She thought about him as she crossed the room to grab the right-size tap from one of the expansive metal tool chests. She pocketed this and pulled down one of the complete cleaning suits, admiring the heft of the outfit, remembering how bulky it had felt when she’d worn one just like it. She lifted it onto a workbench and pulled off the helmet’s locking collar, took this to the drill press and carefully bored a starter hole. With the collar in a vise, she began working the tap into the hole, creating new threads for the air hose. She was wrestling with this and thinking about her last conversation with Lukas when the smell of fresh bread entered the lab, followed by Solo.
“Hello!” he called from the doorway. Juliette looked up and jerked her chin for him to enter. Turning the tap required effort, the metal handle digging into her palms, sweat forming on her brow.
“I baked more bread.”
“Smells great,” she grunted.
Ever since she’d taught Solo how to bake flatbread, she couldn’t get him to stop. The large tins of flour that had been holding up his canned-goods shelves were being removed one at a time while he experimented with recipes. She reminded herself to teach him more things to cook, to put this industriousness of his to good use by having him mix it up a little.
“And I sliced cucumbers,” he said, proud as if it were a feast beyond compare. In so many ways, Solo was stuck with the mind of a teenager—culinary habits included.
“I’ll have some in a bit,” she told him. With effort, she finally got the tap all the way through the pilot hole, creating a threaded connection as neat as if it had come from Supply. The tap backed out easily, just like a fitted bolt would.
Solo placed the plate of bread and vegetables on the workbench and grabbed a stool. “Whatcha working on? Another pump?” He peered at the large wheeled air compressor with the hoses trailing off it.
“No. That was going to take too long. I’m working on a way to breathe underwater.”
Solo laughed. He started munching on a piece of bread until he realized she wasn’t joking.
“You’re serious.”
“I am. The pumps we really need are in the sump basins at the very bottom of the silo. I just need to get some of this electricity from IT down to them. We’ll have the place dry in weeks or months instead of years.”
“Breathe underwater,” he said. He looked at her like she was the one losing her mind.
“It’s no different from how I got here from my silo.” She wrapped the male end of the air hose coupler with silicone tape, then began threading it into the collar. “These suits are airtight, which makes them watertight. All I need is a constant supply of air to breathe, and I can work down there as long as I like. Long enough to get the pumps going, anyway.”
“You think they’ll still work?”
“They should.” She grabbed a wrench and tightened the coupler as hard as she dared. “They’re designed to be submerged, and they’re simple. They just need power, which we’ve got plenty of up here.”
“What will I do?” Solo wiped his hands, sprinkling bread crumbs on her workbench. He reached for another piece of bread.
“You’ll be watching the compressor. I’ll show you how to crank it, how to top it up with fuel. I’m going to install one of the portable deputy radios in the helmet here so we can talk back and forth. There’ll be a whole mess of hose and electrical wire to play out.” She smiled up at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you busy.”
“I’m not worried,” Solo said. He puffed out his chest and crunched on a cucumber, his eyes drifting to the compressor.
And Juliette saw—just like a teenager with little practice but great need—that Solo had not yet mastered the art of lying convincingly.
60
. . . boys from the other side of the camp. These results were closely observed by the experimenters, who were posing as camp counselors. When the violence got out of hand, the experiment was halted before it could run its full course. What began at Robber Cave as two sets of boys, all with nearly identical backgrounds and values, had turned into what became known in the field of psychology as an in-grouping and out-grouping scenario. Small perceived differences, the way one wore a hat, the inflections in speech, turned into unforgivable transgressions. When stones started flying, and the raids on each other’s camps turned bloody, there was no recourse for the experimenters but to put an end to—
Lukas couldn’t read anymore. He closed the book and leaned back against the tall shelves. He smelled something foul, brought the spine of the old book to his nose and sniffed. It was him, he finally decided. When was the last time he’d showered? His routine was all out of whack. There were no screaming kids to wake him in the morning, no evenings hunting for stars, no dimmed stairwell to guide him back to his bed so he could repeat it all the following day. Instead, it was fitful periods of tossing and turning in the hidden bunk room of level thirty-five. A dozen bunks, but him all alone. It was flashing red lights to signal that he had company, conversations with Bernard and Peter Billings when they brought him food, long talks with Juliette whenever she called and he was free to answer. Between it all, the books. Books of history out of order, of billions of people, of even more stars. Stories of violence, of the madness of crowds, of the staggering timeline of life, of orbited suns that would one day burn out, of weapons that could end it all, of diseases that nearly had.
How long could he go on like this? Reading and sleeping and eating? The weeks already felt like months. There was no keeping track of the days, no way to remember how long he’d worn this pair of overalls, if it was time to change out of them and into the pair in the dryer. Sometimes he felt like he changed and washed his clothes three times a day. It could easily have been twice a week. It smelled like longer.
He leaned his head back against the tins of books and closed his eyes. The things he was reading couldn’t all be true. It made no sense, a world so crowded and strange. When he considered the scale of it all, the idea of this life burrowed beneath the earth, sending people to clean, getting worked up over who stole what from whom—he sometimes felt a sort of mental vertigo, this frightening terror of standing over some abyss, seeing a dark truth far below, but unable to make it out before his senses returned and reality snatched him back from the edge.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting like that, dreaming of a different time and place, before he realized the throbbing red lights had returned.
Lukas slid the book back in its tin and struggled to his feet. The computer screen showed Peter Billings at the server-room door, as deep as he was allowed into the room. A tray with Lukas’s dinner sat on top of the work-log filing cabinet inside the door.
He turned away from the computer, hurried down the corridor, and scrambled up the ladder. After removing the grate, he carefully dropped it back into place and picked a circuitous path through the tall humming servers.
“Ah, here’s our little protégé.” Peter smiled, but his eyes narrowed at the sight of Lukas.
Lukas dipped his chin. “Sheriff,” he said. He always had this sense that Peter was silently mocking him, looking down on him, even though they were about the same age. Whenever Peter showed up with Bernard, especially the day Bernard had explained the need to keep Lukas safe, there had seemed some sort of competitive tension between the two more junior men—a tension Lukas was aware of, even if he didn’t share it. In private, Bernard had committed Lukas to secrecy and told him that he was grooming Peter for the eventual job of mayor, that he and Lukas would one day work hand in hand. Lukas tried to remember this as he slid the tray off the cabinet. Peter watched him, his brow lowered in thought.