“You heard …” She wiped her eyes again. “Lukas—” she muttered.
“It wasn’t Lukas. That technician, Nelson, came by for a check-up, asked me if I was going to be on standby in case anything went wrong. I had to pretend to know what he was talking about. I assume you were going to announce your plans out there just now?” He glanced toward the cloakroom.
“We need to know what’s out there,” Juliette said. “Dad, they haven’t been trying to make it better. We don’t know the first thing—”
“Then let the next cleaner see. Let them sample when they’re sent out. Not you.”
She shook her head. “There won’t be anymore cleaning, Dad. Not while I’m mayor. I won’t send anyone out there.”
He placed a hand on her arm. “And I won’t let my daughter go.”
She pulled away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to. I’m taking every precaution. I promise.”
Her father’s face hardened. He turned his hand over and gazed at his palm.
“We could use your help,” she said, hoping to bridge any new rift she feared she was creating. “Nelson’s right. It would be nice to have a doctor on the team.”
“I don’t want any part in this,” he said. “Look what happened to you the last time.” He glanced at her neck, where the suit’s metal collar had left a hook of a scar.
“That was the fire,” Juliette told him, adjusting her coveralls.
“And the next time it’ll be something else.”
They studied one another in that chamber where people were quietly judged, and Juliette felt a familiar temptation to run away from conflict. It was countered by a new desire to bury her face in her father’s chest and sob in a way that women her age weren’t allowed, that mechanics never could.
“I don’t want to lose you again,” she told her dad. “You’re the only family I’ve got left. Please support me in this.”
It was difficult to say. Vulnerable and honest. A part of Lukas now lived inside of her – this was something he had imparted.
Juliette waited for the reaction and saw her father’s face relax. It may have been her imagination, but she thought he moved a step closer, let down his guard.
“I’ll give you a check-up before and after,” he said.
“Thank you. Oh, speaking of a check-up, there’s something else I wanted to ask you about.” She worked the long sleeve of her coveralls up her forearm and studied the white marks along her wrist. “Have you ever heard of scars going away with time? Lukas thought—” She looked up at her father. “Do they ever go away?”
Her father took a deep breath and held it awhile. His gaze drifted over her shoulder and far away.
“No,” he said. “Not scars. Not even with time.”
Silo 1
16
Captain Brevard was nearly through his seventh shift. Only three more to go. Three more shifts of sitting behind security gates reading the same handful of novels over and over until the yellowed pages gave up and fell out. Three more shifts of whipping his deputies at table tennis – a new deputy on each shift – and telling them that it’d been forever since he’d last played. Three more shifts of the same old food and the same old movies and the same old everything else bland that greeted him when he woke. Three more. He could make it.
Silo 1’s Security chief now counted down shifts much as he had once counted down years to retirement. Let them be uneventful, was his mantra. The blandness was good. Vanilla was the taste of passing time. Such was his thought as he stood before an open cryopod splattered with dried blood, a foul taste very un-vanilla-like in his mouth.
A pop of blinding light erupted from Deputy Stevens’s camera as the young man took another shot of the pod’s interior. The body had been removed hours ago. A med tech had been servicing a neighboring pod when he noticed a smear of blood on the lid of this one. He had cleaned half the smear away before he realized what it was. Brevard now studied the tracks that the med tech’s cleaning rag had left behind. He took another bitter sip of coffee.
His mug had lost its steam. It was the cold air in that warehouse of bodies. Brevard hated it down there. He hated waking up naked in that place, hated being brought back down and put to sleep, hated what the room did to his coffee. He took another sip. Three shifts left, and then retirement, whatever that meant. Nobody thought along that far. Only to their next shift.
Stevens lowered his camera and nodded toward the exit. “Darcy’s back, sir.”
The two officers watched as Darcy, the night guard, crossed the hall of cryopods. Darcy had been first on the scene early that morning, had woken Deputy Stevens, who had woken his superior. Darcy had then refused to slag off and get some sleep as ordered. He had instead accompanied the body up to Medical and had volunteered to wait on test results while the other men went over the crime scene. Darcy now waved a piece of paper a bit too enthusiastically as he headed their way.