12
• Silo 17 •
The descent to Mechanical was oddly tranquil, almost mesmerizing. Juliette slid through the green flood, fending herself off the curved railing each time the staircase spiraled around beneath her feet. The only sounds anywhere were the hiss of air entering her helmet and the excess gurgling out the other side. A never-ending stream of bubbles rolled up her visor like beads of solder, drifting up in defiance of gravity.
Juliette watched these silver spheres chase one another and play like children through the metal stairs. They broke up where they touched the railing, leaving just minuscule dots of gas stuck to the surface, rolling and colliding. Others marched in wavy lines inside the stairway. They gathered in crowds beneath the hollow steps, bubbles becoming pockets of air that wobbled and caught the light radiating from the top of her helmet.
It was easy to forget where she was, what she was doing. The familiar had become distorted and strange. Everything seemed magnified by the plastic dome of her visor, and it was easy to imagine that she wasn’t sinking at all, but that the great stairway was rising, pushing up through the deep earth and heading toward the clouds. Even the sensation of the rope sliding through her gloved hands and across her padded belly felt more like something tugged inexorably from above rather than a line she was descending.
It wasn’t until she arched her back and looked straight up that Juliette remembered how much water was stacking up above her. The green glow of the emergency lights faded to an eerie black in the space of a landing or two. The light from her flashlight barely dented it. Juliette inhaled sharply and reminded herself that she had all the air in the silo. She tried to ignore the sensation of so much liquid piled up on her shoulders, of being buried alive. If she had to, if she panicked, she could just cut the weights free. One flick with the chef’s knife and she would bob right back to the surface. She told herself this as she continued to sink. Letting go of the rope with one hand, she patted for the knife, making sure it was still there.
“SLOWER!” her radio barked.
Juliette grabbed the rope with both hands and squeezed until she came to a stop. She reminded herself that Solo was up there, watching the air hose and electrical wires as they spooled off their neat coils. She imagined him tangled up in the lines, hopping around on one foot. Bubbles raced out of her overflow valve and jiggled through the lime water back toward the surface. She leaned her head back and watched them swirl around the taut rope, wondering what was taking him so long. In the undersides of the helical steps, the air pockets danced mercury silver, wavering in the turbulence of her passing—
“OKAY.” The radio speaker behind her neck crackled. “GOOD HERE.”
Juliette cringed from the volume of Solo’s voice and wished she’d checked that before closing up her helmet. There was no fixing it now.
With ears ringing and the silence and majesty of the tranquil descent broken, she slid down another level, keeping her pace steady and slow as she studied the slack in the wire and the air hose for any sign of their pulling taut. As she passed close to the landing of one-thirty-nine, she saw that one of the doors was missing; the other door had been wrenched violently on its hinges. The entire level must be flooded, which meant more water for the pumps to move. Just before the landing rose out of sight, she saw dark forms down the corridor, shadows floating in the water. The flashlight on her helmet barely illuminated a pale and bloated face before she drifted past, leaving the long dead to rise out of sight.
It hadn’t occurred to Juliette that she might come across more bodies. Not the drowned of course—the flood would’ve risen too slowly to take anyone by surprise—but any violence that occurred in the down deep would now be preserved in its icy depths. The chill of the water around her seemed to finally penetrate the layers of her suit. Or perhaps it was just her imagination.
Her boots thumped to the lowermost floor of the stairwell while she was still looking up, keeping an eye on the slack in the lines. Her knees were jarred by the startling end to her descent. It had taken her far less time than a dry hike would have.
With a grip on the rope for balance, Juliette let go with her other hand and waved it through the thick atmosphere of green groundwater. She dipped her chin against the radio switch. “I’m down,” she transmitted to Solo.
She took a few lumbering and tentative steps, waving her arms and half-swimming toward the entrance to Mechanical. The light from the stairwell barely penetrated past the security gates. Beyond, the oily depths of a home both foreign and familiar awaited her.
“I HEAR YOU,” Solo answered after some delay.
Juliette felt her muscles tense up as his voice rattled around inside her helmet. Not being able to adjust the volume was going to drive her mad.
After a dozen halting steps, she eventually got the hang of the awkward wading motion and learned to drag her weighted boots across the steel decking. With the suit inflated and her arms and legs brushing around on the inside, it was like guiding a bubble by throwing oneself against its skin. She paused once to look back at her air hose, making sure it wasn’t getting caught on the stairs, and she gave the rope she had descended one last glance. Even from this distance it appeared as an impossibly slender thread, a thread hanging in that submerged straw of a stairwell. It wavered slightly in the wake she was causing, almost as if saying goodbye.
Juliette tried not to read anything into it; she turned back to the entrance to Mechanical. You don’t have to do this, she reminded herself. She could hook up two, maybe three more small pumps plus a few additional runs of hydroponic piping. The work might take a few months, the water level would recede for years, but eventually these levels would be dry and she could investigate those buried diggers Solo had told her about. It could be done with minimal risk—other than to her sanity.
And if her only reason for getting back home was vengeance, if that was her only motivation, she might have chosen to wait, to take that safe route. She could feel the temptation even then to yank the weights off her boots and float up through the stairwell, to fly past the levels like she used to dream she could, arms out, buoyant and free—
But Lukas had kept her apprised of the horrible mess her friends were in, the mess her leaving had caused. There was a radio mounted to his wall below the servers that leaked violence day and night. Solo’s underground apartment was equipped with an identical radio, but it could only communicate with silo 17’s portables. Juliette had given up fiddling with it.
A part of her was glad she couldn’t hear. She didn’t want to have to listen to the fighting—she just wanted to get home and make it stop. This had become a desperate compulsion: returning to her silo. It was maddening to think that she was only a short walk away, but those doors were only ever opened to kill people. And what good would her return do, anyway? Would her surviving a cleaning and revealing the truth be enough to expose Bernard and all of IT?
As it happened, she had other, less sane plans. It was a fantasy, maybe, but it gave her hope. She dreamed of fixing up one of the diggers that built this place, a machine buried and hidden at the long end of its vertical toil, and driving it through the earth itself to 18‘s down deep. She dreamed of breaking that blockade, of leading her people back to these dry corridors and getting this dead place working again. She dreamed of operating a silo without all the lies and deceptions.
Juliette waded through the heavy water toward the security gate, dreaming these childish dreams, discovering that they somehow steeled her resolve. She approached the security turnstile, and saw that the lifeless and unguarded gate would pose the first true obstacle of her descent. Getting over it wouldn’t be easy. Turning her back to the machine, she placed her hands on either side and pushed, squirming and kicking her heavy heels against the low wall, until she was just barely sitting on the control box.
Her legs were too heavy to lift…not high enough to swing over, anyway. The weights had ended up being more than she’d needed to counter the suit’s buoyancy. She wiggled backwards until her butt was more secure and tried to turn sideways. With a thick glove under her knee, she strained and leaned back until her boot was on the edge of the wall. She rested a moment, breathing hard and filling her helmet with muffled laughter. It felt ridiculous, all this effort to do something so outrageously simple, so benign. With one boot already up, the other was easier to lift. She felt the muscles in her abdomen and thighs, muscles sore from weeks of a porter’s hustle, finally help her lift her own damn foot up.
She shook her head in relief, sweat trickling down the back of her neck, already dreading repeating the maneuver on the return trip. Dropping to the other side was easy: the weights did all the work. She took a moment to make sure the wires knotted around her wrist and the air hose attached to her collar weren’t getting tangled, and then started down the main corridor, the flashlight on the top of her helmet her only illumination.
“YOU OKAY?” Solo asked, his voice startling her again.
“I’m fine,” she said. She held her chin down against her chest, leaving the contact open. “I’ll check in if I need you. The volume is a little high down here. Scares the hell out of me.”
She released the contact and turned to see how her lifeline was doing. All along the ceiling, her overflow bubbles danced in the glow of her flashlight like tiny jewels—
“OKAY. GOTCHA.”
“Goddammit,” she muttered, wishing she could reach inside her helmet to adjust the thing or to dig a finger in her ear. It felt like his voice was still lodged in there, tickling her.
With her boots hardly leaving the floor, pushing forward on them one at a time, she slowly made her way across the main intersection and past the mess hall. To her left, if she made her way down the hallway and took two turns, she could reach Walker’s workshop. Had it always been a workshop? She had no idea. In this place, it might be a storeroom. Or an apartment.
Her small apartment would be in the opposite direction. She turned to peer down that hallway, her cone of light brushing away the darkness to reveal a body pressed up against the ceiling, tangled in the runs of pipe and conduit. She looked away. It was easy to imagine that being George or Scottie or someone else she had cared about and lost. It was easy to imagine it being herself.
She shuffled toward the access stairs, her body wavering in the thick but crystal clear water, the weight of her boots and the buoyancy of her torso keeping her upright even though she felt on the verge of toppling. She paused at the top of the square steps leading down.
“I’m about to descend,” she said, chin down. “Make sure you keep everything feeding. And please don’t respond unless there’s a problem. My ears are still ringing from the last time.”
Juliette lifted her chin from the contact switch and took the first few steps, waiting for Solo to blare something in her ear, but it never came. She kept a firm grip on the wire and hose, dragging it around the sharp corners of the square stairwell as she descended into the darkness. The black water all around was disturbed only by her rising bubbles and the feeble cone of her sweeping, flash-lit gaze.
Six floors down, the hose and wire became difficult to pull, too much friction from the steps. She stopped and gathered more and more of it around herself, letting the slack coil and drift in the weightlessness of the water. Several of her careful splices in both the wire and tubing slid through her gloves. She paused and checked the taped and adhesed joints of the latter to see how they were holding up. Minuscule bubbles were trailing out of one joint—they left a perforated and wavy line of tiny dots in the dark water. It was hardly anything.
Once she had enough slack at the bottom of the stairs to reach the sump basin, she turned and marched purposefully toward her work. The hardest part was over. The air was flowing in, cool and fresh and hissing by her ear. The excess streamed out through the other valve, the bubbles shooting up in a curtain whenever she turned her head. She had enough wire and hose to reach her goal, and all of her tools intact. It felt like she could finally relax now that she knew she wouldn’t be going any deeper. All she had to do was hook up the power lines, two easy connections, and make her way out.
Being so close, she dared to think of getting free, of rescuing this silo’s Mechanical spaces, resuscitating one of its generators and then one of its hidden and buried diggers. They were making progress. She was on her way to rescuing her friends. It all seemed perfectly attainable, practically in her grasp, after weeks of frustrating setbacks.
Juliette found the sump room just where it was supposed to be. She slid her boots to the edge of the pit in the center. Leaning forward, her flashlight shone down on the numbers signifying how deep the waters had risen. They seemed comical under so many hundreds of feet of water. Comical and sad. This silo had failed its people.
But then Juliette corrected herself: These people had failed their silo.
“Solo, I’m at the pump. Gonna hook up the power.”
She peered down at the bottom of the pit to make sure the pump’s pickup was clear of debris. The water down there was amazingly clear. All the oil and grime she’d worked hip-deep in at the bottom of her own basin had been made diffuse, spread out into who knew how many gallons of groundwater seepage. The result was crystal clear stuff she could probably drink.
She shivered, suddenly aware that the chill of the deep water was making its way through her layers and wicking away her body heat. Halfway there, she told herself. She moved toward the massive pump mounted on the wall. Pipes as thick as her waist bent to the ground and snaked over the edge of the pit. The outflow ran up the wall in a similarly sized pipe and joined the jumble of mechanical runs above. As she stood by the large pump and worked the knotted wires off her wrist, she remembered the last job she’d ever performed as a mechanic. She had pulled the shaft on an identical pump and had discovered a worn and broken impeller. As she selected a Phillips driver from her pocket and began loosening the positive power terminal, she took the time to pray that this pump had not been in a similar condition when the power had blown. She didn’t want to have to come down and service it again. Not until she could do it while keeping her boots dry.
The positive power line came free easier than she had hoped. Juliette twisted the new one into place. The sound of her own breathing rattled in the confines of her helmet and provided her only company. As she was tightening the terminal around the new wire, she realized she could hear her breathing because the air was no longer hissing by her cheek.
Juliette froze. She tapped the plastic dome by her ear and saw that the overflow bubbles were still leaking out, but slower now. The pressure was still inside her suit, there just wasn’t any more air being forced inside.
She dipped her chin against the switch, could feel the sweat form around her collar and drip down the side of her jaw. Her feet were somehow freezing while from the neck up she was beginning to sweat.
“Solo? This is Juliette. Can you hear me? What’s going on up there?”
She waited, turned to aim her flashlight down the air hose, and looked for any sign of a kink. She still had air, the air in her suit. Why wasn’t he responding?
“Hello? Solo? Please say something.”
The flashlight on her helmet needed to be adjusted, but she could feel the ticking of some silent clock in her head. How much air would she have starting right then? It had probably taken her an hour to get down there. Solo would fix the compressor before her air ran out. She had plenty of time. Maybe he was gassing it up. Plenty of time, she told herself as the driver slipped off the negative terminal. The damn thing was stuck.
This, she didn’t have time for, not for anything to be corroded. The positive wire was already spliced and locked tight. She tried to adjust the flashlight strapped to her helmet; it was aimed too high, good for walking, horrible for working. She was able to twist it a little and aim it at the large pump.
The ground wire could be connected to any part of the main housing, right? She tried to remember. The entire case was the ground, wasn’t it? Or was it? Why couldn’t she remember? Why was it suddenly difficult to think?
She straightened the end of the black wire and tried to give the loose copper strands a twist with her heavily padded fingers. She jabbed this bundle of raw copper into a cowling vent on the back, a piece of conducting metal that appeared connected to the rest of the pump. She twisted the wire around a small bolt, knotted the slack so it would hold, and tried to convince herself that this would work, that it would be enough to run the damn thing. Walker would know. Where the hell was he when she needed him?
The radio by her neck squawked—a burst and pop of static—what sounded like part of her name in a faraway distance—a dead hiss—and then nothing.
Juliette wavered in the dark, cold water. Her ears were ringing from the outburst. She dipped her chin to tell Solo to hold the radio away from his mouth, when she noticed through the glass window of her helmet’s visor that there were no more bubbles spilling from the overflow valve and rising in that gentle curtain across her vision. The pressure in her suit was gone.
A different sort of pressure quickly took its place.