ust (Silo, #3)(16)

Lukas frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that.” He rubbed her arm. “Why don’t we discuss it tomorrow? I just want to enjoy having you here with me tonight. One night where we aren’t working. I can pretend I’m just a server tech and you can be … not the mayor.”

Juliette squeezed his hand. “You’re right. Of course. And maybe I should jump in the shower real quick—”

“No, stay.” He kissed her neck. “You smell like you. Shower in the morning.”

She relented. Lukas kissed her neck again, but when he moved to unzip her coveralls, she asked him to douse the lights. For once, he didn’t complain as he often did about not being able to see her. Instead, he left the bathroom light on and shut the door most of the way, leaving the barest of glows. As much as she loved being naked with him, she didn’t like to be seen. The patchwork of scars made her look like the slices of mineshaft that cut through granite: a web of white rock standing out from the rest.

But as unattractive as they were to the eyes, they were sensitive to the touch. Each scar was like a nerve ending rising from her own Deep. When Lukas traced them with his fingers – like an electrician following a diagram of wires – wherever he touched was a wrench across two battery terminals. Electricity fluttered through her body as they held each other in the darkness and he explored her with his hands. Juliette could feel her skin grow warm. This would not be a night where they fell fast asleep. Her designs and dangerous plans began to fade under the gentle pressure of his soft touch. This would be a night for travelling back to her youth, of feeling rather than thinking, back to simpler times—

“That’s strange,” Lukas said, stopping what he was doing.

Juliette didn’t ask what was strange, hoping he’d forget it. She was too proud to tell him to keep touching her like that.

“My favorite little scar is gone,” he said, rubbing a spot on her arm.

Juliette’s temperature soared. She was back in the airlock, such was the heat. It was one thing to silently touch her wounds, another to name them. She pulled her arm away and rolled over, thinking this would be a night for sleep after all.

“No, here, let me see,” he begged.

“You’re being cruel,” Juliette told him.

Lukas rubbed her back. “I’m not, I swear. May I please see your arm?”

Juliette sat up in the bed and pulled the sheets over her knees. She wrapped her arms around herself. “I don’t like you mentioning them,” she said. “And you shouldn’t have a favorite.” She nodded toward the bathroom, where a faint glow of light leaked out from the cracked door. “Can we please shut that or turn out the light?”

“Jules, I swear to you, I love you just the way you are. I’ve never seen you any other way.”

She took that to mean that he’d never seen her naked before her wounds, not that he’d always found her beautiful. Getting out of bed, she moved to douse the bathroom light herself. She dragged the sheet behind her, leaving Lukas alone and naked on the bed.

“It was on the crook of your right arm,” Lukas said. “Three of them crossed and made a little star. I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”

Juliette doused the light and stood alone in the darkness. She could still feel Lukas gazing at her. She could feel people gawking at the scars even when she was fully clothed. She thought of George seeing her like that – and a lump rose in her throat.

Lukas appeared next to her in the pitch black, his arm around her, a kiss lighting on her shoulder. “Come back to bed,” he said. “I’m sorry. We can leave the light out.”

Juliette hesitated. “I don’t like you knowing them so well,” she said. “I don’t want to be one of your star charts.”

“I know,” he said. “I can’t help it. They’re a part of you, the only you I’ve ever known. Maybe we should have your father take a look—?”

She pulled away from him, only to click the light back on. She studied the crook of her arm in the mirror, first her right arm and then her left, thinking he must be wrong.

“Are you sure it was there?” she asked, studying the web of scars for some bare patch, some piece of open sky.

Lukas took her tenderly by the wrist and elbow, lifted her arm to his mouth, and kissed it.

“Right there,” he said. “I’ve kissed it a hundred times.”

Juliette wiped a tear from her eye and laughed in that mix of gasp and sigh that comes from a sad burst of emotion. Locating a particularly offensive knot of flesh, a welt that ran right around her forearm, she showed it to Lukas, forgiving him if not believing him.

“Do this one next,” she said.





Silo 1





11



The silicon-carbon batteries the drones ran on were the size of toaster ovens. Charlotte judged each one to weigh between thirty and forty pounds. They had been pulled from two of the drones and wrapped in webbing taken from one of the supply crates. Charlotte gripped one battery in each hand and took lunging squats in a slow lap around the warehouse, her thighs screaming and quivering, her arms numb.

A trail of sweat marked her progress, but she had a long way to go. How had she let herself get so out of shape? All the running and exercise during basic, just to sit at a console and fly a drone, to sit on her butt and play war games, to sit in a cafeteria and eat slop, to sit and read.