rust-colored stain all around them. This was one of the worst scenes, a memory she couldn’t shake. There were other evidences of violence scattered about the silo. The entire place was haunted and marred. She completely understood why Solo limited his rounds to the gardens. She also empathized with his habit of blocking off the server room every night with the filing cabinet, even though he had been alone for years. If someone hadn’t long ago fried the electronic keypad that activated the locks on that door, he would probably be employing it to come and go. Juliette didn’t blame him. She slid the deadbolts on the Suit Lab every night before she went to sleep. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but that conviction was being sorely tested by the constant feeling of being watched by—if not actual people—the silo itself.
She began her work on the air compressor, and as always, it felt good to be doing something with her hands.
The Suit Lab, strangely enough, with the specters and ghouls hanging about, was the only spot where she’d won a decent night of sleep. It was probably the tools everywhere, the welders and wrenches, the walls of drawers full of every socket and driver imaginable. If she was going to fix anything, even herself, it was there in that room. The only other place she’d felt at home in silo 17 was in the two jail cells she sometimes slept in on trips up and down. There, and sitting behind that empty server, talking to Lukas.
She thought about him as she crossed the room to grab the right size tap from one of the expansive metal tool chests. She pocketed this and pulled down one of the complete cleaning suits, admiring the heft of the outfit, remembering how bulky it had felt when she’d worn one just like it. She lifted it onto a clear workbench and pulled off the helmet’s locking collar, took this to the drill press and carefully bored a starter hole. With the collar in a vise, she began working the tap into the hole, creating new threads for the air hose. She was wrestling with this and thinking about her last conversation with Lukas when the smell of fresh bread preceded Solo into the lab.
“Hello!” he called from the doorway. Juliette looked up and jerked her chin for him to enter. Turning the tap required effort, the metal handle digging into her palms, sweat forming on her brow.
“I baked more bread.”
“Smells great,” she grunted.
Ever since she’d taught Solo how to bake flatbread, she couldn’t get him to stop. The large tins of flour that had been holding up his canned goods shelves were being removed one at a time while he experimented with recipes. She reminded herself to teach him more things to cook, to put this industriousness of his to good use by having him mix it up a little.
“And I sliced cucumbers,” he said, proud as if it were a feast beyond compare. In so many ways, Solo was stuck with the mind of a teenager. Culinary habits included.
“I’ll have some in a bit,” she told him. With effort, she finally got the tap all the way through the pilot hole, creating a threaded connection as neat as if it had come from Supply. The tap backed out easily, just like a fitted bolt would.
Solo placed the plate of bread and vegetables on the workbench and grabbed a stool. “Whatcha working on? Another pump?” He peered at the large wheeled air compressor with the hoses trailing off it.
“No. That was going to take too long. I’m working on a way to breathe underwater.”
Solo laughed. He started munching on a piece of bread until he realized she was serious.
“You’re serious.”
“I am. The pumps we
“Breathe underwater,” he said. He looked at her like
“It’s no different than how I got here from my silo.” She wrapped the male end of the air hose coupler with silicone tape, then began threading it into the collar. “These suits are airtight, which makes them watertight. All I need is a constant supply of air to breathe, and I can work down there as long as I like. Long enough to get the pumps going, anyway.”
“You think they’ll still work?”
“They should.” She grabbed a wrench and tightened the coupler as hard as she dared. “They’re designed to be submerged, and they’re simple. They just need power, which we’ve got plenty of up here.”
“What will
“You’ll be watching the compressor. I’ll show you how to crank it, how to top it up with fuel. I’m going to install one of the portable deputy radios in the helmet here so we can talk back and forth. There’ll be a whole mess of hose and electrical wire to play out.” She smiled up at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you busy.”
“I’m not worried,” Solo said. He puffed out his chest and crunched on a cucumber, his eyes drifting to the compressor.
And Juliette saw—just like a teenager with little practice but great need—that Solo had not yet mastered the art of lying convincingly.
8
“—boys from the other side of the camp. These results were closely observed by the experimenters, who were posing as camp counselors. When the violence got out of hand, the experiment was halted before it could run its full course. What began at Robber Cave as two sets of boys, all with nearly identical backgrounds and values, had turned into what became known in the field of psychology as an in-grouping and out-grouping scenario. Small perceived differences, the way one wore a hat, the inflections in speech, turned into unforgivable transgressions. When stones started flying, and the raids on each other’s camps turned bloody, there was no recourse for the experimenters but to put an end to—”
Lukas couldn’t read any more. He closed the book and leaned back against the tall shelves. He smelled something foul, brought the spine of the old book to his nose and sniffed. It was
How long could he go on like this? Reading and sleeping and eating? The weeks already felt like months. There was no keeping track of the days, no way to remember how long he’d had on this pair of coveralls, if it was time to change out of them and into the pair in the dryer. Sometimes he felt like he changed and washed his clothes three times a day. It could easily have been twice a week. It smelled like longer.
He leaned his head back against the tins of books and closed his eyes. The things he was reading couldn’t all be true. It made no sense, a world so crowded and strange. When he considered the scale of it all, the idea of this life burrowed beneath the earth, sending people to clean, getting worked up over who stole what from whom—he sometimes felt a sort of mental vertigo, this frightening terror of standing over some abyss, seeing a dark truth far