She looked away, left the sentence unfinished.
Walker nodded and chewed his food.
“Some of them say the power in IT was up to the max that morning, even though we had it shut down from here.”
“Maybe it was rerouted,” Walker said. “Or battery backups. They have those, you know.” He took another bite but was dying to spin the potentiometer. He was pretty sure the static had changed when he’d made the second connection.
“I keep telling them it’ll do us more harm than good to screw with the silo like that. It’ll just turn the rest of them against us.”
“Yeah. Hey, can you adjust this? You know, while I eat?”
He turned the volume up on the static, needing two hands to work the potentiometer as it dangled from its bright wires. Shirly seemed to shrink from the noise crackling out of his home-built speakers. She reached for the volume knob as if to turn it down.
“No, I want you to spin the one we just installed.”
“What the hell, Walk? Just eat your damn food already.”
He took another bite. And for all her cussing and protests, Shirly began adjusting the knob.
“Slowly,” he said, his mouth full of food.
And sure enough, the static from the speakers modulated. It was as if the crunching plastic had begun to move and bounce around the room.
“What am I even doing?”
“Helping an old man—”
“—yeah, I might need you up here on this one—”
Walker dropped his fork and held out his hand for her to stop. She had gone past it though, into the static once more. Shirly seemed to intuit this. She bit her lip and wiggled the knob the other way until the voices returned.
“Sounds good. It’s quiet down here anyway. You need me to bring my kit?”
“You did it,” Shirly whispered to Walker, as if these people could hear her if she spoke too loudly. “You fixed—”
Walker held up his hand. The chatter continued.
“Negative. You can leave the kit. Deputy Roberts is already here with hers. She’s sweeping for clues as I speak—”
“What I’m doing is working while he does nothing!” a faint voice called out in the background.
Walker turned to Shirly while laughter rolled through the radio, more than one person enjoying the joke. It had been a long time since he’d heard anyone laugh. But he wasn’t laughing. Walker felt his brows furrow in confusion.
“What’s wrong?” Shirly asked. “We did it! We fixed it!” She got off her stool and turned as if to run and tell Jenkins.
“Wait!” Walker wiped his beard with his palm and jabbed his fork toward the strewn collection of radio parts. Shirly stood a pace away, looking back at him, smiling.
“Deputy Roberts?” Walker asked. “Who in all the levels is that?”
59
Juliette flicked the lights on in the Suit Lab as she hauled in her latest load from Supply. Unlike Solo, she didn’t take the constant source of power for granted. Not knowing where it came from made her nervous that it wouldn’t last. So while he had the habit, the compulsion even, of turning every light on to full and leaving it there, she tried to conserve the mysterious energy as much as possible.
She dropped her recent scavenges on her cot, thinking of Walker as she did so. Is this how he ended up living among his work? Was it the obsession, the drive, the need to keep hammering away at a series of never-ending problems until he couldn’t sleep more than a few paces from them?
The more she understood the old man, the farther away from him she felt, the lonelier. She sat down and rubbed her legs, her thighs and calves tight from the most recent hike up. She may’ve been gaining her porter legs these last weeks, but they were still sore all the time, the ache in them a constant new sensation. Squeezing the muscles transformed that ache into pain, which she somehow preferred. The sharp and definable sensations were better than the dull and nameless kind. She liked feelings she could understand.
Juliette kicked her boots off—strange to think of these scavenged things as hers—and stood up. That was enough rest. It was as much rest as she could allow herself to have. She carried her canvas sacks to one of the fancy workbenches, everything in the Suit Lab nicer than what she’d had in Mechanical. Even the parts engineered to fail were constructed with a level of chemical and engineering sophistication she could only begin to appreciate now that she understood their evil intent. She had amassed piles of washers and seals, the good from Supply and the leftover bad from the lab, to see how the system worked. They sat along the back of her main workbench, a reminder of the diabolical murderousness with which she’d been sent away.
She dumped the parts from Supply and thought about how strange it was to have access to, to live in this forbidden heart of some other silo. It was stranger still to appreciate these workbenches, these immaculate tools, all arranged for the purpose of sending people like her to their death.
Looking around at the walls, at the dozen or so cleaning suits hanging from racks in various states of repair, it was like living and working in a room full of ghostly apparitions. If one of those suits jumped down and started moving about on its own, it wouldn’t have surprised her. The arms and legs on each one were puffy, as if full, the mirrored visors easily concealing curious faces. It was like having company, these hanging forms. They watched her impassively while she sorted her finds into two piles: one of items she needed for her next big project, the other of useful tidbits she had snagged with no specific idea of what she might use them for.
A valuable rechargeable battery went in this second group, some blood still on it that she hadn’t been able to wipe off. Images flashed through her mind of some of the scenes she’d found while scrounging for materials, like the two men who had committed suicide in the head office of Supply, their hands interlocked, opposite wrists slit, a rust-colored stain all around them. This was one of the worst scenes, a memory she couldn’t shake. There was more evidence of violence scattered about the silo. The entire place was haunted and marred. She completely understood why Solo limited his rounds to the gardens. She also empathized with his habit of blocking off the server room every night with the filing cabinet, even though he had been alone for years. Juliette didn’t blame him. She slid the dead bolts on the Suit Lab every night before she went to sleep. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but that conviction was being sorely tested by the constant feeling of being watched by—if not actual people—the silo itself.
She began her work on the air compressor and, as always, it felt good to be doing something with her hands. Fixing something. Staying distracted. The first few nights, after surviving the horrible ordeal of being sent to clean, of fighting her way inside this carcass of a silo, she had searched long and hard for someplace that she could actually sleep. It was never going to be below the server room, not with the stench of Solo’s debris piles pervading the place. She tried the apartment for IT’s head, but thoughts of Bernard made it impossible even to sit still. The couches in the various offices weren’t long enough. The pad she’d tried to put together on the warm server-room floor was nice, but the clicking and whirring of all those tall cabinets nearly drove her insane.
The Suit Lab, strangely enough, with the specters and ghouls hanging about, was the only spot where she’d won a decent night of sleep. It was probably the tools everywhere, the welders and wrenches, the walls of drawers full of every socket and driver imaginable. If she was going to fix anything, even herself, it would be there in that room. The only other place she’d felt at home in silo seventeen was in the two jail cells she sometimes slept in on trips up and down. There, and sitting behind that empty server, talking to Lukas.