’t have any of the three, but she looked around anyway. There was no squeezing back through the outer door, she knew she wouldn’t make it a second time, not that kind of straining. So she had this room. The bench was secured to the wall along the back edge and hung from two chains. Juliette wiggled the chains, but didn’t see how they could come free, or what good they would do her anyway.

In the corner, there was a pipe snaking up that led into a series of vents. It must be what delivered the argon, she thought. She wrapped her hands around the pipe, put her feet on the wall, and tugged.

The connection to the vent wiggled; the toxic air had corroded and weakened it. Juliette smiled, set her teeth, and yanked back ferociously.

The pipe came free of the vent and bent at its base. She felt a sudden thrill, like a wild rat standing over a large crumb. She grabbed the free end of the pipe and worked it back and forth, bending and wrenching the fastened end. Metal would snap if you could wiggle it even a little bit, if you did it long enough. She had felt the heat of weakened steel countless times while bending it over and over until it broke.

Sweat beaded on her brow and twinkled in the dim light allowed by her visor screen. It dripped down her nose, fogged the screen, and still she yanked and pushed, back and forth, growing frantic and desperate—

The pipe snapped, taking her by surprise. Just a faint pop bled through her helmet, and then the long piece of hollow metal was free. One end was crushed and twisted, the other whole and round. Juliette turned to the door, a tool now in hand. She slid the pipe through the wheel, leaving as much as she could hanging out the side, just long enough that it wouldn’t brush the wall. With both gloved hands wrapped around the pipe, she lifted herself to her waist, bending over the pipe, her helmet touching the door. She bounced her weight on the lever, knowing it was a jerking motion that freed a bolt, not a steady force. She wiggled her way toward the end of the pipe, watching it bend a little, worried it might snap in half long before the door budged.

When she got toward the end—maximum leverage—she threw her weight up and down with all her strength, and she cursed as the pipe snapped. There was a loud clang, barely muffled by her suit, and then she collapsed to the floor, landing painfully on her elbow.

The pipe was at an angle beneath her, digging into her ribs. Juliette tried to catch her breath. Her sweat dripped against the visor screen, blurring her view. She got up and saw that the pipe was unbroken. She wondered if it had slipped free, but it was still threaded through the spokes of the large wheel.

Disbelieving, excited, she slid the pipe out the other side. She wrapped her hands around the spokes and leaned into it.

And the wheel.

It budged.

6

Walker made it to the end of the hallway and found himself leaving the comforting confines of a tight corridor to enter the wider entrance hall to Mechanical. The room, he saw, was full of young shadows. They hung out in groups, whispering to themselves. Three boys crouched near one wall, throwing stones for chits. Walker could hear a dozen interwoven voices spilling out of the mess hall across the room. The casters had sent these young ears away while they discussed adult things. He took a deep breath and hurried through that damned open space, focusing on each step, moving one foot ahead of him at a time, each small patch of floor a thing to conquer—

After a short lifetime, he finally crashed into the wall on the other side and hugged the steel panels in relief. Behind him, the shadows laughed, but he was too frightened to care. Sliding across the riveted steel, he grabbed the edge of the mess hall door and pulled himself inside. The relief was enormous. Even though the mess hall was several times the size of his workshop, it was at least full of crowding furniture and people he knew. With his back to the wall, his shoulder against the open door, he could almost pretend it was smaller. He slumped to the ground and rested, the men and women of Mechanical arguing amongst themselves, voices rising, agitated, competing.

“She’d be out of air by now, anyway,” Rick was saying.

“You don’t know that,” Shirly said. She was standing on a chair so she could be at least as tall as the others. She surveyed the room. “We don’t know what advances they’ve made.”

“That’s because they won’t tell us!”

“Maybe it’s gotten better out there.”

The room quieted with this last. Waiting, perhaps, to see if the voice would dare speak again and break its anonymity. Walker studied the eyes of those facing his way. They were wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. A double cleaning had removed some taboos. Shadows had been sent away. The adults were feeling frisky and free to speak forbidden thoughts.

“What if it has gotten better?” someone else asked.

“Since two weeks ago? I’m telling you guys, it’s the suits! They figured out the suits!” Marck, an oilman, looked around at the others, anger in his eyes. “I’m sure of it,” he said. “They’ve sorted the suits and now we have a chance!”

“A chance to what?” Knox growled. The grizzled head of Mechanical sat at one of the tables, digging into a breakfast bowl. “A chance to send more of our people out to wander the hills until they run out of air?” He shook his head and took another bite, then jabbed at the lot of them with his spoon. “What we need to be talking about,” he said, chewing, “is this sham of an election, this rat-ass Mayor, and us kept in the dark down here—!”

“They didn’t figure out the suits,” Walker hissed, still breathless from his ordeal.

“We’re the ones who keep this place humming,” Knox continued, wiping at his beard. “And what do we get? Busted fingers and ratshit pay. And now? Now they come and take our people and send them out for a view we don’t care about!” He slammed the table with his mighty fist, sending his bowl hopping.

Walker cleared his throat. He remained crouched on the floor, his back against the wall. No one had seen him enter or had heard him the first time. Now, while the room was scared quiet by Knox, he tried again.

“They did not figure out the suits,” he said, a little louder this time.

Shirly saw him from her perch. Her chin dropped, her mouth hinging open. She pointed, and a dozen other heads turned to follow.

They gaped at him. Walker was still trying to catch his breath and must’ve looked near death. Courtnee, one of the young plumbers who was always kind to him whenever she stopped by his workshop, left her seat and hurried to his side. She whispered his name in surprise and helped him to his feet, urging him to come to the table and take her chair.

Knox slid his bowl away from himself and slapped the table. “Well, people are just wandering all over the damned place now, aren’t they?”

Walker looked up sheepishly to see the old foreman chief smiling through his beard at him. There were two dozen other people staring at him, all at once. Walker half waved, then stared down at the table. It was suddenly too many people.

“All this shouting rouse you, old man? You setting off over the hills, too?”

Shirly jumped down from her chair. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I forgot to take him his breakfast.” She hurried toward the kitchen to fetch him some food even as Walker tried to wave her off. He wasn’t hungry.

“It isn’t—” His voice cracked. He tried again. “I came because I heard,” he whispered. “Jules. Out of sight.” He made a gesture with his hand, arching it over some imaginary hill running across the table. “But it wasn’t them in IT that figured nothing,” he said. He made eye contact with Marck and tapped his own chest. “I did it.”

A whispered conversation in the corner fell quiet. No one sipped their juice, no one moved. They were still half stunned to see Walker out of his workshop, much less among the crowd of them. Not a one of them had been old enough to remember the last time he’d roamed about. They knew him as the crazy electrical man who lived in a cave and refused to cast shadows anymore.

“What’re you sayin’?” Knox asked.

Walker took a deep breath. He was about to speak when Shirly returned and placed a bowl of hot oats in front of him, the spoon standing off the rim the concoction was so thick. Just how he liked it. He pressed his hands against either side of the bowl, feeling the heat in his palms. He was suddenly very tired from lack of sleep.

“Walk?” Shirly asked. “You okay?”

He nodded and waved her away, lifted his head and met Knox’s gaze.

“Jules came to me the other day.” He bobbed his head, gaining confidence. He tried to ignore how many people were watching him speak, or the way the overhead lights twinkled in his watering eyes. “She had a theory about these suits, about IT.” With one hand, he stirred his oats, steeling his resolve to say the unthinkable. But then, how old was he? Why did he care for taboos?

“You remember the heat tape?” He turned to Rachele, who worked first shift and knew Juliette well. She nodded. “Jules sorted that it weren’t no accident, the way the tape broke down.” He nodded to himself. “She sorted it all, she did.”

He took a bite of his food, not hungry but enjoying the burn of the hot spoon on his old tongue. The room was silent, waiting. The whispers and quiet play of the shadows outside could just barely be heard.

“I’ve built up favors and favors with Supply over the years,” he explained. “Favors and favors. So I called them all in. Told them we’d be even.” He looked at this group of men and women from Mechanical, could hear more standing in the hallway who’d arrived late but could read from the frozen demeanors in the room to stay put. “We’ve taken stuff out if IT’s supply chain before. I know I have. All the best electronics and wire go to them that make the suits—”

“The ratshit bastards,” someone muttered, which got more than a few of them bobbing their heads.

“So I told Supply to return the favor. Soon as I heard they took her—” Walker paused and swiped at his eyes. “Soon as I heard, I wired in those favors, said to replace anything them bastards asked for with some of our own. Best of the best. And don’t let ‘em be the wiser.”

“You did what?” Knox asked.

Walker dipped his head over and over, feeling good to let out the truth. “They’ve been making those suits to fail. Not ‘cause it ain’t bad out there, that’s not what I figure. But they don’t want your body wandering out of sight, no sir.” He stirred his oats. “They want us all right here where they can see us.”

“So she’s okay?” Shirly asked.

Walker frowned and slowly shook his head.

“I told you guys,” someone said. “She’d run out of air by now.”

“She was dead anyway,” someone else countered, and the argument began to build again. “This just proves they’re full of shit!”

Walker had to agree with that.

“Everybody, hey, let’s stay calm,” Knox roared. But he appeared the least calm of them all. More workers filed in now that the moment of silence appeared to be over. They gathered around the table, faces full of worry.

“This is it,” Walker said to himself, seeing what was happening, what he had started. He watched his friends and coworkers get all riled up, barking at the empty air for answers, their passions stirred. “This is it,” he said again, and he could feel it brewing, ready to burst out. “Thisisit thisisit—”

Courtnee, still hovering over him, tending to him like he was an invalid, held his wrist with those delicate hands of hers.

“What is it?” she asked. She waved down the others so she could hear. She leaned close to Walker.

“Walk, tell me, what is it? What is this? What’re you trying to say?”

“This is how it starts,” he whispered, the room quiet once more. He looked up at all the faces, scanned them, seeing in their fury, in all the exploded taboos, that he was right to worry.

“This is how the uprising begins—”

7

Lukas arrived at thirty-four breathless and clutching the small box, more exhausted from the laws he had broken than this habitual climb to work. He could still taste the metallic tang of adrenaline in his mouth from hiding behind the servers and rummaging through Juliette’s things. He patted his chest, feeling the items there, and also his racing heart.

Once he was better composed, he reached for the doors to IT and nearly cracked a knuckle as they flew outward toward him. Sammi, a tech he knew, burst out in a hurry and stormed past. Lukas called his name, but the older tech was already gone, storming up the stairs and out of sight.

There was more commotion in the entrance hall. Voices yelling over one another. Lukas entered warily, wondering what the fuss was about. He held open the door with his elbow and slid into the room, the box tight against his chest.

Most of the yelling, it seemed, was coming from Bernard. The head of IT stood outside the security gates and barked at one tech after the other. Nearby, Sims, the head of IT security, similarly lit into three men in gray coveralls. Lukas remained frozen by the door, intimidated by the angry duo.

When Bernard spotted him there, he snapped shut and waded through the trembling techs to greet him. Lukas opened his mouth to say something, but his boss was fixated less on him and more on what was in his hands.

“This is it?” Bernard asked, snatching the box from him.

“It—?”

“Everything that greaser owned fits in this little damn box?” Bernard tugged the flaps open. “Is this everything?”

“Uh… that’s what I was given,” Lukas stammered. “Marsh said—”

“Yeah, the Deputy wired about his cramps. I swear, the Pact should stipulate an age limit for their kind. Sims!” Bernard turned to his security chief. “Conference room. Now.”

Lukas pointed toward the security gate and the server room beyond. “I suppose I should get to—”

“Come with me,” Bernard said, wrapping his arm around Lukas’s back and squeezing his shoulder. “I want you in on this. There seems to be fewer and fewer ratshit techs I can trust around here.”

“Unless y-you want me on the servers. We had that thing with tower thirteen—”

“That can wait. This is more important.” Bernard ushered him toward the conference room, the hulking mass of Sims preceding them.

The security guard grabbed the door and held it open, frowning at Lukas as he went by. Lukas shivered as he crossed the threshold. He could feel the sweat running down his chest, could feel guilty heat in his armpits and around his neck. He had a sudden image of being thrown against the table, pinned down, contraband yanked from his pockets and waved in his face—

“Sit,” Bernard said. He put the box down on the table, and he and Sims began disgorging its contents while Lukas lowered himself into a chair.

“Vacation chits,” Sims said, pulling out the stack of paper coupons. Lukas watched the way the man’s arms rippled with muscle with even the slightest movement. Sims had been a tech once, until his body kept growing and made him too obviously suited for other, less cerebral, endeavors. He lifted the chits to his nose, took a sniff, and recoiled. “Smells like sweaty greaser,” he said.

“Counterfeit?” Bernard asked.

Sims shook his head. Bernard was inspecting the small wooden box. He shook it and rapped it with his knuckles, listening to the rattle of chits inside. He searched the exterior for a hinge or clasp.

Lukas almost blurted out that the top slid, that it was so finely crafted you could barely see the joints and that it took a bit of effort. Bernard muttered something and set the box aside.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Lukas asked. He leaned forward and grabbed the box, pretended to be inspecting it for the first time.

“Anything. A fucking clue,” Bernard barked. He glared at Lukas. “How did this greaser make it over the hill? Was it something she did? One of my techs? What?”

Lukas still couldn’t figure the anger. So what if she hadn’t cleaned—it would’ve been a double anyway. Was Bernard pissed because he didn’t know why she’d survived so long? This made sense to Lukas. Whenever he fixed something by accident, it drove him nearly as nuts as having something break. And he’d seen Bernard angry before, but this was something different. The man was livid. He was manic. It’s just how Lukas would feel if he’d had such an unprecedented piece of success with no cause to pin it on.

Sims, meanwhile, found the notebook and began flipping through it. “Hey boss—”

Bernard snatched it from him and tore through the pages, reading. “Someone’ll have to go through all this,” he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “There might be some sign of collusion in here—”

“Hey look,” Lukas said, holding out the box. “It opens.” He showed them the sliding lid.

“Lemme see that.” Bernard dropped the notebook to the table and snatched the wooden box away. He wrinkled his nose. “Just chits,” he said disgustingly.

He dumped them on the table and was about to toss the box aside, but Sims grabbed it from him. “That’s an antique,” the large man said. “You think it’s a clue, or can I—?”

“Yes, keep it, by all means.” Bernard waved his arms out toward the window with its view of the entrance hall. “Because nothing of greater fucking importance is going on around here, is it, shit-for-brains?”

Sims shrugged noncommittally and slid the wooden box into his pocket. Lukas desperately wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere in the silo but there.

“Maybe she just got lucky,” Sims offered.

Bernard began dumping the rest of the box onto the table, shaking it to loosen the manual that Lukas knew was tightly wedged in the bottom. He paused from his efforts and squinted at Sims over the rims of his glasses.

“Lucky,” Bernard repeated.

Sims tilted his head.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Bernard told him.

Sims nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“No, I mean get out!” Bernard pointed at the door. “Getthefuckout!”

The head of security smiled like this was funny, but lumbered for the door. He slid out of the room and gently clicked the door shut behind him.

“I’m surrounded by morons,” Bernard said, once they were alone.

Lukas tried to imagine this was not meant as an insult directed at him.

“Present company excluded,” Bernard added, as if reading his mind.

“Thanks.”

“Hey, you at least can fix a goddamn server. What the hell do I pay these other ratshit techs to do?”

He pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose again, and Lukas tried to remember if the IT head had always cursed this much. He didn’t think so. Was it the strain of being interim mayor that was getting to him? Something had changed. It felt strange to even consider Bernard his friend anymore. The man was so much more important now, so much busier. Perhaps he was cracking under the stress that came with the extra responsibility, the pain of being the one to send good people to cleaning—

“You know why I’ve never taken a shadow?” Bernard asked. He flipped through the manual, saw the play on the reverse side, and turned the bound sheets of paper around. He glanced up at Lukas, who lifted his palms and shrugged.

“It’s because I shudder to think of anyone else ever running this place.”

Lukas assumed he meant IT, not the silo. Bernard hadn’t been mayor very long.

Bernard set the play down and gazed out the window where muffled voices argued once more.

“But I’ll have to, one of these days. I’m at that age where your friends, the people you grew up with, are dropping like flies, but you’re still young enough to pretend it won’t happen to you.”

His eyes fell to Lukas. The young tech felt uncomfortable being alone with Bernard. He’d never felt that before.

“Silos have burned to the ground before because of one man’s hubris,” Bernard told him. “All it takes is improper planning, thinking you’ll be around forever, but because one man disappears—” He snapped his fingers. “—and leaves a sucking void behind, that can be enough to bring it all down.”

Lukas was dying to ask his boss what the hell he was talking about.

“Today is that day, I think.” Bernard walked around the long conference table, leaving behind him the scattered remnants of Juliette’s life. Lukas’s gaze drifted over the items. The guilt of going through them vanished to see how they’d been treated. He wished instead that he’d stashed away more of them.

“What I need is someone who already has access to the servers,” Bernard said. Lukas turned to the side and realized the short, full-bellied head of IT was standing right beside him. He moved his hand up to his chest pocket, making sure it didn’t bulge open where Bernard could see.

“Sammi is a good tech. I trust him, but he’s nearly as old as I am.”

“You aren’t that old,” Lukas said, trying to be polite, to gather his wits. He wasn’t sure what was going on—

“There’s not many I consider a friend,” Bernard said.

“I appreciate that—”

“You’re probably the closest thing—”

“I feel the same—”

“I knew your father. He was a good man.”

Lukas swallowed and nodded. He looked up at Bernard and realized the man was holding out his hand. Had been for a while. He reached out his own to accept, still not sure what was being offered.

“I need a shadow, Lukas.” Bernard’s hand felt small in Lukas’s own. He watched as his arm was pumped up and down. “I want you to be that man.”

8

Juliette forced her way through the inner airlock door and scrambled to get it closed. Darkness overwhelmed her as the heavy door squealed on its hinges and settled against its dry seals. She groped for the large locking wheel and leaned on the spokes, spinning it and sealing the door tight.

The air in her suit was growing stale; she could feel the dizziness overtaking her. Turning around, keeping one hand on the wall, she stumbled forward through the darkness. The puff of outside air that she’d allowed inside seemed to claw at her back like a horde of mad insects. Juliette staggered blindly down the hallway, trying to put distance between herself and the dead she’d left behind.

There were no lights on, no glow from the wallscreens with their view of the outside world. She prayed the layout was the same, that she could find her way. She prayed the air in her suit would hold out a moment longer, prayed the air in the silo weren’t as foul and toxic as the wind outside. Or—and just as bad—that the air in the silo wasn’t as devoid of oxygen as what little remained in her suit.

Her hand brushed the bars of a cell just where they should be, giving her hope that she could navigate the darkness. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find in the pitch black—she had no plan for salvation—she was simply stumbling away from the horrors outside. It hardly registered for her that she had been there, had gone outside, and now was in some place new.

As she fumbled through the office, sucking on the last breaths of air in her helmet, her feet knocked into something and Juliette went sprawling forward. She landed roughly on a soft mound, groped with her hand, and felt an arm. A body. Several bodies. Juliette crawled over them, the spongy flesh feeling more human and solid than the husks and bones outside—and more difficult to move across. She felt someone’s chin. The weight of her body caused their neck to turn, and she nearly lost her balance. Her body recoiled at the sensation of what she was doing, the reflex to apologize, to pull her limbs away, but she forced herself forward over a pile of them, through the darkness, until her helmet slammed into the office door.

The blow was hard enough and so without warning, that Juliette saw stars and feared blacking out. She reached up and fumbled for the handle. Her eyes might as well have been sealed shut, the utter darkness was so complete. Even the bowels of Mechanical had never seen such deep and perfect shadow.

She found the latch and pushed. The door was unlocked, but wouldn’t budge. Juliette scrambled to her feet, her boots digging into lifeless bodies, and threw her shoulder against the door. She wanted out.

The door moved. A little. She could feel something slide on the other side and imagined more bodies piled up. She threw herself again and again into the door, grunts of effort and frustrated tiny screams echoing in her helmet. Her hair was loose, sweaty, and matting to her face. She couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Was growing more faint as she poisoned her own internal atmosphere.

When the door slid open a crack, she tried to force her way through, one shoulder first, squeezing her helmet past, then pulling her other arm and leg after. She fell to the floor, scrambled around and shoved herself against the door, sealing it tight.

There was a dim light, almost impossible to notice at first. A barricade of tables and chairs were pressed in against her, scattered from her efforts to get through. Their hard edges and spindly legs seemed intent on ensnaring her.

Juliette heard herself wheezing for air and knew her time had run out. She imagined the poison all over her like grease. The toxic air that she’d let in was a cloud of vermin just waiting for her to crawl out of her shell so they could eat away at her.

She considered lying down and letting her air supply run out instead. She would be preserved in this chrysalis of a suit, a well-built suit, a gift from Walker and the people of Supply. Her body would lie forever in this dim silo that shouldn’t exist—but so much better than to rot on a lifeless hill and fly away, piece by piece, on a fickle breeze. It would be a good death. She panted, proud of herself for making it somewhere of her own choosing, for conquering these last few obstacles. Slumping against the door, she very nearly laid down and closed her eyes—but for the nagging of her curiosity.

Juliette held up her hands and studied them in the dim glow from the stairwell. The shiny gloves—wrapped in heat tape and melted to form a bright skin—made her look like a machine of sorts. She ran her hands over the dome of her helmet, realizing she was like a walking toaster. When she had been a mere shadow in Mechanical, she’d had a bad habit of taking things apart, even those that already worked. What had Walker said of her? That she liked nothing more than peering inside of toasters.

Juliette sat up and tried to focus. She was losing sensation, and with it the will to live. She shook her head and pulled herself to her feet, sent a pile of chairs crashing to the floor. She was the toaster, she realized. Her curiosity wanted it open. This time, to see what was outside. To take one breath and know.

She swam through the tables and chairs, wanting more and more distance between herself and any bad air she had let in. The bodies she had crawled over in the sheriff’s office had felt whole. Naturally dead. Trapped inside and starved or asphyxiated, perhaps. But not rotten. Still, and despite her lightheadedness and need to breathe, she wanted to somehow douse herself before cracking the helmet.

She escaped the barrier of tables and chairs and made her way across the open cafeteria floor. The emergency lights in the stairwell leaked a green glow to dimly show the way. She passed through the serving door and into the kitchen, and tried the taps on the large sink. The handles turned, but the spout didn’t leak a drop, didn’t knock with even a futile try from distant pumps. She went to the dangling hose over the dish station and pulled that lever—and was similarly rewarded. There was no water.

Her next thought was the walkins, to maybe freeze the nastiness she could feel crawling all over her suit. She staggered around the cooking stations and pulled the large silver handle on the door, her breath wheezy in her helmet. The light in the back reaches of the kitchen was already so dim she could barely see. She couldn’t feel any cold through her suit, but wasn’t sure if she’d be able to. It was built to shield her and built well. The overhead light didn’t come on, so she assumed the freezer was dead. With the door open, she peered inside, looking for anything fluid, and saw what looked like vats of soup.

She was desperate enough to try anything. Juliette moved inside the walk-in, letting the door swing slowly shut behind her. She seized one of the large plastic containers, a bucket the size of the largest cooking pots, and tore the top off. The door clicked shut, returning her to solid darkness. Juliette knelt beneath the shelf and tipped the massive bucket over. She could feel the liquid soup splatter over her suit, crinkling it and splashing to the floor. Her knees slipped in the stuff. She felt for the next one and did the same, ran her fingers into the puddles and coated herself in it. There was no way of knowing if she was being crazy, if she was making things worse, or if any of it mattered. Her boot slipped, sending her flat onto her back, her helmet cracking against the floor.

Juliette lay there in a puddle of tepid soup, unable to see, her breath raspy and stale. Her time had run out. She was dizzy and could think of nothing else to try, didn’t have the breath or energy, anyway. The helmet had to come off.

She fumbled for the latches, could barely feel them through her gloves. Her gloves were too thick. They were going to kill her.

She rolled to her belly and crawled through the soup, her hands and knees slipping. She reached the door, gasping, and fumbled for the handle, found it, threw the door open. There was a rack of knives gleaming behind the counter. She lurched to her feet and grabbed one, held the blade in her thick mitts, and slumped to the floor, exhausted and dizzy.

Turning the blade toward her own neck, Juliette groped for the latch. She slid the point along her collar until it caught in the crack of the button. Steadying herself, her arm shaking, she moved the knife and pressed in, shoving it toward her body against all physical revulsion at the act.

There was a faint click. Juliette gasped and groped along the rim with the blade for the other button until she found it. She repeated the maneuver.

Another click, and her helmet popped off.

Juliette’s body took over for her, urging deep gulps of foul air. The stench was unbearable, but she couldn’t stop gasping for more. Rotted food, biological decay, a tepid filth of stenches invaded her mouth, tongue, nose.

She turned to the side and wretched, but nothing came out. Her hands were still slippery with soup. Breathing was painful; she imagined a burning sensation on her skin, but it could’ve been her fevered state. She crawled away from the walk-in, toward the cafeteria, out of the fog of rotting soup before she managed a gulp of air.

Air.

She took another lungful, the odor still overpowering, the soup coating her. But beyond the stench, something else was there. Something faint. Something breathable that began to force away the dizziness and the panic. It was oxygen. Life.

Juliette was still alive.

She laughed a mad laugh and stumbled toward the stairwell, drawn to the green glow of light, breathing deeply and too exhausted to appreciate this, the impossible life still in her.

9

Knox saw the uproar in Mechanical as just another emergency to overcome. Like the time the basement subwall sprung a leak, or when the oil rig hit that pocket of methane and they had to evacuate eight levels until the air handlers made it safe to return. Against the inevitable flow of commotion, what he needed to do was push for order. To assign tasks. He had to break a huge undertaking down to discrete bits and make sure they fell to the right hands. Only this time, he and his people wouldn’t be setting out to repair something. There were things the good people of Mechanical meant to break.

“Supply is the key,” he told his foremen, pointing to the large scale blueprint hanging on the wall. He traced the stairwell up the thirty flights to Supply’s main manufacturing floor. “Our greatest advantage is that IT doesn’t know we’re coming.” He turned to his shift leaders. “Shirly, Marck, and Courtnee, you’ll come with me. We’ll load up with supplies and take your shadows with us. Walker, you can wire ahead to let ‘em know we’re coming. Be discrete, though. Assume IT has ears. Say we have a load of your repairs to deliver.”

He turned to Jenkins, who had shadowed under Knox for six years before he grew his own beard and moved to third shift. The assumption everywhere was that Knox’s job was his in waiting. “Jinks, I want you to take over down here. There are no days off for a while. Keep the place running, but get ready for the worst. I want as much food stockpiled as possible. And water. Make sure the cistern is topped up. Divert from the hydroponics feed if you have to, but be discrete. Think of an excuse, like a leak or something, in case they notice. Meanwhile, have someone make the rounds and check every lock and hinge, just in case the fighting comes to us. And stockpile whatever weapons you can make up. Pipes, hammers, whatever.”

Some eyebrows were lifted at this, but Jenkins nodded at the list as if it all made sense and was doable. Knox turned to his foremen. “What? You know where this is heading, right?”

“But what’s the larger picture?” Courtnee asked, glancing at the tall blueprint of their buried home. “Storm IT, and then what? Take over running this place?”

“We already run this place,” Knox growled. He slapped his hand across the floors of the mid-thirties. “We just do it in the dark. Like these levels here are dark to us. But now I mean to shine a light in their rat hole and scare them out, see what else they’re hiding.”

“You understand what they’ve been doing, right?” Marck turned to Courtnee. “They’ve been sending people out to die. On purpose. Not because it had to happen, but because they wanted it to!”

Courtnee bit her lip and didn’t say anything, just stared at the blueprint.

“We need to get going,” Knox said. “Walker, get that wire out. Let’s load up. And think of something pleasant to chat about while we’re on the move. No grumbling about this where some porter can hear and make a chit or two ratting us out.”

They nodded. Knox slapped Jenkins on the back and dipped his chin at the younger man. “I’ll send word when we need everyone. Keep the bare bones you think you’ve gotta have down here and send the rest. Timing is everything, okay?”

“I know what to do,” Jenkins said. He wasn’t trying to be uppity, just reassuring his elder.

“Alright,” Knox said. “Then let’s get to it.”

They made it up ten flights with little complaint, but Knox could begin to feel the burn in his legs from the heavy load. He had a canvas sack stuffed full of welding smocks on his wide shoulders, plus a bundle of helmets. A rope had been strung through their chin straps, and they clattered down his wide back. Marck struggled with his load of pipe stock as they kept trying to slide against one another and slip out of his arms. The shadows brought up the rear, behind the women, with heavy sacks of blasting powder tied together so they hung around their necks. Professional porters with similarly full loads breezed past them in both directions, their glances signaling a mix of curiosity and competitive anger. When one porter—a woman Knox recognized from deliveries to the down deep—stopped and offered to help, he gruffly sent her on her way. She hurried up the steps, looking back over her shoulder before spiraling out of view, and Knox regretted taking his exhaustion out on her.

“Keep it up,” he told the others. Even with the small group, they were making a spectacle. And it was growing ever more tiresome to hold their tongues as news of Juliette’s amazing disappearance gyred all around them. At almost every landing, a group of people, often younger people, stood around and gossiped about what it all meant. The taboo had moved from thought to whisper. Forbidden notions were birthed on tongues and swam through the air. Knox ignored the pain in his back and lumbered up and up, each step driving them closer to Supply, feeling more and more like they needed to get there in a hurry.

As they left the one-thirties, the grumblings were fully in the air. They were nearing the upper half of the down deep, where people who worked, shopped, and ate in the mids mingled with those who would rather they didn’t. Deputy Hank was on the stairwell of one-twenty-eight, trying to mediate between two arguing crowds. Knox squeezed past, hoping the officer wouldn’t turn and see his heavily loaded train and ask them what they were doing up this far. As he ascended past the ruckus, Knox glanced back to watch the shadows slink past, hugging the inner rail. Deputy Hank was still asking a woman to please calm down as the landing sunk out of sight.

They passed the dirt farm on one-twenty-six, and Knox figured this to be a key asset. The thirties of IT were a long hike up, but if they had to fall back, they would need to hold at Supply. Between their manufacturing, the food on this level, and the machinery of Mechanical, they might be self-sufficient. He could think of a few weak links, but many more for IT. They could always shut off their power or stop treating their water—but he really hoped, as they approached Supply on weary legs, that it wouldn’t come to any of that.

They were greeted on the landing of one-ten by frowns. McLain, the elder woman and head of Supply, stood with her arms crossed over her yellow coveralls, her affect screaming unwelcome.

“Hello, Jove.” Knox fixed her with a wide smile.

“Don’t Jove me,” McLain said. “What’s this nonsense you’re after?”

Knox glanced up and down the stairwell, shrugged his heavy load higher up his shoulder. “Mind if we step in and talk about it?”

“I don’t want any trouble here,” she said, her eyes blazing beneath her lowered brow.

“Let’s go inside,” Knox said. “We haven’t stopped once on the way up. Unless you want us collapsing out here.”

McLain seemed to consider this. Her arms loosened across her chest. She turned to three of her workers, who formed an imposing wall behind her, and nodded. While they pulled open the gleaming doors of Supply, she turned and grabbed Knox’s arm. “Don’t get comfortable,” she told him.

Inside the front room of Supply, Knox found a small army of men and women in their yellow coveralls, waiting. Most of them stood behind the low, long counter where the people of the silo normally waited for whatever parts they needed, whether newly fabricated or recently repaired. The parallel and deep aisles of shelves beyond ran into the gloomy distance, boxes and bins bulging off of them. The room was noticeably quiet. Usually, the mechanical thrumming and clanking sounds of fabrication could be heard worming their way through the space. Or one might hear workers chatting unseen back in the stacks while they sorted newly fashioned bolts and nuts into hungry bins.

Now it was just silence and distrustful glares. Knox stood with his people, their sacks and loads slumping exhaustedly to the floor, sweat on their brows, while the men and women of Supply watched, unmoving.

He had expected a more amicable welcome. Mechanical and Supply had a long history together. They jointly ran the small mine beneath the lowest levels of Mechanical that supplemented the silo’s stockpile of ores.

But now, as McLain followed her boys back inside, she graced Knox with a look of scorn he hadn’t seen since his mother passed away.

“What in the hell is the meaning of this?” she hissed at Knox.

He was taken aback by the language, especially in front of his people. He thought of himself and McLain as equals, but now he was being snapped at as if by one of Supply’s dogs.

McLain ranged down the exhausted line of mechanics and their shadows before turning back to him.

“Before we discuss how we’re cleaning this problem up, I want to hear how you’re handling your employees, whoever was responsible.” Her eyes bore through him. “I am correct in assuming you had nothing to do with this, right? That you’ve come to apologize and shower me with bribes?”

Shirly started to say something, but Knox waved her off. There were a lot of people in the room just waiting for this to go undiplomatically.

“Yes, I do apologize,” Knox said, grinding his teeth together and bowing his head. “And no, I just learned of this earlier today. After I found out about the cleaning, in fact.”

“So it was all your electrician,” McLain said, her thin arms crossed tightly over her chest. “One man.”

“That’s right. But—”

“I’ve meted out punishment to those involved here, let me tell you. And I suppose you’ll have to do more than banish that old fart to his room—”

There was laughter behind the counter. Knox put a hand on Shirly’s shoulder to keep her in place. He looked past McLain to the men and women arranged behind McLain.

“They came and took one of our workers,” he said. His chest may have been heavy, but his voice still boomed. “You know how it happens. When they want a body for cleaning, they take it.” He thumped his chest. “And I let them. I stood there because I trust this system. I fear it, just as any of you.”

“Well—” McLain began, but Knox continued in that voice that routinely gave calm commands over the racket of machines run amok.

“One of my people was taken, and it was the oldest of us, the wisest of us, who intervened on her behalf. It was the weakest and most scared of us who braved their neck. And whoever of you he turned to for help, and who gave it, I owe you my life.” Knox blinked away the blur and continued. “You gave her more than a chance to walk over that hill, to die in peace and out of sight. You gave me the courage to open my eyes. To see this veil of lies we live behind—”

“That’s quite enough,” McLain barked. “Someone could be sent to cleaning for even listening to such nonsense, to such drivel—”

“It’s not nonsense,” Marck cried down the line. “Juliette is dead because of—”

“She’s dead because she broke these very laws!” McLain snapped, her voice high and shrill. “And now you march up here to break even more? On my level?”

“We aim to break heads!” Shirly said.

“Leave it!” Knox told them both. He saw the anger in McLain’s eyes, but he also saw something else: The sporadic nods and raised brows among the rank and file behind her.

A porter entered the room with empty sacks in each hand and looked around at the tense silence. One of the large Supply workers by the door ushered him back onto the landing with apologies, telling him to return later. Knox composed his words carefully during the interruption.

“No person has ever been sent to cleaning for listening, however great the taboo.” He allowed that to sink in. He glared at McLain as she moved to interrupt, but she seemed to decide against it. “So let me be sent to cleaning by any of you for what I’m about to say. I will welcome it if these facts do not move you to instead push forward with me and my men. For this is what Walker and a few of you brave souls have shown us this morning. We have cause for more hope than they’ll dare give us. There’s more at our disposal to broaden our horizons than they’ll allow. We have been raised on a pack of lies, made to fear by the sight of our kinsmen rotting on the hills, but now one of us has crossed over that! They have seen new horizons! We have been given seals and washers and told that they should suffice, but what are they?”

He stared down the men and women behind the counter. McLain’s arms seemed to loosen across her chest.

“Designed to fail, that’s what! Fake. And who knows what other lies there are. What if we’d taken any cleaner back and done our best by them? Cleaned and disinfected them? Tried whatever we could? Would they survive? We can no longer trust IT to tell us they wouldn’t!”

Knox saw chins rise and fall. He knew his own people were ready to storm the room if need be; they were as amped up and driven mad by all this as he was.

“We are not here to cause trouble,” he said, “we are here to bring order! The uprising has already happened.” He turned to McLain. “Don’t you see? We’ve been living the uprising. Our parents were the children of it, and now we feed our own children to the same machine. This will not be the start of something new, but the end of something old. And if Supply is with us, we stand a chance. If not, then may our bodies haunt your view of the outside, which I now see as far less rotten than this blasted silo!”

Knox bellowed this last in open defiance of all taboo. He threw it out and savored the taste of it, the admission that anything beyond those curved walls might be better than what’s inside them. The whisper that had killed so many became a throaty roar shouted from his broad chest.

And it felt good.

McLain cringed. She took a step away, something like fear in her eyes. She turned her back on Knox and made to return to her people, and he knew he had failed. That there had been a chance, however slim, in this silent and still crowd to inspire action, but the moment had slipped him by or he had scared it off.

And then McLain did something. Knox could see the tendons in her slender neck bulge. She lifted her chin to her people, her white hair in its tight knot high on her head, and she said, quietly, “What say you, Supply?”

It was a question, not a command. Knox would later wonder if it had been asked in sadness; he would wonder if she had taken poor stock of her people, who had listened patiently during his madness. He would also wonder if she were just curious, or if she were challenging them to cast him and his mechanics out.

He would finally wonder, tears streaming down his face, thoughts of Juliette swelling inside his heart, if he could even hear his handful of compatriots shouting, so drowned out were they by the angry war cries of the good men and women of Supply.

10

Lukas followed Bernard through the halls of IT, nervous techs scattering before them like night bugs startled by the light. Bernard didn’t seem to notice the techs ducking into offices and peering through windows. Lukas hurried to keep up, his eyes darting side to side, feeling conspicuous with all these hidden others watching.

“Aren’t I a little old to be shadowing for another job?” he asked. He was pretty sure he hadn’t accepted the offer, not verbally anyway, but Bernard spoke as if the deal was done.

“Nonsense,” he said. “And this won’t be shadowing in the traditional sense.” He waved his hand in the air. “You’ll continue your duties as before. I just need someone who can step in, who knows what to do in case something happens to me. My will—”

He stopped at the heavy door to the server room and turned to face Lukas. “If it came to it, in an emergency, my will would explain everything to the next Head, but—” He gazed over Lukas’s shoulder and down the hall. “Sims is my executor, which we’ll have to change. I just don’t see that ever going smoothly—”

Bernard rubbed his chin and lost himself in his thoughts. Lukas waited a moment, then stepped beside him and entered his code on the panel by the door, fished his ID out of his pocket—made sure it was his ID and not Juliette’s—and swiped it through the reader. The door clicked open, snapping Bernard out of his thoughts.

“Yes, well, this will be much better. Not that I expect to go anywhere, mind you.” He adjusted his glasses and stepped through the heavy steel doorway. Lukas followed, pushing the monstrous enclosure shut behind them and waiting for the locks to engage.

“But if something did happen to you, I would oversee the cleanings?” Lukas couldn’t imagine. He suspected there was more to learn about those suits than the servers. Sammi would be better at this, would actually want this job. Also—would he have to abandon his star charts?

“That’s a small part of the job, but yes.” Bernard guided Lukas through the servers, past number thirteen with its blank face and still fans, all the way to the back of the room.

“These are the keys to the true heart of the silo,” Bernard said, fishing a jangling set out of his coveralls. They were strung on a cord of leather that hung around his neck. Lukas had never noticed them before.

“There are other features to this cabinet that you’ll learn about in time. For now, you simply need to know how to get downstairs.” He inserted the key into several locks on the back of the server, locks designed to look like recessed screws. What server was this? Twenty-eight? Lukas glanced around the room and tried to count its position, and realized he’d never been assigned to maintain this tower.

There was a gentle clang as the back came off. Bernard set it aside, and Lukas saw why he’d never worked on the machine. It was practically empty, just a shell, like it had been scrapped for parts over the long years.

“It’s crucial that you lock this after coming back up—”

Lukas watched Bernard grab a handle in the bottom of the empty chassis. He pulled up, and there was a soft grinding noise nearby. “When the grate’s back in place, you simply press this down to secure it.”

He was about to ask “what grate” when Bernard stepped aside and dug his fingers into the metal slats of the floor. With a grunt, he pulled the heavy surface of the flooring up and began sliding it over. Lukas jumped around to the other side and bent down to help.

“Wouldn’t the stairs—?” he started to ask.

“They don’t access this part of thirty-five.” Bernard waved at a ladder leading down through the floor. “You go first.”

Lukas’s head spun from the day’s sudden turn. As he bent to grab the ladder, he felt the contents of his breast pocket shift and shot a hand up to hold the watch, ring, and ID steady. What had he been thinking? What was he thinking now? He lowered himself down the long ladder feeling like someone had initiated an automated routine in his brain, a rote program that had taken over his actions. From the bottom of the ladder, he watched as Bernard lowered himself down the first rungs before sliding the grate into place, sealing them both inside the dark dungeon beneath the already fortressed server room.

“You are about to receive a great gift,” Bernard said in the darkness. “Just as I was once granted the same.”

He flicked on a light, and Lukas saw that his boss was grinning maniacally, the anger from before gone. Here was a new man before him, a confident and eager man.

“All the silo and everyone in it hinges on what I’m about to show you,” Bernard said. He waved Lukas down the brightly lit but tight corridor and toward a wider room beyond. The servers felt very far above. They felt closed off from every other soul in the silo. Lukas was curious, but also afraid. He wasn’t sure he wanted such responsibility and cursed himself for going along with this.

And yet, his feet moved. They carried him down that hidden passageway and into a room full of the strange and curious, a place that made the charting of stars seem insignificant, a den where the sense of the world’s scale, of size, took on wholly new proportions.

11

Juliette left her soup-slathered helmet on the floor and moved toward the pale green glow of light. It seemed brighter than before. She wondered how much of the darkness had been her helmet. As her senses returned, she remembered that it wasn’t a piece of glass she’d been looking through, but some infernal screen that took the world as she saw it and overlaid it with half a lie. Maybe it had dimmed her view in the process.

She noticed the stench from her drenched suit followed her, the smell of rotten vegetables and mold—or possibly the toxic fumes from the outside world. Her throat burned a little as she crossed the cafeteria toward the stairwell. Her skin began to itch, and she couldn’t tell if it was from fear, from her imagination, or truly something in the air. She didn’t dare risk finding out, so she held her breath and hurried as fast as her weary legs would take her, around the corner to where she knew the stairs would be.

This world is the same as my world, she thought to herself, stumbling down the first flight of stairs in the wan glow of emergency light strips. The Gods built more than one.

Her heavy boots, still dripping with soup, felt unsteady on the metal treads. At the landing on two, she paused and took in a few gulps of air, less painful gulps, and considered how best to remove the infernal and bulky outfit that made every movement awkward, that reeked of the fetid smell of rot and outside air. She looked down at her arms. The thing had required help to don. There were double zippers in the back, layers of velcro, miles of heat tape. She looked at the knife in her hand, suddenly grateful that she had never dropped it after using it to remove her helmet.

Gripping the knife with one clumsy glove, she carefully inserted the tip through the other sleeve, right above the top of her wrist. She forced the point through, pushing the blade over the top of her arm so it wouldn’t jab her even if it pierced all the way. The fabric was difficult to cut, but a tear finally formed as she augured the handle in small circles. She slid the knife into this tiny rip, the dull side of the blade facing her skin, and slid it down her arm and toward her knuckles. When the tip of the blade ripped through the fabric between her fingers, she was able to free her hand from the long gash she’d made, the sleeve flopping from her elbow.

Juliette sat down on the grating, moved the knife to her newly freed hand, and worked on the other side. She freed it as well while soup dripped from her shoulders and down her arms. She next started a tear at her chest, better control of the knife now without the thick gloves on. She ripped the metal foil exterior away, peeling herself like an orange. The solid collar for her helmet had to stay—it was attached to her charcoal fabric undersuit as well as the reinforced zippers up her back—but piece by piece she removed the shiny outer coat which was slathered with a nastiness she attributed partly to the soup and partly to her trek over the hills.

Next came her boots, which were cut free around the ankles until she was able to work them off, sawing a slit down the outside edge and popping one foot free, then the other.

Before she cleaned up the hanging tatters of fabric any further, or worried about the material still attached to the zipper at her back, she got up from the landing and hurried down the steps, putting more distance between herself and the air above that seemed to scratch at her throat. She was another two flights down, swimming through the green glow of the stairwell, before she appreciated the fact that she was alive.

She was alive.

For however much longer, this was a brutal, beautiful, and brand new fact for Juliette. She had spent three days climbing long stairs similar to these as she came to grips with her fate. Another day and night had been spent in a cell made for the future corpses who dotted the landscape. And then—this. An impossible trek through the wilderness of the forbidden, breaking in to the impenetrable and the unknown. Surviving.

Whatever happened next, for this moment, Juliette flew down foreign steps in bare feet, the steel cool against her tingling skin, the air burning her throat less and less with each gulp of new air, the raw stench and memory of death receding further and further above her. Soon, it was just the patter of her joyous descent ringing out and drifting down a lonely and empty darkness like a muffled bell that rang not for the dead, but for the living.

She stopped on six and rested while she worked on what remained of her protective suit. With care, she sliced her black undersuit by her shoulders and collarbone, working the tear all the way around and clawing at her back as it ripped free, strips of heat tape still attached. Once the helmet collar was detached from the fabric—just the zipper hanging like a second spine along her back—she could finally remove it from her neck. She pulled it off and dropped it to the ground, then stripped off the rest of the black carbon fabric, peeling away the arms and legs and leaving all the material in a rough pile outside the double doors to level six.

Six should be an apartment level, she thought. She considered going inside and yelling out for help or looking for clothes and supplies in the many rooms, but her greater impulse was to descend. The up-top felt poisoned and too close. It didn’t matter if it was all in her imagination—or if it was from her miserable experiences living in the up-top of her own silo—her body felt a revulsion for the place. Safe was the down deep. It had always felt this way.

One hopeful image did linger from the upper kitchen: The rows and rows of canned and jarred food for the lean harvests. Juliette figured there would be more in the lower mess halls as well. And the air in the silo seemed decent as she regained her breath; the sting in her lungs and on her tongue had faded. Either the vast silo held a lot of air that was now being consumed by no one, or there was still a source. All these thoughts gave her hope, these tallies of resources. So she left her spoiled and tattered clothing behind and armed with only a large chef’s knife, she stole down the curved stairs naked, her body becoming more and more alive with every step taken, her mind becoming more determined to keep the rest of her that way.

On thirteen, she stopped and checked inside the doors. There was always the chance that this silo was laid out completely differently, floor to floor, so it made little sense to plan ahead if she didn’t know what to expect. There were only a handful of areas in the up-top that she was intimately familiar with, and every bit of overlap so far had seemed a perfect copy. Thirteen, she would definitely know. There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots. In her mind, as she pushed the door open a crack, she wasn’t in a different silo, an abandoned husk of a silo, but in her past, pushing open a door on her youth.

It was dark inside, none of the security or emergency lights on. There was a different smell. The air was stagnant and had a tinge of decay.

Juliette shouted down the hallway.

“Hello?”

She listened to her voice echo back from the empty walls. The voice that returned sounded distant, weaker, higher than her own. She imagined herself at age nine, running through these very halls, crying out to her older self across the years. She tried to picture her mother chasing behind that girl, attempting to scoop her up and force her to be still, but the ghosts evaporated in the darkness. The last of the echoes faded, leaving her alone and naked in the doorway.

As her eyes adjusted, she could just barely make out a reception desk at the end of the hall. Light reflected off glass windows just where they should be. It was the exact same layout as her father’s nursery in the mids, the place where she had been not just born, but raised. It was hard to believe that this was some place different. That other people had lived here, other children had been born, had played and had been raised just over a hill and down a dip, had given chase or challenged each other to Hop or whatever games they had invented, all of them unaware of the other. Maybe it was from standing in the doorway of a nursery, but she couldn’t help but think of all the lives this place had contained. People growing up, falling in love, burying their dead.

All those people outside. People she had desecrated with her boots, scattering their bones and ashes as she kicked her way into the very place they had fled. Juliette wondered how long ago it had happened, how long since the silo had been abandoned. What had happened here? The stairwell was still lit, which meant the battery room still held juice. She needed paper to do the math, to figure how recently or how long ago all this life had turned to death. There were practical reasons for wanting to know, beyond the mere itch of curiosity.

With one last look inside, one final shudder of regret for not stopping to see her father the last few times she’d passed his nursery, Juliette shut the door on the darkness and the ghosts and considered her predicament. She could very well be perfectly alone in a dying silo. The thrill of being alive at all was quickly draining away, replaced with the reality of her solitude and the tenuousness of her survival. Her stomach grumbled its agreement. She could somehow still smell the fetid soup on her, could taste the stomach acid from her retching. She needed water. She needed clothes. These primal urges were pushed to the forefront, drowning out the severity of her situation, the daunting tasks before her, leaving the regrets of the past behind.

If the layout was the same, the first hydroponic farm would be four floors below. The larger of the two upper dirt farms would lie just below that. Juliette shivered from an updraft of cold air. The stairwell was creating its own thermal cycle, and it would only be colder the further down she went. But she went anyway—lower was better. At the next level, she tried the door. It was too dark to see past the first interior hallway, but it seemed like offices or workrooms. She tried to remember what would be on the fourteenth in her own silo, but didn’t know. Was it incredible to not know? The up-top of her own home had somehow been strange to her. That made this silo something completely alien.

She held the door to fourteen open and stuck the blade of her knife between the slits of metal that formed every landing’s grating. The handle was left sticking up to form a stop. She allowed the door to close on its sprung hinges until it rested on the handle, holding it open. This let in enough light for her to steal inside and grope around the first handful of rooms.

There were no coveralls hanging on the backs of the doors, but one room was set up for conferences. The water in the pitchers had long evaporated out, but the purple tablecloth looked warm enough. Warmer than being naked. Juliette moved the assortment of cups, plates, and pitchers and grabbed the cloth. She wrapped it around her shoulders, but it was going to slip off when she moved, so she tried knotting the corners in front of her. Giving up on this, she ran back to the landing, out into the welcomed light, and removed the fabric completely. Grabbing the knife—the door squealing eerily shut behind her—she pushed the blade through the center of the tablecloth and cut a long gash. Her head went through this, the cloth falling past her feet in front and behind her. A few minutes with the blade and she’d cut away the excess, forming a belt out of a long strip and from another shock of fabric, enough to tie over her head and keep it warm.

It felt good to be making something, to be engineering her way through one particular problem. She had a tool, a weapon if need be, and clothes. The impossible list of tasks had been whittled down a few shavings. She descended further, her feet cold on the stairs, dreaming of boots, thirsty for water, very much aware of all that remained for her to do.

On fifteen, she was reminded of another necessity as her weary legs nearly gave way. Her knees buckled, she grabbed the railing, and she realized, as the adrenaline evaporated from her veins, that she was deathly tired. She paused on the landing, hands on her knees, and took a few deep breaths. How long had she been going? How much further could she push herself? She checked her reflection in the blade of the knife, saw how horrible she looked, and decided she needed rest before she went any further. Rest now, while it was still warm enough to not shiver to pieces.

It was tempting to explore that level for a bed, but she decided against it—there would be little comfort in the pitch black behind those doors. So she curled up on the steel grating of landing fifteen, tucked her arms under her head, and adjusted the tablecloth so every patch of bare skin was covered. And before she could go over the long list forming in her head, exhaustion took over. She drifted off to sleep with only a moment’s panic that she shouldn’t be so tired, that this might be the sort of nap one never woke up from, that she was destined to join the residents of this strange place, curled up and unmoving, frozen and lifeless, rotting and wasting away—

12

Knox looked up at McLain, met her wrinkled and wizened eyes with as much confidence as he could muster. The tiny woman who controlled all the silo’s spares and fabrication cast an oddly imposing figure. She didn’t have Knox’s barrel chest or thick beard, had wrists barely bigger than two of his fingers, but she possessed a wizened gray gaze and the weight of hard years that made him feel but a shadow in her presence.

“It’s not an uprising,” he said, the forbidden words moving easily with the grease of habit and time. “We’re setting things to right.”

McLain sniffed. “I’m sure that’s what my great grandparents said.” She pushed back loose strands of silver hair and peered down at the blueprint spread out between them. It was as if she knew this was wrong, but had resigned herself to helping rather than hinder it. Maybe it was her age, Knox thought, peering at her pink scalp through hair so thin and white as to be like filaments of glass. Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.

He looked down at the blueprint and smoothed the sharp creases in the fine paper. He was suddenly aware of his hands, how thick and grease-limned his fingers appeared. He wondered if McLain saw him as a brute, storming up here with delusions of justice. She was old enough to see him as young, he realized. Young and hot tempered, while he thought of himself as being old and wise.

One of the dozens of dogs that lived among Supply’s stacks grunted discontentedly under the table as if all this war planning were spoiling its nap.

“I think it’s safe to assume IT knows something is coming,” McLain said, running her small hands across the many floors between them and thirty four.

“Why? You don’t think we were discrete coming up?”

She smiled up at him. “I’m sure you were, but it’s safe to assume this because it would be dangerous to assume otherwise.”

He nodded and chewed on the part of his beard below his lower lip.

“How long will the rest of your mechanics take to get here?” McLain asked.

“They’ll leave around ten, when the stairwell is dimmed, and be here by two, three at the latest. They’ll be loaded down.”

“And you think a dozen of your men is sufficient to keep things running down below?”

“As long as nothing major breaks, yeah.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Where d’ya think the porters will fall? Or the people from the mids?”

She shrugged. “The mids see themselves as toppers mostly. I know, I spent my childhood up there. They go for the view and eat at the cafe as much as they can, justifying the climb. The toppers are another question. I think we have more hope among them.”

Knox wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. “Say again?”

She looked up at him, and Knox felt the dog nuzzling against his boots, looking for company or warmth.

“Think about it,” McLain said. “Why are you so riled up? Because you lost a good friend? That happens all the time. No, it’s because you were lied to. And the toppers will feel this ever more keenly, trust me. They live in sight of those who’ve been lied to. It’s the mids, the people who aspire upward without knowing and who look down on us without compassion that will be the most reluctant.”

“So you think we have allies up top?”

“That we can’t get to, yeah. And they would take some convincing. A fine speech like you poisoned my people with.”

She gifted him with a rare grin, and Knox felt himself beaming in return. And right then he knew, instantly, why her people were devoted to her. It was similar to the pull he had on others, but for different reasons. People feared him and wanted to feel safe. But they respected McLain and wanted to feel loved.

“The problem we’re gonna have is that the mids are what separate us from IT.” She drew her hand across the blueprint. “So we need to get through there quick but without starting a fight.”

“I thought we’d just storm up before dawn,” Knox grumbled. He leaned back and peered under the table at the dog, who was half sitting on one of his boots and looking up at him with its foolish tongue hanging out, tail wagging. All Knox saw in the animal was a machine that ate food and left shit behind. A furry ball of meat he wasn’t allowed to eat. He nudged the filthy thing off his boot. “Scram,” he said.

“Jackson, get over here.” McLain snapped her fingers.

“I don’t know why you keep those things around, much less breed more of ‘em.”

“You wouldn’t,” McLain snapped back. “They’re good for the soul, for those of us who have them.”

He checked to see if she was serious and found her smiling a little more easily now.

“Well, after we set this place right, I’m gonna push for a lottery for them, too. Get their numbers under control.” He returned her sarcastic smile. Jackson whined until McLain reached down to pet him.

“If we were all as loyal as this to each other, there’d never need be an uprising,” she said, peering up at him.

He dipped his head, unable to agree. There had been a few dogs in Mechanical over the years, enough for him to know that some people felt this way, even if he didn’t. He always shook his head at those who spent hard-earned chits on food that would fatten a thing that would never fatten him in return. When Jackson crossed under the table and rubbed against his knee, whining to be petted, he left his hands spread out on the blueprint, defiant.

“What we need for the trip up is a diversion,” McLain said. “Something to thin the numbers in the mids. It’d be nice if we could get more of them to go up-top, because we’re going to make a racket moving this many people up the stairs—”

“We? Wait, you don’t think you’re coming—”

“If my people are, then of course I am.” She inclined her head. “I’ve been climbing ladders in the stockroom for over fifty years. You think a few flights of stairs will give me grief?”

Knox wasn’t sure anything could give her grief. Jackson’s tail thumped the leg of the table as the mutt stood there, looking up at him with that dumb grin his breed habitually wore.

“What about welding doors shut on the way up?” Knox asked. “Keep them in until all this is all over.”

“And do what afterwards? Just apologize? What if this takes weeks?”

“Weeks?”

“You don’t think it’ll be that easy, do you? Just march up and take the reins?”

“I’m under no delusions about what comes next.” He pointed at her office door, which led out to the workshops full of clacking machinery. “Our people are building the implements of war, and I aim to use them if it comes to that. I will gladly take a peaceful transfer, would be satisfied pushing Bernard and a few others out to clean, but I have never shied from getting dirty, either.”

McLain nodded. “Just so we’re both clear—”

“Clear as glass,” he said.

He clapped his hands, an idea forming. Jackson ducked away from the sudden noise.

“I’ve got it,” he told her. “A diversion.” He pointed to the lower floors of Mechanical on the blueprint. “What if we have Jenkins cascade a power outage? We could start a few levels above this, or even better, with the farms and the mess halls. Blame it on the recent generator work—”

“And you think the mids’ll clear out?” She narrowed her eyes.

“If they want a warm meal. Or they’ll hunker down in the dark.”

“I think they’ll be in the stairwell gossiping, wondering what all the fuss is about. Even more in our way.”

“Then we’ll tell them we’re going up to fix the problem!” Knox felt himself getting frustrated. The damn dog was sitting on his boot again.

“Up to fix a problem?” McLain laughed. “When’s the last time that made any sense?”

Knox pulled on his beard. He wasn’t sure what was so complicated. There were a lot of them. They worked with tools all day. They were going to go beat in tech heads, little men like Bernard who sat on their butts and clacked on keyboards like secretaries. They just needed to go up there and do it.

“You got any better ideas?” he asked.

“We need to keep in mind the after,” McLain said. “After you’ve bludgeoned some people to death and the blood is dripping through the grates, what then? Do you want people living in fear of that happening again? Or of whatever you put them through to get there?”

“I only want to hurt those that lied,” he said. “That’s all any of us want. We’ve all lived in fear. Fear of the outside. Fear of cleaning. Afraid to even talk about a better world. And none of it was true. The system was rigged, and in a way to make us hang our heads and take it—”

Jackson barked up at him and began to whine, his tail swishing the floor like a dropped air hose with a stuck nozzle that had gone out of control.

“I think when we’re done,” he said, “and we start talking about using our know-how to explore a world we’ve only ever looked out at, I think that’s gonna inspire some people. Hell, it gives me hope. Don’t you feel anything?”

He reached down and rubbed Jackson’s head, which stopped the animal from making so much noise. McLain looked at him for a while. She finally bobbed her head in agreement.

“We’ll go with the power outage,” she said with finality. “Tonight, before any who went to see the cleaning return disappointed. I’ll lead up a squad with candles and flashlights, make it look like a goodwill mission headed by Supply. You’ll follow a few hours later with the rest. We’ll see how far the repair story gets us before we run into trouble. Hopefully, a good number will be staying in the up-top, or back in their beds in the mids, too exhausted from climbing for a meal to care about the commotion.”

“There’ll be less traffic those early hours,” Knox agreed, “so maybe we won’t run into too much trouble.”

“The goal will be to hit IT and contain it. Bernard is still playing Mayor, so he probably won’t be there. But he’ll either come to us or we’ll push up after him once the thirties are secure. I don’t think he’ll put up much of a fight, not once his floors are ours.”

“Agreed,” Knox said, and it felt good to have a plan. To have an ally. “And hey, thanks for this.”

McLain smiled. “You give a good speech for a greaser,” she said. “And besides—” She nodded toward the dog. “Jackson likes you, and he’s hardly ever wrong. Not about men.”

Knox looked down and realized he was still scratching the mutt. He pulled his hand away and watched the animal pant, staring up at him. In the next room, someone laughed at a joke, the voices of his mechanics mixing with the members of Supply, all gently muffled by the wall and door. This laughter was joined by the sounds of steel rods bending into shape, flat pieces hammered sharp, machines for making rivets turned instead into making bullets. And Knox knew what McLain meant about loyalty. He saw it in that dumb dog’s eyes, that it would do anything for him if only he would ask. And this weight bearing down on his chest, of the many who felt that way for him and for McLain—Knox decided that this was the heaviest burden of them all.

13

The dirt farm below filled the stairwell with the rich smell of fresh rot. Juliette was still waking up as she descended another level and began noticing the scent. She had no idea how long she’d slept—it had felt like days but could’ve been hours. She had woken with her face pressed to the grating, a pattern of red lines marking her cheek, and had gotten underway immediately. Her stomach was gnawing at her, the odor from the farm hurrying her along. By twenty-eight, the pungency hung in the air so thick it felt like she was swimming through the scents. It was the smell of death, she decided. Of funerals. Of loamy soil turned over, releasing all those tangy molecules into the air.

She stopped on thirty—the hydroponic farms—and tried the doors. It was dark inside. There was a sound down the hallway, the whir of a fan or a motor. It was a strange encounter, this small noise. For over a day, she had heard nothing but the sounds she made herself. The green glow of the emergency lights were no company; they were like the heat of a dying body, of batteries draining with the leak of photons. But this was something moving, some sound beyond her own breathing and footfalls, and it lurked deep in the dark corridors of the hydroponic farms.

Once again, she left her only tool and defense behind as a doorstop to allow in a trickle of light. She stole inside, the smell of vegetation not as strong as in the stairwell, and padded down the hallway with one hand on the wall. The offices and reception area were dark and lifeless, the air dry. There was no blinking light on the turnstile, and she had no card or chit to feed it. She placed her hands on the supports and vaulted over, this small act of defiance somehow powerful, as though she had come to accept the lawlessness of this dead place, the complete lack of civilization, of rules.

The light spilling from the stairwell barely reached the first of the growing rooms. She waited while her eyes adjusted, thankful of this ability honed by the down deeps of Mechanical and the dark interiors of broken machines. What she saw, barely, when she was finally able, did not inspire her. The hydroponic gardens had rotted away. Thick stalks, like ropes, hung here and there from a network of suspended pipes. It gave her an idea of how long ago these farms had succumbed, if not the silo. It hadn’t been hundreds of years, and it hadn’t been days. Even a window that wide felt like a treasure of information, the first crumb toward an answer to this mysterious place.

She rapped one of the pipes with her knuckles and heard the solid thud of fullness.

No plants, but water! Her mouth seemed to dry out with just the prospect. Juliette leaned over the railing and into the growing room. She pressed her mouth to one of the holes in the top of a pipe where the stalk of a plant should be growing. She created a tight seal and sucked. The fluid that met her tongue was brackish and foul—but wet. And the taste was not of anything chemical or toxic, but stale organics. Dirt. It was only slightly more distasteful than the grease and oil she had practically been drenched in for two decades.

So she drank until she was full. And she realized, now that she had water, that if there were more crumbs to find, more clues, she might just live long enough to gather them.

Before she left, Juliette snapped a section of pipe off the end of a run, keeping the cap intact on one side. It was only a little over an inch in diameter and no more than two feet long, but it would work as a thermos. She gently bent the broken pipe that remained down, allowing water to flow from the remaining loop. While she topped up her pipe, she splashed some water on her hands and arms, still fearful of contamination from the outside.

Once her pipe was full, Juliette stole back toward the lit doorway at the end of the hall. There were three hydroponic farms, all with closed loops that wound through long and twisting corridors. She tried to do a rough calculation in her head, but all she could come up with was enough to drink for a very long time. The aftertaste was awful, and she wouldn’t be surprised if her stomach cramped from the contents, but if she could get a fire going, find enough fabric or leftover paper to burn, even that could be helped with a good boil.

Back in the stairwell, she returned to the rich odors she had left behind. She retrieved her knife and hurried down another thick slice of the silo, almost two times around the stairwell to the next landing, and checked the door.

The smell was definitely coming from the dirt farms. And Juliette could hear that whirring again, louder now. She stopped the door and propped her thermos against the railing and checked inside.

The smell of vegetation was overpowering. Ahead, in the dim green glow, she could see bushy arms reaching over the railings and into the pathway. She vaulted the security gate and explored the edge, one hand on the wall while her eyes adjusted again. There was definitely a pump running somewhere. She could also hear water dripping, either from a leak or a functioning tap. Juliette felt chills from the leaves brushing her arms. The smell of rot was distinguishable now: it was the odor of fruit and vegetables decaying in the soil and withering on the vine. She heard the buzz of flies, the sounds of life.

She reached into a thick stand of green and felt around until her hand hit something smooth. Juliette gave it a tug and held a plump tomato up to the light. Her timeline estimate suddenly shrank. How long could the dirt farms sustain themselves? Did tomatoes require seeding, or did they come back every year like the weeds? She couldn’t remember. She took a bite, the tomato not yet fully ripe, and heard a noise behind her. Another pump clicking on?

She turned just in time to see the door to the stairwell slamming closed, plunging the dirt farm into absolute darkness.

Juliette froze. She waited for the sound of her knife rattling down through the staircase. She tried to imagine that it could’ve slipped and fallen on its own. With the light extinguished, her ears seemed to hijack the unused portion of her brain. Her breathing, even her pulse, seemed audible, the whirring of the pump louder now. Tomato in hand, she crouched down and moved toward the other wall, arms stretched out to feel her way. She slid toward the exit, staying low to avoid the plants, trying to calm herself. There were no ghosts here, nothing to be spooked about. She repeated this to herself as she slowly crept forward.

And then an arm was on her, reaching over her shoulder. Juliette cried out and dropped the tomato. The arm grabbed her shoulder, pinning her down in a crouch as she tried to stand. She slapped at this intruder, tried to pull away from it, the tablecloth bonnet yanked from her head—until finally she felt the hard steel of the turnstile, one of the waist bars jutting out in the hallway, and felt the fool.

“You ‘bout gave me a heart attack,” she told the machine. She reached for its sides and lifted herself over. She would come back for more food once she had light. Leaving the turnstile and heading for the exit, one hand on the wall and another groping ahead of herself, Juliette wondered if she would start talking to objects, now. Start going crazy. As the darkness absorbed her, she realized her mindset was changing by the minute. Resigned to her death the day before, now she was frightened of mere insanity.

It was an improvement.

Her hand finally bumped into the door, and Juliette pushed it open. She cursed the loss of the knife; it was certainly missing from the grating. She wondered how far it might have fallen, if she’d ever find it again or maybe a replacement. She turned to grab her thermos—

And saw that it was missing as well.

Juliette felt her vision narrow, her heart quicken. She wondered if the closing of the door could have toppled her thermos. She wondered how the knife had slipped through a gap in the grating narrower than its handle. And as the pounding in her temples receded, she heard something else:

Footsteps.

Ringing out on the stairwell below her.

Running.

14

The countertop in Supply rattled with the implements of war. Guns, freshly milled and wholly forbidden, were lined up like so many sticks of steel. Knox picked one up—could felt the heat in a barrel recently bored and rifled—and hinged the stock to expose the firing chamber. He reached into one of the buckets of shiny bullets, the casings chopped from thin tubes of pipe and packed with blasting powder, and slotted one into the brand new gun. The operation of the machine seemed simple enough. Point and pull the lever.

“Careful where you aim that,” one of the men of Supply said, leaning out of the way.

Knox raised the barrel toward the ceiling and tried to picture in his mind what one of these could do. He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

One of the Supply workers emerged from the stacks with a tub in his hands. The bend of his back and sag of his shoulders told Knox the thing was heavy. “Just two dozen of these so far,” the man said, hoisting the bin to the counter.

Knox reached inside and pulled out one of the heavy cylinders. His mechanics and even some of the men and women in yellow eyed the bin nervously.

“Slam that end on something hard—” the man behind the counter said, just as calmly as if he were doling out an electrical relay to a customer and giving some last-minute installation advice. “—like a wall, the floor, the butt of your gun—anything like that. And then get rid of it.”

“Are they safe to carry?” Shirly asked as Knox stuffed one into his hip pocket.

“Oh yeah, it takes some force.”

Several people reached their arms in and clattered around for one. Knox caught McLain’s eyes as she took one for herself and slotted it into a pocket on her chest. The look on her face was one of cool defiance. She must see how disappointed he was in her coming, and he could tell at a glance that there would be no reasoning with her.

“Alright,” she said, turning her gray-blue eyes toward the men and women gathered around the counter. “Listen up. We’ve got to get back open for business, so if you’re carrying a gun, grab some ammo. There are strips of canvas over there. Wrap these things up as best you can to keep them out of sight. My group is leaving in five minutes, got that? Those of you in the second wave can wait in the back, out of sight.”

Knox nodded. He glanced over at Marck and Shirly, both of whom would join him in the second wave; the slower climbers would go first and act casual. The stouter legs would follow and make a strong push, hopefully converging on thirty-four at the same time. Each group would be conspicuous enough—combined, and they might as well sing their intentions while they marched.

“You okay, Boss?” Shirly rested her rifle on her shoulder and frowned at him. He rubbed his beard and wondered how much of his stress and fear was shining through.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “Yeah.”

Marck grabbed a bomb, stashed it away, and rested a hand on his wife’s shoulder. Knox felt a pang of doubt. He wished the women didn’t have to get involved. At least the wives. He continued to hope that none of this violence would be necessary, but it was getting harder and harder to pretend as eager hands took up arms. They were, all of them, now capable of taking lives, and he reckoned they were angry enough to do so.

McLain stepped through the opening in the counter and sized him up. “This is it, then.” She reached out a hand.

Knox accepted it. He admired the strength in the woman. “We’ll see you on thirty-five and go up the last level together,” he said. “Don’t have all the fun without us.”

She smiled. “We won’t.”

“And good climbing.” He looked to the men and women gathering up behind her. “All of you. Good luck and see you soon.”

There were stern nods and clenched jaws. The small army in yellow began to file for the door, but Knox held McLain back.

“Hey,” he said. “No trouble until we catch up, okay?”

She slapped his shoulder and smiled.

“And when this does go down,” Knox said, “I expect you at the very back, behind the—”

McLain stepped closer, a hand gripping Knox’s sleeve. Her wrinkled face had suddenly hardened.

“And tell me, where will you be, Knox of Mechanical, when the bombs fly? When these men and women who look up to us are facing their gravest test, where will you be?”

Knox was taken aback by the sudden attack, this quiet hiss that landed with all the force of a shout.

“You know where I’ll—” he started to answer.

“Damn straight,” McLain said, releasing his arm. “And you’d better well know that I’ll see you there.”

15

Juliette stood perfectly still and listened to the sound of footsteps retreating down the stairwell. She could feel the vibrations in the railing. Goose bumps rushed up her legs and down her arms. She wanted to call out, to yell for the person to stop, but the sudden rush of adrenaline made her chest feel cold and empty. It was like a chill wind had forced itself deep into her lungs, crowding out her voice. People were alive and in the silo with her. And they were running away.

She pushed away from the railing and dashed across the landing, hit the curved steps at a dead run and took them as fast as her legs could take her. A flight down, as the adrenaline subsided, she found the lungs to yell, “Stop!,” but the racket of her bare feet on the metal stairs likely drowned out her voice. She could no longer hear the person running, dared not stop and listen for fear they would get too far ahead, but as she passed the doorway on thirty-one, she felt the panic that they might slip inside some level and get away. And if there were only a handful of them hiding in the vast silo, she may never find them. Not if they didn’t want to be found.

Somehow, this was more terrifying than anything else: that she might live the rest of her days foraging and surviving in a dilapidated silo, talking to inanimate objects, while a group of people did the same and stayed out of sight. It so stressed her that it took a while to consider the opposite: that this might instead be a group who would seek her out, and not have the best intentions.

They wouldn’t have the best intentions, but they would have her knife.

She stopped on thirty-two to listen. Holding her breath to keep quiet was almost impossible—her lungs were crying out for deep gulps of air. But she remained still, the pulse in her palms beating against the cool railing, the distinct sound of footsteps still below her and louder now. She was catching up! She took off again, emboldened, taking the steps three at a time, her body sideways as she danced down the stairs as she had in youth, one hand on the curving railing, the other held out in front of her for balance, the balls of her feet just barely touching a tread before she was flying down to the next, concentrating lest she slip. A spill could be deadly at such speeds. Images of casts on arms and legs and stories of the unfortunate elderly with broken hips came to mind. Still, she pushed her limits, positively flying. Thirty three went by in a blaze. Half a spiral later, over her footfalls, she heard a door slam. She stopped and looked up. She leaned over the railing and peered down. The footfalls were gone, leaving just the sound of her panting for air.

Juliette hurried down another rotation of the steps and checked the door on thirty-four. It wouldn’t open. It wasn’t locked, though. The handle clicked down and the door moved, but caught on something. Juliette tugged as hard as she could—but to no avail. She yanked again and heard something crack. With a foot braced on the other door, she tried a third time, yanking sharply, snapping her head back, pulling her arms toward her chest and kicking with her foot—

Something snapped. The door flew open, and she lost her grip on the handle. There was an explosion of light from inside, a bright burst of illumination spilling out the door before it slammed shut again.

Juliette scrambled across the landing and grabbed the handle. She pulled the door open and struggled to her feet. One broken half of a broom stick lay inside the hallway—the other half hung from the handle of the neighboring door. Both stood out in the blinding light all around her. The overhead lamps inside the room were fully lit, the bright rectangles in the ceiling marching down the hall and out of sight. Juliette listened for footsteps, but heard little more than the buzzing of the bulbs. The turnstile ahead of her winked its red eye over and over, like it knew secrets but wouldn’t tell.

She got up and approached the machine, looked to the right where a glass wall peeked into a conference room, the lights full-on in there as well. She hopped over the stile, the motion a habit already, and called out another hello. Her voice echoed back, but it sounded different in the lit air, if that were possible. There was life in here, electricity, other ears to hear her voice, which made the echoes somehow fainter.

She passed offices, peeking in each one to look for signs of life. The place was a mess. Drawers dumped on the floor, metal filing cabinets tipped over, precious paper everywhere. One of the desks faced her, and Juliette could see that the computer was on, the screen full of green text. It felt as though she’d entered a dreamworld. In two days—assuming she’d slept that long—her brain had gradually acclimated to the pale green glow of the emergency lights, had grown used to a life in the wilderness, a life without power. She still had the taste of brackish water on her tongue, and now she strolled through a disheveled but otherwise normal workplace. She imagined the next shift—did offices like these have shifts?—returning, laughing, from the stairwell, shuffling papers and righting furniture and getting back to work.

The thought of work had her wondering what they did here. She had never seen such a layout. She almost forgot about her flight down the stairs as she poked about, as curious about the rooms and power as the footsteps that had brought her there. Around a bend she came to a wide metal door that, unlike the others, wouldn’t open. Juliette heaved on it and felt it barely budge. She pressed her shoulder against the metal door and pushed it, a few inches at a time, until she could squeeze through. She had to step over a tall metal filing cabinet that had been yanked down in front of the heavy door in an attempt to hold it closed.

The room was massive, at least as big as the generator room and far larger than the cafeteria. It was full of tall pieces of furniture bigger than filing cabinets but with no drawers. Instead, their fronts were covered with blinking lights, red, green, and amber.

Juliette shuffled through paper that had spilled from the filing cabinet. And she realized, as she did so, that she couldn’t be alone in the room. Someone had pulled the cabinet across the door, and they had to have done this from inside.

“Hello?”

She passed through the rows of tall machines, for that’s what she figured they were. They hummed with electricity, and now and then seemed to whir or clack like their innards were busy. She wondered if this were some sort of exotic power plant—providing the lighting perhaps? Or did these have stacks of batteries inside? Seeing all the cords and cables at the backs of the units had her leaning toward batteries. No wonder the lights were blaring. This was like twenty of Mechanical’s battery rooms combined.

“Is anyone here?” she called out. “I mean you no harm.”

She worked her way through the room, listening for any movement, until she came across one of the machines with its door hinged open. Peering inside, she saw not batteries but boards like the kind Walker was forever soldering on. In fact, the guts of this machine looked eerily similar to the inside of the dispatch room’s computer—

Juliette stepped back, realizing what these were. “The servers,” she whispered. She was in this silo’s IT. Level thirty-four. Of course.

There was a scraping sound near the far wall, the sound of metal sliding on metal. Juliette ran in that direction, darting between the tall units, wondering who the hell this was running from her, and where they planned to hide.

She rounded the last row of servers to see a portion of the floor moving, a section of metal grate sliding to cover a hole. Juliette dove for the floor, her tablecloth garb wrapping up her legs, her hands seizing the edge of the cover before it could close. Right in front of her, she saw the knuckles and fingers of a man’s hands gripping the edge of the grate. There was a startled scream, a grunt of effort. Juliette tried to yank back on the grate, but had no leverage. One of the hands disappeared. A knife took its place, snicking against the grate, hunting for her fingers.

Juliette swung her feet beneath her and sat up for leverage. She yanked on the grate and felt the knife bite into her finger as she did so.

She screamed. The man below her screamed. He emerged and held the knife between them, his hand shaking, the blade catching and reflecting the overhead lights. Juliette tossed the metal hatch away and clutched her hand, which was dripping blood.

“Easy!” she said, scooting out of reach.

The man ducked his head down, then poked it back up. He looked past Juliette as if others were coming up behind her. She fought the urge to check—but decided to trust the silence just in case he was trying to fool her.

“Who are you?” she asked. She wrapped part of her garment around her hand to bandage it. She noticed the man, his beard thick and unkempt, was wearing gray coveralls. They could’ve been made in her silo, with just slight differences. He stared at her, his dark hair wild and hanging shaggy over his face. He grunted, coughed into his hand, seemed prepared to duck down under the floor and disappear.

“Stay,” Juliette said. “I mean you no harm.”

The man looked at her wounded hand and at the knife. Juliette glanced down to see a thin trace of blood snaking toward her elbow. The wound ached, but she’d had worse in her time as a Mechanic.

“S-s-sorry,” the man muttered. He licked his mouth and swallowed. The knife was trembling uncontrollably.

“My name’s Jules,” she said, realizing this man was much more frightened of her than the other way around. “What’s yours?”

He glanced at the knife blade held sideways between them, almost as if checking a mirror. He shook his head.

“No name,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “No need.”

“Are you alone?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Solo,” he said. “Years.” He looked up at her. “Where did—” He licked his lips again, cleared his throat. His eyes watered and glinted in the light. “—you come from? What level?”

“You’ve been by yourself for years?” Juliette said in wonder. She couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t come from any level,” she told him. “I came from another silo.” She enunciated this last softly and slowly, worried what this news might do to such a seemingly fragile man.

But Solo nodded as if this made sense. It was not the reaction Juliette had expected.

“The outside—” Solo looked again at the knife. He reached out of the hole and set it on the grating, slid it away from both of them. “—is it safe?”

Juliette shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had a suit. It wasn’t a far walk. But still, I shouldn’t be alive.”

Solo bobbed his head. He looked up at her, wet tracks running from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his beard. “None of us should,” he said. “Not a one.”

16

“What is this place?” Lukas asked Bernard. The two of them stood before a large chart hanging on the wall like a tapestry. The diagrams were precise, the lettering ornate. It showed a grid of circles evenly spaced with lines between them and intricacies inside each. Several of the circles were crossed out with thick red marks of ink. It was just the sort of majestic diagramming he hoped to one day achieve with his star charts.

“This is our legacy,” Bernard said simply.

Lukas had often heard him speak similarly of the mainframes upstairs.

“Are these supposed to be the servers?” he asked, daring to rub his hands across a continuous piece of paper the size of a small bed sheet. “They’re laid out like the servers.”

Bernard stepped beside him and rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Interesting. So they are. I never noticed that before.”

“What are they?” Lukas looked closer and saw each was numbered. There was also a jumble of squares and rectangles in one corner with parallel lines spaced between them, keeping the blocky shapes separate and apart. These figures contained no detail within them, but the word “Atlanta” was written large beneath.

“We’ll get to that. Come, let me show you something.”

At the end of the room was a door. Bernard led him through this, turning on more lights as he went.

“Who else comes down here?” Lukas asked, following along.

Bernard glanced back over his shoulder. “No one.”

Lukas didn’t like that answer. He glanced back over his own shoulder, feeling like he was descending into something people didn’t return from.

“I know this must seem sudden,” Bernard said. He waited on Lukas to join him, threw his small arm around Lukas’s shoulder. “But things changed this morning. The world is changing. And she rarely does it pleasantly.”

“Is this about… the cleaning?” He nearly said “Juliette.” The picture of her felt hot against his breastbone.

Bernard’s face grew stern. “There was no cleaning,” he said abruptly. “And now all hell will break loose, and people will die. And the silos, you see, were designed from the ground down to prevent this.”

“Designed—” Lukas repeated. His heart beat once, twice. His brain whirred its old circuits and finally computed something Bernard had said that had made no sense.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you say silos?”

“You’ll want to familiarize yourself with this.” Bernard gestured toward a small desk which had a fragile-looking wooden chair tucked up against it. There was a book on the desk unlike any Lukas had ever seen, or even heard of. It stood nearly as high as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are to never remove from your neck. Come down when you can and read. Our history is in here, as well as every action you are to take in any emergency.”

Lukas approached the book, a lifetime’s worth of paper, and hinged open the cover. The contents were machine printed, the ink pitch-black. He flipped through a dozen pages of listed contents until he found the first page of the body. Oddly, he recognized the opening lines immediately.

“It’s the Pact,” he said, looking up at Bernard. “I already know quite a bit of—”

“This is the pact,” Bernard told him, pinching the first half inch of the thick book. “The rest is the Order.”

He stepped back.

Lukas hesitated, digesting this, then reached forward and flopped the tome open near its middle.

“Sabotage?” Lukas flipped a few pages and read something about air handling and asphyxiation. “Who came up with all this stuff?”

“People who have experienced many bad things.”

“Like… ?” He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say this, but it felt like taboos weren’t allowed down there. “Like the people before the uprising?”

“The people before those people,” Bernard said. “The one people.”

Lukas closed the book. He shook his head, wondering if this was all a gag, some kind of initiation. The priests usually made more sense than this. The children’s books, too.

“I’m not really supposed to learn all this, am I?”

Bernard laughed. His countenance had fully transformed from earlier. “You just need to know what’s in there so you can access it when you need to.”

“What does it say about this morning?” He turned to Bernard, and it dawned on him suddenly that no one knew of his fascination, his enchantment, with Juliette. The tears had evaporated from his cheeks, the guilt of possessing her forbidden things had overpowered his shame for falling so hard for someone he hardly knew. And now this secret had wandered out of sight. It could only be betrayed by the flush he felt on his cheeks as Bernard studied him and pondered his question.

“Page seventy-two,” Bernard said, the humor draining from his face and replaced with the frustration from earlier.

Lukas turned back to the book. This was a test. A shadowing rite. It had been a long time since he’d performed under a caster’s glare. He began flipping through the pages and saw at once that the section he was looking for came right after the Pact, was at the very beginning of this new Order.

He found the page. At the very top, in bold print, it said:

And below this rested terrible words strung into awful meaning. Lukas read the instructions several times, just to make sure. He glanced over at Bernard, who nodded sadly, before Lukas turned back to the print.

17

Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.

“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress in one corner resting directly on the floor, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing off. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.

“You live here alone?” Juliette asked. “Is there no one else?” She couldn’t help but hear the thin hope in her voice.

Solo shook his head.

“What about further down?” Juliette inspected her wound. The bleeding had almost stopped.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I’ll find a tomato missing, but I figure it’s the rats.” He stared at the corner of the room. “Can’t catch them all,” he said. “More and more of them—”

“Sometimes you think there’s more of you, though? More survivors?” She wished he would focus.

“Yeah.” He rubbed his beard, looked around the room like there was something he should be doing for her, something you offered guests. “I find things moved sometimes. Find things left out. The grow lights left on. Then I remember I did them.”

He laughed to himself. It was the first natural thing she’d seen him do, and Jules figured he’d been doing a lot of it over the years. You either laughed to keep yourself sane or you laughed because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.

“Thought the knife in the door was something I did. Then I found the pipe. Wondered if it was left behind by a really, really big rat.”

Juliette smiled. “I’m no rat,” she said. She adjusted her tablecloth, patted her head and wondered what had happened to her other scrap of cloth.

Solo seemed to consider this.

“So how many years has it been?” she asked.

“Thirty four,” he said, no pause.

“Thirty four years? Since you’ve been alone?”

He nodded, and the floor seemed to fall away from her. Her head spun with the concept of that much time with no other person around.

“How old are you?” she asked. He didn’t seem all that much older than her.

“Fifty,” he said. “Next month, I’m pretty sure.” He smiled. “This is fun, talking.” He pointed around the room. “I talk to things sometimes, and whistle.” He looked straight at her. “I’m a good whistler.”

Juliette realized she probably wasn’t even born when whatever happened here took place. “How exactly have you survived all these years?” she asked.

“I dunno. Didn’t set out to survive for years. Tried to last hours. They stack up. I eat. I sleep. And I—” He looked away, went to one of the shelves and sorted through some cans, many of them empty. He found one with the lid hinged open, no label, and held it out toward her. “Bean?” he asked.

Her impulse was to decline, but the eager look on his poor face made it impossible. “Sure,” she said, and she realized how hungry she was. She could still taste the brackish water from earlier, the tang of stomach acid, the unripe tomato. He stepped closer, and she dug into the wet juice in the can and came out with a raw green bean. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.

“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”

“In apartments?” Juliette asked.

Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of other garbage and bachelor debris.

“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.

“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty four years ago?”

He lifted his arms. “What always happens. People go crazy. It only takes once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”

He suddenly sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, and twisted the fabric of his coveralls where they bunched up at his knees. “Our silo had one bad day. Was all it took.” He looked up at Juliette. “No credit for all the years before that. Nope. You wanna sit?”

He waved at the floor. Again, she couldn’t say no. She sat down, away from the reeking bed, and rested her back against the wall. There was so much to digest.

“How did you survive?” she asked. “That bad day, I mean. And since.”

She immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t important to know. But she felt some need, maybe to glimpse what awaited her, maybe because she feared that surviving in this place could be worse than dying on the outside.

“Staying scared,” he said. “My dad’s caster was the head of IT. Of this place.” He nodded. “My dad was a big shadow. Knew about these rooms, one of maybe two or three who did. In just the first few minutes of fighting, he showed me this place, gave me his keys. He made a diversion, and suddenly I became the only one who knew about this place.” He looked down at his lap a moment, then back up. Juliette realized why he seemed so much younger. It wasn’t just the fear, the shyness, that made him seem that way—it was in his eyes. He was locked in the perpetual terror of his teenage ordeal. His body was simply growing old around the frozen husk of a frightened little boy.

He licked his lips. “None of them made it, did they? The ones who got out?” Solo searched her face for answers. She could feel the dire hope leaking out of his pores.

“No,” she said sadly, remembering what it felt like to wade through them, to crawl over them. It felt like weeks ago rather than days.

“So you saw them out there? Dead?”

She nodded.

He dipped his chin. “The view didn’t stay on for long. I only snuck up once in the early days. There was still a lot of fighting going on. As time went by, I went out more often and further. I found a lot of the mess they made. But I haven’t found a body in—” He thought carefully. “—maybe twenty years?”

“So there were others in here for a while?”

He pointed toward the ceiling. “Sometimes they would come in here. With the servers. And fight. They fought everywhere. Got worse as it went along, you know? Fight over food, fight over women, fight over fighting.” He twisted at the waist and pointed back through another door. “These rooms are like a silo in a silo. Made to last ten years. But it lasts longer if you’re solo.” He smiled.

“What do you mean? A silo in a silo?”

He nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry. I’m used to talking with someone who knows everything I know.” He winked at her, and Juliette realized he meant himself. “You don’t know what a silo is.”

“Of course I do,” she said. “I was born and raised in a place just like this. Only, I guess you could say that we’re still having good days and not giving ourselves credit for them.”

Solo smiled. “Then what’s a silo?” he asked, that teenage defiance bubbling to the surface.

“It’s—” Juliette searched for the words. “It’s our home. A building like those over the hill, but underground. The silo is the part of the world you can live in. The inside,” she said, realizing it was harder to define than she thought.

Solo laughed.

“That’s what the word means to you. But we use words all the time without really knowing them.” He pointed toward the shelf with all the metal canisters. “All the real knowing is in those. Everything that ever happened.” He shot her a look. “You’ve heard the term ‘raging bull?’ Or someone being ‘bull-headed?’”

She nodded. “Of course.”

“But what’s a bull?” he asked.

“Someone who’s careless. Or mean, like a bully.”

Solo laughed. “So much we don’t know,” he said. He studied his fingernails. “A silo isn’t the world. It’s nothing. The term, this word, comes from a long time ago, back when crops grew in the outside farther than you could see—” He waved his hand over the floor like it was some vast terrain. “—back when there were more people than you could count, back when everyone had lots of kids—” He glanced up at her. His hands came together and kneaded one another, almost as if embarrassed to bring up the making of kids around a woman.

“They grew so much food,” he continued, “that even for all these people they couldn’t eat it all, not at once. So they stored it away in case times got bad. They took more seeds of grain than you could count and they would pour them into these great silos that stood aboveground—”

“Aboveground,” Juliette said. “Silos.” She felt as though he must be making this up, some delusion he’d concocted over the lonely decades.

“I can show you pictures,” he said petulantly, as if upset by her doubt. He got up and hurried to the shelf with the metal canisters. He read the small white labels on the bottom, running his fingers across them.

“Ah!” He grabbed one—it looked heavy—and brought it to her. The clasp on the side released the lid, revealing a thick object inside.

“Let me,” he said, even though she hadn’t moved a muscle to help. He tilted the box and let the heavy object fall onto his palm, where it balanced expertly. It was the size of a children’s book, but ten or twenty times as thick. Still, it was a book. She could see the edges of miraculously fine-cut paper.

“I’ll find it,” he said. He flipped pages in large chunks, each flap a fortune in pressed paper clapping solidly against more fortunes. Then he whittled his search down more finely, a pinch at a time, before moving to a single page at a time.

“Here.” He pointed.

Juliette moved closer and looked. It was like a drawing, but so exact as to almost seem real. It was like looking at the view of the outside from the cafeteria, or the picture of someone’s face on an ID, but in color. She wondered if this book had batteries in it.

“It’s so real,” she whispered, rubbing it with her fingers.

“It is real,” he said. “It’s a picture. A photograph.”

Juliette marveled at the colors, the green field and blue sky reminding her of the lie she had seen in her visor’s false video. She wondered if this was false as well. It looked nothing like the rough and smeared photos she’d ever seen.

“These buildings,” he pointed to what looked like large white cans sitting on the ground. “These are silos. They hold seed for during the bad times. For when the times get good again.”

He looked up at her. They were just a few feet apart, Juliette and him. She could see the wrinkles around his eyes, could see how much the beard concealed his age.

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,” she told him.

He pointed at her. Pointed at his own chest. “We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times.”

“Who? Who put us here? And what bad times?”

He shrugged. “But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope.”

He glanced up from the book and bit his lip, water welling up in his eyes. “Seeds don’t go crazy,” he told her. “They don’t. They have bad days and lots of good ones, but it doesn’t matter. You leave them and leave them, however many you bury, and they do what seeds do when they’re left alone too long—”

He stopped. Closed the book and held it to his chest. Juliette watched as he rocked back and forth, ever so slightly.

“What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him.

He frowned.

“We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.”

18

The waiting beyond the stacks of Supply was the worst. Those who could, napped. Most engaged in nervous banter. Knox kept checking the time on the wall, picturing all the pieces moving throughout the silo. Now that his people were armed, all he could hope for was a smooth and bloodless transfer of power. He hoped they could get their answers, find out what’s been going on in IT—those secretive bastards—and maybe vindicate Jules. But he knew bad things could happen.

He saw it on Marck’s face, the way he kept looking at Shirly. The worry there was evident in the man’s frown, the tilt of his eyebrows, the wrinkles above the bridge of his nose. Knox’s shift leader wasn’t hiding the concern for his wife as well as he probably thought he was.

Knox pulled out his multi-tool and checked the blade. He flashed his teeth in the reflection to see if anything from his last meal was stuck there. As he was putting it away, one of Supply’s shadows emerged from behind the stacks to let them know they had visitors.

“What color visitors?” Shirly asked, as the group gathered their guns and lurched to their feet.

The young girl pointed at Knox. “Blue. Same as you.”

Knox rubbed the girl’s head as he slipped between the shelving units. This was a good sign. The rest of his people from Mechanical were running ahead of schedule. He made his way to the counter while Marck gathered the others, waking a few, the extra rifles clattering as they were gathered up.

As Knox rounded the counter, he saw Pieter enter through the front door, the two Supply workers guarding the landing having allowed him past.

Pieter smiled as he and Knox clasped hands. Members of Pieter’s refinery crew filed in behind, their customary black coveralls replaced with the more discrete blue.

“How goes it?” Knox asked.

“The stairs sing with traffic,” Pieter said. His chest swelled as he took in and held a deep breath, then blew it out. Knox imagined the pace they’d maintained to shave off so much time.

“Everyone’s underway?” He and Pieter slid to the side while their two groups merged, members of Supply introducing themselves or embracing those they already knew.

“They are.” He nodded. “I’d give the last of them another half hour. Though I fear the whispers on porters’ lips travel even faster than we do.” He looked toward the ceiling. “I’d wager they echo above our heads even now.”

“Suspicions?” Knox asked.

“Oh, aye. We had a run-in by the lower market. People wanted to know the fuss. Georgie gave them lip, and I thought it’d come to blows.”

“God, and not in the mids yet.”

“Aye. Can’t help but think a smaller incursion would’ve had a greater chance of success.”

Knox frowned, but he understood Pieter thinking so. The man was used to doing a great deal with only a handful of strong backs. But it was too late for them to argue over plans already in action. “Well, the blackouts have likely begun,” Knox said. “There’s nothing to it but for us to chase them up.”

Pieter nodded gravely. He looked around the room at the men and women arming themselves and re-packing their gear for another quick climb. “And I suppose we mean to bludgeon our way up.”

“Our plan is to be heard,” Knox said. “Which means making some noise.”

Pieter patted his boss on the arm. “Well then, we are already winning.”

He left to pick out a gun and top up his canteen. Knox joined Marck and Shirly by the door. Those without guns had armed themselves with fearsome shanks of flattened iron, the edges bright silver from the shrill work of the grinder. It was amazing to Knox that they all knew, instinctively, how to build implements of pain. It was something even shadows knew how to do at young ages, knowledge somehow dredged up from the brutal depths of their imagination, this ability to deal harm to one another.

“Are the others running behind?” Marck asked Knox.

“Not too bad,” Knox said. “More that these guys made good time. The rest’ll catch up. You guys ready?”

Shirly nodded. “Let’s get moving,” she said.

“Alright, then. Onward and upward, as they say.” Knox scanned the room and watched his mechanics meld with members of Supply. More than a few faces were turned his way, waiting for some sign, maybe another speech. But Knox didn’t have another one in him. All he had was the fear that he was leading good people to their slaughter, that the taboos were falling in some runaway cascade, and it was all happening much too quickly. Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.

“On me,” he growled, and the chatter began to die down. Packs rustled into place, pockets jangling with danger. “On me,” he said again to the quieting room, and his soldiers began to form up in columns. Knox turned to the door, thinking this was certainly all on him. He made sure his rifle was covered, tucked it under his arm, and squeezed Shirly’s shoulder as she pulled the door open for him.

Outside, two workers from Supply stood by the railing. They had been turning the sparse traffic away with a made-up power outage. With the doors open, bright light and the noise of Supply’s machinery leaked out into the stairwell, and Knox saw what Pieter meant by whispers traveling swifter than feet. He adjusted his pack of supplies—the tools, candles, and flashlights that made it seem as if he were marching to aid rather than war. Beneath this beguiling layer hid more bullets and an extra bomb, bandages and pain salve for just in case. His rifle was wrapped in a strip of cloth and remained tucked under his arm. Knowing what it was, he found the concealment ridiculous. Looking at the others marching with him, some in welding smocks, some holding construction helmets, he saw their intentions were all too obvious.

They left the landing and the light spilling from Supply behind and began their climb. Several of his people from Mechanical had changed into yellow coveralls, the better to blend in the mids. They moved noisily up the dimmed nighttime glow of the stairwell, the shiver of traffic from below giving Knox hope that the rest of his people would be catching up soon. He felt sorry for their weary legs but reminded himself that they were traveling light.

He tried his damnedest to picture the coming morning as positively as he could. Perhaps the clash would conclude before any more of his people arrived. Maybe they would end up being nothing more than a wave of supporters coming to join in the celebrations. Knox and McLain would have already entered the forbidden levels of IT, would have yanked the cover off the inscrutable machinery inside, exposing those evil whirring cogs once and for all.

They made good progress while Knox dreamed of a smooth overthrow. They passed one landing where a group of women were hanging laundry over the metal railing to dry. The women spotted Knox and his people in their blue coveralls and complained of the power outages. Several of his workers stopped to hand out supplies and to spread lies. It wasn’t until after they had left and had wound their way up to the next level that Knox saw the cloth had come unwrapped from Marck’s barrel. He pointed this out and it was fixed before the next landing.

The climb turned into a silent, grueling ordeal. Knox let others take the lead while he slid back and checked on the status of his people. Even those in yellow, he considered his responsibility. Their lives were hanging in the balance of decisions he’d made. It was just as Walker had said, that crazy fool. This was it. An uprising, just like the fables of their youth. And Knox suddenly felt a dire kinship with those old ghosts, those ancestors of myth and lore. Men and women had done this before. Maybe for different reasons, with a less noble anger caught in their throats, but somewhen, on some level, there had been a march like this. Similar boots on the same treads. Maybe some of the same boots, just with new soles. All with the jangle of mean machines in hands not afraid to use them.

It startled Knox, this sudden link to a mysterious past. And it wasn’t that terribly long ago, was it? Less than two hundred years? He imagined, if someone lived as long as Jahns had, or McLain for that matter, that three long lives could span that distance. Three handshakes to go from that uprising to this one. And what of the years between? That long peace sandwiched between two wars?

Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking on these things. Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of something awful. And yet it felt so right. So necessary. What if that former clash had felt the same? Had felt the same in the breasts of the men and women who’d waged it?

19

“It would take ten lifetimes to read all these.”

Juliette looked up from the pile of scattered tins and stacks of thick books. There was more to marvel at in their text-heavy pages than in any of the children’s books of her youth.

Solo turned from the stove where he was heating soup and boiling water. He waved a dripping metal spoon at the scattered mess she’d made. “I don’t think they were meant to be read,” he told her. “At least, not like I’ve been reading them, front to back.” He touched his tongue to the spoon, then stuck it back in the pot and stirred. “Everything’s out of order. It’s more like a backup to the backup.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Juliette admitted. She looked down at her lap where pictures of animals called “butterflies” filled the pages. Their wings were comically bright. She wondered if they were the size of her hands or the size of people. She had yet to find any sense of scale for the beasts.

“The servers,” Solo said. “What did you think I meant? The backup.”

He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages?

She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.

“The backup of what exactly?” she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answers to come.

Solo found two bowls. He began wiping one out with the fabric in the belly of his coveralls. “The backup of everything,” he said. “All that we know. All that ever was.” He set the bowls down and adjusted a knob on the stove. “Follow me,” he said, waving his arm. “I’ll show you.”

Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin. She rose and followed Solo out of the room and into the next one.

“Don’t mind the mess,” he said, gesturing at a small hill of trash and debris piled up against one wall. It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and smelled like ten thousand. Juliette wrinkled her nose and fought the reflex to gag. Solo seemed unaffected. He stood beside a small wooden desk and flipped through diagrams hanging from the wall on enormous sheets of paper.

“Where’s the one I want?” he wondered aloud.

“What are these?” Juliette asked, entranced. She saw one that looked like a schematic of the silo, but unlike any they’d had in Mechanical.

Solo turned. He had several sheets flopped over one shoulder, his body practically disappearing between the layers of them. “Maps,” he said. “I want to show you how much is out there. You’ll shit yourself.”

He shook his head and muttered something to himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to say that.”

Juliette told him it was fine. She held the back of her hand to her nose, the stench of rotting food intolerable.

“Here it is. Hold this end.” Solo held out the corner of a half dozen sheets of paper. He took the other side and they lifted them away from the wall. Juliette felt like pointing out the grommets at the bottom of the maps and how there were probably sticks or hooks around here somewhere for propping them up, but held her tongue. Opening her mouth just made the smell of the rotting cans worse.

“This is us,” Solo said. He pointed to a spot on the paper. Dark, squiggly lines were everywhere. It didn’t look like a map or schematic of anything Juliette had ever seen. It looked like children had drawn it. Hardly a straight line existed anywhere.

“What’s this supposed to show?” she asked.

“Borders. Land!” Solo ran his hands over one uninterrupted shape that took up nearly a third of the drawing. “This is all water,” he told her.

“Where?” Juliette’s arm was getting tired of holding up her end of the sheet. The smell and the riddles were getting to her. She felt a long way from home. The thrill of survival was in danger of being replaced with the depression of a long and miserable existence looming for years and years before her.

“Out there! Covering the land.” Solo pointed vaguely at the walls. He narrowed his eyes at Juliette’s confusion. “The silo, this silo, would be as big around as a single hair on your head.” He patted the map. “Right here. All of them. Maybe all of us left. No bigger than my thumb.” He placed a finger in a knot of lines. Juliette thought he seemed so sincere. She leaned closer to see better, but he pushed her back.

“Let those go,” he said. He slapped at her hand holding the corners of paper. He smoothed the maps against the wall. “This is us.” He indicated one of the circles on the top sheet. Juliette eyeballed the columns and rows, figured there were four dozen or so of them. “Silo seventeen.” He slid his hand up. “Number twelve. This is eight. And silo one up here.”

“No.”

Juliette shook her head and reached for the desk, her legs weak.

“Yes. Silo one. You’re probably from sixteen or eighteen. Do you remember how far you walked?”

She grabbed the small chair and pulled it out. Sat down heavily.

“How many hills did you cross?”

Juliette didn’t answer. She was thinking about the other map and comparing the scales. What if Solo was right? What if there were fifty or so silos and all of them could be covered by a thumb? What if Lukas had been right about how far away the stars were? She needed something to crawl inside, something to cover her. She needed some sleep.

“I once heard from silo one,” Solo said. “A long time ago. Not sure how well any of these others are doing—”

“Wait.” Juliette sat up straight. “What do you mean, you heard from them?”

Solo didn’t turn from the map. He ran his hands from one circle to another, a childlike expression on his face. “They called. Checking in.” He looked away from the map and her, toward the far corner of the room. “We didn’t talk for long. I didn’t know all the procedures. They weren’t happy.”

“Okay, but how did you do this? Can we call someone now? Was it a radio? Did it have a little antennae, a small black pointy thing—” Juliette stood and crossed to him, grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. How much did this man know that could help her but that she couldn’t get out of him? “Solo, how did you talk to them?”

“Through the wire,” he said. He cupped his hands and covered his ears with them. “You just talk in it.”

“You need to show me,” she said.

Solo shrugged. He flipped up a few of the maps again, found the one he wanted and pressed the others against the wall. It was the schematic of the silo she had seen earlier, a side-on view of it divided into thirds, each third side by side. She helped him hold the other sheets out of the way.

“Here are the wires. They run every which way.” He traced thick branches of lines that ran from the exterior walls and off the edges of the paper. They were labeled with minuscule print. Juliette leaned closer to read; she recognized many of the engineering marks.

“These are for power,” she said, pointing at the lines with the jagged symbols above them.

“Yup.” Solo nodded. “We don’t get our own power anymore. Borrow it from others, I think. All automatic.”

“You get it from others?” Juliette felt her frustration rise. How many crucial things did this man know that he considered trifling? “Anything else you want to add?” she asked him. “Do you have a flying suit that can whisk me back to my silo? Or are there secret passages beneath all the floors so we can just stroll there as easy as we like?”

Solo laughed and looked at her like she was crazy. “No,” he said. “Then it would be one seed, not many. One bad day would ruin us all. Besides, the diggers are dead. They buried them.” He pointed at a nook, a rectangular room jutting off from the edge of Mechanical. Juliette peered closer. She recognized every floor of the down deep at a glance, but this room wasn’t supposed to exist.

“What do you mean, the diggers?”

“The machines that removed the dirt. You know, that made this place.” He ran his hand down the length of the silo. “Too heavy to move, I guess, so they poured the walls right over them.”

“Do they work?” Juliette asked. An idea formed. She thought of the mines, of how she’d helped excavate rock by hand. She thought of the sort of machine that could dig out an entire silo, wondered if it could be used to dig between them.

Solo clicked his tongue. “No way. Nothing down there does. All toast. Besides—” he chopped his hand partway up the down deep. “There’s flooding up to—” He turned to Juliette. “Wait. Are you wanting out? To go somewhere?” He shook his head in disbelief.

“I want to go home,” Juliette said.

His eyes widened. “Why would you go back? They sent you away, didn’t they? You’ll stay here. We don’t want to leave.” He scratched his beard and shook his head side to side.

“Someone has to know about all of this,” Juliette told him. “All these other people out there. All that space beyond. The people in my silo need to know.”

“People in your silo already do,” he said.

He studied her quizzically, and it dawned on Juliette that he was right. She pictured where they currently stood in this silo. They were in the heart of IT, deep inside the fortress room of the mythical servers, below the servers in a hidden passage, hidden probably even from the people who had access to the innermost kernels of the silo’s mysteries.

Someone in her own silo did know. He had helped keep these secrets for generations. Had decided, alone and without input from anyone, what they should and should not know. It was the same man who had sent Juliette to her death, a man who had killed who knew how many more—

“Tell me about these wires,” Juliette said. “How did you talk to the other silo? Give me every detail.”

“Why?” Solo asked, seemingly shrinking before her. His eyes were wet with fear.

“Because,” she said. “I have someone I very much wish to call.”

20

The waiting was interminable. It was the long silence of itchy scalps and trickling sweat, the discomfort of weight on elbows, of backs bent, of bellies flat against an unforgiving conference table. Lukas peered down the length of his fearsome rifle and through the conference room's shattered glass window. Little fragment jewels remained in the side of the jamb like transparent teeth. Lukas could still hear, ringing in his ears, the incredible bang from Sims's gun that had taken out the glass. He could still smell the acrid scent of gunpowder in the air, the looks of worry on the faces of the other techs. The destruction had seemed so unnecessary. All this preparation, the toting of massive black guns out of storage, the interruption of his talk with Bernard, news of people coming from the down deep, it all made little sense.

He checked the slide on the side of the rifle and tried to remember the five minutes of instruction he’d been given hours earlier. There was a round in the chamber. The gun was cocked. More bullets waited patiently in the clip.

And the boys in security gave him a hard time for his tech jargon. Lukas’s vocabulary had exploded with new terms. He thought about the rooms beneath the servers, the pages and pages of the Order, the rows of books he’d only gotten a glimpse of. His mind sagged under the weight of it all.

He spent another minute practicing his sighting, looking down the barrel and lining up the small cross in the tiny circle. He aimed at the cluster of conference chairs that had been rolled into an obstructing jumble by the door. For all he knew, they would be waiting like this for days and nothing would ever happen. It had been a while since any porter had brought an update on what was going on below.

For practice, he gently slid his finger into the guard and against the trigger. He tried to get comfortable with the idea of pulling that lever, of fighting the upward kick Sims had told them to expect.

Bobbie Milner—a shadow no more than sixteen—made a joke beside him, and Sims told them both to shut the fuck up. Lukas didn't protest being included in the admonishment. He glanced over at the security gate where a bristle of black barrels poked through the stanchions and over the metal duty desk. Peter Billings, the new silo sheriff, was over there fiddling with his small gun. Bernard stood behind the sheriff, doling out instructions to his men. Bobbie Milner shifted his weight beside Lukas and grunted, trying to get more comfortable.

Waiting. More waiting. They were all waiting.

Of course, had Lukas known what was coming, he wouldn't have minded.

He would've begged to wait there forever.

Knox led his group through the sixties with just a few stops for water, a pause to secure their packs and tighten their laces. They passed several curious porters with overnight deliveries who prodded for details about where they were heading, about the blackouts. Each porter left unhappy. And hopefully, empty headed.

Pieter had been right: The stairwell was singing. It vibrated with the march of too many feet. Those who lived above were generally moving upward, away from the blackouts and toward the promise of power, of warm food and hot showers. Meanwhile, Knox and his people mobilized behind them to squelch a different kind of power.

At fifty-six, they had their first spot of trouble. A group of farmers stood outside the hydroponic farm lowering a cluster of power cables over the railing, presumably toward the small group they had seen the last landing down. When they spotted the blue coveralls of Mechanical, one of the farmers called out, “Hey, we keep you fed, why can’t you keep the juice on?”

“Talk to IT,” Marck replied from the front of the queue. “They’re the ones blowing fuses. We’re doing what we can.”

“Well, do it faster,” the farmer said. “I thought we just had a ratdamned power holiday to prevent this nonsense.”

“We’ll have it by lunchtime,” Shirly told them.

Knox and the others caught up with the head of the group, creating a jamb by the landing.

“The faster we get up there the faster you’ll get your juice,” Knox explained. He tried to hold his concealed gun casually, like it was any other tool.

“Well how about giving us a hand with this tap, then? They’ve had power on fifty-seven for most of the morning. We’d like enough to get our pumps cranking.” He indicated the trunk of wires coiling over the railing.

Knox considered this. What the man was asking was technically illegal. Calling him out on it would mean delays, but telling him to go ahead might look suspicious. He could sense McLain’s group several levels up, waiting on them. Pace and timing were everything.

“I can spare two of my men to help out. Just as a favor. As long as it doesn’t get back to me that Mechanical had shit to do with this.”

“Like I care,” the farmer said. “I just want water moving.”

“Shirly, you and Courtnee give them a hand. Catch up when you can.”

Shirly’s mouth dropped open. She begged with her eyes for him to reconsider.

“Get going,” he told her.

Marck came to her side. He lifted his wife’s pack and handed her his multi-tool. She begrudgingly accepted it, glowered at Knox a moment longer, then turned to go, not saying a word to him or her husband.

The farmer let go of the cables and took a step toward Knox. “Hey, I thought you said you’d lend me two of—”

Knox leveled a glare harsh enough to make the man pause. “Do you want the best I got?” he asked. “Because you’ve got it.”

The farmer lifted his palms and backed away. Courtnee and Shirly could already be heard stomping their way below to coordinate with the men on the lower landing.

“Let’s go,” Knox said, hitching up his pack.

The men and women of Mechanical and Supply lurched forward once more. They left behind a group of farmers on landing fifty-six, who watched the long column wind its way upward.

Whispers rose as the power cables were lowered. Powerful forces were merging over these people’s heads, bad intentions coming together and heading for something truly awful.

And anyone with eyes and ears could tell: some kind of reckoning was coming.

There was no warning for Lukas, no countdown. Hours of quiet anticipation, of insufferable nothingness, simply erupted into violence. Even though he had been told to expect the worst, Lukas felt like the waiting so long for something to happen just made it a fiercer surprise when it finally did.

The double doors of landing thirty-four blew open. Solid steel peeled back like curls of paper. The sharp ring made Lukas jump, his hand slip off the stock of his rifle. Gunfire erupted beside him, Bobbie Milner shooting at nothing and screaming in fear. Maybe excitement. Sims was yelling impossibly over the roar. When it died down, something flew through the smoke, a canister, bouncing toward the security gate.

There was a terrible pause—and then another explosion like a blow to the ears. Lukas nearly dropped his gun. The smoke by the security gate couldn't quite fog the carnage. Pieces of people Lukas had known came to a sick rest in the entrance hall of IT. The people responsible began to surge through before he could take stock, before he could become fearful of another explosion occurring right in front of him.

The rifle beside him barked again, and this time Sims didn't yell. This time, several other barrels partook. The people trying to push through the chairs tumbled into them instead, their bodies shaking as if pulled by invisible strings, arcs of red like hurled paint flying from their bodies.

More came. A large man with a throaty roar. Everything moved so slowly. Lukas could see his mouth part, a yell in the center of a burly beard, a chest as wide as two men. He held a rifle at his waist. He fired at the ruined security station. Lukas watched Peter Billings spin to the floor, clutching his shoulder. Bits of glass shivered from the window frame in front of Lukas as barrel after barrel erupted across the conference table, the shattered window seeming insignificant now. A prudent move.

The hail of bullets hit the man unseen. The conference room was an ambush, a side-on attack. The large man shook as some of the wild fire got lucky. His beard sagged open. His rifle was cracked in half, a shiny bullet between his fingers. He tried to reload.

The guns of IT loosed their own bullets too fast to count. Levers were held, and springs and gunpowder did the rest. The giant man fumbled with his rifle, but never got it reloaded. He tumbled into the chairs, sending them crashing across the floor. Another figure appeared through the door, a tiny woman. Lukas watched her down the length of his barrel, saw her turn and look right at him, the smoke from the explosion drifting toward her, her gray hair flowing like more of it wrapped in a halo around her.

He could see her eyes. He had yet to shoot his gun, had watched, jaw slack, as the fighting took place.

The woman bent her arm back and made to throw something his way.

Lukas pulled the trigger. His rifle flashed and lurched. In the time it took, the long and terrible time it took for the bullet to cross the room, he realized it was just an old woman. Holding something. A bomb.

Her torso spun and her chest blossomed red. The object fell. There was another awful wait, more attackers appearing, screaming in anger, until an explosion blew the chairs and the people among them apart.

Lukas wept while a second surge made a futile attempt. He wept until his clip was empty, wept as he fumbled for the clasp, shoved a spare into the butt, the salt bitter on his lips as he drew back that bolt and let loose with another menacing hail of metal—so much stouter and quicker than the flesh it met.

21

Bernard woke to shouting, to his eyes burning from the smoke, his ears ringing with a long-ago blast.

Peter Billings was shaking his shoulders, yelling at him, a look of fright in his wide eyes and soot-stained brow. Blood stained his coveralls in a wide rust-colored pool.

“Hrm?”

“Sir! Can you hear me?”

Bernard pushed Peter’s hands away and tried to sit up. He groped about his body, looking for anything bleeding or broken. His head throbbed. His hand came away from his nose wet with blood.

“What happened?” he groaned.

Peter crouched by his side. Bernard saw Lukas standing just behind the sheriff, rifle on his shoulder, peering toward the stairwell. There was shouting in the distance, and then the patter of gunfire.

“We’ve got three men dead,” Peter said. “A few wounded. Sims led a half dozen into the stairwell. They got it a lot worse than us. A lot worse.”

Bernard nodded. He checked his ears, was surprised they weren’t bleeding as well. He dotted his sleeve with blood from his nose and patted Peter on the arm. He nodded over his shoulder. “Get Lukas,” he said.

Peter frowned but nodded. He spoke with Lukas, and the young man knelt by Bernard.

“Are you okay?” Lukas asked.

Bernard nodded. “Stupid,” he said. “Didn’t know they’d have guns. Should’ve guessed about the bombs.”

“Take it easy.”

He shook his head. “Shouldn’t have had you here. Dumb. Could have been us both—”

“Well it was neither of us, sir. We’ve got ‘em running down the stairwell. I think it’s over.”

Bernard patted his arm. “Get me to the server,” he said. “We’ll need to report this.”

Lukas nodded. He seemed to know just the server Bernard meant. He helped Bernard to his feet, an arm around his back, Peter Billings frowning as the two of them staggered down the smoky hallway together.

“Not good,” Bernard told Lukas, once they were away from the others.

“But we won, right?”

“Not yet. The damage won’t be contained here. Not today. You’ll have to stay below a while.” Bernard grimaced and tried to walk alone. “Can’t risk something happening to us both.”

Lukas seemed unhappy about this. He entered his code into the great door, pulled out his ID, wiped someone else’s blood off it and his hand, then swiped it through the reader.

“I understand,” he finally said.

Bernard knew he’d picked the right man. He left Lukas to close the heavy door while he made his way to the rearmost server. He staggered once and fell against number eight, catching himself and resting a moment until the wooziness went away. Lukas caught up before he got to the back of the room, was pulling his copy of the master key out of his coveralls.

Bernard rested against the wall while Lukas opened the server. He was still too shaken up to notice the flashing code on the server’s front panel. His ears were too full of a false ringing to notice the real one.

“What’s that mean?” Lukas asked. “That noise?”

Bernard looked at him quizzically.

“Fire alarm?” Lukas pointed up at the ceiling. Bernard finally heard it as well. He swam toward the back of the server as Lukas opened the last lock, pushed the young man out of the way.

What were the chances? Did they already know? Bernard’s life had become unhinged in two short days. He reached inside the cloth pouch, grabbed the headset, and pulled it over his tender ears. He pushed the jack into the slot labeled “1” and was surprised to hear a beep. The line was ringing. He was making a call.

He pulled the jack out hurriedly, canceling the call, and saw that the light above “1” wasn’t blinking. The light above “17” was.

Bernard felt the room spin. A dead silo was calling him. A survivor? After all these years? With access to the servers? His hand trembled as he guided the jack into the slot. Lukas was asking something behind him, but Bernard couldn’t hear anything through the headphones.

“Hello?” he croaked. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Hello,” a voice said.

Bernard adjusted his headphones. He waved for Lukas to shut the fuck up. His ears were still ringing, his nose bleeding into his mouth.

“Who is this?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you,” the voice said. “Is this who I think it is?”

“Who the fuck is this?” Bernard sputtered. “How do you have access to—?”

“You sent me out,” the voice said. “Is this Bernard? You sent me to die—”

Bernard slumped down, his legs numb. The cord on the headphones uncoiled and nearly pulled the cups from his head. He clutched the phones and fought to place this voice. Lukas was holding him by the armpits, keeping him from collapsing to his back.

“Are you there?” the voice asked. “Do you know who this is?”

“No,” he said. But he knew. It was impossible, but he knew.

“You sent me to die, you fuck.”

“You knew the rules—!” Bernard cried, yelling at a ghost. “You knew—!”

“Shut up and listen, Bernard. Just shut the fuck up and listen to me very carefully.”

Bernard waited. He could taste the copper of his own blood in his mouth.

“I’m coming for you. I’m coming home, and I’m coming to clean.”