his cuffs.
“I’m sorry, Jules,” he said, as they got close.
“What happened?” Juliette asked. “Dad?”
Hank’s brow wrinkled in confusion. Knox was shaking his head and chewing on his beard. He studied the deputy like he might eat the man.
“Knox, what’s going on?”
“Jules, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. He seemed to want to say more but was powerless to do so. Juliette felt Hank reaching for her arm.
“You are under arrest for grave crimes against the silo.”
He recited the lines like they were from a sad poem. The steel clicked around her wrist.
“You will be judged and sentenced according to the Pact.”
Juliette looked up at Knox. “What is this?” she asked. Was she really being arrested again?
“If you are found guilty, you will be given a chance at honor.”
“What do you want me to do?” Knox whispered, his vast muscles twitching beneath his coveralls. He wrung his hands together, watching the second metal band clack around her other wrist, her two hands shackled together now. The large Head of Mechanical seemed to be contemplating violence—or worse.
“Easy, Knox,” Juliette said. She shook her head at him. The thought of more people getting hurt because of her was too much to bear.
“Should humanity banish you from this world—” Hank continued to recite, his voice cracking, his eyes wet with shame.
“Let it go,” Juliette told Knox. She looked past him to where more workers were coming off second shift, stopping to see this spectacle of their prodigal daughter being put in cuffs.
“—in that banishment, may you find your sins scrubbed, scrubbed away,” Hank concluded.
He looked up at her, one hand gripping the chain between her wrists, tears streaking down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Juliette nodded to him. She set her teeth and nodded to Knox as well.
“It’s alright,” she said. She kept bobbing her head. “It’s alright, Knox. Let it go.”
12
The climb up was to take three days. Longer than it should have, but there were protocols. A day trip up to Hank’s office, a night in his cell, Deputy Marsh coming down the next morning from the mids to escort her up another fifty levels to his office.
She felt numb during this second day of climbing, the looks from passersby sliding off her like water on grease. It was difficult to concern herself with her own life—she was too busy tallying all the others, some of them because of her.
Marsh, like Hank, tried to make small talk, and all Juliette could contemplate to say in return was that they were on the wrong side. That evil ran amuck. But she kept her mouth shut.
At the mids deputy station, she was shown to a familiar enough cell, just like the one in Hank’s. No wallscreen, just a stack of primed cinderblocks. She collapsed onto the bunk before he even had the gate locked, and lay there for what felt like hours, waiting for night to come and pass to dawn, for Peter’s new deputy to come and march her up the last leg of her journey.
She checked her wrist often, but Hank had confiscated her watch. He probably wouldn’t even know how to wind it. The thing would eventually fall into disrepair and return to being a trinket, a useless thing worn upside down for its pretty band.
This saddened her more than it should have. She rubbed her bare wrist, dying to know the time, when Marsh came back and told her she had a visitor.
Juliette sat up on the cot and swung her legs around. Who would come up to the mids from Mechanical?
When Lukas appeared on the other side of the bars, the dam that held back all her emotions nearly broke. She felt her neck constrict, her jaws ache from fighting the sobs, the emptiness in her chest nearly puncture and burst. He grabbed the bars and leaned his head against them, his temples touching the smooth steel, a sad smile on his face.
“Hey,” he said.
Juliette barely recognized him. She was used to seeing him in the dark, had been in a hurry when they’d bumped into each other on the stairs. He was a striking man, his eyes older than his face, his light brown hair slicked back with sweat from what she assumed was a hurried walk down.
“You didn’t need to come,” she said, speaking softly and slowly to keep from crying. What really saddened her was someone seeing her like this, someone she was beginning to realize she cared about. The indignity was too much.
“We’re fighting this,” he said. “Your friends are collecting signatures. Don’t give up.”
She shook her head. “It won’t work,” she told him. “Please don’t get your hopes up.” She walked to the bars and wrapped her hands a few inches below his. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know this is ratshit—”
He turned away, a tear streaking down his cheek. “Another cleaning?” he croaked. “Why?”
“It’s what they want,” Juliette said. “There’s no stopping them.”
Lukas’ hands slid down the bars and wrapped around hers. Juliette couldn’t free them to wipe at her cheeks. She tried to dip her head to use her shoulder.
“I was coming up to see you that day—” Lukas shook his head and took a deep breath. “I was coming to ask you out—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Lukas. Don’t do this.”
“I told my mom about you.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Lukas—”
“This can’t happen,” he said. He shook his head. “It can’t. You can’t go.”
When he looked back up, Juliette saw that there was more fear in his eyes than even she felt. She wiggled one hand free and peeled his other one off. She pushed them away. “You need to let this go,” she said. “I’m sorry. Just find someone. Don’t end up like me. Don’t wait—”
“I thought I
Juliette turned to hide her face.
“Go,” she whispered.
She stood still, feeling his presence on the other side of those bars, this boy who knew about stars but nothing about her. And she waited, listening to him sob while she cried quietly to herself, until she finally heard his feet shuffle across the floor, his sad gait carrying him away.
That night, she spent another evening on a cold cot, another evening of not being told what she’d been arrested for, and evening to count the hurts she had unwittingly caused. The next day, there was a final climb up through a land of strangers, the whispers of a double cleaning chasing after her, Juliette falling into another stunned trance, one leg moving and then the other.
At the end of her climb, she was moved into a familiar cell, past Peter Billings and her old desk. Her escort collapsed into Deputy Marnes’ squeaking chair, complaining of exhaustion.
Juliette could feel the shell that had formed around her during the long three days, that hard enamel of numbness and disbelief. People didn’t talk softer, they just sounded that way. They didn’t stand further from her, they just seemed more distant.
She sat on the lone cot and listened to Peter Billings charge her with conspiracy. A data drive hung in a limp plastic bag like a pet fish that had gobbled all its water and now lay dead. Dug out of the incinerator, somehow. Its edges were blackened. A scroll was unspooled, only partly pulped. Details of her computer search were listed. She knew most of what they found was Holston’s data, not hers. She wasn’t sure what the point would be of telling
