Juliette followed Raph through the great digger and into the tunnel. They walked a long way over piles of rocks, scampered over avalanches of tailings cascading down from both sides, saw clothes, a single boot, and a half-buried blanket that’d been dropped. Someone’s canteen lay forgotten, which Raph collected; he shook it and smiled when it sloshed.
In the distance, open flames bathed rock in orange and red, the raw meat of the earth exposed. A fresh pile of rubble sloped down from a full cave-in of the ceiling, the result of Shirly’s sacrifice. Juliette pictured her friend on the other side of those rocks. She saw Shirly slumped over in the generator control room, asphyxiated or poisoned or simply disintegrating in the outside air. This image of a friend lost joined that of Lukas in his small apartment below the servers, his young and lifeless hand relaxed around a silent radio.
Juliette’s radio had gone silent as well. There had been that brief transmission in the middle of the night from someone above them, a transmission that woke her up and that she had ended by announcing that everyone was dead. After that call, she had tried to reach Lukas. She had tried him over and over, but it hurt too much to listen to the static. She was killing herself and her battery by trying, had finally switched the unit off, had briefly considered calling on channel 1 to yell at the fucker who had betrayed her, but she didn’t want them to know any of her people had survived, that there were more of them out there to kill.
Juliette vacillated between fuming over the evil of what they’d done and mourning the loss of those they’d taken. She leaned against her father and followed Raph and Bobby toward the clinks and thwacks and shouts of digging. Right then, she needed to buy time, to save what was left. Her brain was in survival mode, her body numb and staggering. What she knew for sure was that joining the two silos yet again would mean the death of them all. She had seen the white mist descending the stairwell, knew that this wasn’t some harmless gas, had seen what was left of the gasket and heat tape. This was how they poisoned the outside air. It was how they ended worlds.
“Watch yer toes!” someone barked. A miner trundled by with a barrow of rubble. Juliette found herself walking up a sloping floor, the ceiling getting closer and closer. She could make out Courtnee’s voice ahead. Dawson’s too. Piles of tailings had been hauled away from the collapse to mark the progress already made. Juliette felt torn between the urge to warn Courtnee to stop what she was doing and the desire to jump forward and dig with her own hands, to bend her nails back as she clawed her way toward whatever had happened over there, death be damned.
“Okay, let’s clear that top back before we go any further. And what’s taking so long with the jack? Can we please get some hydraulics from the genset fed back here? Just because it’s dark doesn’t mean I can’t see you dregs slackin’—”
Courtnee fell silent when she saw Juliette. Her face hardened, her lips pressed tight. And Juliette could sense her friend was wavering between slapping her and hugging her. It stung that she did neither.
“You’re up,” Courtnee said.
Juliette averted her gaze and studied the piles of stone and rock. Soot swirled and settled from the burning diesel torches. It made the cold air deep inside the earth feel dry and thin, and Juliette worried about the oxygen being burned and whether the sparse farms of Silo 17 could keep up with the demand. And what about all the new lungs – hundreds of pairs of them – sucking that oxygen down as well?
“We need to talk about this,” Juliette said, waving at the cave-in.
“We can talk about what the hell happened here after we dig our way back home. If you want to grab a shovel—”
“This rock is the only thing keeping us alive,” Juliette said.
Several of those digging had already stopped when they saw who was talking to Courtnee. Courtnee barked at them to get back to work, and they did. Juliette didn’t know how to do this delicately. She didn’t know how to do it at all.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at—” Courtnee started.
“Shirly brought the roof down and saved us. If you dig through this, we’ll die. I’m sure of it.”
“Shirly—?”
“Our home was poisoned, Court. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was. People were dying up top. I heard from Peter and—” She caught her breath. “From Luke. Peter saw the outside. The outside. The doors had opened and people were dying. And Luke—” Juliette bit her lip until the pain cleared her thoughts. “The first thing I thought of was to get everyone over here, because I knew it was safe here—”
A bark of laughter from Courtnee. “Safe? You think it’s …?” She took a step closer to Juliette, and suddenly no one was digging. Juliette’s father placed a hand on his daughter’s arm and tried to pull her back, but Juliette held her ground.
“You think it’s safe over here?” Courtnee hissed. “Where the hell are we? There’s a room back there that looks a goddamn lot like our gen room, except that it’s a rusted wreck. You think those machines will ever spin again? How much air do we have over here? How much fuel? What about food and water? I give us a few days if we don’t get back home. That’s a few days of dead-out digging, mostly by hand. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us, bringing us over here?”
Juliette withstood the barrage. She welcomed it. She longed to add a few stones of her own.
“I did this,” she said. She pulled away from her father and faced the diggers, whom she knew well. She turned and threw her voice down the dark pit from which she’d just come. “I did this!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, sending her words barreling toward those she’d damned and doomed. Again, she screamed: “I did this!” and her throat burned from the soot and the sting of the admission, her chest cracking open and raw with misery. She felt a hand on her shoulder, her father again. The only sounds, once her echoes died down, were the crackle and whisper of open flames.
“I caused this,” she said, nodding. “We shouldn’t have come here to begin with. We shouldn’t. Maybe my digging is the reason they poisoned us, or my going outside, but the air over here is clean. I promised you all that this place was here and that the air was fine. And now I’m telling you, just as surely, that our home is lost. It is poisoned. Opened to the outside. Everyone we left behind—” She tried to catch her breath, her heart empty, her stomach in knots. Again, her father propped her up. “Yes, it was my fault. My prodding. That’s why the man who did this—”
“Man?” Courtnee asked.
Juliette surveyed her former friends, men and women she had worked alongside for years. “A man, yes. From one of the silos. There are fifty silos just like ours—”
“So you’ve told us,” one of the diggers said gruffly. “So the maps say.”
Juliette searched him out. It was Fitz, an oilman and former mechanic. “And do you not believe me, Fitz? Do you now believe that there are only two in all the universe and that they were this near to one another? That the rest of that map is a lie? I am telling you that I stood on a ridge and I saw them with my own eyes. While we stand here in this dark pit choking on fumes, there are tens of thousands of people going about their days, days like we once knew—”
“And you think we should be digging toward them?”
Juliette hadn’t considered that. “Maybe,” she said. “That might be our only way out of this, if we can reach them. But first we need to know who is over there and if it’s safe. It might be as ruined as our silo. Or as empty as this one. Or full of people not at all happy to see us. The air could be toxic when we push through. But I can tell you that there are others.”
One of those digging slid down the rubble to join the conversation. “And what if everything is fine on the other side of this pile? Aren’t you the one who always has to go look and see?”
Juliette absorbed the blow. “If everything is fine over there, then they will come for us. We will hear from them. I would love for that to be true, for this to happen. I would love to be wrong. But I’m not.” She studied their dark faces. “I’m telling you that there’s nothing over there but death. You think I don’t want to hope? I’ve lost … we’ve all lost people we love. I listened as men I loved and cared about breathed their last, and you don’t think I want to get over there and see for myself? To bury them proper?” She wiped her eyes. “Don’t you think for a moment that I don’t want to grab a shovel and work three shifts until we’re through to them. But I know that I would be burying those of us who are left. We would be tossing this dirt and these rocks right into our own graves.”
No one spoke. Somewhere, gravity won a delicate struggle against a rock, and the loose stone tumbled with clacks and clatters toward their feet.
“What would you have us do?” Fitz asked, and Juliette heard an intake of air from Courtnee, who seemed to bristle at the thought of anyone taking advice from her ever again.
“We need a day or two to determine what happened. Like I said, there are a lot of worlds like our own out there. I don’t know what they hold, but I know one of them seems to think it’s in charge. They have threatened us before, saying they can push a button and end us, and I believe that’s what they’ve done. I believe it’s what they did to this other world as well.” She pointed down the tunnel to Silo 17. “And yes, it may have been because we dared to dig or because I went outside looking for answers, and you can send me to clean for those sins. I will gladly go. I will clean and die in sight of you. But first, let me tell you what little I know. This silo we’re in, it will flood. It is slowly filling even now. We need to power the pumps that keep it dry, and we need to make sure that the farms stay wet, the lights stay on, that we have enough air to breathe.” She gestured to one of the torches set into the wall. “We’re going through an awful lot of air.”
“And where are we supposed to get this power? I was one of the first through to the other side. It’s a heap of rust over there!”
“There’s power up in the thirties,” Juliette said. “Clean power. It runs the pumps and lights in the farms. But we shouldn’t rely on that. We brought our own power with us—”
“The backup generator,” someone said.
Juliette nodded, thankful to have them listening. For now, at least, they’d stopped digging.
“I’ll shoulder the burden for what I’ve done,” Juliette said, and the flames blurred behind a film of tears. “But someone else brought this hell on us. I know who it was. I’ve spoken with him. We need to survive long enough to make him and his people pay—”
“Revenge,” Courtnee said, her voice a harsh whisper. “After all the people who died trying to get some measure of that when you left to clean—”
“Not revenge, no. Prevention.” Juliette peered down the dark tunnel and into the gloom. “My friend Solo remembers when this world – his world – was destroyed. It wasn’t gods that brought this upon us, but men. Men close enough to talk to by radio. And there are other worlds standing out there beneath their thumbs. Imagine if someone else had acted before now. We would have gone about our lives, never knowing the threat that existed. Our loved ones would be alive right now.” She turned back to Courtnee and the others. “We shouldn’t go after these people for what they did. No. We should go after them for what they’re capable of doing. Before they do it again.”
She searched her old friend’s eyes for understanding, for acceptance. Instead, Courtnee turned her back on her. She turned away from Juliette and studied the pile of rubble they’d been clearing. A long moment passed, smoke filling the air, orange flames whispering.
“Fitz, grab that torch,” Courtnee ordered. There was a moment’s hesitation, but the old oilman complied. “Douse that thing,” she told him, sounding disgusted with herself. “We’re wasting air.”