He didn’t answer. It was hard to tell if that was a shrug, or if he was adjusting his grip.
They passed another landing. Nelson and Sophia had taped the doors off, but faces watched from behind dirty glass. Juliette spotted an elderly woman holding a bright cross against the glass. As she turned, the woman rubbed the cross and kissed it, and Juliette thought of Father Wendel and the idea that she was bringing fear, not hope, to the silo. Hope was what he and the church offered, some place to exist after death. Fear came from the chance that changing the world for the better could possibly make it worse.
She waited until they were beneath the landing. “Hey, Luke?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you ever wonder what happens to us after we’re gone?”
“I know what happens to us,” he said. “We get slathered in butter and chewed off the cob.”
He laughed at his own joke.
“I’m serious. Do you think our souls join the clouds and find some better place?”
His laughter stopped. “No,” he said after a long pause. “I think we simply stop being.”
They descended a turn and passed another landing, another door taped off and sealed as a precaution. Juliette realized their voices were drifting up and down a quiet and empty stairwell.
“It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be around one day,” Lukas said after a while. “I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”
Again, he adjusted his grip or shrugged. It was impossible to say.
“I’ll tell you what does last forever.” He turned his head to make sure she could hear, and Juliette braced for something corny like “love” or something unfunny like “your casseroles”.
“What lasts forever?” she obliged, sure to regret it but sensing that he was waiting for her to ask.
“Our decisions,” he said.
“Can we stop a moment?” Juliette asked. There was a burn where the strap rubbed across her neck. She set her end down on a step, and Lukas held his half to keep the trunk level. She checked the knot and stepped around to switch shoulders. “I’m sorry – ‘our decisions’?” She had lost him.
Lukas turned to face her. “Yeah. Our actions, you know? They last forever. Whatever we do, it’ll always be what we did. There’s no taking them back.”
This wasn’t the answer she was expecting. There was sadness in his voice as he said these things, that box resting against his knee, and Juliette was moved by the utter simplicity of his answer. Something resonated, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “Tell me more,” she said. She looped the strap around her other shoulder and readied to lift it again. Lukas held the rail with one hand and seemed content to rest there a moment longer.
“I mean, the world goes around the sun, right?”
“According to you.” She laughed.
“Well, it does. The Legacy and the man from Silo 1 confirm it.”
Juliette scoffed as if neither could be trusted. Lukas ignored her and continued.
“That means we don’t exist in one place. Instead, everything we do is left in … like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take—”
“And mistake.”
He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”
“Makes you not want to fuck up,” Juliette said, thinking on all the times she had, wondering if this box between them was one more mistake. She saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot.
And the stains would never wash out. That’s what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed. Always have had a brother die and a mother take her own life. Always have had taken that damn job as sheriff.
There was no going back. Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.
“You okay?” Lukas asked. “Ready to go on?”
But she knew he was asking more than if her arm was tired. He had this ability to spot her secret worries. He had a keen vision that allowed him to glimpse the smallest pinprick of hurt through heavy clouds.
“I’m fine,” she lied. And she searched her past for some noble deed, for a bloodless tread, for any touch on the world that had left it a brighter place. But when she had been sent to clean, she had refused. Always have had refused. She had turned her back and walked off, and there was no chance of going back and doing it any other way.