Juliette greeted Hyla and sized up the progress on the digger. The machine was cleaning up well, was in remarkable shape. She placed a hand on Bobby’s arm. “She’ll steer,” she assured him. “We’ll place iron wedges along the wall here on the right-hand side.” She pointed to the place. Overhead floodlights from the mines illuminated the dark rock. “When the back end presses on these wedges, it’ll force the front to the side.” With one hand representing the digger, she pushed on her wrist with the other, cocking her hand to show how it would maneuver.
Bobby reluctantly grumbled his agreement. “It’ll be slow going, but that might work.” He unfolded a sheet of fine paper, a schematic of all the silos, and studied the path Juliette had drawn. She had stolen the layout from Lukas’s hidden office, and her proposed dig traced an arc from Silo 18 to Silo 17, generator room to generator room. “We’ll have to wedge it downward as well,” Bobby told her. “She’s on an incline like she’s itchin’ to go up.”
“That’s fine. What’s the word on the bracing?”
Hyla studied the two adults and twisted a charcoal in one hand, held her slate in the other. Bobby glanced up at the ceiling and frowned.
“Erik’s not so keen on lending what he’s got. He says he can spare girders enough for a thousand yards. I told him you’d be wanting five or ten times that.”
“We’ll have to pull some out of the mines, then.” Juliette nodded to Hyla and her slate, suggesting she write that down.
“You mean to start wars down here, do you?” Bobby tugged on his beard, clearly agitated. Hyla stopped scratching on the slate and looked from one of her superiors to the other, not sure what to do.
“I’ll talk to Erik,” she told Bobby. “When I promise him the pile of steel girders we’ll find in the other silo, he’ll cave.”
Bobby lifted an eyebrow. “Bad choice of words.”
He laughed nervously while Juliette gestured to his daughter. “We’ll need thirty-six beams and seventy-two risers,” she said.
Hyla glanced guiltily at Bobby before jotting this down.
“If this thing moves, it’s gonna make a lot of dirt,” Bobby said. “Hauling the tailings from here to the crusher down in the mines is gonna make a mess and take as many men as the digging.”
The thought of the crushing room where tailings were ground to powder and vented to the exhaust manifold stirred painful memories. Juliette aimed her flashlight at Bobby’s feet, trying not to think of the past. “We won’t be expelling the tailings,” she told him. “Shaft six is almost directly below us. If we dig straight down, we hit it.”
“You mean to fill number six?” Bobby asked, incredulous.
“Six is nearly tapped out anyway. And we double our ore the moment we reach this other silo.”
“Erik’s gonna blow a gasket. You aren’t forgettin’ anybody, are you?”
Juliette studied her old friend. “Forgetting anybody?”
“Anyone you’re neglecting to piss off.”
Juliette ignored the jab and turned to Hyla. “Make a note to Courtnee. I want the backup generator fully serviced before it’s brought in. There won’t be room to pull the heads and check the seals once it’s fitted in here. The ceiling will be too low.”
Bobby followed as Juliette continued her inspection of the digger. “You’ll be here to look after that, won’t you?” he asked. “You’ll be here to couple the genset to this monster, right?”
She shook her head. “Afraid not. Dawson will be in charge of that. Lukas is right, I need to go up and make the rounds—”
“Bullshit,” Bobby said. “What’s this about, Jules? I’ve never seen you leave a project in half like this, not even if it meant working three shifts.”
Juliette turned and gave Hyla that look that all children and shadows know to mean their ears aren’t welcome. Hyla stayed back while the two old friends continued on.
“My being down here is causing unrest,” Juliette told Bobby, her voice quiet and swallowed by the vastness of the machine around them. “Lukas did the right thing to come get me.” She shot the old miner a cold look. “And I’ll beat you senseless if that gets back to him.”
He laughed and showed his palms. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m married.”
Juliette nodded. “It’s best you all dig while I’m elsewhere. If I’m to be a distraction, then let me be a distraction.” They reached the end of a void that the backup generator would soon fill. It was so clever, this arrangement, keeping the delicate engine out where it would be used and serviced. The rest of the digger was just steel and grinding teeth, gears packed tight with grease.
“These friends of yours,” Bobby said. “They’re worth all this?”
“They are.” Juliette studied her old friend. “But this isn’t just for them. This is for us too.”
Bobby chewed on his beard. “I don’t follow,” he said after a pause.
“We need to prove this works,” she said. “This is only the beginning.”
Bobby narrowed his eyes at her. “Well, if it ain’t the beginning of one thing,” he said, “I would hazard to say it spells the end of another.”
8