ust (Silo, #3)(22)

Juliette bit down the urge to snap at him, to tell him these weren’t games she was playing, that it was something far worse.

Lukas looked away from whatever face she was making. His eyes settled on the stack of books piled up by the cot she had brought in. She slept there sometimes when the two of them were disagreeing or when she just needed a place to be alone. Not that she’d slept much recently. She rubbed her eyes and tried to remember the last time she’d gotten four hours in a row. Her nights were spent welding in the airlock. Her days were spent in the Suit Lab or down behind the comm hub. She didn’t really sleep anymore – she just passed out here and there.

“We should keep those locked up,” Lukas said, indicating the books. “Shouldn’t keep them out.”

“No one would believe them if they opened them,” Juliette said.

“For the paper.”

She nodded. He was right. She saw information; others would see money. “I’ll take them back down,” she promised, and the anger drained away like oil from a cracked casing. She thought of Elise, who had told her over the radio of a book she was making, a single book from all her favorite pages. Juliette needed a book like that. Except where Elise’s was probably full of pretty fish and bright birds, Juliette’s would catalog darker things. Things in the hearts of men.

Lukas took a step closer. He rested a hand on her arm. “This meeting—”

“I hear they’re thinking about a revote,” Juliette said, cutting him off. She wiped a loose strand of hair off her face, tucked it behind her ear. “I’m not going to be mayor for long anyway. Which is why I need to get this done. By the time everyone votes again, it shouldn’t matter.”

“Why? Because you’ll be the mayor of a different silo by then? Is that your plan?”

Juliette rested a hand on the domed helmet. “No. Because I’ll have my answers by then. Because people will see by then. They’ll believe me.”

Lukas crossed his arms. He took a deep breath. “I’ve got to get down to the servers,” he said. “If no one’s there to answer the call, the lights eventually start flashing in the offices and everyone asks what the hell they’re for.”

Juliette nodded. She’d seen it for herself. She also knew that Lukas liked the long talks behind the server as much as she did. Except that he was better at it. All her talks led to arguments. He was good at smoothing things over, figuring things out.

“Please tell me you’ll go to the meeting, Jules. Promise me you’ll go.”

She scanned the suit on the other table to see how far along Nelson was. They’d need one more suit for the extra person in the second airlock. If she worked through the night and all day tomorrow—

“For me,” he pleaded.

“I’ll go.”

“Thank you.” Lukas glanced at the old clock on the wall, its red arms visible behind hazed plastic. “I’ll see you for dinner?”

“Sure.”

He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. When he turned to go, Juliette began arranging her tools on the leather pad, setting them aside for later. She picked up a clean cloth and wiped her hands. “Oh, and Luke?”

“Yeah?” He paused at the door.

“Tell that f*cker I said hello.”





14



Lukas left the Suit Lab and headed toward the server room on the other side of thirty-four. He passed a tech room that sat empty. The men and women who used to work in there now took up slack in the Down Deep and in Supply where mechanics and workers had lost their lives. People from IT sent to replace those they’d killed.

Juliette’s friend Shirly had been left in charge of the aftermath down in Mechanical. She was forever complaining to his office about skeleton shifts, and then complaining again when Lukas reassigned anyone to help. What did she want from him? People, he supposed. Just not his people.

A handful of techs and security personnel standing outside the break room fell silent as Lukas approached. He waved, and hands went up politely. “Sir,” someone said, which made him cringe. The chatter resumed only after he rounded the corner, and Lukas remembered being in on conversations like that as his former boss had stormed past.

Bernard. Lukas used to think he understood what it meant to be in charge. You did what you wanted. Decisions were arbitrary. You were cruel for the sake of being cruel. And now he found himself agreeing to worse things than he had ever imagined. Now he knew about a world of such horrors, that maybe men of his ilk weren’t suited to lead. It wasn’t a thing he could ever say out loud, but perhaps a revote would be for the best. Juliette would make a great lab tech there in IT. Soldering and welding weren’t all that different, just matters of scale. And then he tried to imagine her building a suit for someone to clean in, or her sitting idly by while they took orders from another silo on how many births were allowed that week.

It was more likely that a new mayor would mean time apart. Or that he would have to file for a transfer to Mechanical and learn to turn a wrench. From head of IT to a third-shift greaser. Lukas laughed. He coded open the server room door and thought there might be something romantic about that, giving up his job and life to be with her. Maybe something more romantic than going up at night to hunt for stars. He would have to get used to Juliette bossing him around, but that wouldn’t be a stretch. Enough degreaser, and her old room down there could be livable. As he wove his way through the servers, he thought of how he had lived in far worse, right there beneath his feet. It was being together that mattered.