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.