A bark of laughter from Courtnee. “Safe? You think it’s …?” She took a step closer to Juliette, and suddenly no one was digging. Juliette’s father placed a hand on his daughter’s arm and tried to pull her back, but Juliette held her ground.
“You think it’s safe over here?” Courtnee hissed. “Where the hell are we? There’s a room back there that looks a goddamn lot like our gen room, except that it’s a rusted wreck. You think those machines will ever spin again? How much air do we have over here? How much fuel? What about food and water? I give us a few days if we don’t get back home. That’s a few days of dead-out digging, mostly by hand. Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us, bringing us over here?”
Juliette withstood the barrage. She welcomed it. She longed to add a few stones of her own.
“I did this,” she said. She pulled away from her father and faced the diggers, whom she knew well. She turned and threw her voice down the dark pit from which she’d just come. “I did this!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, sending her words barreling toward those she’d damned and doomed. Again, she screamed: “I did this!” and her throat burned from the soot and the sting of the admission, her chest cracking open and raw with misery. She felt a hand on her shoulder, her father again. The only sounds, once her echoes died down, were the crackle and whisper of open flames.
“I caused this,” she said, nodding. “We shouldn’t have come here to begin with. We shouldn’t. Maybe my digging is the reason they poisoned us, or my going outside, but the air over here is clean. I promised you all that this place was here and that the air was fine. And now I’m telling you, just as surely, that our home is lost. It is poisoned. Opened to the outside. Everyone we left behind—” She tried to catch her breath, her heart empty, her stomach in knots. Again, her father propped her up. “Yes, it was my fault. My prodding. That’s why the man who did this—”
“Man?” Courtnee asked.
Juliette surveyed her former friends, men and women she had worked alongside for years. “A man, yes. From one of the silos. There are fifty silos just like ours—”
“So you’ve told us,” one of the diggers said gruffly. “So the maps say.”
Juliette searched him out. It was Fitz, an oilman and former mechanic. “And do you not believe me, Fitz? Do you now believe that there are only two in all the universe and that they were this near to one another? That the rest of that map is a lie? I am telling you that I stood on a ridge and I saw them with my own eyes. While we stand here in this dark pit choking on fumes, there are tens of thousands of people going about their days, days like we once knew—”
“And you think we should be digging toward them?”
Juliette hadn’t considered that. “Maybe,” she said. “That might be our only way out of this, if we can reach them. But first we need to know who is over there and if it’s safe. It might be as ruined as our silo. Or as empty as this one. Or full of people not at all happy to see us. The air could be toxic when we push through. But I can tell you that there are others.”
One of those digging slid down the rubble to join the conversation. “And what if everything is fine on the other side of this pile? Aren’t you the one who always has to go look and see?”
Juliette absorbed the blow. “If everything is fine over there, then they will come for us. We will hear from them. I would love for that to be true, for this to happen. I would love to be wrong. But I’m not.” She studied their dark faces. “I’m telling you that there’s nothing over there but death. You think I don’t want to hope? I’ve lost … we’ve all lost people we love. I listened as men I loved and cared about breathed their last, and you don’t think I want to get over there and see for myself? To bury them proper?” She wiped her eyes. “Don’t you think for a moment that I don’t want to grab a shovel and work three shifts until we’re through to them. But I know that I would be burying those of us who are left. We would be tossing this dirt and these rocks right into our own graves.”
No one spoke. Somewhere, gravity won a delicate struggle against a rock, and the loose stone tumbled with clacks and clatters toward their feet.
“What would you have us do?” Fitz asked, and Juliette heard an intake of air from Courtnee, who seemed to bristle at the thought of anyone taking advice from her ever again.
“We need a day or two to determine what happened. Like I said, there are a lot of worlds like our own out there. I don’t know what they hold, but I know one of them seems to think it’s in charge. They have threatened us before, saying they can push a button and end us, and I believe that’s what they’ve done. I believe it’s what they did to this other world as well.” She pointed down the tunnel to Silo 17. “And yes, it may have been because we dared to dig or because I went outside looking for answers, and you can send me to clean for those sins. I will gladly go. I will clean and die in sight of you. But first, let me tell you what little I know. This silo we’re in, it will flood. It is slowly filling even now. We need to power the pumps that keep it dry, and we need to make sure that the farms stay wet, the lights stay on, that we have enough air to breathe.” She gestured to one of the torches set into the wall. “We’re going through an awful lot of air.”
“And where are we supposed to get this power? I was one of the first through to the other side. It’s a heap of rust over there!”
“There’s power up in the thirties,” Juliette said. “Clean power. It runs the pumps and lights in the farms. But we shouldn’t rely on that. We brought our own power with us—”
“The backup generator,” someone said.
Juliette nodded, thankful to have them listening. For now, at least, they’d stopped digging.
“I’ll shoulder the burden for what I’ve done,” Juliette said, and the flames blurred behind a film of tears. “But someone else brought this hell on us. I know who it was. I’ve spoken with him. We need to survive long enough to make him and his people pay—”
“Revenge,” Courtnee said, her voice a harsh whisper. “After all the people who died trying to get some measure of that when you left to clean—”
“Not revenge, no. Prevention.” Juliette peered down the dark tunnel and into the gloom. “My friend Solo remembers when this world – his world – was destroyed. It wasn’t gods that brought this upon us, but men. Men close enough to talk to by radio. And there are other worlds standing out there beneath their thumbs. Imagine if someone else had acted before now. We would have gone about our lives, never knowing the threat that existed. Our loved ones would be alive right now.” She turned back to Courtnee and the others. “We shouldn’t go after these people for what they did. No. We should go after them for what they’re capable of doing. Before they do it again.”
She searched her old friend’s eyes for understanding, for acceptance. Instead, Courtnee turned her back on her. She turned away from Juliette and studied the pile of rubble they’d been clearing. A long moment passed, smoke filling the air, orange flames whispering.
“Fitz, grab that torch,” Courtnee ordered. There was a moment’s hesitation, but the old oilman complied. “Douse that thing,” she told him, sounding disgusted with herself. “We’re wasting air.”
42
Elise heard voices down the stairwell. There were strangers in her home. Strangers. Rickson used to frighten her and the twins into behaving by telling them stories of strangers, stories that made them never want to leave their home behind the farms. In a long time ago, Rickson used to say, anyone you didn’t know was out to kill you and take your things. Even some of those who did know you couldn’t be trusted. That’s what Rickson used to say late at night when the clicking timers made the grow lights go suddenly out.
Rickson told them the story over and over of how he was born because of two people in love – whatever that meant – and that his father had cut a poisoned pill out of his mother’s hip, and that’s how people had babies. But not all people had babies out of two people in love. Sometimes it was strangers, he said, who came and took whatever they wanted. It was men in those old days, and often what they wanted was for women to make babies, and so they cut poisoned pills right out of their flesh and the women had babies.
Elise didn’t have a poisoned pill in her flesh. Not yet. Hannah said they grew in there late like grown-up teeth, which was why it was important to have babies as early as you could. Rickson said this weren’t true at all, and that if you were born without a pill in your hip you’d never have one, but Elise didn’t know what to believe. She paused on the stairs and rubbed her side, feeling for any bumps there. Tonguing the gap between her teeth in concentration, she felt something hard beneath her gums and growing. It made her want to cry, knowing her body could do foolish things like growing teeth and pills beneath her flesh without her asking. She called up the stairs for Puppy, who had squirmed loose again and had bounded out of sight. Puppy was bad like this. Elise was starting to wonder if puppies were a thing you could own or if they were always running away. But she didn’t cry. She clutched the rail and took another step and another. She didn’t want babies. She just wanted Puppy to stay with her, and then her body could do whatever it wanted.
A man overtook her on the stairs – it wasn’t Solo. Solo had told her to stick close. “Tell Puppy to stick close,” she would say when Solo caught up to her. It paid to have excuses ready like this. Like pumpkin seeds in pockets. This man overtaking her looked back at her over his shoulder. He was a stranger, but he didn’t seem to want her things. He already had things, had a coil of the black and yellow wire that dipped from the ceiling in the farms that Rickson said never to touch. Maybe this man didn’t know the rules. It was peculiar to see people she didn’t know in her home, but Rickson lied sometimes and was wrong some other times and maybe he lied or was wrong with his scary stories and Solo had been right. Maybe it was a good thing, these strangers. More people to help out and make repairs and dig water trenches in the soil so all the plants got a good drink. More people like Juliette, who had come and made their home better, took them up to where the light was steady and you could heat water for a bath. Good strangers.
Another man spiraled into view with noisy boots. He had a sack bursting with green leaves, the smell of ripe tomatoes and blackberries trailing past. Elise stopped and watched him go. That’s too much to pick all at once, she could hear Hannah saying. Too much. More rules that nobody knew. Elise might have to teach them. She had a book that could teach people how to fish and how to track down animals. And then she remembered that all the fish were gone. And she couldn’t even track down one puppy.
Thinking of fish made Elise hungry. She very much wanted to eat right at that moment, and as much as possible. Before there wasn’t any left. This hunger was a feeling that came sometimes when she saw the twins eating. Even if she wasn’t hungry, she would want some. A lot. Before it was all gone.
She trundled up the steps, her bag with her memory book knocking against her thigh, wishing she’d stayed with the others or that Puppy would just stay put.
“Hey, you.”
A man on the next landing peered over the rails and down at her. He had a black beard, only not as messy as Solo’s. Elise paused a moment, then continued up the stairs. The man and the landing disappeared from view as she twisted beneath them. He was waiting for her as she reached the landing.
“You get separated from the flock?” the man asked.
Elise cocked her head to the side. “I can’t be in a flock,” she said.
The man with the dark beard and bright eyes studied her. He wore brown coveralls. Rickson had a pair like them that he wore sometimes. That boy from the bizarre had coveralls like that.
“And why not?” the man asked.
“I’m not a sheep,” said Elise. “Sheep make flocks, and there aren’t any of them left.”
“What’s a sheep?” the man asked. And then his bright eyes flashed even brighter. “I seen you. You’re one of the kids who lived here, aren’t you?”
Elise nodded.
“You can join our flock. A flock is a congregation of people. The members of a church. Do you go to church?”
Elise shook her head. She rested her hand on her memory book, which had a page on sheep, how to raise them and how to care for them. Her memory book and this man disagreed. She felt a hollow in her stomach as she tried to sort out which of them to trust. She leaned toward her book, which was right about so much else.
“Do you want to come inside?” The man waved an arm at the door. Elise peered past him and into the darkness. “Are you hungry?”
Elise nodded.
“We’re gathering food. We found a church. The others will be down from the farms soon. Do you want to come in, get something to eat or drink? I picked what I could carry. I’ll share it with you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and Elise found herself studying his forearm, which was thick with dark hair like Solo’s but not like Rickson’s. Her tummy grumbled, and the farms seemed so far away.
“I need to get Puppy,” she said, her voice small in that vast stairwell, a tiny puff of fog in the cool air.
“We’ll get your puppy,” the man said. “Let’s go inside. I want to hear all about your world. It’s a miracle, you know. Did you know that you are a miracle? You are.”