“Shhh,” Juliette said, resting a hand on his trembling shoulder. She looked to her father, who shook his head. There was nothing to be done for him.
Raph aimed the flashlight elsewhere. Further down, a mother rocked back and forth and wailed. She clutched a baby to her chest. The child seemed to be okay, its small arm reaching up for its mother, its hand opening and closing, but making no noise. So much had been lost. Everyone had what they could carry and nothing more, just whatever they had grabbed. Jomeson sobbed for what he had grabbed as floodwater trickled from the ceiling, a silo weeping, all but the children crying.
41
Juliette followed Raph through the great digger and into the tunnel. They walked a long way over piles of rocks, scampered over avalanches of tailings cascading down from both sides, saw clothes, a single boot, and a half-buried blanket that’d been dropped. Someone’s canteen lay forgotten, which Raph collected; he shook it and smiled when it sloshed.
In the distance, open flames bathed rock in orange and red, the raw meat of the earth exposed. A fresh pile of rubble sloped down from a full cave-in of the ceiling, the result of Shirly’s sacrifice. Juliette pictured her friend on the other side of those rocks. She saw Shirly slumped over in the generator control room, asphyxiated or poisoned or simply disintegrating in the outside air. This image of a friend lost joined that of Lukas in his small apartment below the servers, his young and lifeless hand relaxed around a silent radio.
Juliette’s radio had gone silent as well. There had been that brief transmission in the middle of the night from someone above them, a transmission that woke her up and that she had ended by announcing that everyone was dead. After that call, she had tried to reach Lukas. She had tried him over and over, but it hurt too much to listen to the static. She was killing herself and her battery by trying, had finally switched the unit off, had briefly considered calling on channel 1 to yell at the fucker who had betrayed her, but she didn’t want them to know any of her people had survived, that there were more of them out there to kill.
Juliette vacillated between fuming over the evil of what they’d done and mourning the loss of those they’d taken. She leaned against her father and followed Raph and Bobby toward the clinks and thwacks and shouts of digging. Right then, she needed to buy time, to save what was left. Her brain was in survival mode, her body numb and staggering. What she knew for sure was that joining the two silos yet again would mean the death of them all. She had seen the white mist descending the stairwell, knew that this wasn’t some harmless gas, had seen what was left of the gasket and heat tape. This was how they poisoned the outside air. It was how they ended worlds.
“Watch yer toes!” someone barked. A miner trundled by with a barrow of rubble. Juliette found herself walking up a sloping floor, the ceiling getting closer and closer. She could make out Courtnee’s voice ahead. Dawson’s too. Piles of tailings had been hauled away from the collapse to mark the progress already made. Juliette felt torn between the urge to warn Courtnee to stop what she was doing and the desire to jump forward and dig with her own hands, to bend her nails back as she clawed her way toward whatever had happened over there, death be damned.
“Okay, let’s clear that top back before we go any further. And what’s taking so long with the jack? Can we please get some hydraulics from the genset fed back here? Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean I can’t see you dregs slackin’—”
Courtnee fell silent when she saw Juliette. Her face hardened, her lips pressed tight. And Juliette could sense her friend was wavering between slapping her and hugging her. It stung that she did neither.
“You’re up,” Courtnee said.
Juliette averted her gaze and studied the piles of stone and rock. Soot swirled and settled from the burning diesel torches. It made the cold air deep inside the earth feel dry and thin, and Juliette worried about the oxygen being burned and whether the sparse farms of Silo 17 could keep up with the demand. And what about all the new lungs – hundreds of pairs of them – sucking that oxygen down as well?
“We need to talk about this,” Juliette said, waving at the cave-in.
“We can talk about what the hell happened here after we dig our way back home. If you want to grab a shovel—”
“This rock is the only thing keeping us alive,” Juliette said.
Several of those digging had already stopped when they saw who was talking to Courtnee. Courtnee barked at them to get back to work, and they did. Juliette didn’t know how to do this delicately. She didn’t know how to do it at all.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at—” Courtnee started.
“Shirly brought the roof down and saved us. If you dig through this, we’ll die. I’m sure of it.”