While Lukas saw how the preparations for her return were going, Juliette trudged toward the nearest hill. Her old footsteps had been worn away by a light rain, but she remembered the path well. The crease in the hill stood like an inviting stairway, a ramp on which two forms still nestled.
She stopped at the base of the hill and pulled out another container with gaskets and heat tape inside. The cap came off easily. She held it up to the wind, allowing whatever blew inside to become trapped. For all they knew, these were the first tests made of the outside air. Reams and reams of bogus reports from previous cleanings had been nothing but numbers used to uphold and justify fears. It was a charade of progress, of efforts being made to right the world, when all they ever cared about was selling the story of how wrong it was.
The only thing more impressive to Juliette than the depths of the conspiracy had been the speed and relief with which its mechanisms had crumbled within IT. The men and women of level thirty-four reminded her of the children of Silo 17, frightened and wide-eyed and desperate for some adult they could cling to and trust. This foray of hers to test the outside air was looked upon with suspicion and fear elsewhere in the silo, but in IT, where they had pretended to do this work for generations, the chance to truly investigate had been seized by many with wild abandon.
Damn!
Juliette slapped the cover on the container. Her mind had wandered; she had forgotten to count to ten, had probably gone twice that.
“Hey, Jules?”
She squeezed her fingers together. “Yeah?” Releasing the mic, she locked the lid tight, made sure it said “2” on the top, and sealed the edges. She put it away with the other container, cursing her inattention.
“The airlock burn is complete. Nelson went in afterward to get things ready for you, but they’re saying it’s gonna be a while to charge the argon again. Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
She took a moment to survey herself and give an honest answer. A few deep breaths. Wiggled her joints. Looked up at the dark clouds to make sure her vision and balance were normal.
“Yeah. I feel fine.”
“Okay. And they are going to go with the flames when you come back. It looks like they really might’ve been necessary. We were getting some strange readings in the airlock before you left. As a precaution, Nelson is getting a scrub-down in the inner lock right now. We’ll have everything prepped for you as fast as we can.”
Juliette didn’t like the sound of any of that. Her passage through the Silo 17 airlock had been terrifying, but with no lasting consequences. Dumping soup on herself had been enough to survive. The theory they had been working under was that conditions outside weren’t as bad as they’d been led to believe, and that the flames were more a deterrent against not leaving the airlock than an actual necessity for cleansing the air. The challenge with this mission of hers was getting back inside without enduring another burn or another stint in the hospital. But she couldn’t put the silo at risk, either.
She squeezed her fingers together, thinking suddenly of all that was at stake. “Is there still a crowd up there watching?” she asked Lukas.
“Yeah. There’s a lot of excitement in the air. People can’t believe this is happening.”
“I want you to clear them out,” she said.
She let go of her thumb. There was no reply.
“Lukas? Do you read me? I want you to get everyone down to at least level four. Clear out anyone not working on this, okay?”
She waited.
“Yeah,” Lukas said. There was a lot of noise in the background. “We’re doing that right now. Trying to keep everyone calm.”
“Tell them it’s just a precaution. Because of the readings in the airlock.”
“Doing that.”
He sounded winded. Juliette hoped she wasn’t causing a panic for no reason.
“I’m going to get the last sample,” she said, focusing on the task at hand. They had prepared for the worst. Everything was going to be okay. She was thankful for the crude sensors they’d installed in the airlock. The next time out, she hoped to install a permanent array on the tower. But she couldn’t get too far ahead of herself. She approached one of the cleaners at the base of the hill.
The body they’d chosen belonged to Jack Brent. It had been nine years since he’d been sent to clean, having gone mad after his wife’s second miscarriage. Juliette knew very little else about him. And that had been her main criterion for the final sample.