only two adults left, and neither seemed all that bad.
“There’s food on sixty-two,” she said.
“Numbers—” Rickson shook his head. “I don’t—”
Of course. Why would he need to count numbers he’d never live to see, and in more ways than one?
“Solo will show you where,” she told him. “We’ve stayed there before. Good food. Canned stuff as well. Solo?” She waited until he looked up at her, the glazed expression partly melting away. “I have to get back to your place. I have people I need to call, okay? My friends. I need to find out if they’re okay.”
He nodded.
“You guys will be fine?” She hated to leave them but needed to. “I’ll try and make it back down to you tomorrow. Take your time getting all the way up, okay? No need to rush home.”
There were nods in the group. One of the young boys pulled a water bottle out of the other’s bag and unscrewed the cap. Juliette turned and began taking the stairs two at a time, her legs begging her not to.
This was her
Juliette was in the forties when it occurred to her that she might not make it. The sweat she’d worked up was chilling her skin; her legs were beyond the ache, beyond the pain; they were numb with fatigue. She found her arms doing a lot of the work as she lunged ahead, gripped the railing with clammy hands and hauled herself up another two steps.
Her breathing was ragged. It had been for half a dozen levels. She wondered if she’d done damage to her lungs from the underwater ordeal. Was that possible? She had no idea. Her father would know. She thought of spending the rest of her life without a doctor, of teeth as yellow as Solo’s, of caring for a growing child and the challenge of seeing that more weren’t made.
At the next landing, she again touched her hip where her birth control rode under her skin. Such things made more sense in light of silo 17. So
Her mind wandered while she climbed, wandered in order to avoid the aches in her muscles, to escape the day’s ordeals. When she finally hit the thirties it gave her, if not an end to the suffering, a renewed focus. She stopped trying the portable radio as often. The static never changed, and she had a different idea for contacting Walker, something she should have pieced together sooner, a way to bypass the servers and communicate with other silos. It was there all along, staring her and Solo in the face. There was a small sliver of doubt that she might be wrong, but why else lock up a radio that was already locked up two other ways? It only made sense if that device was supremely dangerous. Which is what she hoped it would be.
She stomped up to thirty-five dead on her feet. Her body had never been pushed this hard, not even while plumbing the small pump, not during her trek through the outside. Will alone helped her lift each foot, plant it, straighten her leg, pull with her arm, lunge forward for another grab. One step at a time, now. Her toe banged on the next step as she could barely lift her boot high enough. The green emergency lights gave her no sense of the passing of time, no idea if night had come, when morning would be. She desperately missed her watch. All she had these days was her knife. She laughed at the switch, at having gone from counting the seconds in her life to fending for each and every one of them.
Thirty-four. It was tempting to collapse to the steel grating, to sleep, to curl up like her first night in that place, just thankful to be alive. Instead, she pulled the door open, amazed at the effort this required, and stepped back into civilization. Light. Power. Heat.
She staggered down the hallway with her vision so constricted it was as if she could only see through some straw at her center, everything else out of focus and spinning.
Her shoulder brushed the wall. Walking required effort. All she wanted was to go call Lukas, to hear his voice. She imagined falling asleep behind that server, warm air blowing over her from its fans, the headphones tight against her ears. He could murmur to her about the faraway stars while she slept for days and days—
But Lukas would wait. Lukas was locked up and safe. She had all the time in the world to call him.
She turned instead into the suit lab, shuffled toward the tool wall, didn’t dare look at her cot. A glance at her cot, and she’d wake up the next day. Whatever day that was.
Grabbing the bolt cutters, she was about to leave, but went back for the small sledge as well. The tools were heavy, but they felt good in her hands, one tool in each, pulling down on her arms, stretching her muscles and grounding her, keeping her stable.
At the end of the hall, she pressed her shoulder against the heavy door to the server room. She leaned until it squeaked open. Just a crack. Just wide enough for her. Juliette hurried as much as her numb muscles would allow toward the ladder. Shuffling. Fast as she could go.
The grate was in place; she tugged it out of the way and dropped the tools down. Big noise. She didn’t care—they couldn’t break. Down she went, hands slick, chin catching a rung, floor coming up faster than she’d anticipated.
Juliette sank to her butt, sprawled out, shin banging the sledge. It took a force of will, an act of God, to get up. But she did.
Down the hall and past the small desk. There was a steel cage there, a radio, a big one. She remembered her days as sheriff. They had a radio just like it in her office, used it to call Marnes when he was on patrol, to call Hank and Deputy Marsh. This one was different. She remembered something Lukas said once, about listening in, about wishing he could talk to her down below where it was comfortable.
He meant this radio.
She set the sledge down and pinched the jaws of the cutter on one of the hinges. Squeezing was too hard. Her arms shook. They trembled.
Juliette adjusted herself, put one of the handles against her neck, cradled it with her collarbone and shoulder. She grabbed the other handle with both hands and pulled toward herself, hugging the cutters. Squeezing. She felt them move.
There was a loud crack, the twang of splitting steel. She moved to the other hinge and did it again. Her collarbone hurt where the handle dug in, felt like it might be the thing to crack, not the hinge.
Another violent burst of metal.
Juliette grabbed the steel cage and pulled. The hinges came away from the mounting plate. She tore hungrily at the box, trying to get to the prize inside, thinking of Walker and all her family, all her friends, the sound of people screaming in the background. She had to get them to stop fighting. Get everyone to stop fighting.
Once she had enough gap between the bent steel and the wall, she wrapped her fingers around this and tugged, bending the protective cage on its front edge, tilting the box away from the wall, the shelf, revealing the entire radio unit beneath. Who needed keys? Screw keys. She wrenched the cage flat, then bent her weight on it, making a new hinge of its front, warping it out of the way.
The dial on the front seemed familiar. She turned it to power the unit on and found that it clicked instead of spinning. Juliette knelt down, panting and exhausted, sweat running down her neck. There was another switch for power; she turned this one instead, static rising in the speakers, a buzz filling the room.
The other knob. This was what she wanted, what she expected to find. She thought it might be patch cables like the back of the server, or dip switches like a pump control, but it was tiny numbers arranged around the edge of a knob. Juliette smiled, exhausted, and dialed the pointer to 18. Home. She grabbed the mic and squeezed the button.
“Walker? Are you there?”
