ust (Silo, #3)(110)

“This isn’t right,” her father said, his voice muffled and his mask bobbing up and down with the movement of his jaw. They tucked the body into an open bag and zipped it up.

“We’ll give them a proper burial,” she assured him, assuming he meant it wasn’t right how the bodies were being handled – stacked like bags of dirty laundry.

He removed his gloves and his mask, rested back on his heels, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “No. It’s these people. I thought you said this place was practically empty when you got here.”

“It was. Just Solo and the kids. These people have been dead a long time.”

“That’s not possible,” her father said. “They’re too well preserved.” His eyes drifted across the bags, wrinkles of concern or confusion in his brow. “I’d say they’ve been dead for three weeks. Four or five at the most.”

“Dad, they were here when I arrived. I crawled over them. I asked Solo about them once, and he said he discovered them years ago.”

“That simply can’t be—”

“It’s probably because they weren’t buried. Or the gas outside kept the bugs away. It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It matters plenty when something isn’t right like this. There’s something not right about this entire silo, I’m telling you.” He stood and headed toward the stairwell where Raph was ladling hauled water into scrounged cups and cans. Her father took one for himself and passed one to Juliette. He was lost in thought, she could tell. “Did you know Elise had a twin sister?” her father asked.

Juliette nodded. “Hannah told me. Died in childbirth. The mother passed as well. They don’t talk about it much, especially not with her.”

“And those two boys. Marcus and Miles. Another set of twins. The eldest boy Rickson says he thought he had a brother, but his father wouldn’t talk about it and he never knew his mother to ask her.” Her father took a sip of water and peered into the can. Juliette tried to drown the metallic taste on her tongue while Dawson helped with one of the bags. Dawson coughed and looked as though he were about to gag.

“It’s a lot of dying,” Juliette agreed, worried where her father’s thoughts were going. She thought of the brother she never knew. She looked for any sign on her father’s face, any indication that this reminded him of his wife and lost son. But he was piecing together some other puzzle.

“No, it’s a lot of living. Don’t you see? Three sets of twins in six births? And those kids are as fit as fiddles with no care. Your friend Jimmy doesn’t have a hole in his teeth and can’t remember the last time he was sick. None of them can. How do you explain that? How do you explain these bodies piled up like they fell over a few weeks ago?”

Juliette caught herself staring at her arm. She gulped the last of her water, handed the tin to her father, and began rolling up her sleeve. “Dad, do you remember me asking you about scars, about whether or not they go away?”

He nodded.

“A few of my scars have disappeared.” She showed him the crook of her arm as if he would know what was no longer there. “I didn’t believe Lukas when he told me. But I used to have a mark here. And another here. And you said it was a miracle I survived my burns, didn’t you?”

“You received good attention straight away—”

“And Fitz didn’t believe me when I told him about the dive I made to fix the pump. He said he’s worked flooded mineshafts and has seen men twice my size get sick from breathing air just ten meters deep, much less thirty or forty. He says I would’ve died if I’d done what I did.”

“I don’t know the first thing about mining,” her father said.

“Fitz does, and he thinks I should be dead. And you think these people should be rotted—”

“They should be bones. I’m telling you.”

Juliette turned and gazed at the blank wallscreen. She wondered if it was all a dream. This was what happened to the dying soul; it scrambled for some perch, some stairway to cling to, some way not to fall. She had cleaned and died on that hill outside her silo. She had never loved Lukas at all. Never gotten to know him properly. This was a land of ghosts and fiction, events held together with all the vacant solidarity of dreams, all the nonsense of a drunken mind. She was long dead and only just now realizing it—

“Maybe something in the water,” her father said.

Juliette turned away from the blank wall. She reached out to him, held his arms in her hands, then stepped closer. He wrapped his arms around her and she wrapped hers around him. His stubble scratched her cheek, and she fought hard not to cry.

“It’s okay,” her father said. “It’s okay.”

She wasn’t dead. But things weren’t right.

“Not in the water,” she said, though she’d swallowed her fair share in that silo. She released her father and watched the first of the bags head to the stairwell. Someone was rigging up spliced electrical cables for rope and running it over the rail to lower a body. Porters be damned, she saw. Even the porters were saying porters be damned.

“Maybe it’s in the air,” she said. “Maybe this is what happens when you don’t gas a place. I don’t know. But I think you’re right that there’s something wrong with this silo. And I think it’s high time we get out of here.”