Juliette nodded. She could sense that she was supposed to and that this made it okay to lie.
“Her father and I came to this show years ago when we first started dating,” her mother said. She rubbed Juliette’s hair. “We were going to name our first child either Romeus or Juliette.”
“Well, be glad you had a girl, then,” the lady said, smiling.
Her parents laughed, and Juliette was beginning to be less afraid of this woman with the same name as her.
“Do you think we could get your autograph?” Her father let go of her shoulder and rummaged in his pack. “I have a program in here somewhere.”
“Why not a script for this young Juliette?” The lady smiled at her. “Are you learning your letters?”
“I can count to a hundred,” Juliette said proudly.
The woman paused, then smiled. Juliette watched her as she stood and crossed the stage, her dress flowing in a way that coveralls never could. The lady returned from behind a curtain with a tiny book of papers held fast with brass pins. She accepted a charcoal from Juliette’s father and wrote her name large and curly across the cover.
The woman pressed the collection of papers into her small hands. “I want you to have this, Juliette of the silo.”
Her mother protested. “Oh, we couldn’t. That’s too much paper—“
“She’s only five,” her father said.
“I have another,” the lady assured them. “We make our own. I want her to have it.”
She reached out and touched Juliette’s cheek, and this time Juliette didn’t pull away. She was too busy flipping through the papers, looking at all the curly notes handwritten along the sides beside the printed words. One word, she noticed, was circled over and over among all the others. She couldn’t make out many of them, but this one she could read. It was her name. It was at the beginning of so many sentences:
Juliette. Juliette.
This was her. She looked up at the lady, understanding at once why her parents had brought her there, why they had walked so far and for so long.
“Thank you,” she said, remembering her manners.
And then, after some consideration:
“I’m sorry I fell asleep.
1
It was the morning of the worst cleaning of Lukas’s life—and for once he considered going into work, to ignore the paid holiday, to pretend it was a day like any other. He sat at the foot of his bed as he worked up the courage to move, one of his many star charts in his lap. Lightly with his fingers, so as to not smear the marks away, he caressed the charcoal outline of one star in particular.
It wasn’t a star like the others. Those were simple dots on a meticulous grid with details of date sighted, location, and intensity. This wasn’t that kind of star—not one that lasted nearly so long. It was the five pointed kind, the outline of a sheriff’s badge. He remembered drawing the shape while she was talking to him one night, the steel on her chest glowing faintly as it caught the weak light from the stairwell. He remembered her voice being magical, the way she carried herself mesmerizing, and her arrival into his boring routine had been as unexpected as the parting of clouds.
He also remembered how she had turned away from him in her cell two nights ago, had tried to save his feelings by pushing him away—
Lukas had no more tears. He had spent most of the night shedding them for this woman he hardly knew. And now he wondered what he would do with his day, with his life. The thought of her out there, doing anything for them—cleaning—made him sick. He wondered if that was why he’d had no appetite for two days. Some deep part of his gut must know he’d never keep anything down, even if he forced himself to eat.
He set the star chart aside and dropped his face into his palms. He rested there, so tired, trying to convince himself to just get up and go to work. If he went to work, at least he’d be distracted. He tried to remember where he’d left off in the server room last week. Was it the number eight tower that had gone down again? Sammi had suggested he swap out the control board, but Lukas had suspected a bad cable. That’s what he’d been doing—he remembered now—toning out the Ethernet runs. It’s what he should be doing right then, that very day. Anything but sitting around on a holiday, feeling like he could be physically ill over a woman he’d done little more than tell his mother about.
Lukas stood and shrugged on the same pair of coveralls he’d worn the day before. He remained there a moment, staring at his bare feet, wondering why he’d gotten up. Where was he going? His mind was completely blank, his body numb. He wondered if he could stand there, unmoving, his stomach twisted in knots, for the rest of his life. Someone would eventually find him, wouldn’t they? Dead and stiff, standing upright, a statue of a corpse.
He shook his head and these black thoughts loose and looked for his boots.
He found them; it was an accomplishment. Lukas had done something by getting himself dressed.
He left his room and ambled toward the landing, weaving around kids squealing from another day off school, parents trying to corral them and get their boots and coveralls on. The commotion was little more than background noise for Lukas. It was a hum, like the aches in his legs from gathering signatures the days before. He stepped out onto the apartment’s landing and felt a habitual tug upwards toward the cafeteria. All he could think about was all he had thought of for the past week: making it through another day so he could go up-top for the chance to see her.
It suddenly occurred to Lukas that he still could. He wasn’t one for sunrises—he much preferred the twilight and the stars—but if he wanted to see her, all he had to do was climb to the cafeteria and scan the landscape. There would be a new body there, a new suit with the shine still on it glimmering in whatever weak rays the sun dribbled through those blasted clouds.
He could see the image clearly in his head: her uncomfortable sprawl—legs twisted, arm pinned, helmet turned to the side, gazing back at the silo. Sadder still, he saw himself decades later, a lonely old man sitting in front of that gray wallscreen and drawing not star charts but landscapes. The same landscapes over and over, looking up at a wasting might-have-been, sketching that same still pose while weeping old-man tears that dripped and turned charcoal to mud.
He would be like Marnes, that poor man. And thinking of the Deputy, who died with no one to bury him, it reminded Lukas of the last thing Juliette had told him. She had begged him to find someone, to not be like her, to never be alone.
He gripped landing fifty’s cool steel railing and leaned over. Looking down, he could watch the stairwell drill its way deep into the earth. The landing for fifty-six was visible below, the several landings between jutting off in unseen angles. It was hard to gauge the distance—Lukas was used to the much larger scale of stars—but he figured it was more than enough. No need to walk down to eighty-two, which most jumpers preferred for its long clear path down to ninety-nine.
Suddenly, he saw himself in flight, tumbling down, arms and legs splayed. He reckoned he would just miss the landing. One of the railings would catch him and saw him near in half. Or maybe if he jumped out a little further,
