by Hugh Howey
••••
Juliette was in the forties when it occurred to her that she might not make it. The sweat she’d worked up was chilling her skin; her legs were beyond the ache, beyond the pain; they were numb with fatigue. She found her arms doing a lot of the work as she lunged ahead, gripped the railing with clammy hands and hauled herself up another two steps.
Her breathing was ragged. It had been for half a dozen levels. She wondered if she’d done damage to her lungs from the underwater ordeal. Was that possible? She had no idea. Her father would know. She thought of spending the rest of her life without a doctor, of teeth as yellow as Solo’s, of caring for a growing child and the challenge of seeing that more weren’t made.
At the next landing, she again touched her hip where her birth control rode under her skin. Such things made more sense in light of silo 17. So much about her previous life made sense. Things that once seemed twisted now had a sort of pattern. A logic about them. The expense of sending a wire, the spacing of the levels, the single and cramped stairway, the bright colors for particular jobs, dividing the silo into sections, breeding mistrust . . . it was all designed. She’d seen hints of this before, but never knew why. Now this empty silo told her, the presence of these kids told her. It turned out some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.
Her mind wandered while she climbed, wandered in order to avoid the aches in her muscles, to escape the day’s ordeals. When she finally hit the thirties it gave her, if not an end to the suffering, a renewed focus. She stopped trying the portable radio as often. The static never changed, and she had a different idea for contacting Walker, something she should have pieced together sooner, a way to bypass the servers and communicate with other silos. It was there all along, staring her and Solo in the face. There was a small sliver of doubt that she might be wrong, but why else lock up a radio that was already locked up two other ways? It only made sense if that device was supremely dangerous. Which is what she hoped it would be.
She stomped up to thirty-five dead on her feet. Her body had never been pushed this hard, not even while plumbing the small pump, not during her trek through the outside. Will alone helped her lift each foot, plant it, straighten her leg, pull with her arm, lunge forward for another grab. One step at a time, now. Her toe banged on the next step as she could barely lift her boot high enough. The green emergency lights gave her no sense of the passing of time, no idea if night had come, when morning would be. She desperately missed her watch. All she had these days was her knife. She laughed at the switch, at having gone from counting the seconds in her life to fending for each and every one of them.
Thirty-four. It was tempting to collapse to the steel grating, to sleep, to curl up like her first night in that place, just thankful to be alive. Instead, she pulled the door open, amazed at the effort this required, and stepped back into civilization. Light. Power. Heat.
She staggered down the hallway with her vision so constricted it was as if she could only see through some straw at her center, everything else out of focus and spinning.
Her shoulder brushed the wall. Walking required effort. All she wanted was to go call Lukas, to hear his voice. She imagined falling asleep behind that server, warm air blowing over her from its fans, the headphones tight against her ears. He could murmur to her about the faraway stars while she slept for days and days—
But Lukas would wait. Lukas was locked up and safe. She had all the time in the world to call him.
She turned instead into the suit lab, shuffled toward the tool wall, didn’t dare look at her cot. A glance at her cot, and she’d wake up the next day. Whatever day that was.
Grabbing the bolt cutters, she was about to leave, but went back for the small sledge as well. The tools were heavy, but they felt good in her hands, one tool in each, pulling down on her arms, stretching her muscles and grounding her, keeping her stable.
At the end of the hall, she pressed her shoulder against the heavy door to the server room. She leaned until it squeaked open. Just a crack. Just wide enough for her. Juliette hurried as much as her numb muscles would allow toward the ladder. Shuffling. Fast as she could go.
The grate was in place; she tugged it out of the way and dropped the tools down. Big noise. She didn’t care—they couldn’t break. Down she went, hands slick, chin catching a rung, floor coming up faster than she’d anticipated.
Juliette sank to her butt, sprawled out, shin banging the sledge. It took a force of will, an act of God, to get up. But she did.
Down the hall and past the small desk. There was a steel cage there, a radio, a big one. She remembered her days as sheriff. They had a radio just like it in her office, used it to call Marnes when he was on patrol, to call Hank and Deputy Marsh. This one was different. She remembered something Lukas said once, about listening in, about wishing he could talk to her down below where it was comfortable.
He meant this radio.
She set the sledge down and pinched the jaws of the cutter on one of the hinges. Squeezing was too hard. Her arms shook. They trembled.
Juliette adjusted herself, put one of the handles against her neck, cradled it with her collarbone and shoulder. She grabbed the other handle with both hands and pulled toward herself, hugging the cutters. Squeezing. She felt them move.
There was a loud crack, the twang of splitting steel. She moved to the other hinge and did it again. Her collarbone hurt where the handle dug in, felt like it might be the thing to crack, not the hinge.
Another violent burst of metal.
Juliette grabbed the steel cage and pulled. The hinges came away from the mounting plate. She tore hungrily at the box, trying to get to the prize inside, thinking of Walker and all her family, all her friends, the sound of people screaming in the background. She had to get them to stop fighting. Get everyone to stop fighting.
Once she had enough gap between the bent steel and the wall, she wrapped her fingers around this and tugged, bending the protective cage on its front edge, tilting the box away from the wall, the shelf, revealing the entire radio unit beneath. Who needed keys? Screw keys. She wrenched the cage flat, then bent her weight on it, making a new hinge of its front, warping it out of the way.
The dial on the front seemed familiar. She turned it to power the unit on and found that it clicked instead of spinning. Juliette knelt down, panting and exhausted, sweat running down her neck. There was another switch for power; she turned this one instead, static rising in the speakers, a buzz filling the room.
The other knob. This was what she wanted, what she expected to find. She thought it might be patch cables like the back of the server, or dip switches like a pump control, but it was tiny numbers arranged around the edge of a knob. Juliette smiled, exhausted, and dialed the pointer to 18. Home. She grabbed the mic and squeezed the button.
“Walker? Are you there?”
Juliette slumped down to the ground and rested her back against the desk. With her eyes shut, mic by her face, she could imagine going to sleep like that. She saw what Lukas meant. This was comfortable.
She squeezed again. “Walk? Shirly? Please answer me.”
The radio crackled to life.
Juliette opened her eyes. She stared up at the unit, her hands trembling.
A voice:
“Is this who I think it is?”
The voice was too high, too high to be Walker. She knew this voice. Where did she know it from? She was tired and confused. She squeezed the button on the mic.
“This is Juliette. Who is this?”
Was it Hank? She thought it might be Hank. He had a radio. Maybe she had the wrong silo completely. Maybe she’d screwed up.
“I need radio silence,” the voice demanded. “All of them off. Now.”
Was this directed at her? Juliette’s mind spun in circles. A handful of voices chimed in, one after the other. There were pops of static. Was she supposed to say something? She was confused.
&n
bsp; “You shouldn’t be transmitting on this frequency,” the voice said. “You could be put to cleaning for such things.”
Juliette’s hand fell to her lap. She slumped against the wooden desk, dejected. She recognized the voice.
Bernard.
For weeks, she had been hoping to speak to this man, had been silently begging for him to answer. But not now. Now, she had nothing to say. She wanted to talk to her friends, to make things okay.
She squeezed the radio.
“No more fighting,” she said. All the will was drained from her. All desire for vengeance. She just wanted the world to quiet itself, for people to live and grow old and feed the roots one day—
“Speaking of cleanings,” the voice squeaked. “Tomorrow will be the first of many more to come. Your friends are lined up and ready to go. And I believe you know the lucky one who’s going first.”
There was a click, followed by the hiss and crinkle of static. Juliette didn’t move. She felt dead. Numb. The will was drained from her body.
“Imagine my surprise,” the voice said. “Imagine when I found out a decent man, a man I trusted, had been poisoned by you.”
She clicked the microphone with her fist but didn’t raise it to her mouth. She simply raised her voice instead.
“You’ll burn in hell,” she told him.
“Undoubtedly,” Bernard said. “Until then, I’m holding some things in my hand that I think belong to you. An ID with your picture on it, a pretty little bracelet, and this wedding ring that doesn’t look official at all. I wonder about that . . . ”
Juliette groaned. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. She could barely hear her thoughts. She managed to squeeze the mic, but it required every ounce of effort that she had left.
“What are you going on about, you twisted fuck?”
She spat the last, her head drifting to the side, her body craving sleep.
“I’m talking about Lukas, who betrayed me. We found some of your things on him just now. Exactly how long has he been talking to you? Well before the servers, right? Well guess what? I’m sending him your way. And I finally figured out what you did last time, what those idiots in Supply helped you do, and I want you to be assured, be very assured that your friend won’t have the same help. I’m going to build his suit personally. Me. I’ll stay up all night if I have to. So when he goes out in the morning, I can be sure that he gets nowhere near those blasted hills.”
26
• Silo 18 •
A group of kids thundered down the staircase as Lukas was escorted to his death. One of them squealed in delighted horror as if being chased. They spiraled closer, coming into view, and Lukas and Peter had to squeeze to one side to let them pass.
Peter played the sheriff role and yelled at the kids to slow down, to be careful. They giggled and continued their mad descent. School was out for the day, no more listening to adults.
While Lukas was pressed against the outer railing, he took a moment to consider the temptation. Freedom was just a jump away. A death of his own choosing, one he had considered in the past when moods turned dark.
Peter pulled him along, hand on his elbow, before Lukas could act. He was left admiring that graceful bar of steel, watching the way it curved and curved, always spinning the same amount, never ending. He pictured it corkscrewing through the earth, could sense its vibrations like some cosmic string, like a single strand of DNA at the silo’s core with all of life clinging to it.
Thoughts like these swirled as they gained another level on his death. He watched the welds go by, some of them neater than others. A few puckered up like scars; several had been polished so smoothly he almost missed them. Each was a signature by its creator, a work of pride here, a rushed job at the end of a long day there, a shadow learning for the first time, a seasoned pro who with decades of practice making it look all too easy.
He brushed his shackled hands over the rough paint, the bumps and puckers, the missing chips that revealed centuries of layers, of colors that changed with the times or with the supply of dyes or cost of paint. The layers reminded him of the wooden desk he’d stared down at for almost a month. Each little groove marked the passage of time, just as each name scratched into its surface marked a man’s mad desire to have more of it, to not let that time whisk his poor soul away.
For a long while, they marched in silence, a porter passing with a bulky load, a young couple looking guilty. Exiting the server vault had not been the stroll to freedom Lukas had longed for the past weeks. It had been an ambush, a march of shame, faces in doorways, faces on landings, faces on the stairway. Blank, unblinking faces. Faces of friends wondering if he was their enemy.
And maybe he was.
They would say he had broken down and uttered fateful taboo, but Lukas now knew why people were put out. He was the virus. If he sneezed the wrong words, it would kill everyone he knew. This was the path Juliette had walked and for the same absence of reason. He believed her, always had, always knew she’d done nothing wrong, but now he really understood. She was like him in so many ways. Except he would not survive, he knew that. Bernard had told him so.
They were ten levels up from IT when Peter’s radio buzzed with chatter. He took his hand off Lukas’s elbow to turn up the volume, see if it was for him.
“This is Juliette. Who is this?”
That voice.
Lukas’s heart leapt up a little before plummeting a very long way. He fixed his gaze on the railing and listened.
Bernard responded, asked for silence. Peter reached for his radio, turned it down but not off. The voices climbed with them, back and forth. Each step and each word ground down on Lukas, chipped away at him. He studied the railing and again considered true freedom.
A grab and a short leap up; a long flight.
He could feel himself going through the motions, bending his knees, throwing his feet over.
The voices in the radio argued. They said forbidden things. They were sloppy with secrets, thinking other ears were off.
Lukas watched his death play out over and over. His fate awaited him over that rail. The visual was so powerful, it wrecked his climbing pace, it affected his legs.
He slowed, Peter slowing with him. Each of them began to falter, to waver in their convictions. The strength in Lukas drained away, and he decided not to jump.
Both men were having second thoughts.
27
• Silo 17 •
Juliette woke up on a floor, someone shaking her. A man with a beard. It was Solo, and she was passed out in his room, by his desk.
“We made it,” he said, flashing his yellow teeth. He looked better than she remembered him looking. More alive. She felt as though she were dead.
Dead.
“What time is it?” she asked. “What day?”
She tried to sit up. Every muscle felt torn in half, disconnected, floating beneath her skin.
Solo went to the computer and turned on the monitor. “The others are picking out rooms and then going to the upper farms.” He turned to look at her. Juliette rubbed her temples. “There are others,” he said solemnly, like this was still news.
Juliette nodded. There was only one other that she could think of right then. Dreams came back to her, dreams of Lukas, of all her friends in holding cells, a room of suits being prepped for each of them, no care for whether they cleaned or not. It would be a mass slaughter, a symbol to those who remained. She thought of all the bodies outside of this silo, silo 17. It was easy to imagine what came next.
“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 rub
bed 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.”
