ust (Silo, #3)(40)

The trunk swayed and banged against the rail with a jarring clang, and she tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

“You okay back there?” Lukas called.

“How do porters do this?” she asked, switching hands. The weight of the lead-lined trunk pulled down, and its bulk was in the way of her legs. Lukas was lower down and able to walk in the center of the stairway with his arm straight by his side – much more comfortable-looking. She couldn’t manage anything similar from higher up. At the next landing, she made Lukas wait while she removed the belt threaded through the waist of her coveralls and tied this to the handle, looping it over her shoulder the way she’d seen a porter do. This allowed her to walk to the side, the weight of the box leaning against her hip, just how they carried those black bags with bodies to be buried. After a level, it almost grew comfortable, and Juliette could see the appeal of porting. It gave one time to think. The mind grew still while the body moved. But then the thought of black bags and what she and Lukas were porting, and her thoughts found a dark shadow to lie still in.

“How’re you doing?” she asked Lukas after two turns of complete silence.

“Fine,” he said. “Just wondering what we’re carrying here, you know? What’s inside the box.”

His mind had found similar shadows.

“You think this was a bad idea?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. It was hard to tell if that was a shrug, or if he was adjusting his grip.

They passed another landing. Nelson and Sophia had taped the doors off, but faces watched from behind dirty glass. Juliette spotted an elderly woman holding a bright cross against the glass. As she turned, the woman rubbed the cross and kissed it, and Juliette thought of Father Wendel and the idea that she was bringing fear, not hope, to the silo. Hope was what he and the church offered, some place to exist after death. Fear came from the chance that changing the world for the better could possibly make it worse.

She waited until they were beneath the landing. “Hey, Luke?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you ever wonder what happens to us after we’re gone?”

“I know what happens to us,” he said. “We get slathered in butter and chewed off the cob.”

He laughed at his own joke.

“I’m serious. Do you think our souls join the clouds and find some better place?”

His laughter stopped. “No,” he said after a long pause. “I think we simply stop being.”

They descended a turn and passed another landing, another door taped off and sealed as a precaution. Juliette realized their voices were drifting up and down a quiet and empty stairwell.

“It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be around one day,” Lukas said after a while. “I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”

Again, he adjusted his grip or shrugged. It was impossible to say.

“I’ll tell you what does last forever.” He turned his head to make sure she could hear, and Juliette braced for something corny like “love” or something unfunny like “your casseroles”.

“What lasts forever?” she obliged, sure to regret it but sensing that he was waiting for her to ask.

“Our decisions,” he said.

“Can we stop a moment?” Juliette asked. There was a burn where the strap rubbed across her neck. She set her end down on a step, and Lukas held his half to keep the trunk level. She checked the knot and stepped around to switch shoulders. “I’m sorry – ‘our decisions’?” She had lost him.

Lukas turned to face her. “Yeah. Our actions, you know? They last forever. Whatever we do, it’ll always be what we did. There’s no taking them back.”

This wasn’t the answer she was expecting. There was sadness in his voice as he said these things, that box resting against his knee, and Juliette was moved by the utter simplicity of his answer. Something resonated, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “Tell me more,” she said. She looped the strap around her other shoulder and readied to lift it again. Lukas held the rail with one hand and seemed content to rest there a moment longer.

“I mean, the world goes around the sun, right?”

“According to you.” She laughed.

“Well, it does. The Legacy and the man from Silo 1 confirm it.”

Juliette scoffed as if neither could be trusted. Lukas ignored her and continued.

“That means we don’t exist in one place. Instead, everything we do is left in … like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take—”

“And mistake.”

He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”

“Makes you not want to f*ck up,” Juliette said, thinking on all the times she had, wondering if this box between them was one more mistake. She saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot.