Dust (16 page)

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 fuck 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.

And the stains would never wash out. That’s what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar.
Always have had
gotten friends killed.
Always have had
a brother die and a mother take her own life.
Always have had
taken that damn job as sheriff.

There was no going back. Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.

“You okay?” Lukas asked. “Ready to go on?”

But she knew he was asking more than if her arm was tired. He had this ability to spot her secret worries. He had a keen vision that allowed him to glimpse the smallest pinprick of hurt through heavy clouds.

“I’m fine,” she lied. And she searched her past for some noble deed, for a bloodless tread, for any touch on the world that had left it a brighter place. But when she had been sent to clean, she had refused. Always have had refused. She had turned her back and walked off, and there was no chance of going back and doing it any other way.

••••

Nelson was waiting for them in the Suit Lab. He was already prepped and in his second suit, but with his helmet off. The suit Juliette wore outside and the two used to scrub her down had been left in the airlock. Only the radios installed in the collars had been saved. They were as precious as people, Juliette had joked. Nelson and Sophia had already installed them in this pair of suits; Lukas would have a third radio in the hall.

The trunk went on the floor by a cleared workbench; Juliette and Lukas both shook sensation and blood back into their arms. “You’ve got the door?” she asked Lukas.

He nodded and threw a last frowning glance at the trunk. Juliette could tell he would rather stay and help. He squeezed her arm and kissed her on the cheek before leaving and closing the door. Juliette sat on her cot and squeezed herself into yet another suit and could hear him and Sophia working seal tape around the door. The vents overhead had already been double-bagged. Juliette reckoned there was far less air in the container than she had allowed inside Silo 17 – and she had survived that ordeal – but they were still taking every precaution. They were acting as if even one of those containers had enough poison in it to kill everyone in the silo. It was a condition Juliette had insisted upon.

Nelson zipped up her back and folded the velcro flap over, sealing it tight. She tugged on her gloves. Both of their helmets clicked into place. To give them plenty of air and time, she had pulled an oxygen bottle from the acetylene kit. The flow of air was regulated with a small knob, and the overflow spilled out through a set of double valves. Testing the set-up, Juliette had found they could go for days on the trickle of air from the shared tank.

“You good?” she asked Nelson, testing the volume on her radio.

“Yeah,” he said. “Ready.”

Juliette appreciated the rapport they had developed, the rhythm of two mechanics on the same shift working the same project night after night. Most of their conversations regarded the project, challenges to overcome, tools to pass back and forth. But she had also learned that Nelson’s mother used to work with her father, was a nurse before moving down to the Deep to become a doctor. She also learned that Nelson had built the last two cleaning suits, had fitted Holston before cleaning, had just missed being assigned to her. Juliette had decided that this project was as much for his absolution as hers. He had put in long hours that she didn’t think she could expect from anyone else. They were both looking to make things right.

Selecting a flat screwdriver from the tool rack, she began scraping caulk from around the lid of the trunk. Nelson chose another driver and worked his side. When their efforts met, she checked with him, and they pried the lid open to reveal the metal container from the airlock bench. Lifting this out, they rested it on a cleared work surface. Juliette hesitated. From the walls, a dozen cleaning suits looked down on them in silent disapproval.

But they had taken all precautions. Even ludicrous ones. The suits they were wearing had been stripped down of all the excess padding, making it easier to work. The gloves as well. Every concession Lukas had asked for, she had provided. It’d been like Shirly with the backup generator and the dig, going so far as to throttle back the main genny to reduce the power load, even rigging the tunnel with blast charges in case of contamination, whatever it took to allow the project to move forward.

Juliette snapped back to the present as she realized Nelson was waiting on her. She grabbed the lid and hinged it open, pulled out the samples. There were two of air, one control sample of argon from the airlock, one each of surface and deep soil, and one of desiccated human remains. They were each placed on the workbench, and then the metal container was set aside.

“Where do you want to start?” Nelson asked. He grabbed a small length of steel pipe with a piece of chalk slotted into the end, an improvised writing device for gloved hands. A blackboard slate stood ready on the bench to take notes.

“Let’s start with the air samples,” she said. It had already been several hours in getting the samples down to the lab. Her private fear was that there’d be nothing left of the gaskets by now, nothing to observe. Juliette checked the labels on the containers and found the one marked “2”. It’d been taken near the hills.

“There’s irony here, you know,” Nelson said.

Juliette took the sample container from him and peered through the clear plastic top. “What do you mean?”

“It’s just …” He turned and checked the clock on the wall and scratched the time onto the slate, glanced back guiltily at Juliette. “Being allowed to do this, to see what’s out there, to even talk about it. I mean, I put your suit together. I was lead tech on the sheriff’s suit.” He frowned behind his clear dome. Juliette could see a shine on his brow. “I remember helping him get dressed.”

It was his third or fourth awkward attempt at an apology, and Juliette appreciated it. “You were just doing your job,” she assured him. And then she thought just how powerful that sentiment was, how far down a nasty road that could take a person, shuffling along and simply doing their job.

“But the irony is that this room—” He waved a glove at the suits peering down from the walls. “Even my mom thought this room was here to help people, help cleaners survive for as long as possible, help explore the outside world that nobody’s supposed to talk about. And finally, here we are. More than talking about it.”

Juliette didn’t say anything, but he was right. It was a room of both hope and dread. “What we yearn to find and what’s out there are two different things,” she eventually said. “Let’s stay focused.”

Nelson nodded and readied his chalk. Juliette shook the first sample container until the two gaskets inside separated. The durable one from Supply was perfectly whole. The yellow marks on the edge were still there. The other gasket was in far worse shape. Its red marks were already gone, the edges eaten away by the air inside the container. The same was true of the two samples of heat tape adhered to the bottom. The square piece from Supply was intact. She had cut the one from IT into a triangle in order to tell them apart. It had a small hole eaten through it.

“I’d say an eighth gone on the sample two gasket,” Juliette said. “One hole in the heat tape three millimeters across. Both Supply samples appear fine.”

Nelson wrote her observations down. This was how she had decided to measure the toxicity of the air, by using the seals and heat tape designed to rot out there and compare it to the ones she knew would last. She passed him the container so he could verify and realized that this was their first bit of data. This was confirmation as great as her survival on the outside. The equipment pulled from the cleaning suit storage bays was meant to fail. Juliette felt chills at the momentous nature of this first step. Already, her mind raced with all the experiments to perform next. And they hadn’t yet opened the containers to see what the air inside was like.

“I confirm an eighth of wear on the gasket,” Nelson said, peering inside the container. “I would go two and a half mils on the tape.”

“Mark two and a half,” she said. One way she would change this next time would be to keep their own slates. Her observations might affect his and vice versa. So much to learn. She grabbed the next sample while Nelson scratched his numbers.

“Sample one,” she said. “This one was from the ramp.” Peering inside, she spotted the whole gasket that had to be from Supply. The other gasket was half worn. It had nearly pinched all the way through in one place. Tipping the container upside down and rattling it, she was able to get the gasket to rest against the clear lid. “That can’t be right,” she said. “Let’s see that lamp.”

Nelson swiveled the arm of the worklight toward her. Juliette aimed it upward, bent over the workbench, and twisted her body and head awkwardly to peer past the dilapidated gasket toward the shiny heat tape beyond.

“I … I’d say half wear on the gasket. Holes in the heat tape five … no, six mils across. I need you to look at this.”

Nelson marked down her numbers before taking the sample. He returned the light to his side of the bench. She hadn’t expected a huge difference between the two samples, but if one sample was worse, it should be the one from the hills, not the ramp. Not where they were pumping out good air.

“Maybe I pulled them out in the wrong order,” she said. She grabbed the next sample, the control. She’d been so careful outside, but she did remember her thoughts being scrambled. She had lost count at one point, had held one of the canisters open too long. That’s what it was.

“I confirm,” Nelson said. “A lot more wear on these. Are you sure this one was from the ramp?”

“I think I screwed up. I held one of them open too long. Dammit. We might have to throw those numbers out, at least for any comparison.”

“That’s why we took more than one sample,” Nelson said. He coughed into his helmet, which fogged the dome in front of his face. He cleared his throat. “Don’t beat yourself up.”