“Friday,” Solo said, looking at the computer. “Or Thursday night, depending on how you like it. Two in the morning.” He scratched his beard. “Felt like we slept longer than that.”
“What day was it yesterday?” She shook her head. That didn’t make sense. “What day did I dive down? With the compressor?” Her brain wasn’t working.
Lukas looked at her like he was having similar thoughts. “The dive was Thursday. Today is tomorrow.” He rubbed his head. “Let’s start over—”
“No time.” Juliette groaned and tried to stand up. Solo rushed to her and put his hands under her arms, helped lift her. “Suit Lab,” she said. He nodded. She could tell he was exhausted, maybe half as much as she was, but he was still willing to do anything for her. It made her sad, someone being this loyal to her.
She led him down the narrow passage, and the climb up the ladder brought back a legion of aches. Juliette crawled out to the server room floor; Solo followed up the ladder and helped her to her feet. They made their way to the Suit Lab together.
“I need all the heat tape we’ve got,” she told him, prepping him while he escorted her. She staggered through the servers, bumped into one of them. “It needs to be the kind on the yellow spool, the stuff from Supply. Not the red kind.”
He nodded. “The good kind. Like we used on the compressor.”
“Right.”
They left the server room and shuffled down the hallway. Juliette could hear the kids squealing around the bend, the patter of their feet. It was a strange sound, like the echoes of ghosts. But something normal. Something normal had returned to silo 17.
In the suit lab, she got Solo busy with the tape. He stretched out long strips on one of the workbenches, overlapping the edges, using the torch to cauterize and seal the joints.
“At least an inch of overlap,” she told him, when it looked like he was being shy with the stuff. He nodded. Juliette glanced at her cot and considered collapsing into it. But there was no time. She grabbed the smallest suit in the room, one with a collar she knew might be a tight fit. She remembered the difficult squeeze to get into silo 17 and didn’t want to repeat it.
“I’m not gonna have time to make another switch for the suit, so I won’t have a radio.” She went through the cleaning outfit, piece by piece, pulling out the parts engineered to fail and hunting through her hauls from Supply for a better version of each. Some she’d have to seal over with the good tape. It wouldn’t be as nice as the one Walker had helped arrange, but it would be a world different than what Lukas was getting. She grabbed all the parts she’d spent weeks puzzling over, marveling at the engineering it took to make something weaker than it appeared. She tested a gasket from a pile she wasn’t sure about by pinching her fingernails together. The gasket parted easily. She dug for another.
“How long?” Solo asked, noisily stretching another piece of tape out. “You’ll be gone a day? A week?”
Juliette looked up from her workbench to the one Solo was working over. She didn’t want to tell him she might not make it. This was a dark thought she would keep to herself. “We’ll figure out a way to come for you,” she said. “First, I have to try and save someone.” It felt like a lie. She wanted to tell him she might be gone for good.
“With this?” Solo rustled the blanket of heat tape.
She nodded. “The doors to my home never open,” she told him. “Not unless they are sending someone to clean—”
Solo nodded. “It was the same here, back when this place was crazy.”
Juliette looked up at him, puzzled, and saw that he was smiling. Solo had told a joke. She laughed, even though she didn’t feel like it, and then found that it helped.
“We’ve got six or seven hours until those doors open,” she told him. “And when they do, I want to be there.”
“And then what?” Solo shut down the torch and inspected his work. He looked up at her.
“Then I want to see how they explain my being alive. I think—” She changed out a seal and flipped the suit around to get to the other sleeve. “I think my friends are fighting on one side of this fence, and the people who sent me here are fighting on the other. Everyone else is watching, the vast majority of my people. They are too scared to take sides, which basically means they’ve checked out.”
She paused while she used one of the small extractors to remove the seal that linked the wrist to the glove. Once she had it out, she reached for a good one.
“You think this will change that? Saving your friend?”
Juliette looked up and studied Solo, who was almost done with the tape.
“Saving my friend is all about saving my friend,” she said. “What I think will happen, when all those people on that fence see that a cleaner has come home, I think it’ll make them come down on the right side of things, and with that much support, the guns and the fighting are meaningless.”
Solo nodded. He began to fold up the blanket without even being asked. This bit of initiative, of knowing what needed to happen next, filled Juliette with hope. Maybe he needed these kids, someone to take care of. He seemed to have aged a dozen years already.
“I’ll come back for you and the others,” she told him.
He dipped his head, kept his eyes on her a while, his brain seeming to whir. He came to her workbench and set the neatly folded blanket down, patted it twice. A quick smile flashed in his beard, and then he had to turn away, had to scratch his cheek as if he had an itch there.
He was still a teenager like that, Juliette saw. Still ashamed to cry.
••••
Nearly four of Lukas’s final hours were burned hiking the heavy gear up to level three. The kids had helped, but she made them stop one level down, worried about the air up top. Solo assisted her in suiting up for the second time in as many days. He studied her somberly.
“You’re sure about this?”
She nodded and accepted the blanket of heat tape. Rickson could be heard a level below, commanding one of the boys to settle down.
“Try not to worry,” she told him. “What happens, happens. But I have to try.”
Solo frowned and scratched his chin. He nodded. “You’re used to being around your people,” he said. “Probably happier there anyway.”
Juliette reached out and squeezed his arm with one of her thick gloves. “It’s not that I would be miserable here, it’s that I would be miserable knowing I let him go out without trying something.”
“And I was just starting to get used to having you here.” He turned his head to the side, bent over and grabbed her helmet from the decking.
Juliette checked her gloves, made sure everything was wrapped tightly, and looked up. The climb to the top would be brutal with the suit on. She dreaded it. And then navigating the remains of all those people in the sheriff’s office and getting through the airlock doors. She accepted the helmet, scared of what she was about to do despite her convictions.
“Thanks for everything,” she said. She felt like she was doing more than saying goodbye. She knew there was a very good chance that she was doing willingly what Bernard had attempted so many weeks ago. Her cleaning had been delayed, but now she was going back to it.
Solo nodded and stepped around her to check her back. He patted the velcro, tugged on her collar. “You’re good,” he said, his voice cracking.
“You take care of yourself, Solo.” She reached out and patted his shoulder. She had decided to carry the helmet one more flight up before putting it on, just to conserve her air.
“Jimmy,” he said. “I think I’m going back to being called Jimmy, now.”
He smiled at Juliette. Shook his head sadly, but smiled.
“I’m not going to be alone anymore,” he told her.
28
• •
Juliette made her way through the airlock doors and up the ramp, ignoring the dead around her, just focusing on each step, and the hardest part was over. The rest was open space and the scattered remains she wished
she could pretend were boulders. Finding her way was easy. She simply turned her back on that crumbling metropolis in the distance, the one she had set off for so very long ago, and began to walk away from it.
As she picked her way across the landscape, the sight of the occasional dead seemed sadder now than during that previous hike, more tragic for having shared their home for a while. Juliette was careful not to disturb them, passed them with the solemnity they deserved, wishing she could do more than feel sorry for them.
Eventually, they thinned, and she and the landscape were left alone. Trudging up that windswept hill, the sound of fine soil peppering her helmet became oddly familiar and strangely comforting. This was the world in which she lived, in which they all lived. Through the clear dome of her helmet, she saw it all as clearly as it could be seen. The speeding clouds hung angry and gray; sheets of dust whipped sideways and low to the ground; jagged rocks looked like they’d been sheared from some larger piece, perhaps by the machines that had crafted these hills.
When she reached the crest, she paused to take in the vista around her. The wind was fierce up there, her body exposed. She planted her boots wide so she wouldn’t topple over and peered down into the inverted dome before her, at the flattened roof of her home. There was a mix of excitement and dread. The low sun had only barely cleared the distant hills, and the sensor tower below was still in shadow, still in nighttime. She would make it. But before she started down the hill, she found herself gazing, amazed, at the scattering of depressions marching toward the horizon. They were just like the silo schematic, evenly spaced depressions, fifty of them.
And it occurred to her, suddenly and with a violent force, that countless others were going about their days nearby. People alive. More silos than just hers and Solo’s. Silos unaware, packed with people waking up for work, to go to school, maybe even to cleaning.
She turned in place and took it all in, wondering if maybe there was someone else out on that landscape at the exact same time as her wearing a similar suit, a completely different set of fears racing through their mind. If she could call out to them, she would. If she could wave to all the hidden sensors, she would.
The world took on a different scope, a new scale from this height. Her life had been cast away weeks ago, likely should have ended. If not on the slope of that hill in front of her home, then surely in the flooded deeps of silo 17. But it hadn’t ended like that. It would probably end here, instead, this morning with Lukas. They might burn in that airlock together if her hunch was wrong. Or they could lie in the crook of that hill and waste away as a couple, a couple whose kinship had been formed by desperate talks lingering into the night, an intense bond between two stranded souls that was never spoken nor admitted to.
Juliette had promised herself never to love in secret again, never to love at all. And somehow this time was worse: she had kept it a secret even from him. Even from herself.
Maybe it was the proximity of death talking, the reaper buffeting her clear helmet with sand and toxins. What did any of it matter, seeing how wide and full the world was? Her silo would probably go on. Other silos surely would. And the things that she thought mattered—suddenly shrank. It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.
A mighty gust of wind struck her, nearly ripping the folded blanket out of her hands. Juliette steadied herself, gathered her wits, and began the much easier descent toward her home. She ducked down below the crest with its sobering views and saddening heights, out of the harsh and caustic winds. She followed that crook where two hills met, winding her way toward the sad sight of a couple buried in plain view, who marked her fateful, desperate, and weary way home.
••••
She arrived at the ramp early. There was no one on the landscape, the sun still hidden behind the hills. As she hurried down the slope, she wondered what anyone would think if they saw her on the sensors, stumbling toward the silo.
At the bottom of the ramp, she stood close to the heavy steel doors and waited. She checked the heat tape blanket, ran through the procedure in her mind. Every scenario had been thought of either during her climb, in her mad dreams, or during the walk through the wild outside. This would work, she told herself. The mechanics were sound. The only reason no one survived a cleaning was because they never had help; they couldn’t bring tools or resources. But she had.
Time seemed to pass not at all. It was like her delicate and precious watch when she forgot to wind it. The trapped soil along the edge of the ramp shifted about impatiently with her, and Juliette wondered if maybe the cleaning had been called off, if she would die alone. That would be better, she told herself. She took a deep breath, wishing she would’ve brought more air, enough for a return trip, just in case. But she had been too worried about the cleaning going through to consider that it might not.
After a long wait, her nerves swelling and heart racing, she heard a noise inside, a metallic scraping of gears.
Juliette tensed, her arms rippling with chills, her throat constricting. This was it. She shifted in place, listening to the great grind of those heavy doors as they prepared to disgorge poor Lukas. She unfolded part of the heat blanket and waited. It would all go so quickly. She knew. But she would be in control. No one could come in and stop her.
With a terrible screech, the doors to silo 18 parted, and a hiss of argon blasted out at her. Juliette leaned into it. The fog consumed her. She pushed blindly forward, groping ahead of herself, the blanket flapping noisily against her chest. She expected to run into him, to find herself wrestling a startled and frightened man, had prepared herself to need to wrestle him, hold him down, get him wrapped up tightly in the blanket—
But there was no one in the doorway, no body struggling to get out, to get away from the coming purge of flames.
Juliette practically fell into the airlock; her body expected resistance like a boot at the top of a darkened stairway and found instead empty space.
As the argon cleared and the door began to grind shut, she had a brief hope, a tiny fantasy, that there was no cleaning. That the doors had simply been opened for her, welcoming her back. Maybe someone had seen her on the hillside and had taken a chance, had forgiven her, and all would be okay—
But as soon as she could see through the billowing gas, she saw that this was not the case. A man in a cleaning suit was kneeling in the center of the airlock, hands on his thighs, facing the inner door.
Lukas.
Juliette raced to him as a halo of light bloomed in the room, the fire nozzles spitting on and reflecting off the shimmering plastic. The door thunked shut behind her, locking them both inside.
Juliette shook the blanket loose and shuffled around so he could see her, so he would know he wasn’t alone.
The suit couldn’t hide the shock. Lukas startled, his arms leaping up in alarm, even as the flames began to lance out.
She nodded, knowing he could see her through her clear dome, even if she couldn’t see him. With a sweeping twirl she had practiced in her mind a thousand times, she spread the blanket over his head and knelt down swiftly, covering herself as well.
It was dark under the heat tape. The temperature outside was rising. She tried to shout to Lukas that it was going to be okay, but her voice sounded muffled even inside her own helmet. Tucking the edges of the blanket down beneath her knees and feet, she wiggled until it was tightly pinned. She reached forward and tried to tuck the material under him as well, making sure his back was fully protected.
Lukas seemed to know what she was doing. His gloved hands fell to her arms and rested there. She could feel how still he was, how calm. She couldn’t believe he was going to wait, had chosen to burn rather than clean. She couldn’t remember anyone ever making that choice. This worried her as they huddled together in the darkness, everything growing warm.
The flames licked against the heat tape, striking the blanket with enough force to be felt, like a buffeting wind. The temperature shot up, sweat leaping out on he
r lip and forehead, even with all the superior lining of her suit. The blanket wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t keep Lukas alive in his suit. The fear in her heart was only for him, even as her skin began to heat up.
Her panic seemed to leach into him, or maybe he was feeling the burns even worse. His hands trembled against her. And then she literally felt him go mad, felt him change his mind, begin to burn, something.
Lukas pushed her away from himself. Bright light entered their protective dome as he began to crawl out from under it, kicking away.
Juliette screamed for him to stop. She scrambled after him, clutching his arm, his leg, his boot, but he stomped her, kicked at her, beat her with his fists, frantically tried to get away.
The blanket fell off her head, and the light nearly blinded her. She felt the intense heat, could hear her dome pop and make noises, saw the clear bubble dip in above her and warp. She couldn’t see Lukas, couldn’t feel him, just saw blinding light and felt searing heat, scorching her wherever her suit crinkled against her body. She screamed in pain and yanked the blanket back over her head, covering the clear plastic.
And the flames raged on.
She couldn’t feel him. Couldn’t see him. There would be no way to find him. A thousand burns erupted across her body like so many knives gouging her flesh. Juliette sat alone under that thin film of protection, burning up, enduring the raging flames, and wept hot tears. Her body convulsed with sobs and anger, cursing the fire, the pain, the silo, the entire world.
Until eventually—she had no more tears and the fuel ran its course. The boiling temperature dropped to a mere scalding, and Juliette could safely shrug off the steaming blanket. Her skin felt as if it were on fire. It burned wherever it touched the interior of her suit. She looked for Lukas and found she didn’t have to look far.
He was lying against the door, his suit charred and flaking in the few places it remained intact. His helmet was still in place, saving her the horror of seeing his young face, but it had melted and deformed far worse than hers. She crawled closer, aware that the door behind her was opening, that they were coming for her, that it was all over. She had failed.
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