Dust (9 page)

Lukas shot a look at Nelson, who set down his spanner, gathered Marsha, and slid out the door. Juliette watched them leave and realized her young Lukas had more authority than she gave him credit for.

“It’s the monthly town hall,” Lukas said. “The first since your election. I told Judge Picken you’d be there. Jules, you’ve gotta play mayor or you won’t
be
one for much longer—”

“Fine.” She raised her hands. “I’m not mayor. I so decree it.” She scrawled the air with a driver. “Signed and stamped.”

“Not fine. What do you think the next person will make of all this?” He waved his hand at the workbenches. “You think you’ll be able to play these games? This room will go right back to what it was built for in the first place.”

Juliette bit down the urge to snap at him, to tell him these weren’t games she was playing, that it was something far worse.

Lukas looked away from whatever face she was making. His eyes settled on the stack of books piled up by the cot she had brought in. She slept there sometimes when the two of them were disagreeing or when she just needed a place to be alone. Not that she’d slept much recently. She rubbed her eyes and tried to remember the last time she’d gotten four hours in a row. Her nights were spent welding in the airlock. Her days were spent in the Suit Lab or down behind the comm hub. She didn’t really sleep anymore – she just passed out here and there.

“We should keep those locked up,” Lukas said, indicating the books. “Shouldn’t keep them out.”

“No one would believe them if they opened them,” Juliette said.

“For the paper.”

She nodded. He was right. She saw information; others would see money. “I’ll take them back down,” she promised, and the anger drained away like oil from a cracked casing. She thought of Elise, who had told her over the radio of a book she was making, a single book from all her favorite pages. Juliette needed a book like that. Except where Elise’s was probably full of pretty fish and bright birds, Juliette’s would catalog darker things. Things in the hearts of men.

Lukas took a step closer. He rested a hand on her arm. “This meeting—”

“I hear they’re thinking about a revote,” Juliette said, cutting him off. She wiped a loose strand of hair off her face, tucked it behind her ear. “I’m not going to be mayor for long anyway. Which is why I need to get this done. By the time everyone votes again, it shouldn’t matter.”

“Why? Because you’ll be the mayor of a different silo by then? Is that your plan?”

Juliette rested a hand on the domed helmet. “No. Because I’ll have my answers by then. Because people will see by then. They’ll believe me.”

Lukas crossed his arms. He took a deep breath. “I’ve got to get down to the servers,” he said. “If no one’s there to answer the call, the lights eventually start flashing in the offices and everyone asks what the hell they’re for.”

Juliette nodded. She’d seen it for herself. She also knew that Lukas liked the long talks behind the server as much as she did. Except that he was better at it. All her talks led to arguments. He was good at smoothing things over, figuring things out.

“Please tell me you’ll go to the meeting, Jules. Promise me you’ll go.”

She scanned the suit on the other table to see how far along Nelson was. They’d need one more suit for the extra person in the second airlock. If she worked through the night and all day tomorrow—

“For me,” he pleaded.

“I’ll go.”

“Thank you.” Lukas glanced at the old clock on the wall, its red arms visible behind hazed plastic. “I’ll see you for dinner?”

“Sure.”

He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. When he turned to go, Juliette began arranging her tools on the leather pad, setting them aside for later. She picked up a clean cloth and wiped her hands. “Oh, and Luke?”

“Yeah?” He paused at the door.

“Tell that fucker I said hello.”

14

Lukas left the Suit Lab and headed toward the server room on the other side of thirty-four. He passed a tech room that sat empty. The men and women who used to work in there now took up slack in the Down Deep and in Supply where mechanics and workers had lost their lives. People from IT sent to replace those they’d killed.

Juliette’s friend Shirly had been left in charge of the aftermath down in Mechanical. She was forever complaining to his office about skeleton shifts, and then complaining again when Lukas reassigned anyone to help. What did she want from him? People, he supposed. Just not his people.

A handful of techs and security personnel standing outside the break room fell silent as Lukas approached. He waved, and hands went up politely. “Sir,” someone said, which made him cringe. The chatter resumed only after he rounded the corner, and Lukas remembered being in on conversations like that as his former boss had stormed past.

Bernard. Lukas used to think he understood what it meant to be in charge. You did what you wanted. Decisions were arbitrary. You were cruel for the sake of being cruel. And now he found himself agreeing to worse things than he had ever imagined. Now he knew about a world of such horrors, that maybe men of his ilk weren’t suited to lead. It wasn’t a thing he could ever say out loud, but perhaps a revote would be for the best. Juliette would make a great lab tech there in IT. Soldering and welding weren’t all that different, just matters of scale. And then he tried to imagine her building a suit for someone to clean in, or her sitting idly by while they took orders from another silo on how many births were allowed that week.

It was more likely that a new mayor would mean time apart. Or that he would have to file for a transfer to Mechanical and learn to turn a wrench. From head of IT to a third-shift greaser. Lukas laughed. He coded open the server room door and thought there might be something romantic about that, giving up his job and life to be with her. Maybe something more romantic than going up at night to hunt for stars. He would have to get used to Juliette bossing him around, but that wouldn’t be a stretch. Enough degreaser, and her old room down there could be livable. As he wove his way through the servers, he thought of how he had lived in far worse, right there beneath his feet. It was being together that mattered.

The lights overhead weren’t yet blinking. He was early or the man named Donald was late. Lukas made his way toward the far wall, passing by several servers with their sides off and wires streaming out. With Donald’s help, he was figuring out how to fully access the machines, see what was on them. Nothing exciting yet, but he was making progress.

He stopped at the comm server, which had been his home within a home some lifetime ago. Now it was a different sort of conversation he fell into behind that server. It was a different sort of person on the other end of the line.

One of the rickety wooden chairs from below had been brought up. Lukas remembered climbing the ladder and pushing it ahead of him, Juliette yelling at him that they should lower a rope, the two of them arguing like young porters. Beside the chair, a stack of book tins made a side table of sorts. One of the Legacy books was splayed out on top. Lukas made himself comfortable and picked up the book. He had marked pages by creasing the corners. There were small dots in the margins where he had questions. He flipped through the book and scanned the material while he waited on the call.

What once had been boring about the books was now all he cared about. During his imprisonment – his Rite – he had been forced to read the parts of the Order on human behavior. Now he pored over these sections. And Donald, the voice on the other end of the line, had him fairly convinced that these were more than mere stories, these Robbers Cave boys and Milgrams and Skinners. Some of these things had truly happened.

He had graduated from these stories to find even more lessons in the Legacy books. It was the history of the old world that now commanded his attention. Episodic uprisings had occurred over thousands of years. He and Jules argued over whether or not there could be an end to such cyclic violence. The books suggested such hope was folly. And then Lukas had discovered an entire chapter on the dangers of an uprising’s aftermath, the very situation in which they now found themselves. He read about men with strange names – Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Lenin – who fought to liberate a people and then enslaved them into something even worse.

They were legends, Juliette insisted. Myths. Like the ghouls parents use to make their children behave. She saw those chapters to mean that tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to. Always with the tearing down, she said, as if the scraps and ashes could be pieced back together.

Lukas disagreed. He thought, and Donald said, that these stories were real. Yes, the revolutions were painful. There would always be a period when things were worse. But eventually, they get better. People learn from their mistakes. This is what he had tried to convince her of one night after a call from Donald had kept them up through the dim time. Jules, of course, had to get in the last word. She had taken him up to the cafeteria and had pointed to the glow over the horizon, to the lifeless hills, to the rare glint of sunlight on decrepit towers. “Here is your world made better,” she had told him. “Here is man well learned from his mistakes.”

Always with the last word, though Lukas had more to say. “Maybe this is the bad time that comes
before
,” he had whispered into his coffee. And Juliette, for her part, had pretended not to hear.

The pages beneath Lukas’s fingers pulsed red. He glanced up at the lights overhead, now flashing with the incoming call. There was a buzzing from the comm server, a blinking indicator over the very first slot. He gathered the headset and untangled the cord, slotted it into the receiver.

“Hello?” he said.

“Lukas.” The machine removed all intonation from the voice, all emotion. Except for disappointment. That it was not Juliette who answered elicited a letdown that could be felt if not quite heard. Or perhaps it was all in Lukas’s head.

“Just me,” he said.

“Very well. Just so you know, I have pressing matters here. Our time is short.”

“Okay.” Lukas found his place in the book. He skipped down to where they’d previously left off. These talks reminded him of his studies with Bernard, except now he had graduated from the Order to the Legacy. And Donald was swifter than Bernard, more open with his answers. “So … I wanted to ask you something about this Rousseau guy—”

“Before we do,” Donald said, “I need to implore you again to stop with the digging.”

Lukas closed the book on his finger, marking his place. He was glad Juliette had agreed to attend the Town Hall. She got animated whenever this topic came up. Because of an old threat she’d made, Donald seemed to think they were digging toward him, and she made Lukas vow to leave the lie alone. She didn’t want them finding out about her friends in 17 or her plans to rescue them. Lukas found the ruse uncomfortable. Where Juliette distrusted this man – who had warned them both that their home could be shut down at any time through mysterious means – Lukas saw someone trying to help them at some cost to himself. Jules thought Donald was scared for his own life. Lukas thought Donald was frightened for
them
.

“I’m afraid that the digging will have to continue,” Lukas said. He nearly blurted out:
She won’t stop
, but best for there to be some sense of solidarity.

“Well, my people can pick up the vibrations. They know something is happening.”

“Can you tell them we’re having trouble with our generator? That it’s misaligned again?”

There was a disappointed sigh that the computers couldn’t touch. “They’re smarter than that. What I’ve done is ordered them not to waste their time looking into it, which is all I can do. I’m telling you, nothing good can come of this.”

“Then why are you helping us? Why stick your neck out? Because that’s what it seems like you’re doing.”

“My job is to see that you don’t die.”

Lukas studied the inside of the server tower, the winking lights, the wires, the boards. “Yeah, but these conversations, going through these books with me, calling every single day like clockwork, why do you do it? I mean … what is it that you get out of these conversations?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, a rare lack of surety from the steady voice of their supposed benefactor.

“It’s because … I get to help you remember.”

“And that’s important?”

“Yes. It’s important. It is to me. I know what it feels like to forget.”

“Is that why these books are here?”

Another pause. Lukas felt that he was stumbling accidentally toward some truth. He would have to remember what was being said and tell Juliette later.

“They are there so that whoever inherits the world – whoever is chosen – will know …”

“Know what?” Lukas asked desperately. He feared he was going to lose him. Donald had trod near to this in prior conversations, but had always pulled away.

“To know how to set things right,” Donald said. “Look, our time is up. I need to go.”

“What did you mean about inheriting the world?”

“Next time. I need to go. Stay safe.”

“Yeah,” Lukas said. “You too—”

But his headphone had already clicked. The man who somehow knew so much about the old world had signed off.

15

Juliette had never attended a Town Hall before. Like sows giving birth, she knew such things took place, but had never felt the urge to witness the spectacle. Her first time would be while as mayor, and she hoped it would be her last.

She joined Judge Picken and Sheriff Billings on the raised platform while residents spilled from the hallway and found their seats. The platform they’d put her on reminded her of the stage in the bazaar, and Juliette remembered her father comparing these meetings to plays. She never took him to mean that as a compliment.

“I don’t know any of my lines,” she whispered cryptically to Peter Billings.