“Yes, you did. Well, now they have to tunnel their way through solid rock to get to us. That won’t be easy.”
“Hannah says there’ll be dozens and dozens of people after Jewel comes.”
Jimmy swallowed. “Hundreds,” he said hoarsely. “Thousands, even.”
Elise squeezed his hand. Another dozen steps went by, both of them quietly counting. It was difficult for either of them to count so high.
“Rickson says they aren’t coming to rescue us, but that they want our silo.”
“Yes, well, he sees the bad in people,” Jimmy said. “Just like you see the good in them.”
Elise looked up at Jimmy. Both of them had lost their count. He wondered if she could imagine what thousands of people would be like. He could barely remember himself.
“I wish he could see the good in people like me,” she said.
Jimmy stopped before they got to the next landing. Elise clutched his hand and her swinging satchel and stopped with him. He knelt to be closer to her. When Elise pouted, he could see the gap left by her missing tooth.
“There’s a bit of good in all people,” Jimmy said. He squeezed Elise’s shoulder, could feel a lump forming in his throat. “But there’s bad as well. Rickson is probably more right than wrong at times.”
He hated to say it. Jimmy hated to fill Elise’s head with such things. But he loved her as though she were his own. And he wanted to give her the great steel doors she would need if the silo were to grow full again. It was why he allowed her to cut up the books inside the tin cans and take the pages she liked. It was why he helped her choose which ones were important. The ones he chose were the ones for helping her survive.
“You’ll need to start seeing the world with Rickson’s eyes,” Jimmy said, hating himself for it. He stood and pulled her down the steps this time, no longer counting. He wiped his eyes before Elise noticed him crying, before she asked him one of her easy questions with no easy answers at all.
6
It was difficult to leave the bright lights and comfort of his old home behind, but Jimmy had agreed to move down to the lower farms. The kids were comfortable there. They quickly resumed their work among the grow plots. And it was closer to the last of the dwindling floods.
Jimmy descended slick steps spotted with fresh rust and listened to the plopping tune of water hitting puddle and steel. Many of the green emergency lights had been drowned by the floods. Even those that worked held murky bubbles of trapped water. Jimmy thought about the fish that used to swim in what now was open air. A few had been found swimming around as the water retreated, even though he’d long ago thought he’d caught them all. Trapped in shallowing pools, they had proved too easy to catch. He had taught Elise how, but she had trouble getting them off the hook. She was forever dropping the slimy creatures back into the water. Jimmy jokingly accused her of doing it on purpose, and Elise admitted she liked catching them more than eating them. He had let her catch the last few fish over and over until he felt too sorry for the poor things to allow it to go on. Rickson and Hannah and the twins had been happy to put these desperate survivors out of their misery and into their bellies.
Jimmy glanced up beyond the rail overhead, picturing his bobber out there in the middle of the air. He imagined Shadow peering down and batting his paw at him, as if Jimmy were now the fish, trapped underwater. He tried to blow bubbles, but nothing came out, just the tickle of his whiskers against his nose.
Further down, a puddle gathered where the stairs bottomed out. The floor was flat here, wasn’t sloped to drain. The floods were never meant to get so high. Jimmy flicked on his torch, and the beam cut through the dismal darkness deep inside Mechanical. An electrical wire snaked through the open passageway and draped across a security station. A tangle of hose traced along beside it before doubling back on itself. The cable and the hose knew the way to the pumps; they had been left behind by Juliette.
Jimmy followed their trail. His first time to the bottom of the stairs, he had found the plastic dome of her helmet. It was among a raft of trash and debris and sludge, all the foulness left over once the water was gone. He had tried to clean it up as much as he could, had found his small metal washers – the ones that anchored his old paper parachutes – like silver coins among the detritus. Much of the garbage from the floods remained. The only thing he had saved from it all was the plastic dome of her helmet.