Dust (3 page)

Lukas’s eyes widened at the flippant heresy. He glanced around the hall to see if others were around. “Jules, you’re worrying about a handful of people while the rest of the silo grows uneasy. There are murmurs of dissent all through the Up Top. There are echoes of the last uprising you stirred, only now they’re aimed at us.”

Juliette felt her skin warm. Her hand fell from Lukas’s arm. “I wanted no part of that fight. I wasn’t even
here
for it.”

“But you’re here for this one.” His eyes were sad, not angry, and Juliette realized the days were as long for him in the Up Top as they were for her down in Mechanical. They’d spent less time talking in the past week than they had while she’d been in Silo 17. They were nearer to one another and in danger of growing apart.

“What would you have me do?” she asked.

“To start with, don’t dig. Please. Billings has fielded a dozen complaints from neighbors speculating about what will happen. Some of them are saying that the outside will come to us. A priest from the Mids is holding two Sundays a week now to warn of the dangers, of this vision of his where the dust fills the silo to the brim and thousands die—”

“Priests—” Juliette spat.

“Yes, priests, with people marching from the Top and the Deep both to attend his Sundays. When he finds it necessary to hold three of them a week, we’ll have a mob.”

Juliette ran her fingers through her hair, rock and rubble tumbling out. She looked at the cloud of fine dust guiltily. “What do people think happened to me outside the silo? My cleaning? What are they saying?”

“Some can scarcely believe it,” Lukas said. “It has the makings of legend. Oh, in IT we know what happened, but some wonder if you were sent to clean at all. I heard one rumor that it was an election stunt.”

Juliette cursed under her breath. “And news of the other silos?”

“I’ve been telling others for years that the stars are suns like our own. Some things are too big to comprehend. And I don’t think rescuing your friends will change that. You could march your radio friend up to the bazaar and say he came from another silo, and people would just as likely believe you.”

“Walker?” Juliette shook her head, but she knew he was right. “I’m not after my friends to prove what happened to me, Luke. This isn’t about me. They’re living with the dead over there. With ghosts.”

“Don’t we as well? Don’t we dine on our dead? I’m begging you, Jules. Hundreds will die for you to save a few. Maybe they’re better off over there.”

She took a deep breath and held it a pause, tried her best not to feel angry. “They’re not, Lukas. The man I aim to save is half mad from living on his own all these years. The kids over there are having kids of their own. They need our doctors and they need our help. Besides … I promised them.”

He rewarded her pleas with sad eyes. It was no use. How do you make a man care for those he’s never met? Juliette expected the impossible of him, and she was just as much to blame. Did she truly care for the people being poisoned twice on Sundays? Or any of the strangers she had been elected to lead but had never met?

“I didn’t want this job,” she told Lukas. It was hard to keep the blame out of her voice. Others had wanted her to be mayor, not her. Though not as many as before, it seemed.

“I didn’t know what I was shadowing for either,” Lukas countered. He started to say something else, but held his tongue as a group of miners exited the generator room, a cloud of dust kicked up from their boots.

“Were you going to say something?” she asked.

“I was going to ask that you dig in secret if you have to dig at all. Or leave these men to it and come—”

He bit off the thought.

“If you were about to say home, this is my home. And are we really no better than the last of them who were in charge? Lying to our people? Conspiring?”

“I fear we are worse,” he said. “All they did was keep us alive.”

Juliette laughed at that. “Us? They elected to send you and me to die.”

Lukas let out his breath. “I meant everyone else. They worked to keep everyone else alive.” But he couldn’t help it: he cracked a smile while Juliette continued to laugh. She smeared the tears on her cheeks into mud.

“Give me a few days down here,” she said. It wasn’t a question; it was a concession. “Let me see if we even have the means to dig. Then I’ll come kiss your babies and bury your dead – though not in that order, of course.”

Lukas frowned at her morbidness. “And you’ll tamp down the heresies?”

She nodded. “If we dig, we’ll do it quietly.” To herself, she wondered if such a machine as she’d uncovered could dig any way but with a growl. “I was thinking of going on a slight power holiday, anyway. I don’t want the main generator on a full load for a while. Just in case.”

Lukas nodded, and Juliette realized how easy and necessary the lies felt. She considered telling him right then of another idea of hers, one she’d been considering for weeks, all the way back when she was in the doctor’s office recovering from her burns. There was something she needed to do up top, but she could see that he was in no mood to be angered further. And so she told him the only part of her plan that she thought he’d enjoy.

“Once things are underway down here, I plan to come up and stay for a while,” she said, taking his hand. “Come home for a while.”

Lukas smiled.

“But listen here,” she told him, feeling the urge to warn. “I’ve seen the world out there, Luke. I stay up at night listening to Walk’s radio. There are a lot of people just like us out there, living in fear, living apart, kept ignorant. I mean to do more than save my friends. I hope you know this. I mean to get to the bottom of what’s out there beyond these walls.”

The knot in Lukas’s throat bobbed up and down. His smile vanished. “You aim too far,” he said meekly.

Juliette smiled and squeezed her lover’s hand. “Says the man who watches the stars.”

Silo 17

5

“Solo! Mr. Solo!”

The faint voice of a young child worked its way into the deepest of the grow pits. It reached all the way to the cool plots of soil where lights no longer burned and things no longer grew. There, Jimmy Parker sat alone atop the lifeless soil and near to the memory of an old friend.

His hands idly picked clumps of clay and crushed them into powder. If he imagined really hard, he could feel the pinprick of claws through his coveralls. He could hear Shadow’s little belly rattling like a water pump. It got harder and harder to imagine as the young voice calling his name grew nearer. The glow of a flashlight cut through the last tangle of plants that the young ones called the Wilds.

“There you are!”

Little Elise made a heap of noise that belied her small size. She stomped over to him in her too-big boots. Jimmy watched her approach and remembered wishing long ago that Shadow could talk. He’d had countless dreams wherein Shadow was a boy with black fur and a rumbly voice. But Jimmy no longer had such dreams. Nowadays, he was thankful for the speechless years with his old friend.

Elise squirmed through the rails of the fence and hugged Jimmy’s arm. The flashlight nearly blinded him as she clutched it against his chest, pointing it up.

“It’s time to go,” Elise said, tugging at him. “It’s time, Mr. Solo.”

He blinked against the harsh light and knew that she was right. The youngest among them, and little Elise settled more arguments than she started. Jimmy crushed another clump of clay in his hand, sprinkled the soil across the ground, and wiped his palm on his thigh. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew they couldn’t stay. He reminded himself that it would be temporary. Juliette said so. She said he could come back here and live with all the others who came over. There would be no lottery for a while. There would be lots of people. They would make his old silo whole again.

Jimmy shivered at the thought of so many people. Elise tugged his arm. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” she said.

And Jimmy realized what he was scared of. It wasn’t the leaving one day, which was still some time off. It wasn’t him setting up home in the Deep, which was nearly pumped dry and no longer frightened him. It was the idea of what he might return to. His home had only grown safer as it had emptied; he had been attacked when it had started filling up again. Part of him just wanted to be left alone, to be Solo.

On his feet, he allowed Elise to lead him back to the landing. She tugged on his calloused hand and pulled him forward with spirit. Outside, she gathered her things by the steps. Rickson and the others could be heard below, their voices echoing up the shaft of quiet concrete. One of the emergency lights was out on that level, leaving a black patch amid the dull green. Elise adjusted the shoulder satchel that held her memory book and cinched the top of her backpack. Food and water, a change of clothes, batteries, a faded doll, her hairbrush – practically everything she owned. Jimmy held the shoulder strap so she could work her arm through, then picked up his own load. The voices of the others faded. The stairwell faintly shook and rang with their footsteps as they headed down, which seemed a fairly odd direction to go in order to get
out.

“How long before Jewel comes for us?” Elise asked. She took Jimmy’s hand, and they spiraled down side by side.

“Not long,” Jimmy said, which was his answer for I-don’t-know. “She’s trying. It’s a long way to go. You know how it took a long time for the water to go down and vanish?”

Elise bobbed her head. “I counted the steps,” she said.

“Yes, you did. Well, now they have to tunnel their way through solid rock to get to us. That won’t be easy.”

“Hannah says there’ll be dozens and dozens of people after Jewel comes.”

Jimmy swallowed. “Hundreds,” he said hoarsely. “Thousands, even.”

Elise squeezed his hand. Another dozen steps went by, both of them quietly counting. It was difficult for either of them to count so high.

“Rickson says they aren’t coming to rescue us, but that they want our silo.”

“Yes, well, he sees the bad in people,” Jimmy said. “Just like you see the good in them.”

Elise looked up at Jimmy. Both of them had lost their count. He wondered if she could imagine what thousands of people would be like. He could barely remember himself.

“I wish he could see the good in people like me,” she said.

Jimmy stopped before they got to the next landing. Elise clutched his hand and her swinging satchel and stopped with him. He knelt to be closer to her. When Elise pouted, he could see the gap left by her missing tooth.

“There’s a bit of good in all people,” Jimmy said. He squeezed Elise’s shoulder, could feel a lump forming in his throat. “But there’s bad as well. Rickson is probably more right than wrong at times.”

He hated to say it. Jimmy hated to fill Elise’s head with such things. But he loved her as though she were his own. And he wanted to give her the great steel doors she would need if the silo were to grow full again. It was why he allowed her to cut up the books inside the tin cans and take the pages she liked. It was why he helped her choose which ones were important. The ones he chose were the ones for helping her survive.

“You’ll need to start seeing the world with Rickson’s eyes,” Jimmy said, hating himself for it. He stood and pulled her down the steps this time, no longer counting. He wiped his eyes before Elise noticed him crying, before she asked him one of her easy questions with no easy answers at all.

6

It was difficult to leave the bright lights and comfort of his old home behind, but Jimmy had agreed to move down to the lower farms. The kids were comfortable there. They quickly resumed their work among the grow plots. And it was closer to the last of the dwindling floods.

Jimmy descended slick steps spotted with fresh rust and listened to the plopping tune of water hitting puddle and steel. Many of the green emergency lights had been drowned by the floods. Even those that worked held murky bubbles of trapped water. Jimmy thought about the fish that used to swim in what now was open air. A few had been found swimming around as the water retreated, even though he’d long ago thought he’d caught them all. Trapped in shallowing pools, they had proved too easy to catch. He had taught Elise how, but she had trouble getting them off the hook. She was forever dropping the slimy creatures back into the water. Jimmy jokingly accused her of doing it on purpose, and Elise admitted she liked catching them more than eating them. He had let her catch the last few fish over and over until he felt too sorry for the poor things to allow it to go on. Rickson and Hannah and the twins had been happy to put these desperate survivors out of their misery and into their bellies.

Jimmy glanced up beyond the rail overhead, picturing his bobber out there in the middle of the air. He imagined Shadow peering down and batting his paw at him, as if Jimmy were now the fish, trapped underwater. He tried to blow bubbles, but nothing came out, just the tickle of his whiskers against his nose.

Further down, a puddle gathered where the stairs bottomed out. The floor was flat here, wasn’t sloped to drain. The floods were never meant to get so high. Jimmy flicked on his torch, and the beam cut through the dismal darkness deep inside Mechanical. An electrical wire snaked through the open passageway and draped across a security station. A tangle of hose traced along beside it before doubling back on itself. The cable and the hose knew the way to the pumps; they had been left behind by Juliette.

Jimmy followed their trail. His first time to the bottom of the stairs, he had found the plastic dome of her helmet. It was among a raft of trash and debris and sludge, all the foulness left over once the water was gone. He had tried to clean it up as much as he could, had found his small metal washers – the ones that anchored his old paper parachutes – like silver coins among the detritus. Much of the garbage from the floods remained. The only thing he had saved from it all was the plastic dome of her helmet.

The wire and hose turned down a flight of square steps. Jimmy followed them, careful not to trip. Water fell occasionally from the pipes and wires overhead and smacked him on the shoulder and head. The drops twinkled in the beam of his flashlight. Everything else was dark. He tried to imagine being down there when the place was full of water – and couldn’t. It was scary enough while dry.