ust (Silo, #3)(9)

7



The argument with Shirly about the generator went badly. Juliette got her way, but she didn’t emerge feeling victorious. She watched her old friend stomp off and tried to imagine being in her place. It had only been a couple of months since her husband, Marck, had died. Juliette had been a wreck for a solid year after losing George. And now some mayor was telling the head of Mechanical that they were taking the backup generator. Stealing it. Leaving the silo at the whim of a mechanical failure. One tooth snaps off one gear, and all the levels descend into darkness, all the pumps fall quiet, until it can be fixed.

Juliette didn’t need to hear Shirly argue the points. She could well enough name them herself. Now she stood alone in a dim hallway, her friend’s footsteps fading to silence, wondering what in the world she was doing. Even those around her were losing their trust. And why? For a promise? Or was she just being stubborn?

She scratched her arm, one of the scars beneath her coveralls itching, and remembered speaking with her father after almost twenty years of hardheaded avoidance. Neither of them had admitted how dumb they’d been, but it hung in the room like a family quilt. Here was their failing, the source of their drive to accomplish much in life and also the cause of the damage they so often left behind – this injurious pride.

Juliette turned and let herself back into the generator room. A clanging racket along the far wall reminded her of more … unbalanced days. The sound of digging was not unlike the warped generator of her past: young and hot and dangerous.

Work was already underway on the backup generator. Dawson and his team had the exhaust coupling separated. Raph worked one of the large nuts on the forward mount with a massive wrench, separating the generator from its ancient mooring. Juliette realized she was really doing this. Shirly had every right to be pissed off.

She crossed the room and stepped through one of the holes in the wall, ducked her head under the rebar, and found Bobby at the rear of the great digger, scratching his beard. Bobby was a boulder of a man. He wore his hair long and in the tight braids miners enjoyed, and his charcoal skin hid the efforts of dark digging. He was in every way his friend Raph’s antithesis. Hyla, his daughter and also his shadow, stood quietly at his elbow.

“How goes it?” Juliette asked.

“How goes it? Or how goes this machine?” Bobby turned and studied her a moment. “I’ll tell you how this rusted bucket goes. She’s not one for turning, not like you need. She’s aimed straight as a rod. Not meant to be guided at all.”

Juliette greeted Hyla and sized up the progress on the digger. The machine was cleaning up well, was in remarkable shape. She placed a hand on Bobby’s arm. “She’ll steer,” she assured him. “We’ll place iron wedges along the wall here on the right-hand side.” She pointed to the place. Overhead floodlights from the mines illuminated the dark rock. “When the back end presses on these wedges, it’ll force the front to the side.” With one hand representing the digger, she pushed on her wrist with the other, cocking her hand to show how it would maneuver.

Bobby reluctantly grumbled his agreement. “It’ll be slow going, but that might work.” He unfolded a sheet of fine paper, a schematic of all the silos, and studied the path Juliette had drawn. She had stolen the layout from Lukas’s hidden office, and her proposed dig traced an arc from Silo 18 to Silo 17, generator room to generator room. “We’ll have to wedge it downward as well,” Bobby told her. “She’s on an incline like she’s itchin’ to go up.”

“That’s fine. What’s the word on the bracing?”

Hyla studied the two adults and twisted a charcoal in one hand, held her slate in the other. Bobby glanced up at the ceiling and frowned.

“Erik’s not so keen on lending what he’s got. He says he can spare girders enough for a thousand yards. I told him you’d be wanting five or ten times that.”

“We’ll have to pull some out of the mines, then.” Juliette nodded to Hyla and her slate, suggesting she write that down.

“You mean to start wars down here, do you?” Bobby tugged on his beard, clearly agitated. Hyla stopped scratching on the slate and looked from one of her superiors to the other, not sure what to do.

“I’ll talk to Erik,” she told Bobby. “When I promise him the pile of steel girders we’ll find in the other silo, he’ll cave.”

Bobby lifted an eyebrow. “Bad choice of words.”

He laughed nervously while Juliette gestured to his daughter. “We’ll need thirty-six beams and seventy-two risers,” she said.

Hyla glanced guiltily at Bobby before jotting this down.

“If this thing moves, it’s gonna make a lot of dirt,” Bobby said. “Hauling the tailings from here to the crusher down in the mines is gonna make a mess and take as many men as the digging.”

The thought of the crushing room where tailings were ground to powder and vented to the exhaust manifold stirred painful memories. Juliette aimed her flashlight at Bobby’s feet, trying not to think of the past. “We won’t be expelling the tailings,” she told him. “Shaft six is almost directly below us. If we dig straight down, we hit it.”

“You mean to fill number six?” Bobby asked, incredulous.

“Six is nearly tapped out anyway. And we double our ore the moment we reach this other silo.”