Dust (4 page)

A smack of water right on the crown of his head, and then a tickle as the rivulet raced into his beard. “Mostly dry, I meant,” Jimmy said, talking to the ceiling. He reached the bottom of the steps. It was only the wire now guiding him along, and tricky to see. He splashed through a thin film of water as he headed down the hall. Juliette said it was important to be there when the pump got done. Someone would have to be around to turn it on and off. Water would continue seeping in, and so the pump needed to do its job, but it was bad for the thing to run dry. Something called an “impeller” would burn, she had told him.

Jimmy found the pump. It was rattling unhappily. A large pipe bent over the lip of a well – Juliette had told him to be careful not to fall in – and there was a sucking, gurgling sound from its depths. Jimmy aimed the flashlight down and saw that the shaft was nearly empty. Just a foot or so of water thrown into turbulence by the fruitless pull of the great pipe.

He pulled his cutters out of his breast pocket and fished the wire out of the thin layer of water. The pump growled angrily, metal clanging on metal, the smell of hot electrics in the air, steam rising from the cylindrical housing that provided the power. Teasing apart the two joined wires, Jimmy severed one of them with his cutters. The pump continued to run for a breath but slowly wound itself down. Juliette had told him what to do. He stripped the cut wire back and twisted the ends. When the basin filled again, Jimmy would have to short out the starter switch by hand, just as she had done all those weeks ago. He and the kids could take turns. They would live above the levels ruined by the floods, tend the Wilds, and keep the silo dry until Juliette came for them.

Silo 18

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.”

“Erik’s gonna blow a gasket. You aren’t forgettin’ anybody, are you?”

Juliette studied her old friend. “Forgetting anybody?”

“Anyone you’re neglecting to piss off.”

Juliette ignored the jab and turned to Hyla. “Make a note to Courtnee. I want the backup generator fully serviced before it’s brought in. There won’t be room to pull the heads and check the seals once it’s fitted in here. The ceiling will be too low.”

Bobby followed as Juliette continued her inspection of the digger. “You’ll be here to look after that, won’t you?” he asked. “You’ll be here to couple the genset to this monster, right?”

She shook her head. “Afraid not. Dawson will be in charge of that. Lukas is right, I need to go up and make the rounds—”

“Bullshit,” Bobby said. “What’s this about, Jules? I’ve never seen you leave a project in half like this, not even if it meant working three shifts.”

Juliette turned and gave Hyla that look that all children and shadows know to mean their ears aren’t welcome. Hyla stayed back while the two old friends continued on.

“My being down here is causing unrest,” Juliette told Bobby, her voice quiet and swallowed by the vastness of the machine around them. “Lukas did the right thing to come get me.” She shot the old miner a cold look. “And I’ll beat you senseless if that gets back to him.”

He laughed and showed his palms. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m married.”

Juliette nodded. “It’s best you all dig while I’m elsewhere. If I’m to be a distraction, then let me be a distraction.” They reached the end of a void that the backup generator would soon fill. It was so clever, this arrangement, keeping the delicate engine out where it would be used and serviced. The rest of the digger was just steel and grinding teeth, gears packed tight with grease.

“These friends of yours,” Bobby said. “They’re worth all this?”

“They are.” Juliette studied her old friend. “But this isn’t just for them. This is for us too.”

Bobby chewed on his beard. “I don’t follow,” he said after a pause.

“We need to prove this works,” she said. “This is only the beginning.”

Bobby narrowed his eyes at her. “Well, if it ain’t the beginning of one thing,” he said, “I would hazard to say it spells the end of another.”

8

Juliette paused outside Walker’s workshop and knocked before entering. She had heard tell of him being out and about during the uprising, but this was a cog whose teeth refused to align with anything in her head. As far as she was concerned, it was mere legend, a thing to be disbelieved because it hadn’t been seen with her own eyes – similar, she reckoned, to how her jaunt between silos didn’t compute for most people. A rumor. A myth. Who was this woman mechanic who claimed to have seen another land? Stories such as these were dismissed – unless legend took seed and sprouted religion.

“Jules!” Walker peered up from his desk, one of his eyes the size of a tomato through his magnifiers. He pulled the lens away, and his eye shrank back to normal. “Good, good. So glad you’re here.” He waved her over. There was the smell of burning hair in the room, as if the old man had been leaning over his soldering work while careless of his long gray locks.

“I just came to transmit something to Solo,” she said. “And to let you know I’ll be away for a few days.”

“Oh?” Walker frowned. He slotted a few small tools into his leather apron and pressed his soldering iron into a wet sponge. The hiss reminded Juliette of a ill-tempered cat who used to live in the pump room, fussing at her from the darkness. “That Lukas fellow pulling you away?” Walker asked.

Juliette was reminded that Walker was no friend to open spaces, but he was a friend to porters. And they were friendly with his coin.

“That’s part of it,” she admitted. She pulled out a stool and sank against it, studied her hands, which were scraped and stained with grease. “The other part is that this digging business is going to take a while, and you know how I get when I sit still. I’ve got another project I’ve been thinking on. It’s going to be even less popular than this one here.”

Walker studied her for a moment, glanced up at the ceiling, and then his eyes widened. Somehow, he knew precisely what she was planning. “You’re like a bowl of Courtnee’s chili,” he whispered. “Making trouble at both ends.”

Juliette laughed, but also felt a twinge of disappointment that she was so transparent. So predictable.

“I haven’t told Lukas yet,” she warned him. “Or Peter.”

Walker scrunched up his face at the second name.

“Billings,” she said. “The new sheriff.”

“That’s right.” He unplugged his soldering iron and dabbed it against the sponge again. “I forget that ain’t your job no more.”

It hardly ever was
, she wanted to say.

“I just want to tell Solo that we’re nearly underway with the digging. I need to make sure the floods are under control over there.” She gestured to his radio, which could do far more than broadcast up and down a single silo. Like the radio in the room beneath IT’s servers, this unit he had built was capable of broadcasting to other silos.

“Sure thing. Shame you aren’t leaving in a day or two. I’m almost done with the portable.” He showed her a plastic box a little larger than the old radios she and the deputies used to wear on their hips. It still had wires hanging loose and a large external battery attached. “Once I get done with it, you’ll be able to switch channels with a dial. It piggybacks the repeaters up and down both silos.”

She picked the unit up gingerly, no clue what he was talking about. Walker pointed to a dial with thirty-two numbered positions around it. This she understood.

“Just got to get the old rechargeables to play nice in there. Working on the voltage regulation next.”

“You are amazing,” Juliette whispered.

Walker beamed. “Amazing are the people who made this the first time. I can’t get over what they were able to do hundreds of years ago. People weren’t as dumb back then as you’d like to believe.”

Juliette wanted to tell him about the books she’d seen, how the people back then seemed as if they were from the future, not the past.

Walker wiped his hands on an old rag. “I warned Bobby and the others, and I think you should know too. The radios won’t work so well the deeper they dig, not until they get to the other side.”

Juliette nodded. “So I heard. Courtnee said they’ll use runners just like in the mines. I put her in charge of the dig. She’s thought of just about everything.”

Walker frowned. “I heard she wanted to rig this side to blow as well, in case they hit a pocket of bad air.”

“That was Shirly’s idea. She’s just trying to come up with reasons not to dig. But you know Courtnee, once she sets her mind to something, it gets done.”

Walker scratched his beard. “As long as she don’t forget to feed me, we’ll be fine.”

Juliette laughed. “I’m sure she won’t.”

“Well, I wish you luck on your rounds.”

“Thanks,” she said. She pointed to the large radio set on his workbench. “Can you patch me through to Solo?”

“Sure, sure. Seventeen. Forgot you didn’t come down here to chat with me. Let’s call your friend.” He shook his head. “Have to tell you, from talking to him, he’s one odd fellow.”