“Shirly—?”
“Our home was poisoned, Court. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was. People were dying up top. I heard from Peter and—” She caught her breath. “From Luke. Peter saw the outside. The outside. The doors had opened and people were dying. And Luke—” Juliette bit her lip until the pain cleared her thoughts. “The first thing I thought of was to get everyone over here, because I knew it was safe here—”
A bark of laughter from Courtnee. “Safe? You think it’s …?” She took a step closer to Juliette, and suddenly no one was digging. Juliette’s father placed a hand on his daughter’s arm and tried to pull her back, but Juliette held her ground.
“You think it’s safe over here?” Courtnee hissed. “Where the hell are we? There’s a room back there that looks a goddamn lot like our gen room, except that it’s a rusted wreck. You think those machines will ever spin again? How much air do we have over here? How much fuel? What about food and water? I give us a few days if we don’t get back home. That’s a few days of dead-out digging, mostly by hand. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us, bringing us over here?”
Juliette withstood the barrage. She welcomed it. She longed to add a few stones of her own.
“I did this,” she said. She pulled away from her father and faced the diggers, whom she knew well. She turned and threw her voice down the dark pit from which she’d just come. “I did this!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, sending her words barreling toward those she’d damned and doomed. Again, she screamed: “I did this!” and her throat burned from the soot and the sting of the admission, her chest cracking open and raw with misery. She felt a hand on her shoulder, her father again. The only sounds, once her echoes died down, were the crackle and whisper of open flames.
“I caused this,” she said, nodding. “We shouldn’t have come here to begin with. We shouldn’t. Maybe my digging is the reason they poisoned us, or my going outside, but the air over here is clean. I promised you all that this place was here and that the air was fine. And now I’m telling you, just as surely, that our home is lost. It is poisoned. Opened to the outside. Everyone we left behind—” She tried to catch her breath, her heart empty, her stomach in knots. Again, her father propped her up. “Yes, it was my fault. My prodding. That’s why the man who did this—”
“Man?” Courtnee asked.
Juliette surveyed her former friends, men and women she had worked alongside for years. “A man, yes. From one of the silos. There are fifty silos just like ours—”
“So you’ve told us,” one of the diggers said gruffly. “So the maps say.”
Juliette searched him out. It was Fitz, an oilman and former mechanic. “And do you not believe me, Fitz? Do you now believe that there are only two in all the universe and that they were this near to one another? That the rest of that map is a lie? I am telling you that I stood on a ridge and I saw them with my own eyes. While we stand here in this dark pit choking on fumes, there are tens of thousands of people going about their days, days like we once knew—”
“And you think we should be digging toward them?”
Juliette hadn’t considered that. “Maybe,” she said. “That might be our only way out of this, if we can reach them. But first we need to know who is over there and if it’s safe. It might be as ruined as our silo. Or as empty as this one. Or full of people not at all happy to see us. The air could be toxic when we push through. But I can tell you that there are others.”
One of those digging slid down the rubble to join the conversation. “And what if everything is fine on the other side of this pile? Aren’t you the one who always has to go look and see?”
Juliette absorbed the blow. “If everything is fine over there, then they will come for us. We will hear from them. I would love for that to be true, for this to happen. I would love to be wrong. But I’m not.” She studied their dark faces. “I’m telling you that there’s nothing over there but death. You think I don’t want to hope? I’ve lost … we’ve all lost people we love. I listened as men I loved and cared about breathed their last, and you don’t think I want to get over there and see for myself? To bury them proper?” She wiped her eyes. “Don’t you think for a moment that I don’t want to grab a shovel and work three shifts until we’re through to them. But I know that I would be burying those of us who are left. We would be tossing this dirt and these rocks right into our own graves.”
No one spoke. Somewhere, gravity won a delicate struggle against a rock, and the loose stone tumbled with clacks and clatters toward their feet.