27
• Silo 17 •
Juliette woke up on a floor, someone shaking her. A man with a beard. It was Solo, and she was passed out in his room, by his desk.
“We made it,” he said, flashing his yellow teeth. He looked better than she remembered him looking. More alive. She felt as though she were dead.
Dead.
“What time is it?” she asked. “What day?”
She tried to sit up. Every muscle felt torn in half, disconnected, floating beneath her skin.
Solo went to the computer and turned on the monitor. “The others are picking out rooms and then going to the upper farms.” He turned to look at her. Juliette rubbed her temples. “There are others,” he said solemnly, like this was still news.
Juliette nodded. There was only one other that she could think of right then. Dreams came back to her, dreams of Lukas, of all her friends in holding cells, a room of suits being prepped for them, no care for whether they cleaned or not. It would be a mass slaughter, a symbol to those who remained. She thought of all the bodies outside of this silo, silo 17. It was easy to imagine what came next.
“Friday,” Solo said, looking at the computer. “Or Thursday night, depending on how you like it. Two in the morning.” He scratched his beard. “Felt like we slept longer than that.”
“What day was it yesterday?” She shook her head. That didn’t make sense. “What day did I dive down? With the compressor?” Her brain wasn’t working.
Solo looked at her like he was having similar thoughts. “The dive was Thursday. Today is tomorrow.” He rubbed his head. “Let’s start over—”
“No time.” Juliette groaned and tried to stand up. Solo rushed to her and put his hands under her arms, helped lift her. “Suit Lab,” she said. He nodded. She could tell he was exhausted, maybe half as much as she was, but he was still willing to do anything for her. It made her sad, someone being this loyal to her.
She led him down the narrow passage, and the climb up the ladder brought back a legion of aches. Juliette crawled out to the server room floor; Solo followed up the ladder and helped her to her feet. They made their way to the Suit Lab together.
“I need all the heat tape we’ve got,” she told him, prepping him while he escorted her. She staggered through the servers, bumped into one of them. “It needs to be the kind on the yellow spool, the stuff from Supply. Not the red kind.”
He nodded. “The good kind. Like we used on the compressor.”
“Right.”
They left the server room and shuffled down the hallway. Juliette could hear the kids squealing around the bend, the patter of their feet. It was a strange sound, like the echoes of ghosts. But something normal. Something normal had returned to silo 17.
In the suit lab, she got Solo busy with the tape. He stretched out long strips on one of the workbenches, overlapping the edges, using the torch to cauterize and seal the joints.
“At least an inch of overlap,” she told him, when it looked like he was being shy with the stuff. He nodded. Juliette glanced at her cot and considered collapsing into it. But there was no time. She grabbed the smallest suit in the room, one with a collar she knew might be a tight fit. She remembered the difficult squeeze to get into silo 17 and didn’t want to repeat it.
“I’m not gonna have time to make another switch for the suit, so I won’t have a radio.” She went through the cleaning outfit, piece by piece, pulling out the parts engineered to fail and hunting through her hauls from Supply for a better version of each. Some she’d have to seal over with the good tape. It wouldn’t be as nice as the one Walker had helped arrange, but it would be a world different than what Lukas was getting. She grabbed all the parts she’d spent weeks puzzling over, marveling at the engineering it took to make something weaker than it appeared. She tested a gasket from a pile she wasn’t sure about by pinching her fingernails together. The gasket parted easily. She dug for another.
“How long?” Solo asked, noisily stretching another piece of tape out. “You’ll be gone a day? A week?”
Juliette looked up from her workbench to the one Solo was working over. She didn’t want to tell him she might not make it. This was a dark thought she would keep to herself. “We’ll figure out a way to come for you,” she said. “First, I have to try and save someone.” It felt like a lie. She wanted to tell him she might be gone for good.
“With this?” Solo rustled the blanket of heat tape.
She nodded. “The doors to my home never open,” she told him. “Not unless they are sending someone to clean—”
Solo nodded. “It was the same here, back when this place was crazy.”
Juliette looked up at him, puzzled, and saw that he was smiling. Solo had told a joke. She laughed, even though she didn’t feel like it, and then found that it helped.
“We’ve got six or seven hours until those doors open,” she told him. “And when they do, I want to be there.”
“And then what?” Solo shut down the torch and inspected his work. He looked up at her.
“Then I want to see how they explain my being alive. I think—” She changed out a seal and flipped the suit around to get to the other sleeve. “I think my friends are fighting on one side of this fence, and the people who sent me here are fighting on the other. Everyone else is watching, the vast majority of my people. They are too scared to take sides, which basically means they’ve checked out.”
She paused while she used one of the small extractors to remove the seal that linked the wrist to the glove. Once she had it out, she reached for a good one.
“You think this will change that? Saving your friend?”
Juliette looked up and studied Solo, who was almost done with the tape.
“Saving my friend is all about saving my friend,” she said. “What I think will happen, when all those people on that fence see that a cleaner has come home, I think it’ll make them come down on the right side of things, and with that much support, the guns and the fighting are meaningless.”
Solo nodded. He began to fold up the blanket without even being asked. This bit of initiative, of knowing what needed to happen next, filled Juliette with hope. Maybe he needed these kids, someone to take care of. He seemed to have aged a dozen years already.
“I’ll come back for you and the others,” she told him.
He dipped his head, kept his eyes on her a while, his brain seeming to whir. He came to her workbench and set the neatly folded blanket down, patted it twice. A quick smile flashed in his beard, and then he had to turn away, had to scratch his cheek as if he had an itch there.
He was still a teenager like that, Juliette saw. Still ashamed to cry.
• • • •
Nearly four of Lukas’s final hours were burned hiking the heavy gear up to level three. The kids had helped, but she made them stop one level down, worried about the air up top. Solo assisted her in suiting up for the second time in as many days. He studied her somberly.
“You’re sure about this?”
She nodded and accepted the blanket of heat tape. Rickson could be heard a level below, commanding one of the boys to settle down.
“Try not to worry,” she told him. “What happens, happens. But I have to try.”
Solo frowned and scratched his chin. He nodded. “You’re used to being around your people,” he said. “Probably happier there anyway.”
Juliette reached out and squeezed his arm with one of her thick gloves. “It’s not that I would be miserable here, it’s that I would be miserable knowing I let him go out without trying something.”
“And I was just starting to get used to having you here.” He turned his head to the side, bent over and grabbed her helmet from the decking.
Juliette checked her gloves, made sure everything was wrapped tightly, and looked up. The climb to the top would be brutal with the suit on. She dreaded it. And then navigating the remains of all those people in the sheriff’s office and getting through the airlock doors. She accepted the helmet, scared of what she was about to do despite her convictions.
“Thanks for everything,” she said. She felt like she was doing more than saying goodbye. She knew there was a very good chance that she was doing willingly what Bernard had attempted so many weeks ago. Her cleaning had been delayed, but now she was going back to it.
Solo nodded and stepped around her to check her back. He patted the velcro, tugged on her collar. “You’re good,” he said, his voice cracking.
“You take care of yourself, Solo.” She reached out and patted his shoulder. She had decided to carry the helmet one more flight up before putting it on, just to conserve her air.
“Jimmy,” he said. “I think I’m going back to being called Jimmy, now.”
He smiled at Juliette. Shook his head sadly, but smiled.
“I’m not going to be alone anymore,” he told her.