The chapter

This short prologue is told only through talk, with no narrator. It seems to take place in silo 18, some time after the end of Wool. Lukas is wearing a headset and speaking with a voice from somewhere else. The caller is not named. At first the caller asks if anyone is there, then admits to thinking for a moment that Lukas was someone else. Lukas says he was just fixing his headset after a busy morning.

Lukas gives a calm report. There have been committee meetings. IT is short of people because of many reassignments. Things are settling back to normal. People go to work and go to bed. There was a big lottery this week, which made many people happy. There have been no uprisings. The caller asks about the work on server six. Lukas says the caller's passcodes all work, but he only finds more of the same data. Lukas doesn't see why it matters. The caller tells him to keep looking, because if it's in there, there is a reason.

Lukas says the caller said the same about the entries in "these books," but many seem like nonsense. He is up to volume C. This morning he read about a fungus called cordyceps. It gets into an ant's brain and controls it like a machine, making it climb to the top of a plant before it dies. The caller says that entry is not random. To the caller, it means none of them are free.

Lukas jokes that he can see why "she" makes him take these calls. The caller asks about Lukas's mayor, who hasn't answered in a while. Lukas says she is away, working on something. He won't say what, because the caller wouldn't like it. Lukas doesn't like it either. He tried to talk her out of it, but she can be stubborn.

The caller says they should be told if it will cause trouble. The caller wants to help and could keep people from looking. Lukas explains that the mayor doesn't trust the caller. She doesn't even believe the caller is the same person each time. The caller insists on being the same person, and says the machines change the voice. The caller really wants to help, and Lukas believes it. The best help, Lukas says, is to keep his fingers crossed. He has a feeling nothing good will come of this.

The chapter

In silo 18, deep in Mechanical, Juliette Nichols is digging through the wall of the silo. She is in the generator room, running the miners' excavator herself. Its heavy metal piston slams into the concrete again and again. Dust rains down in the halls. Wires swing and pipes rattle. Her coveralls are tied around her waist, and her undershirt is soaked with sweat and grime. The shaking makes her teeth buzz and her old wounds ache.

The miners who usually run the machine stand watching, arms crossed and frowning. Maybe they are angry she took their excavator. Maybe they hate that she is digging where digging is forbidden. Juliette also wonders about something worse. Good mechanics and miners died in the brutal fighting that broke out when she refused to clean. How many of these watchers lost someone? How many blame her?

She has already carved a deep crater in the outer wall. She cut through a first row of rebar with a blowtorch, then two more feet of concrete, and then another row of iron rods. The wall is much thicker than she imagined. If she hadn't seen the schematic herself, and didn't know other silos exist, she would have given up. She keeps nudging the machine forward an inch at a time. She is choking on chalk, desperate for water, her arms shaking. But she is afraid to stop. If she rests again, she may not be able to talk the others into letting her carry on.

Some men she thought were fearless have already left the room, worried. People fear she will break a sacred seal and let in deadly air. They look at her as if she were a ghost, because she has been outside. Some keep away as if she carried a disease. Juliette curses in her head. She curses the fighting, her dead friends, and the thought of Solo and the kids alone, trapped far away through solid rock. She curses being mayor, too. People act as though she runs everything and knows what she's doing, and they obey her even while they fear her.

Suddenly the excavator lurches forward more than an inch. The hammer screams with a high whine, as though it is running with nothing to push against. Juliette loses her grip with one hand, and the machine revs as if it might explode. Miners rush toward her. She slaps the red kill switch, almost hidden under white dust, and the machine bucks as it winds down.

Raph, a pale miner with strong arms, pulls her back, shouting that she's through. Someone clamps a greasy hand over her mouth to protect her from whatever air lies beyond. As the dust clears, a black, empty space appears between two bars of iron. Behind the wall there is a dark gap, a different kind of outside. Juliette pries the hand off her mouth, risks a breath, and asks for the cutting torch and a flashlight.

The chapter

In silo 18's generator room, right after the breakthrough, miners and mechanics crowd behind Juliette. They had kept their distance while she dug. Now they push close to peer through the hole. Juliette and Raph are squeezed into the cone-shaped crater, cut through five or six feet of concrete. She shines her flashlight into the dusty dark. Beyond the wall stands a huge machine: struts, bolts, hoses, plate steel with chipped paint and streaks of rust. It stretches up and sideways past the reach of their lights. Someone thinks the lines are hydraulic. Fitz, the gap-toothed oilman, guesses it must be a thousand years old.

Raph, an albino, is holding his breath, his cheeks puffed out. Juliette tells him he can breathe. It's just another room. He lets out his air with relief. Juliette wriggles back through the crowd, her pulse racing. Someone hands her a tin cup of water. She is exhausted, but she can't wait to tell Solo on the radio, and to tell Lukas. This feels like buried hope.

Dawson, the new third-shift foreman, gave her the water. He is in his late thirties but looks older from working nights. His big knotted hands show years of broken fingers, from work and from fighting. He asks what now. Make a bigger hole, she says, and see if the machine can be saved. She tells him to cut many small holes and join them, bring up the second excavator, and set men loose with picks, keeping the dust down. No blasting, she says. She doesn't want to damage whatever is over there.

On top of the humming main generator, Shirly is frowning down at her, then turns away. Juliette climbs up, covering her scars with her sleeves, and offers to help. Shirly, the new head of Mechanical, is wiping old grease and new dust off the machine. Her shadow, Kali, rinses the rags in a bucket and tosses them back. Shirly says she's fine. Juliette apologizes for the mess. She tries to picture Knox up there doing this work. It strikes her, again, that she is mayor, yet she spends her days smashing walls and cutting rebar.

Shirly's silence says a lot. She was unhappy to lose workers to the dig, at a time when the fighting had already thinned their ranks. She also disliked breaking the silo's seal. Her husband died in that violence. Whether or not Shirly blames Juliette, Juliette blames herself. The tension sits between them like a lump of grease.

Soon the hammering starts again. Bobby, a muscular miner, runs the excavator. Seeing the strange buried machine has lit a spark in the reluctant workers. Fear and doubt have turned into determination. A young porter brings fruit and hot lunches, studies the work closely, and leaves carrying gossip. Standing on the generator, Juliette calms her doubts. She has seen how big the world is from the top of a hill. All she must do is show people what is out there, and then they will stop fearing this work and throw themselves into it.

The chapter

In silo 18, the hole behind the generator room is finally big enough to squeeze through. Juliette goes first, with a flashlight. The air beyond is cool, like the deep mines. The floor is rough, as if a giant had clawed it out. The machine in front of her is enormous. It dwarfs the main generator and the oil pumps. Her heart sinks. Surely nothing this big can ever be repaired.

Raph follows. He is albino and left the farms as a boy for the mines, where the dark suits him. He whistles, and the echo comes back from far away. He calls it a thing of the gods. Juliette has seen Solo's books, and she suspects the same ancient people built this machine, the crumbling towers beyond the hills, and the silo itself. Maybe the priests aren't so wrong, she thinks. Dawson asks how they'll ever dig it out. They won't, she says. It is meant to dig its own way out.

Climbing along the sloping floor, she finds the room has no corners. It curves all the way round in a big circle. Dawson finds a door with pin hinges and forces it open. Inside, Juliette realizes the drawings she saw in Solo's schematics were to scale. The little "worms" sticking out from the bottom of Mechanical are diggers, each a level high and twice as long. This one sits snug in a round cave, almost as if it buried itself. A dozen workers follow her in, their fear replaced by wonder.

They explore its guts. There are moving chutes of overlapping plates, like snake scales, to carry crushed rock out the back. It's rusty, but less than it should be. Some steel is still shiny. Juliette thinks the room was airtight, remembering the breeze and dust sucked in when she broke through. Bobby notes that it's all hydraulic. There are treads along the bottom, sides and ceiling to push against the earth. At the front is a wall of steel. Juliette explains that the whole front spins on a central axle as thick as two men, and round discs cut the rock. Bobby doubts anything could cut solid stone. Raph finds a gearbox the size of a double bunk, full of huge gears in dried grease.

Then Bobby spots bad news. The driveshaft leads back to empty space. There's no engine. "She ain't going nowhere," Raph mutters. Juliette goes to the back and finds strong struts built to hold a power plant. There are six mounting posts, eight inches across, each with its matching nut hanging on a hook nearby. To her it feels like a message from the ancients, written in the language of machines: this goes here.

Fitz kneels beside her and says he's sorry about her friends, though he sounds glad it's over. Others hover at the back, hoping she'll stop. Dawson asks if they should seal it up. Juliette says it is waiting for something. The machine wasn't hidden. It was carefully stored. The size of the mounts seems familiar. The back is meant to open, she says, to let rock out and to let something in. The motor isn't missing at all. She tells Raph she knows why the digger was placed beside the generator room.

The chapter

In silo 18's generator room, Shirly and Kali are still cleaning the main generator when Juliette climbs out of the digger. Juliette has them measure the gap between the digger's posts, then the mounts on the backup generator. They match, as she expected. The digger is a living schematic, a message from older times.

Watching Kali rinse rags, Juliette has a realization. An engine left alone for a thousand years would rot. It only keeps running if people spend their lives caring for it. So Mechanical has been working toward this moment for years without knowing it. Even Shirly, now Chief of Mechanical, who hates the project, has been helping. The smaller backup generator has a bigger purpose: to power the digger. Still, sending away the backup would leave the whole silo at the mercy of one breakdown.

Then Kali stares at the doorway. Lukas Kyle, head of IT and Juliette's lover, stands there in spotless silver among the grimy workers. Juliette quickly tells Raph to service the backup generator so they can try it in the digger. Raph stiffens. He seems to know where this is heading. She greets Lukas too sharply and feels awful. In the hall, he says she's digging holes while the head of IT does the mayor's work. She offers to sign papers, give speeches, or kiss babies, but she promised to rescue her friends. And he vetoed her walking back over the hills.

Lukas is shocked by that heresy. He says the silo is uneasy. There is dissent all through the Up Top, echoes of the last uprising, but now aimed at them. Billings has had a dozen complaints. A priest from the Mids now holds two Sundays a week, warning of a vision where dust fills the silo and thousands die. Some doubt she was sent to clean. One rumor calls it an election stunt. Lukas says people wouldn't believe in other silos even if she brought her radio friend Walker to the bazaar.

Juliette insists this isn't about proving anything. Solo is half mad from years alone. The kids are having kids, and they need doctors. She promised. Lukas begs her to dig in secret, or leave it to the men and come home. She asks if they are no better than the old leaders, lying and plotting. He fears they are worse, since the old leaders at least kept everyone alive. She laughs: those leaders sent them both to die. He smiles despite himself.

She asks for a few days to see if digging is even possible. She promises to dig quietly and claims she wants a power holiday for the main generator anyway. The lie feels easy. She has another plan she's had since recovering from her burns in the doctor's office, something she needs to do up top, but she keeps it to herself. She says she'll come up and stay with him for a while. Then she warns him that she means to find out what lies beyond the walls. "You aim too far," he says. She replies that this comes from the man who watches the stars.

The chapter

The story jumps to silo 17. Jimmy Parker, known as Solo, sits alone in the deepest, darkest grow pits, where the lights no longer work and nothing grows. He is near the memory of an old friend: his cat, Shadow. He crushes lumps of clay in his hands. If he imagines hard enough, he can feel Shadow's claws and hear his rumbling purr. Long ago he wished Shadow could talk. Now he is grateful for those quiet years together.

A young voice calls "Mr. Solo!" A flashlight cuts through the last tangle of overgrown plants that the children call the Wilds. Little Elise stomps up in her too-big boots and hugs his arm. It's time to go, she says. Jimmy knows she's right. Elise is the youngest, yet she settles more arguments than she starts. He doesn't want to leave, but they can't stay. He reminds himself it is only for a while. Juliette said he could come back and live here with all the people who come over. There would be no lottery for a while. They would make his silo whole again.

The thought of so many people makes him shiver. He realizes what really scares him. It isn't leaving, or living in the Deep, which is nearly pumped dry now. It's what he might come back to. His silo grew safer as it emptied. He was attacked when it began to fill up again. Part of him just wants to be left alone, to be Solo.

At the landing, Elise gathers her things: her memory book in a satchel, food and water, clothes, batteries, a faded doll, a hairbrush. Rickson and the others can be heard going down the stairwell. As Jimmy and Elise spiral down, she asks how long before "Jewel" comes. "Not long," he says, which means he doesn't know. He reminds her how long it took the water to go down. She counted the steps. Now Juliette's people must tunnel through solid rock. Elise says Hannah thinks dozens of people will come. Hundreds, Jimmy says hoarsely. Thousands, even.

Elise says Rickson thinks the newcomers don't want to rescue them. They want the silo. Rickson sees the bad in people, Jimmy says, just as she sees the good. Elise wishes Rickson could see the good the way Jimmy does. Jimmy kneels and sees the gap from her missing tooth. There's good in everyone, he says, but bad too. Rickson is probably more right than wrong at times.

He hates saying it. But he loves Elise as if she were his own daughter, and he wants her to have strong defenses if the silo fills again. That's why he lets her cut pages she likes from the books in the tin cans, and why he helps her choose. He picks the ones that will help her survive. She'll need to start seeing the world with Rickson's eyes, he tells her, hating himself. He leads her on down the stairs and wipes away his tears before she notices.

The chapter

In silo 17, Jimmy has left the bright lights and comforts of his old home and agreed to move down to the lower farms. The kids feel at home there and quickly get back to work in the grow plots. The lower farms are also closer to the last of the shrinking floodwater.

Jimmy walks down slippery steps spotted with fresh rust, listening to water dripping. Many green emergency lights were drowned by the floods, and even the working ones hold cloudy bubbles of water. He thinks about the fish that once swam where there is now open air. As the water dropped, a few fish were left trapped in shallow pools, easy to catch. He taught Elise to fish, but she kept dropping them back in. She admitted she liked catching them more than eating them. He let her catch the last few again and again, until he felt sorry for the fish. Then Rickson, Hannah and the twins happily ate them.

Jimmy looks up and pictures his fishing float hanging in the empty air. He imagines Shadow peering down and swatting at him, as if Jimmy were now the fish, trapped underwater. He tries to blow bubbles, but only feels his whiskers tickle his nose.

At the bottom of the stairs, a puddle has gathered on the flat floor. The floods were never meant to rise this high. Jimmy switches on his torch. In the dark of Mechanical, an electrical wire snakes past a security station, with a tangle of hose beside it. Juliette left them behind, and they lead to the pumps. On his first trip down, Jimmy found the plastic dome of her helmet in a pile of sludge and rubbish left by the flood. He also found some of the small metal washers that weighted his old paper parachutes, shining like coins. Of everything in the mess, he kept only her helmet dome.

He follows the wire down square steps, with drops falling on his head from the pipes above. He can't imagine this place full of water, and it's scary enough dry. A drip lands on his head, and he jokes to the ceiling that he meant mostly dry. Juliette told him someone must be there when the pump finishes. Water will keep seeping in, so the pump must keep working. But running it dry will burn out a part called the impeller.

He finds the pump rattling unhappily. Its big pipe bends over the lip of a well, which Juliette warned him not to fall into. The well is nearly empty, just a foot of churning water. The pump growls, metal clangs, and he smells hot wiring. Jimmy pulls out his cutters, fishes up the wire, separates the two joined wires and cuts one. The pump slowly winds down. As Juliette taught him, he strips and twists the cut ends. When the well fills again, he'll have to short the starter switch by hand, as she did weeks ago. He and the kids can take turns. They will live above the ruined levels, tend the Wilds, and keep the silo dry until Juliette comes.

The chapter

In silo 18's Mechanical, Juliette has won her argument with Shirly about taking the backup generator. But she doesn't feel like a winner. She watches Shirly stomp off and tries to imagine being her. Shirly's husband, Marck, died only a couple of months ago. Juliette was a wreck for a whole year after losing George. And now a mayor is telling the head of Mechanical she's taking the backup generator. One snapped gear tooth, and the whole silo could go dark, with every pump silent, until it's fixed.

Alone in a dim hallway, Juliette wonders what she is doing. Even people close to her are losing trust. Is this about a promise, or just stubbornness? Her scars itch. She remembers talking with her father after nearly twenty years of avoiding each other. Neither admitted how foolish they had been. Their shared pride drives them to achieve a lot, but it also causes damage.

Back in the generator room, Dawson's team has already separated the backup generator's exhaust coupling. Raph is loosening its mounts with a huge wrench. Juliette realizes she is really doing this. Shirly has every right to be angry. Through the holes in the wall, Juliette finds Bobby at the back of the digger with his daughter and shadow, Hyla. Bobby is a huge man with long braided hair and dark skin, the opposite of his friend Raph in every way. The digger is cleaning up well. But Bobby warns it won't turn. It's aimed dead straight. Juliette says they'll steer it with iron wedges along the right-hand wall, so the back pushes against them and the front swings aside. Bobby agrees it might work, slowly. He studies a schematic of all the silos, which Juliette stole from Lukas's hidden office. Her planned route curves from silo 18's generator room to silo 17's. Bobby adds that they'll need wedges to angle it down too, since it tilts upward.

Bracing is another problem. Erik will only lend girders for a thousand yards, and Juliette needs five or ten times that. She says they'll pull some from the mines. Bobby fears she'll start a war. She plans to win Erik over by promising him steel from the other silo. She has Hyla note thirty-six beams and seventy-two risers. Bobby worries about hauling the tailings to the crusher. The crushing room stirs painful memories for her. Instead, she'll dig straight down into mine shaft six, nearly used up, and fill it. Bobby jokes she's trying to anger everyone. She has Hyla write a note for Courtnee: service the backup generator fully before it goes in, because there won't be room afterward.

Bobby is shocked to hear she won't stay to fit the generator. Dawson will do it. She sends Hyla out of earshot. Her presence down here is causing unrest, she admits quietly, and Lukas was right to come for her. She threatens to beat Bobby if that gets back to Lukas. He laughs that he's married and understands. Bobby asks if her friends are worth all this. They are, she says, but it's for everyone here too. They need to prove this works. It's only the beginning. Bobby replies that the beginning of one thing usually means the end of another.

The chapter

In silo 18's Mechanical, Juliette knocks at Walker's workshop. She has heard he left it during the uprising, but she can't quite believe it. Walker greets her warmly, one eye huge behind his magnifiers. She's come to radio Solo, and to say she'll be away a few days.

Walker asks if Lukas is pulling her away. Partly, she says. She has another project in mind, even less popular than the dig. Walker thinks for a moment, then his eyes widen. Somehow he knows exactly what she plans. He jokes that she's like Courtnee's chili, causing trouble at both ends. She hasn't told Lukas yet, or Peter Billings, the new sheriff.

Walker's big radio can reach other silos, like the one in the room beneath IT's servers. He shows her a portable radio he's nearly finished. It has a dial with thirty-two positions and will piggyback on the repeaters in both silos. He warns that radios won't work well deep in the dig. Juliette says Courtnee, whom she put in charge of the dig, will use runners as in the mines. Walker heard Courtnee wanted to rig their side to blow in case of bad air. Juliette says that was Shirly's idea, a reason not to dig. Walker patches her through to Solo, whom he calls one odd fellow. Solo's news is mixed. Mechanical over there is dry, sooner than expected, but rust will set in at once. It could be weeks or months before they can salvage anything.

She packs a small bag: her barely worn silver coveralls, damp socks and underwear, her dented canteen and a ratchet set. Her pockets hold her multi-tool and twenty chits. She has no radio, because Walker scrapped two to build the new one. Leaving Mechanical feels like leaving the airlock weeks ago, a one-way valve. On the stairs, people glare and quickly look away. The wonder at her survival is crumbling. Her tunnel plans are spreading fear, not hope. A shopkeeper avoids her eyes. A mother shields her child. A few people nod and say "Mayor," and a young porter happily shakes her hand. But at the lower farms on 126, and at a bathroom further up, she feels unwelcome.

At the deputy station on 120, she nervously visits Hank, the deputy of the Down Deep, who fought in the uprising. They haven't spoken since her return. He offers his hand timidly. She hugs him instead. He apologizes, and she stops him, asking about his injured arm. They agree on a truce. Hank says transfer requests up and out are ten times normal. His deputies have no direction, with no dispatches from Security or her office. She says she's going to her office for a week or two, and things will improve. Hank warns that people hear "improve" as "change," and those still alive fear change. She turns down his joking offer of her old jail cell. She must plant the first crop in new soil at the mids farms by lights out. She asks him to watch the stairwell. She expects trouble, and offers to pay for a shadow or two.

The chapter

In silo 18, Juliette climbs up from Hank's station through levels badly scarred by the fighting. She sees silver streaks where bullets hit, black burns, pitted concrete and rebar sticking out like broken bone. She has spent her life keeping the silo running, and the silo has kept her alive in return. They need each other. The small problems in Mechanical she once hoped to fix now seem tiny beside the damage her leaving caused. One big mistake, she feels, can bury all the little ones.

She crosses the spot where a bomb tore a gap in the stairs. It's patched with metal taken from landings, which are now narrower. Names of the dead are written nearby in charcoal. Higher up, Supply's doors have been replaced. The people in yellow paid heavily for siding with Mechanical's people in blue.

A Sunday is letting out at the church on 99, and the people passing her give hostile looks. Knox once told her how this temple began, when his father was a boy. People protested about music and plays on Sundays and camped outside the bazaar, blocking the stairs. In time they took over much of the hydroponics level. The temple on 28 opened an outpost here, and now it is bigger than the original.

Father Wendel, bald and glowing in white robes, shakes hands at the door. People thank him and press chits into his palm. He greets Juliette as mayor. That was the tens, he says. They added another Sunday, and people from the top come down for the late one. An acolyte, Remmy, brings a carved bowl full of chits. He has a shaved patch on his head, dark eyes and no expression. Wendel makes him greet the mayor. Juliette feels sorry for him without knowing why. Wendel invites her in to fill her canteen and promises to bless her journey. Inside, there are costly new pews made from salvaged wood, and Remmy keeps watching her.

Wendel suggests she is hiding from the gods. Annoyed, Juliette says she believes in the gods who made this silo, and all the other silos. "Blasphemy," he whispers. She goes on. The gods made the towers beyond the hills and left a way out: a digger that could take them to new places. Wendel calls the digger the devil's work in the devil's deep. There are no such gods, only demons. Juliette realizes this is his sermon. She says her gods were the people who built the silos to protect them from the world they destroyed. They were gods and demons both, but they left room for redemption and meant people to be free. She has seen the other silos. They should use every tool the gods left, she says, except his power to make people afraid.

Wendel says she is the one spreading fear. People crowd in three Sundays a day, and children can't sleep, afraid she'll kill them all. Juliette is lost for words, remembering the mother on the stairs. She offers to show him the books of the Legacy. He says only one book matters: a gilded book on a podium inside a steel cage. Juliette remembers it from lessons, full of blacked-out lines. The podium is welded to the floor with clumsy, fearful welds. Both know they've gone too far. Remmy fills her canteen. Wendel says nothing more, and his blessing is forgotten.

The chapter

In silo 18, after leaving the church, Juliette takes part in a ceremonial planting at the mids farm. Then she keeps climbing at an easy pace. By the time she reaches the thirties, the lights are dimming for the night. Lukas is waiting for her on the landing. A porter told him she was close. Juliette remembers a young girl in light blue who passed her earlier, and she is reminded that Lukas has eyes and ears all over the silo.

Level thirty-four holds heavy memories for her. Knox died here. Mayor Jahns was poisoned here. Juliette was sentenced to clean here, and the doctors patched her up here afterwards. She looks at the conference room where she was told she was mayor. There she once suggested telling everyone they are not alone in the world. Now she daydreams about showing people instead. She pictures families travelling down to Mechanical, the way people used to climb up to look at the wallscreen, then passing through a tunnel to see a whole other silo.

The halls of IT are quiet and empty at night. They look exactly like the halls in silo 17. Juliette half expects Solo to come round the corner with bread in his hand and crumbs in his beard. She imagines Elise running out to hug her leg, the twins arguing over finds, and Rickson and Hannah kissing in the dark. She is so lost in thought that she misses what Lukas says. He jokes that she seems to be in another world. He is worried, not angry.

In his apartment, which feels more like home to her than her own unused flat on level six, Lukas offers dinner and a bath. Juliette wonders if she smells of grease and torch fumes. Then she says they need to talk. Lukas panics that she doesn't want to register as a couple after all. She promises she does. She once hid a love from the Pact, and she won't do that again. It's about the digging, she says, and about something else he won't like. She doesn't want to tell people about the other silos. She wants to show them, with a project up top that needs his IT staff. Lukas frowns. He asks to talk about it tomorrow and just enjoy one night together.

In the dark they make love. Juliette hates people seeing her burn scars, so she asks for the lights off. But the scars are very sensitive, and his touch sends sparks through her. Then Lukas stops. His favourite little scar is gone, he says, from the crook of her right arm. Three lines once crossed there to make a small star, and he has kissed it a hundred times. Juliette feels hurt that he names her wounds. She says she doesn't want to be one of his star charts. When he suggests her father take a look, she switches on the light and checks both arms in the mirror. She can't find the gap. Lukas kisses the spot anyway. Half crying, half laughing, she forgives him without believing him, and shows him an ugly welt to kiss next.

The chapter

The story jumps to silo 1. Charlotte, Donald's sister, is exercising in the drone warehouse. She has wrapped two drone batteries in webbing, each weighing thirty or forty pounds, and does slow lunges in a lap around the room. Her legs shake. She feels out of shape after years of sitting at a drone console, and then centuries frozen. Her brother woke her a few weeks ago. The routine of eating, exercising and working on the drones is starting to feel normal, and that scares her. Her time in the Air Force, stationed in Iraq during a war, taught her how to stay sane while cooped up.

She showers, sniffs her three sets of coveralls, and makes her bunk crisp, Air Force style. She sleeps in the old barracks now. In a room of pilot stations, she is building a radio from spare parts Donald has quietly taken from the storerooms. It can already pick up stations, but it still needs better speakers and a way to send. She listens to the static and pretends it is the sea or rain.

Donald arrives with breakfast and bad news. He got stuck on the lift with a handyman he knew from his first shift. He doesn't know if the man recognized him. Charlotte points out that few people know him as Thurman, the man he is pretending to be. Still, Donald is bringing down extra food. He has also changed her badge so she can use the lifts, in case something happens to him. And the head of the silo goes off shift in a week, which will make things harder.

He has talked to Lukas, the IT head in silo 18. Lukas has cracked another server, but it holds the same data: every resident's jobs, family and life from birth to death. Donald shows Charlotte a printed ranking of the silos. Beside each number is a percentage, all very close to 100. Silo six is on top again. Below a certain line, silos are marked off or listed as N/A, including 40, 12 and 17. Donald believes only the silo at the top will be allowed to survive. The Pact and his notes have convinced Charlotte that all the others, their own included, will be wiped out. She notices he hasn't told silo 18, which sits far down the list. He insists he saves that silo every day by not reporting what goes on there.

Charlotte asks what Juliette, the mayor, gets out of their talks. Donald says she enjoys threatening him. Charlotte thinks he seems different each time he talks to her. Donald explains that Juliette was sent to clean and came back. The computers can't account for that, he thinks. Silo 18 has just moved up two places. It might give them the best hope. Charlotte trusts the computers more than he does. He answers that people can be more compassionate than machines.

Donald coughs blood into a handkerchief. Charlotte admits she is scared. He says he isn't afraid of dying, only of being buried alive and of doing the wrong thing. She begs him to do nothing and let the machines run things. He squeezes her arm and says that might be the worst choice of all.

The chapter

In silo 1, that same night, Charlotte wakes from a nightmare. She always dreams of flying and falling, unable to steer. In the dream, a bomb drops toward a man with his family. He turns at the last second to shield his eyes from the sun. For an instant she sees her own parents, her brother and herself, and then the signal is lost. Her sheets are damp with sweat. The empty bunks around her feel like ghosts of the sleeping pilots.

She knows she won't sleep again. She pulls on a pair of red coveralls, one of three colours Donald brought her. She remembers red is for the reactor. These are her work clothes, heavy with tools that rattle as she walks. She heads down the hall to work on a drone.

The lights in the warehouse are already on. That's strange, because it must be the middle of the night, and nobody else can reach this level. Her mouth goes dry. She hears what sounds like whispers. Past the drones, near the tall shelves of spares and rations, a man is kneeling over a still body. He turns at the jangle of her tools. It's Donald. The body is not a body at all. It's an empty, puffy suit laid out flat. Beside it are shears, a roll of silver tape, a helmet, gloves, boots, and a bottle like a dive tank. The rustling fabric was the whispering she heard.

Donald shifts to block her view and starts folding the suit up. Charlotte lies that she only got up for the bathroom. He coughs into his rag. He says he was going through supplies for something they need upstairs, and offers to fetch her a hot breakfast. He is clearly looking for a way out of the conversation. He also says he has asked for a microphone for the radio. If none turns up, he may steal a faulty one from the comm room. Charlotte uncovers a drone and lays out her spanners, trying to sound casual. She asks what the suit is for. Something to do with the reactor, he says. She lets the lie hang in the air so he can hear it.

As she works, she remembers coming home from basic training, fit and strong. Donald teased her, and she pinned him on the sofa. Then a cushion pressed against his face, and he panicked and squealed. His terror of being buried alive came out, something she never teased him about again.

Donald hides the bin with the suit under a shelf and coughs again. Charlotte pretends not to notice. She knows her brother is dying. In her mind she sees his face on her screen, like the faces in her dreams, shielding his eyes in the last moment. That is why he is storing food for her, giving her lift access, and building her a radio. He doesn't want to be buried, to die in a pit where he can't breathe. Charlotte says to herself that she knows exactly what the suit is for. Probably he plans to walk outside to die in the open (my guess, because of his fear of being buried and his cough).

The chapter

In silo 18, some time later, an empty cleaning suit lies on a workbench in the Suit Lab. Juliette is building it. She has removed the small screen inside the helmet so the visor is a clear window onto the real world. As she tightens the collar screws, she remembers the last time she built a suit like this. Across the room, Nelson, the young IT tech who runs the cleaning lab, works on an identical suit. Juliette picked him as her helper because he knows the suits and doesn't seem to be against her.

Her assistant Marsha is there too, an assistant Juliette never asked for. Marsha is just out of her teens and has served the last two mayors. She came with the job, like the gold ID card and the flat on level six. She reads out the population report. The silo has fewer than five thousand people for the first time in thirty years, because of all the deaths. The lottery committee wants an official count and two hundred new lottery numbers. Juliette asked them to pause the lottery, since the silo will soon double its space. Marsha says the committee didn't respond. Many of them don't believe in the other silo. Juliette says the truth doesn't change because people doubt it. The dig is clearing three hundred feet a day. The committee should go and see.

Lukas arrives, and Marsha blushes at his jokes. Lukas asks if Juliette has even told her assistant what she is planning. She hasn't. Marsha looks at the suits as if for the first time. Juliette says she is rushing because the diggers have hit soft soil, and she wants to be there when they break through. Lukas wants her at today's meeting, the first monthly town hall since her election. He promised Judge Picken she would come. With a look, he sends Nelson and Marsha out, and Juliette sees he has more authority than she realised.

He warns that if she doesn't act like a mayor, she won't stay one. The next mayor would turn this room back into what it was built for. Juliette holds back from saying this is far more serious than a game. Lukas notices the books stacked by the cot where she sometimes sleeps. They should be locked up, he says, because people would want them for the paper. She agrees to take them back down. She thinks of Elise, who told her over the radio about making a book of favourite pages. Juliette's book would hold darker things. She barely sleeps, welding in the airlock at night.

She has heard there may be a revote. By then, she says, she will have her answers, and people will believe her. Lukas must go down to answer the call behind the servers. She promises, for him, to attend the meeting. They still need one more suit, for the extra person in the second airlock. As Lukas leaves, she asks him, in very rude words, to say hello to the man on the other end.

The chapter

In silo 18, Lukas leaves the Suit Lab and walks across level thirty-four to the server room. He passes an empty tech room. Its workers were sent to fill gaps in the Down Deep and Supply, replacing the people IT killed in the fighting. Shirly keeps complaining about short staff, then complains again when he sends IT workers to help. A group of techs falls silent as he passes. Someone calls him sir, which makes him cringe. He remembers chatting the same way when his old boss, Bernard, walked by.

Lukas once thought being in charge meant doing what you liked and being cruel for fun. Now he has agreed to worse things than he imagined. Privately he wonders if a revote might be for the best. But he can't picture Juliette building suits for cleanings, or taking orders from another silo about how many births are allowed. More likely a new mayor would split them up. He jokes to himself about transferring to Mechanical as a third-shift greaser. It might even be romantic. Being together is what matters.

He reaches the comm server behind the servers. Several servers stand open with wires spilling out. With the help of the man named Donald, he is learning to get into them. A rickety chair, hauled up from below during an argument with Juliette, sits beside a stack of book tins. On top lies a Legacy book with folded corners and question dots in the margins. During his Rite, his time shut away below as Bernard's shadow, he had to read the Order's sections on human behaviour. Donald has convinced him some of those studies really happened. Now Lukas reads history: uprising after uprising, and men like Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro and Lenin, who freed people and then enslaved them in something worse.

Juliette calls these stories myths. To her, tearing a world down is easy, but rebuilding is hard, and few think about it. Lukas, like Donald, believes revolutions are painful but things get better as people learn. One night Juliette took him to the cafeteria and pointed at the dead hills and ruined towers. This, she said, is what learning from mistakes looks like. Lukas whispered that maybe this is the bad time before things improve. She pretended not to hear.

The lights flash red with the call. Donald's voice is flattened by a machine, yet Lukas senses disappointment that Juliette didn't answer. Donald says time is short and begs them again to stop digging. Because of an old threat Juliette made, Donald thinks they are digging toward him. Juliette made Lukas promise not to correct him, to keep silo 17 and the rescue secret. Lukas dislikes the lie. He thinks Donald is frightened for them, not himself. Lukas says the digging will continue. Donald's people can feel the vibrations. He has ordered them not to look into it.

Lukas asks why Donald helps them and calls every day. Donald says he helps them remember, because he knows what forgetting feels like. The books exist, he says, so that whoever inherits the world, whoever is chosen, will know how to set things right. Lukas begs him to explain. Donald says next time and hangs up.

The chapter

In silo 18, Juliette goes to a town hall meeting for the first time in her life. She sits on a raised platform with Judge Picken and Sheriff Peter Billings. It reminds her of the bazaar stage, and of her father once comparing these meetings to plays. She whispers to Peter that she doesn't know her lines. Peter smiles at a young woman in the front row, and Juliette sees he has found someone.

The room is split into three sections, like the silo. The Up Top benches in the middle are packed, with IT and cafeteria people standing at the back. The Mids benches are half full. The Down Deep side is nearly empty, apart from an elderly bootmaker and his wife holding hands. Juliette remembers how far away these meetings felt when she worked in the depths. People there are too busy surviving to climb so far. She expects to be bored. Since surviving cleaning and the fire, most squabbles feel small to her.

Judge Picken bangs his gavel and calls her to the podium. Everyone is staring at her, and they look angry. Then the shouting starts. Did she let poison in? A woman with a baby says her child has had a fever ever since Juliette came back. People ask if the other silos are real, what it was like outside, and what the noise below is. Juliette spots her father at the back, calm but worried. A bang like a gunshot makes her flinch. It's the judge's gavel. Deputy Hoyle and Peter push the crowd back into their seats.

Juliette chooses her words carefully. She says she can't tell them what it's like outside, because nobody knows. Everything they were told about the world beyond the walls was a lie. She proposes doing what has never been done: going outside to take a sample of the air and find out what is wrong with the world. The room explodes. Some people are curious, but most are furious. Peter rests a hand on his gun. Marsha opens a door at the back, and Peter pulls Juliette into the judge's chambers. She sinks into a taped leather chair. She feels angry at Peter and Lukas for making her mayor, and at Lukas for making her come.

Then her father walks in and hugs her. He hasn't come about the digging. He has heard about her plan up top, from Nelson, who asked whether he would be on standby if something went wrong. He says the next cleaner can take samples instead. Juliette answers that there will be no more cleanings while she is mayor. He won't let his daughter go. He looks at the scar the suit's collar left on her neck. That was the fire, she says. Next time, he answers, it will be something else.

Juliette tells him she doesn't want to lose him again. He is all the family she has left. Saying it openly feels like something Lukas taught her. Her father softens and agrees to examine her before and after. Then she shows him her wrist and asks if scars can fade with time. He takes a long breath and looks far away. No, he says. Not scars. Not even with time.

The chapter

In silo 1, Captain Brevard, the head of Security, is nearly through his seventh shift. Only three more to go before retirement. He counts them down the way he once counted down years. His wish is for each shift to be dull and uneventful. Dull is good. But right now he stands in the cold hall of frozen sleepers, in front of an open cryopod splashed with dried blood. His coffee has gone cold, which he hates.

The body was taken out hours ago. A med tech servicing the next pod noticed a smear of blood on this one's lid, and cleaned half of it away before he realised what it was. Deputy Stevens is photographing the pod's inside with a flash camera. Then Darcy, the night guard, hurries over waving a sheet of paper. Darcy found the scene early that morning. Instead of going to bed as ordered, he went up to Medical with the body and waited for test results. He is young, blond and always grinning. Stevens whispers that he can't stand him. Brevard thinks Darcy is clearly no trained policeman.

Darcy has a DNA match. Brevard guesses it dryly: the blood on the lid matches the person the pod is registered to. Darcy says there's more, but Brevard lets Stevens give his theory first. Stevens says it's a clear murder. A fight began outside the pod, which put the victim's blood on the lid. The victim's hands were tied, he was pushed back inside, and he was shot once in the chest while sitting up. The lid was shut straight after. It probably happened within the last month, on this shift. Someone then put in an IV and a catheter to keep the body from rotting, so the killer may have medical training. Stevens wants to question the medical staff one at a time.

Darcy can't hold back. It wasn't murder, he insists. The blood on the lid does match the pod's registered owner, but it doesn't match the man inside. It is mixed with saliva, probably from a cough, so it came from a second person, likely injured or sick. Nobody is sure who the man inside is, because his records seem to have been tampered with. The man the pod belongs to shouldn't even be in the executive wing. He should be in Deep Freeze. The blood inside the lid matches only a partial record in the executive files. According to Doctor Whitmore, the files are badly messed up.

Stevens starts a new theory, but Brevard stops him. A gunshot, splattered blood, bound hands, a shut lid and no weapon: everything shouts murder. So why does Darcy keep saying it isn't? Because, Darcy explains, the man was plugged into the pod the whole time, and the pod was still running. This Troy fellow, or whoever was pulled out of there, is still alive.

Readers of Shift will know this pod. Donald, once given the name Troy, shot Thurman inside it and closed the lid. So the blood on the lid is probably Donald's (my guess, because he coughs blood and the pod is registered to his old name).

The chapter

In silo 1, right after the last chapter, Brevard, Stevens and Darcy head up to the medical wing. Stevens asks if they should involve the Shepherd, the top executive who keeps to himself. Brevard says no. The Shepherd has whole silos to worry about. Even a murder is Security's job. In the lift, Brevard wonders if the tiny machines in sleepers' blood, which repair freezing damage, could also heal a gunshot wound. If the victim can talk, he can name his attacker.

On level sixty-eight, Dr. Whitmore and an assistant wait outside the little-used operating room. Through the window, the man from the pod lies sleeping, his colour much better. Brevard pours away his cold coffee and finds no fresh pot. Whitmore says the patient woke up strong and angry, insisting his name wasn't Troy. They sedated him and took blood. His records come up only partly, because Whitmore isn't allowed to see them. Whitmore has seen this once before, with someone from the executive wing.

Whitmore's hunch is worse than a hidden body. The pod is labelled Troy, and the blood on the lid matches Troy. But Troy was put into Deep Freeze over a century ago and should never have woken. Darcy points out that he clearly has. Brevard realises he misjudged the young guard. Whitmore checked the records. Twice, people have been woken from Deep Freeze by this very office, though not on his shift. One came from the old Deep Freeze, the storehouse from before orientation. Darcy asks if it was a woman. Whitmore suspects so, and has sent his assistant Michael to look.

Stevens suggests a crime of passion. Brevard pictures a lonely official secretly waking his wife, then a killing that went wrong, and gives up because it's too complicated. Whitmore adds the kicker. The only other person pulled from Deep Freeze is someone whose records he can see. Darcy guesses the name is Troy, and he's right. Brevard sums up: a rogue sleeper from Deep Freeze has attacked an administrator, taken his place and codes, and is waking women. Now it's time to tell the Shepherd. Then Michael runs in, out of breath. It was a woman, and her pod readout was flashing. She is dead. The name on the pod was Anna.

In the operating room, the old man strains against leather cuffs and demands to be freed. He knows he was shot. Brevard asks who did it. A man called Donald, he says, then agrees that Troy is the same man. He says he is one of the heads of this silo and tells them to check his records. They've been tampered with, Brevard answers. The man gives his name: Paul, usually called Thurman, once a senator. Brevard says Paul Thurman is the name of the man they call Shepherd. The old man narrows his eyes. He has been called many things, he says, but never that.

The chapter

In silo 17, the earth is growling beyond the walls. A few days ago it began as a distant hum, like a far-off pump. Yesterday it became a steady shaking that Jimmy, known as Solo, feels in his knees, bones and teeth. Drops of water shake loose from the pipes above and fall into puddles left from the floods. Elise squeals when one hits her head and looks up, grinning through her missing tooth, waiting for more.

Everyone has gathered in the old generator room in Mechanical, on level one-forty-two. Rickson shines his flashlight at the far wall, where the noise seems to come from. One twin, probably Miles, presses his ear to the concrete. His brother Marcus pulls him back, excited. Hannah tells the twins to get away from the wall. She holds the baby, who somehow sleeps through it all. For two weeks they have kept the pump running and Mechanical dry. Today the noise is unbearable. They have waited for hours. Elise asks how much longer. Soon, Jimmy says, though he doesn't really know.

Then come new sounds: squealing metal, clanging teeth, noise from every direction at once. The puddles leap. Water flies up from the floor as well as down from the pipes. Jimmy nearly falls and yells at everyone to step back. A sheet of concrete the size of a man slides off the wall and crumbles. Dust pours out. It sounds like hundreds of machines now, as if they are inside everyone's chests.

The digger breaks through. A curved gash races across the wall. Cutting teeth burst from the ceiling, spin down below the floor and come back up. The hole is taller than a whole level. Cut iron rods stick out, and the air smells of burnt metal and chalk. The twins cheer. Elise squeezes Jimmy so hard he struggles to breathe. A boulder rolls toward the bigger generator. A light bulb shatters. Jimmy suddenly fears the machine will never stop and will bore straight through the silo. Then the great spinning disc enters the room, slows and halts. Its small wheels shine where the rock wore them bare. A length of rebar is wrapped around one like a knotted bootlace.

In the silence, voices call out from behind the digger. A woman shouts that they're through. Jimmy scoops up Elise and runs toward the machine, with Rickson and the twins close behind. He can hardly breathe at the thought of visitors he doesn't need to fear. Everyone is grinning.

A woman climbs up from the tunnel below the floor, stands and brushes back her hair. She is covered in dust and smiling. She asks if he is Solo. She shakes his hand and introduces herself as Courtnee. She guesses Elise's name and squeezes her shoulder, and Elise clings tighter to Jimmy. A very pale man with white hair climbs out and studies the cutting teeth. Jimmy asks where Juliette is. Courtnee frowns. Didn't Juliette tell him? She went outside.

The chapter

In silo 18, Juliette stands in the airlock in a cleaning suit while gas is pumped in around her. This time she feels no fear and no false hope. She just wants to know what the world is really like, and maybe make it better. Clear plastic sheets line the walls. She opens one sample jar to catch some of the airlock gas, argon, as a comparison. Then the great outer door opens, and she walks up the ramp and outside for the third time in her life.

Lukas's voice is in her helmet. She keys her microphone by pinching her thumb and finger together. It feels very different to go out with friends behind her instead of being exiled. With no lying screen in her visor, she feels the thrill of open land and endless sky. She takes an air sample at the top of the ramp, counting to ten with the lid off, then seals it with wax. Next she scoops up a surface soil sample. Then she uses a T-shaped corkscrew tool she built to drill out a deep plug of soil.

Lukas reports that the airlock has had a full burn and that Nelson will go in once it cools. Juliette knows dozens of people are watching her on the cafeteria wallscreen. She heads toward the nearest hill, where two bodies still lie, and takes a second air sample. She thinks about the old cleaning reports. They were fake numbers, used to keep people afraid. These may be the first real tests of the outside air. She is struck by how fast the lies collapsed inside IT. The techs there seized the chance to do the real work at last. Lost in thought, she forgets to count to ten and leaves the jar open too long.

Lukas says recharging the airlock with argon will take a while. They will use the flames when she comes back, because there were strange readings in the airlock before she left. Nelson is being scrubbed down in the inner lock as a precaution. Juliette doesn't like this. Their theory was that outside isn't as bad as people were told, and the flames mostly scared cleaners out. She hoped to come back without another burn. Worried, she asks Lukas to clear the watching crowd down to at least level four. After a pause, and with noise behind him, he says they're doing it.

Her last sample comes from a dead cleaner, Jack Brent. He was sent out nine years ago after he went mad when his wife lost a second pregnancy. She chose him because she knew little else about him. His suit has faded to gray, and he lies with his arms folded as if napping. She thinks this would have been her fate without Scottie, Walker and Supply. Holding her breath, she cuts a square from his suit and then pries out a bit of the rotted undersuit at his belly. It seems to hold only soil and dry bones. She leaves the blade by the body.

Lukas's voice now sounds muffled. He tells her to start back. Then he jokes that they forgot to send her out with cleaning pads, since there is already some grime on the sensors. Juliette glares at the tower.

The chapter

Still in silo 18, straight after her samples, Juliette waits at the bottom of the ramp. She remembers the last time she stood here, wrapped in the heat tape blanket Solo made. Back then she thought Lukas was inside the airlock, and found herself fighting Bernard instead. She shakes off the memory and checks that every pouch is sealed. Lukas says "here we go" over the radio. His voice still sounds hollow and far away.

The outer door opens in a cloud of argon, and Juliette dives inside, relieved. A suited figure watches through the porthole in the inner door. Working fast, because the gas and flames run automatically, she puts her sample pouches and the deep-soil borer into an airtight, fireproof box Nelson has set on the bench. She locks it. She has rehearsed every step in bed at night.

Next she climbs into a huge metal tub of water she welded together herself. Once her helmet goes under, real fear hits her for the first time. Being underwater brings back the floods of silo 17: the taste of rust, the gulps of air, the panic. She grabs handles at the bottom and hooks her boots under a bar, holding herself down while the flames roar over the tub. Lukas counts slowly to ten. Then she bobs up into boiling, steaming water and scrambles for the inner door.

She slips on the door frame, and gloved hands drag her through. Two suit techs, Nelson and Sophia, scrub her with brushes dipped in a blue neutralizing liquid, then scrub each other. When Juliette starts scrubbing "Sophia," she sees it is really Lukas inside the suit. He shrugs, guilty. She guesses he couldn't bear for anyone else to take the risk, and that he wanted to be near if something went wrong. She would have done the same. Peter Billings watches from the sheriff's office and calls out that they have a perfect vacuum. The low ceiling of this new airlock was built on purpose, to keep the air small and easy to clean. Juliette checks Nelson's flushed face for signs of trouble and decides it's just from scrubbing.

As fresh air comes in from the cafeteria, Juliette lets herself enjoy it. They did it: no burns, no hospital, no contamination. Then Peter tells her news they held back while she suited up. The dig broke through to the other silo about half an hour ago. She feels joy and guilt at once. She should have been there. But she felt her chance up top was closing, so she settles for being glad for Solo and the kids.

The second airlock's door, which she made from a shower stall, opens. Behind her, a second round of flames fills the old airlock, boiling away the spilled water. She stares at it, remembering. Lukas tugs her into the old jail cell, where they strip to their undersuits for another shower. All she can think about is the fireproof box on the bench, and whether its answers were worth the risk.

The chapter

In silo 17, right after the breakthrough, the giant digger sits silent. Its teeth gleam, and its face is caked with dirt, rock and torn rebar. Beside it, a black crack joins two very different worlds. Jimmy, the man called Solo, watches strangers pour through into his home. They are bearded miners and mechanics with greasy hands. They shake his hand, call him Solo, hug the frightened children and say Jules sends her greetings. Then they switch on their helmet lights and splash off to explore.

More workers squeeze past, with two dogs that sniff at the puddles and at a trembling Elise. Courtnee, Juliette's friend, finishes giving orders. Jimmy notices that she has the same fierceness as Juliette. Courtnee hands him a flashlight and explains the tunnel: stay close, mind the support columns, keep to the center. Rickson asks why the doctor can't just come to them. Courtnee says it is safer on the other side, glancing at the rusted walls. Jimmy feels defensive. They have been managing fine.

Jimmy knows what the young couple fear. The twins have overheard the older kids whispering. Hannah would have to get an implant in her hip, like their mothers had. Rickson would be given a color and a job, instead of looking after his own family. Jimmy shares their distrust of these adults. Still, they put on borrowed hard hats and squeeze through the gap. They pass through the warm inside of the digger and out into the cool, dark tunnel. Workers shout and wrestle with piles of rubble on both sides, leaving a narrow path in the middle. A boulder taller than Jimmy blocks part of the way.

What scares Jimmy most is the straightness. He is used to a staircase that spirals up and down. Walking in one direction with nothing to stop them feels unnatural. They pass workers carrying machine parts and steel taken from his silo, and he wants to object. Elise says she is scared, and he carries her. A square of light appears far ahead, yet it takes countless steps to grow larger. He thinks of Juliette walking this far outside and keeping her promise to return. Loose rocks crumble from the ceiling, and he hurries on.

Far behind them comes a loud crack, a rumble of shifting rock and shouts. The kids run ahead. Jimmy touches the old key on his chest, the one he took from the server room. His silo is now unguarded. But the children's fear makes him feel stronger, and he decides it is his duty to be brave.

At last they come out into silo 18's Mechanical. Workers in dark blue coveralls and leather tool aprons stop and stare. Everything halts at the sight of Hannah's baby. A woman reaches out to touch it, but Courtnee waves her back. Jimmy looks for Juliette, though he knows she is up top. He carries Elise, ignoring his sore hip, her heavy book bag bumping his ribs. Here there is power, steady lights, noise and crowds. Jimmy feels deep down that this is a grave mistake. Suddenly he feels like just another frightened youngster.

The chapter

In silo 18's Mechanical, straight after the tunnel walk, the kids are given a small bunkroom. Jimmy gets a private room down the hall. Elise is unhappy with this and clings to his hand. Courtnee says food is coming, then showers. First she introduces a tall man in spotless pale red. He is Dr. Nichols, Juliette's father. He checks Jimmy's eyes, mouth and breathing with a cold metal disc. It feels faintly familiar from Jimmy's distant past. Jimmy realizes he is a model of courage for the kids.

Elise goes next. The doctor checks the gap where her tooth is missing and asks about fairies. She has never heard of them, so he gives her a dime. The twins beg for their turn. Miles says they used to hear noises in their farm. Marcus claims he lost twenty teeth and they all grew back except the one Miles knocked out. Each twin gets a dime. The doctor says parents put two dimes under their pillows hoping for healthy twins. Miles mentions that Rickson used to be a twin too. Jimmy notices the doctor keeps glancing at Hannah's baby.

Hannah says coolly that she won't take the implant. Her mother had one, but it was cut out of her, and she doesn't want to be cut. Rickson holds her close and glares. Dr. Nichols whispers that she doesn't have to, but Jimmy sees him glance at Courtnee. The doctor explains that Juliette sent him because she cares, and that he specializes in the youngest children. He warms the metal disc with his palm so the baby won't mind. Rickson asks if he gets a dime. The doctor offers chits, and Rickson asks what a chit is. Hannah is already letting the doctor listen.

Courtnee says she must radio Juliette now that they are across. Jimmy and Elise insist on coming. Courtnee mentions getting them freshened up to see their new home. Elise asks when they will go back to their real home. Jimmy struggles between truth and a lie. He tells her this will be home for a while, until their old home is made better. Elise's eyes fill with tears. Courtnee kneels and promises her some sweetcorn after the call. None of them has heard of sweetcorn.

The halls look like a clean copy of silo 17's Mechanical. Suddenly something yips at Jimmy's feet. He thinks it's a big rat and screams, while Courtnee laughs. It's a dog pup. Elise calls it a cat, but Jimmy knows cats. A young mechanic grabs it by the scruff. Courtnee says Conner was supposed to put the litter down weeks ago, but he's been digging the tunnel. She explains that dogs multiplied after people from Supply hid down here. Jimmy thinks of himself as a boy in the server room. You can't hate something for living.

On the way to Walker's workshop, Elise slips into a room and finds a crate full of pups. She lifts one out, and it licks her. The mechanic drops it back and kicks the lid shut. He says Conner has been feeding them because they come from his own dog. Courtnee says they'll talk later, clearly not in front of Elise. Jimmy tugs the complaining child along.

The chapter

In silo 18's Mechanical, Courtnee leads Jimmy and Elise to Walker's workshop. It smells of hot electronics and unwashed man, and radios hiss with static. For Jimmy, it is like a whiff of his old home and his old self. The room is crammed with workbenches and half-done or abandoned projects. Computer parts lie in a messy heap by the door, and Jimmy thinks his father would have scolded anyone for that. At the far bench sits a man in a leather smock with a smoking soldering wand, tools sticking out of countless pockets, a grizzled beard and wild eyes. Jimmy has never seen anyone like him.

This is Walker. He asks if it's dinner time. Courtnee says it isn't even lunch, and introduces Juliette's friends from the other silo. Walker peers through a lens over one eye and recognizes Solo, since they have spoken by radio. The two bearded men study each other, and Jimmy says he prefers to be called Jimmy. Elise introduces herself too. She says Hannah calls her Lily, but she prefers Elise. Walker agrees it's a good name.

Courtnee asks if Juliette's trip went okay. Walker snaps out of a daze and says she's back inside. Jimmy asks what she went out for. He only knew she had a secret project she wouldn't discuss on the radio in case someone was listening. Walker says she went to see what was out there. He clearly thinks that's no reason to go anywhere. Then he picks up an odd radio covered in knobs and dials and calls for her. Someone else answers first, then Juliette.

Jimmy takes the radio. He realizes that for the first time they are under the same roof, with her somewhere above him. She calls him Solo, and he lets it go. She apologizes for missing the breakthrough. She says a place is being made for the kids near the farms, more like home, and she'll come down after finishing one little project, in a few days. A few days feels long to Jimmy. He asks her not to make it too long, and she promises. She checks that her dad has seen them, then asks for Courtnee.

Jimmy's hand trembles as he passes the radio over. Courtnee and Juliette talk about the great stairway and the dig, and about sending the radio up to her. They argue over why her father isn't up top checking on her and someone named Nelson. Jimmy's mind wanders, and then he notices Elise is gone. Panic rises as he searches under benches and behind shelves. Then Elise waves from the hallway and says she's hungry.

Courtnee hands Jimmy the strange radio. Juliette wants him to keep it, and will see him in a day or two at his new place by the lower farms. Courtnee promises Mama Jean's sweetcorn. Elise follows slowly, hugging her memory book, humming because she can't whistle. Her shoulder bag kicks, squirms and makes noises of its own. She has probably hidden a pup in it (my guess, because she loved them and the bag is moving).

The chapter

In silo 18, after her return, Juliette fetches the sample box from the airlock bench. Its lid is scorched, but it feels cool. The box goes into a padded, lead-lined trunk sealed with caulk. Nelson and Sophia go ahead to clear the stairs, while Juliette and Lukas carry the trunk down to the Suit Lab on level 34. People in silver carrying loads breaks the Pact, she thinks. How many laws can she break now that she is meant to uphold them? She is glad her father went down to see the kids.

The trunk is heavy and awkward. Juliette ties her belt to the handle and slings it over her shoulder like a porter. It reminds her of how bodies are carried for burial. Behind a taped-off landing door, an old woman kisses a cross, and Juliette thinks of Father Wendel saying she brings fear, not hope. She asks Lukas what happens after we die. He jokes first, then says he thinks we just stop being. What lasts forever, he says, is our decisions. Everything we do leaves a permanent trail, good or bad, as the world circles the sun. It can never be changed.

His words stay with her. She pictures her own trail: fighting with her father, losing a lover, her brother's death, her mother taking her own life, friends killed, becoming sheriff, refusing to clean. Apologies don't weld broken things back together, she thinks. They only admit the break. When Lukas asks if she is okay, she lies and says she's fine.

In the Suit Lab, Lukas kisses her cheek and seals the door from the hall with Sophia, listening by radio. Juliette and Nelson suit up with a shared oxygen bottle, taking every precaution, as if one jar could poison the whole silo. Over many nights she has come to know him. His mother was a nurse who worked with her father. He built the last two cleaning suits and helped dress Holston. He apologizes again, awkwardly. She tells him he was only doing his job, and then thinks how dangerous that excuse can be. He finds it ironic that people believed this lab existed to explore outside, and only now does it truly do that.

Her test is simple. Each air jar holds a strong gasket and heat tape from Supply, plus a weaker gasket and tape from the cleaning stores, meant to rot. The hill sample's weak gasket is an eighth eaten, with a small hole in the tape. The ramp sample is far worse: the gasket half gone, a bigger hole. That makes no sense, since good air is pumped out at the ramp. Juliette blames herself for mixing up the jars. Nelson keeps coughing, and his face is shining with sweat.

Then she checks the control jar, filled only with argon inside the airlock. The weak gasket and its tape are completely gone. Nelson suggests they fell out, or the jars are out of order. But Juliette feels a terrible sense of betrayal, like a trusted pump suddenly running backward. She calls Lukas, whose voice sounds thin and far away. She asks where the argon comes from, and whether they are even sure what it is.

The chapter

In silo 1, Donald sits in the comm room, coughing hard until something tears loose into his filthy rag. He folds it without looking. A painless breath feels wonderful. Around him lie signs of the operators' easy shifts: leftover meals, a deck of cards, an open paperback. He is suffering. He studies the schematic of the silos and sees dead worlds, all doomed except one. He fears he will die before he finds a way to steer the project off its deadly course. He is the only one who knows or cares.

He doubts himself. How could he fix a world he helped destroy? Long ago he saw green fields and blue sky on a drone's screen, but now he wonders if that was just another machine's lie. Still, foolish hope keeps him calling. He wants the silos free to live their own lives. He wants to learn what is on silo 18's servers with Lukas's help. Most of all, he wants a painless death for himself and Charlotte, perhaps a resting place on the hill near his wife Helen's grave.

Silo 18 is fifteen minutes late to answer. He clears the operators out at the same time every day, and they are starting to exchange looks. Maybe they think it's a romance. He pictures the whole silo project as a giant clock, running on its own and winding down. Invisible machines ride the winds, wiping out anything human, while the buried people wait like seeds. He has barely reacted to news of a murder in his own silo. He cares more about the other silos than his own.

At last someone picks up, breathing, without saying hello. So it isn't Lukas. It is Juliette, out of breath. Donald prefers her calls, strangely. Her anger feels deserved, and part of him wants her to end him. She says she has figured out the cleanings. She has just been outside, out on the hills, and taken samples. Donald is thrilled, not threatened. He has dreamed of doing exactly this. He begs to know what she found.

Juliette pours out her fury. She calls him a liar and says the books should be burned. She says silo 1 fills the airlocks with something that eats away the seals first, and then people's bodies. She says she cut the hidden camera feeds weeks ago and saw the power lines and pipes coming in. The gas must be in the pipes. She tells him his daily calls give them headaches, that she is cutting off his cameras, power and gas, and that no one will clean again. Next time she goes out, it will be with clean air. Then she hangs up.

Donald throws his headset, scattering cards and losing someone's place in the book. He has no idea what she means about argon. Then, dizzy and sweaty, he remembers the day the bombs fell. He stumbled down a ramp into a fog-filled airlock, crying for Helen, while Anna and Charlotte pulled him along. Gas pushes out of every airlock during a cleaning. He realizes the dust is in the air. The tiny machines are released with each cleaning, like clockwork. He shouts into the dead microphone that he is an ancient and did this. He yells that he is sorry, but nobody hears.

The chapter

In silo 1, in the drone warehouse, Charlotte lies under a drone, tightening the cables of a wing flap. She has stripped out everything it doesn't need: the bombing computer, the weapon mounts, all but one camera, even some braces. This will be one straight flight, low and fast, not caring if it is seen. The goal is to see farther and make sure. After a week of work, she worries because the last two drones broke down so fast. Her brother is in such a bad state that she feels they won't get another try. It is all or nothing.

Donald came back from his latest call and forgot her dinner and the radio part he promised. Now he paces, coughing, with blood specks on his coveralls, talking to himself. He says the silos poison the world with their fear. When they send people out to clean, that poisons the world. Then he talks about the gas. It is pumped into silos to end them when they are no longer wanted, and he admits he has done it himself. It's all the same gas, he says. He mentions that silo 18 turned off its cameras, and that one silo once turned off its demolitions. Maybe they can turn off the gas too. He wanders back to his notes in the conference room.

Charlotte watches his shadow pace and thinks of their grandmother, who declined badly at the end. She fears this is how she'll remember him, never again the sharp Congressman Keene in a pressed suit. She has her own idea: wake the many thousands of women asleep in the freezers to outnumber the hundred or so men on shift. But she wonders, as Donald does, whether they would fight their own fathers, husbands and brothers. Donald's other idea is to give every silo an equal chance. He compares it to tearing down old borders. "Let's lower the ladders," he keeps saying, and let people decide, not computers. Charlotte doesn't see how that would work, and neither does he.

She thinks of times when people were born into their jobs with no choice. She remembers being grateful, while deployed in Iraq, that she was born in America instead. It was just a roll of the dice. Borders on maps can be as real as silo walls.

The wing is finally fixed. Then a lift dings at the far end of the warehouse. It can't be Donny with food, because his shadow is still down the hall. Boots pound in, several pairs. Charlotte shouts his name once, throws the tarp over the drone and parts, and crawls under it. Men run straight toward the back as if they know where to go. She wonders whether the handyman on the lift recognized Donny.

Peeking under the tarp, she sees a weak, shuffling man held up by a younger man in silver. The hallway lights blaze on. Donald is dragged out of the conference room, and a man in silver punches him in the ribs. The feeble man orders them to stop. He has brilliant white hair. Donald stares up at him, coughing, trying to say something. Then the old man, barely able to stand, kicks Donald again and again while two men pin him down. Charlotte watches, trembling.

The chapter

In silo 18, on the IT level, Juliette crawls beneath the floor grates at the bottom of the server room ladder. Lukas holds the flashlight and keeps asking if she should be poking around in there. A month ago, soon after Lukas made her mayor, she traced the hidden camera feeds here. Lukas had shown her the cameras could see anywhere in the silo, and she asked who else could see. He said no one, until she found the feeds vanishing through a sealed port in the outer wall. She remembers other lines in that bundle, and now she wants to be sure.

She unscrews the last cover panel. Inside are the camera wires she cut, plus thick power cables like the main feeds from Mechanical's generators, and two copper pipes. She explains that in silo 17, level thirty-four still has full power with no generator running, and the servers there still hum. She thinks all that power comes from outside. Lukas asks why anyone would supply it. Juliette doesn't know. Maybe they don't trust the silos to keep things running, or the servers need more power. What she really wonders is why they left it on after trying to kill everyone in silo 17. Lukas suggests Solo turned it back on. She laughs at the idea.

A voice comes from the radio down the hall. Lukas runs off with the flashlight, leaving her in the dark. She feels for the copper pipes. They are the right size. Nelson showed her the argon tanks, with a pump and filter meant to draw argon up from deep in the earth. But behind the tanks she found two extra lines feeding in, separate from that system. She now suspects the supply system does nothing at all. Like the gaskets, the hidden power and the lying visors, everything has a false front, with the truth buried beneath.

Lukas returns and begs her to come out. She hears in his voice that something is wrong, and wriggles back out, leaving her multi-tool behind. Her father called. One of the kids went over the railing on the way up to the farms and fell twenty levels. Dizzy, Juliette grabs the radio. It is still set to channel 17, the one she uses for Jimmy, so her father must have Walker's portable.

Her father sounds shaken and says they've also lost Elise, and Jimmy has gone after her. An angry crowd heading down knew who he had with him. In the scuffle, Marcus went over the rails. Her father hasn't gone down yet to check on him. Rickson is hurt, but Hannah, Miles and the baby are fine. They are at Supply on 110. Someone saw Elise heading up. Juliette says she's coming down and tells him to take everyone back to Mechanical, back home. Bringing them over was a mistake, she thinks. Her father warns that the angry crowd seemed to be heading that way too.

The chapter

In silo 18, little Elise is lost in the bazaar on level 100. She has heard people call it the "bizarre," and to her that name fits. Her puppy ran off during the big clash with the angry crowd, and she chased after it up the stairs. Strangers kept pointing her upward. A woman in yellow said a man with a dog went toward the bazaar. Two men smoking on the landing waved her in.

In her own silo, level 100 is empty rooms, trash and rats. Here it is packed with people, animals, noise, bright colors and bad smells. People breathe smoke from things held in their fingers. Some men wear face paint. A woman in red with horns and a tail beckons her into a tent, and Elise runs. Soon she is completely lost and hides under a counter to cry. A fat, hairless animal on a rope walks past, snorting like Rickson snoring. She looks it up in her book. It's a pig. Naming things makes them less scary. Then she remembers Rickson telling her the littlest ones are the safest. She crawls out and keeps turning right, her trick for the dark Wilds.

A boy with short hair and bright green eyes asks if she's lost. He gives her a strip of hot meat. It's pig, not rat, and it tastes wonderful. He guesses she's from the Mids. She says she's from silo 17, west of here, and that they dug over and rescued her group. His eyes go wide. So the dig is real! His name is Shaw. He wants her to meet his dad, who says people like her aren't real. When she says she is looking for her puppy, Shaw casually says puppy is sold in the next hall. It costs more than dog but tastes the same. Elise is horrified that people here eat dogs, and she runs off.

In the next hall she finds pens of dogs for sale and meat on display. A huge dog with its jaws tied shut lunges at her. In a smaller pen at the back, a mother dog feeds six tiny pups. Then Puppy himself jumps up and licks her chin. She grabs him over the fence. A man in a bloody white apron grabs her from behind. He says he paid for that runt. Her bag falls, and he picks up her Memory Book and leafs through it. He offers to trade the book for the dog, then decides to keep the book anyway and pushes her away. When she fights, he grabs her hair and shouts for a boy named Roy.

Suddenly a figure in brown coveralls slams into the man and knocks him down. It's Shaw. Elise grabs her bag, her book and a handful of loose pages. Shaw scoops up Puppy and tells her to run. They race through the crowd, under counters, through someone's bedroom and kitchen, laughing and terrified, with the stall men behind them. Then big hands snatch Shaw into the air. It's Solo, smiling through his beard. Elise tells him Shaw is a friend. She says she wants to go home. Solo says that's where they're heading.

The chapter

In silo 18, right after the bazaar, Elise clutches Puppy while Solo carries her bag and book. They head down the stairs to find the others. Shaw follows them, even after Solo tells him to go back to his family. Elise keeps spotting his brown coveralls peeking from higher landings, but she doesn't tell Solo. A few levels down, a porter brings a message. Juliette is coming down and has half the porters searching for Elise. Elise never even knew she was missing.

They wait on a landing, and Elise shares water from Solo's canteen with Puppy. At last Juliette arrives in a thunder of boots, sweaty and breathless. She and Solo hug for a long time. She tells him something, and he cries too. Elise can tell it's a secret or something bad. Juliette hugs Elise hard and says it will be okay. Puppy pees on Juliette's boot. Juliette says she can't keep a dog, because dogs are dangerous, and asks if she took it from a vendor at the bazaar. Elise says Puppy came from Mechanical and says sorry for taking him. Solo backs her up. Juliette says they'll sort it out later.

As they walk, Elise says they should make things the way they used to be. Juliette laughs and says she's too young to be nostalgic. She explains the word: thinking the past was better than it was, because the present is so bad. Elise says she feels that a lot. Then Juliette and Solo stop on the stairs and tell her the bad news. Marcus slipped over the rails when the crowd knocked her down and Puppy ran off. He fell and died. Elise can't see how anyone could go over rails so high. But she knows it's like when their parents went away and never came back. She feels awful for Miles, who isn't a twin anymore. Juliette says she never should have brought them here. Elise agrees. But secretly she is not giving Puppy back.

Now we follow Juliette. Her legs ache, and she blames herself for Marcus. Shirly calls on the radio, upset. A mob has just come through Mechanical. A man named Frankie was overrun at the gates and is in the infirmary. Two or three dozen more people are heading through the tunnel. Shirly says she didn't sign up for this. Juliette turns the volume down so Elise can't hear. Shirly lists who is over there: the dig team, curious third-shift mechanics, and a planning committee with a note from Juliette's office. Juliette vaguely remembers Marsha mentioning it, but she was busy with the suits. Shirly says she is close to pulling everyone back and shutting the dig down. Juliette privately agrees things are out of hand. She says she's on her way.

Jimmy drops back to talk. In the tunnel, he saw people carrying pipe and equipment from his silo, as if that was the plan all along. Juliette promised to rebuild his home, not use it for spares. She insists she still means to. She admits she may have said an extra silo would give them backups. Jimmy points out that's exactly what spares are. She promises everything will be all right in the end. He says she keeps saying that.

The chapter

In silo 1, in the hidden drone warehouse, Charlotte wakes in total darkness. She is cold and damp with sweat, lying on the metal floor under the tarp. Her face is sore and marked by the diamond pattern of the steel. The attack on Donny comes back to her like a half-remembered dream. She had curled up, held back her tears, and at last fallen asleep from exhaustion or fear.

She listens for footsteps before peeking out. Then she crawls out from under the drone like a chick leaving a nest. Her joints are stiff, and she feels terribly alone. Feeling around for her worklight, she knocks over a ratchet set with a clatter. She remembers the drone has a headlamp, finds its test switch, and turns it on. A golden beam spreads across the floor, and she finds her light. She also picks up a big wrench as a weapon. Her army past comes back. It feels like a camp under fire, where a mortar shell can drop at any moment.

She points her light at the lifts, afraid of who might come out. Then she goes to the conference room, where she last saw her brother. There is no sign of a fight on the floor. Notes are still on the table, but maybe fewer than before, and the bins among the chairs are gone. Someone tidied up badly, which means someone will be back. On her way out she sees blood splattered on the wall where he was attacked. Sobs rise in her throat. She doesn't know if he is alive. She pictures the white-haired man kicking him in a rage. Now she has no one.

Hurrying back toward the drone, she sees its light falling on a door. She tells herself she is not quite alone. Down that way is the radio. She pulls herself together. She turns off the drone's headlamp and carefully puts the tarp back. From now on she must always expect visitors. She grabs her tool bag and goes to the flight room. On the workbench is the radio she and Donny pieced together over the weeks. It can receive, and they have listened to chatter from far-off places. She digs through the spare parts he left her, looking for a way to make it transmit. At the very least she can listen. Maybe she can learn what happened to him, hear from him, or reach someone else.

The chapter

In silo 1, Donald lies on a cot in a locked room, beaten and bleeding. Every cough sends pain through his cracked ribs. He has given up on escape. The worst pain is fearing for Charlotte. He thinks he should tell Thurman she is hiding below and beg for mercy. Thurman loved her like a daughter, and he might simply put her back to sleep. Hours pass in fever. He dreams of captaining a sinking ship while lifeboats shaped like cryopods burn on the water, full of women and children. Awake, he realizes the frozen women were never meant to stop men fighting. They were someone to save, something to work for. He thinks people and the planet should have been left alone to go extinct, as living things do.

Boots approach, and Thurman comes in alone. He looks stronger than yesterday. He says Donald has only a few days to live. The poisoned air he breathed will kill him unless treated. Instead, he will be frozen again in the morning. He says drones and bombs are missing, and asks if Donald knows what he has risked. Donald hears something like fear in his voice. Donald says he has been cleaning up Thurman's mess: silo 40, and silo 17, which was not dead. Thurman knows. Donald feels oddly stronger, because he knows so much that Thurman doesn't.

Then Thurman says quietly that he is shutting down silo 18 today. Donald thinks of Victor, who shot himself over an old uprising there. All his hope for 18 and for blue skies seems wasted. Asked why, Thurman angrily says Donald has been talking to them. Did he think they could save him? Donald says they deserve a chance. Thurman wants to know how Donald took his name and place, so it can't happen again. The system's biggest weakness, he says, is a revolt from the top, like silo 12, which Donald watched fall. Thurman says they planned for that with spares and the Rite. He boasts that the shifts and pods solve the hardest problem in history: handing on power. Power never really changes hands.

Donald offers a trade. He knows the servers track every detail of every life. He found the shifting percentages, each silo's odds of surviving once set free. But what else are they for? Thurman explains that the servers weigh those lives and also decide the lotteries. That lets silo 1 shape who is born and raise the odds over time. Donald feels stupid. Thurman always said they left nothing to chance.

Donald keeps his side of the deal. It was Anna. She feared Thurman would freeze her forever, so she arranged for Donald to take his place and left a note in Thurman's inbox. Donald now thinks silo 40 had hacked the system backward: first the bombs, then the gas, then the cameras. Anna may have let them be, hoping they could save everyone. Donald admits he bombed silo 40 and killed Anna before he understood. Without knowing it, he crushed two rebellions for Thurman. Crying, he blames Thurman for waking Anna and turning him into this. He braces for a blow and starts to tell Thurman about Charlotte. But the shadow pulls away, and the door slams.

The chapter

In silo 18, on the IT level, Lukas senses something is wrong. The red lights above the servers are flashing at the wrong time of day. Calls from silo 1 always come at the same time, but this one comes in the middle of dinner. Sims, the old Security chief, found Lukas in the break room to tell him. Lukas plugs in his headset. The voice sounds the same as always, but the words are wrong. It asks who he is. Lukas says he is head of silo 18. The caller says he dreamed up the whole World Order. He wants the head of the silo, a man named Bernard Holland.

Lukas nearly blurts out that Bernard is dead. He watched Bernard burn in the airlock rather than be saved. But this man doesn't know that. Lukas's world wobbles. The people on the other end aren't all-knowing, or they don't all work together. He fumbles and says Bernard is unavailable. The caller gives him fifteen minutes. After that, things will go very badly for everyone in the silo. The line goes dead. The caller is probably Thurman (my guess, because in Chapter 31 Thurman said he was shutting down silo 18 today).

Lukas grabs a portable radio and calls Juliette while running to find Nelson to pose as Bernard. Juliette is down in Mechanical dealing with "a nightmare." She has left the kids with her dad and is heading to Walker's. She tells Lukas to calm down. Nelson isn't in the Suit Lab. Lukas remembers passing Sims, who has clearance for the server room. He chases Sims down and begs him to pretend to be Bernard. Sims is confused but agrees. He is red-faced, sweaty and nervous.

In the server room the lights are already flashing again. Sims puts on the headset and says he is Bernard, in a high, pinched voice that sounds nothing like him. He soon hands it back. The man knows. The caller tells Lukas he shouldn't have done that. He knows Bernard is dead and asks if it was an accident or murder. He says they have no camera feeds from silo 18. He says Lukas has been talking to someone in silo 1. What did that person tell him? Lukas glances at his pile of books, and Sims stares at so much paper. Lukas claims they talked about population reports and put down an uprising. The caller says he has a machine that tells when Lukas is lying. Lukas collapses into his chair. He says he is Bernard's shadow and passed the Rite. The voice says it knows, but thinks Lukas has been "poisoned." It says it is sorry. Then, softly, as if to someone else, it says to shut them down.

A hiss comes from above. A thick white cloud pours down from the vents. Lukas remembers when Mechanical tried to choke him with exhaust fumes during the uprising, but this fog is different, thick and sinister. He pulls his undershirt over his mouth and runs with Sims between the servers to the airtight door. The keypad stays red. He enters his code twice, but it won't open. He turns to Sims and sees blood pouring from the big man's nose and covering his hands.

The chapter

In silo 18, in Walker's workshop down in Mechanical, Juliette is fighting with the portable radio. Lukas has called through a couple of times, but all they hear are running boots, heavy breathing and static. She lets Walker try. Courtnee watches, worried. Walker fiddles with the knobs he added and says it looks fine, so the problem must be on Lukas's end.

Then Walker's big radio on the bench crackles. It's Hank, the deputy. He says there are reports from the Mids of some kind of vapor leak. He is out on a landing and can't see anything, but he hears a huge racket of people on the stairs above him. There is no fire alarm. Peter Billings cuts in. He has a leak too, in the airlock. Juliette imagines an exhaust leak from the main generator. They would have to shut it down, and the backup generator is gone. That is her worst fear.

But Peter says it isn't smoke. The vapor is inside the new airlock Juliette welded, behind its glass door. Then he notices the yellow inner door is wide open, and he didn't open it. A moment later he swears, something Juliette has never heard him do. The outer door is open too. He can see straight through the airlock to the ramp. He is looking outside.

Juliette tells him to leave everything and get out. He must shut the cafeteria door behind him and seal it with tape or caulk. She asks Walker to reach Lukas. Walker is trying. Peter reports a crowd running up the stairs toward him, like half the silo. Juliette can't understand why people would run up. In a fire, they should grab a hose or go to a safe level. She tells Peter to keep them away from the office and the airlock. She realizes only her new glass door now stands between the silo and the outside air.

Peter says he can't stay. People are acting crazy and are already in his office. He doesn't want to shoot anyone. Juliette asks if the vapor is the argon. He thinks so. It looks like what filled the airlock when she went out. Juliette feels her heart sink. She thinks of the gas, the poison, the missing seal from the test canister, and the threats from the man in silo 1. She believes he has done it. He is killing them all, and every plan she thinks of is far too late.

Then a voice calls her name, not from the big radio but from the portable in Walker's hands. It's Lukas. Her vision blurs as she reaches for it.

The chapter

In silo 18, Lukas's voice finally comes through the portable radio in Walker's workshop. His volume was down. Juliette hears crashes and bangs. He says he fell down the ladder and is bleeding. Sims is dead. They are shutting the silo down. He is heading into the pantry, and then the signal turns to static. When he comes back, his voice is thick, as if his nose is blocked. He tells her to seal herself off. He can't stop his nose bleeding.

In a flash, Juliette remembers Solo's stories of how silo 17 fell: the rush to the top, people spilling outside, the piles of bodies she later waded through. She is watching silo 17's past happen in her own home. She knows how this ends. She believes Lukas is already dead. She tells him to forget the radio and seal himself in the pantry. She will save as many people as she can.

She radios Hank and orders him to send everyone down to Mechanical, fast. He says he feels he should go up, since everyone is storming upward. She screams no. Courtnee asks whether they should seal off Mechanical, as they did with steel plates during the old holdout. There's no time, Juliette says, and she quietly fears the air may already be spoiled. She sends Courtnee to get the kids back to their own silo, despite the mob over there, and to take Walker to the dig. Juliette will round up everyone she can.

Mechanical's halls are oddly calm. People walk to shifts, weld and push trolleys. Only the radio warned her. She shouts at everyone to get to the dig, but people make excuses about being busy. She grabs Raina, Dawson's wife, and tells her to get all the children from the classroom through the tunnel. A crowd forms. Juliette swears and yells that this is not a drill. Raina runs first. Juliette's old friends spring into action next. Juliette vaults the security gates and runs to the bottom of the stairwell. The whole stairway trembles with boots.

Looking up the shaft, she sees white clouds high above, maybe from the Mids. Hank doesn't answer. People from the 130s stumble down, confused that the stairs actually end. Some carry children. They talk of fire and smoke. A man with a bloody nose insists they should all be going up. Juliette sends them inside. Then Peter's voice breaks through the noise. People are getting outside. Juliette slides down the wall into a crouch. Supply workers in yellow arrive, and Hank appears at last, turning people back toward Mechanical. Peter gasps that he can't breathe. A cloud is coming in, and he is in the galley. Everyone is pouring up, acting crazy, falling over, dying. Then his radio clicks off.

The fog in the stairwell grows thicker. A dark shape punches through it. A person falls, screaming, past the landings and hits the floor with a boom Juliette feels in her boots. The survivors scream and scramble for Mechanical as the white smoke comes down the stairwell like a hammer.

The chapter

In silo 18, Juliette is the last one into Mechanical. One security gate has been smashed, and people pour over it while the guard helps them through. The kids' bunkroom is empty, so she hopes Courtnee has them. She joins a packed crowd down to the generator room and the dig. The oil pump keeps nodding up and down, as if sadly saying "of course." There are fewer people than she hoped. For a moment she hopes it was all a false alarm. Then she remembers Peter and Lukas.

At the tunnel she finds Courtnee and Walker. Courtnee says the kids are already through with Juliette's father. Juliette plunges into the dark tunnel. It was dug for a few people, and most of it is still full of rubble. A few torches and miners' helmet lights flash in the black. People climb the rubble piles and send rocks down on others. Juliette helps dig someone out. Some people try to turn back, and others yell at them to keep going. A baby screams somewhere. The trip feels endless, as if the poison will catch them from behind.

At the far end, people jam up at the open door in the back of the digger. Raph holds a flashlight there. He says many kids came through, and Shirly is inside directing traffic. Juliette tells him to make sure he gets through too. Inside the digger, Shirly is squeezing people one by one through a gap so narrow they must turn sideways. The backup generator is still warm. Juliette tells Shirly they are losing the silo. The outside is getting in, and the air is coming down the stairwell. She plans to seal off the dig with the blast charges. Shirly points out the charges are rigged from silo 18's side, to protect 18 from silo 17's air. Juliette says silo 17's air is all they have now. She gives Shirly her radio and asks her to look after everyone, Solo and the kids. Then she turns to go back for the last stragglers, maybe a hundred more.

Shirly grabs her and refuses to be left in charge. In the dark, Juliette never sees the punch. It hits her jaw, and everything goes black.

She wakes curled on the digger's floor, her face throbbing. The voices are fewer and far away. Someone calls her name, but she is hidden in the shadow of the generator. Then a huge boom shakes the earth. Juliette understands. Shirly has gone back to the control room and taken her place. She set off the charges, sealing herself in with everyone left in silo 18.

Juliette weeps. Then her name comes from the radio by her head. It's Lukas. His voice means he is outside the airtight pantry. She sobs at him to get back in and seal himself off. Solo lived for decades on canned food like that. Lukas coughs and wheezes. He says he can't. He wanted to hear her voice one last time. He is done. He tells her he loves her, in a fading whisper. Juliette screams and curses him and herself. Dust from Shirly's blast blows in through the digger door. It tastes of crushed rock, and of everything she has ever known, now dead.

The chapter

In silo 1, Charlotte sits back from her radio, stunned. She has just heard silo 18 fall: an open door, poison air, people dying, a stampede. A silo her brother worked so hard to save is gone. With a shaking hand she flips through channels. Snippets of ordinary talk come from other silos, proof that life goes on elsewhere. The static between them feels like silos full of the dead. She turns back to silo 18's channel. She heard a woman there ordering everyone down to the bottom levels, and someone said her name. Charlotte thinks it was the rogue mayor Donny was so caught up with, the cleaner who came home. She feels a sudden bond with that woman, alone somewhere deep down. She wishes she could transmit.

She rubs the spot where the microphone would connect. She wonders why Donny saved that part for last. Maybe he didn't trust her not to talk. Or maybe he didn't trust himself, since anyone with a radio could hear. She touches the ID card he gave her and remembers the kicking and the blood. She can't just sit and listen to people die. Donny said her ID works the lifts. She decides to act.

She hides the radio and makes the room look untouched. From her trunk she picks the red reactor coveralls, which fit loosely. The name patch says Stan. She can be a Stan. In the men's room she smears drone grease on her face to flatten her cheekbones, thicken her brows and dull her lips. It is the opposite of the make-up she wore when young. She tucks her hair under a cap and hides her shape in folds of fabric. The disguise looks pathetic to her. But in a world where women aren't allowed, would anyone suspect? She misses Donny and cries, telling the mirror not to. The tears slide over the grease without smudging it.

She hunts for a silo 1 schematic. The conference room is a wreck, and most of Donny's notes have been taken. Someone will be back for the rest. She practices an excuse in a flattened voice. She finds a map of circles on a grid, with red lines running from every circle to a single point near the center. She knows it shows the silos. It reminds her of the target grids she used in the Air Force. She pockets it. Then she finds a staff directory listing every man by rank, job and level. They are all men. She thinks of Sasha, the only other woman in her boot camp, now long dead.

From the directory she works out levels. Administration and a comms officer are on 34. Security is on 12, where Donny might be held. Cryo is somewhere below. She sketches her own rough map of the silo. The comm room will surely have a microphone. It's 6:25, dinnertime, with lots of people moving about. She decides to wait until late at night. Sounding like she has a cold, she finds, is the best way to sound male. She slips a screwdriver into her pocket and works on the next drone to pass the time. Tonight she will go find the part she needs and try to reach that stricken silo.

The chapter

In silo 1, just after midnight, Charlotte finally works up the nerve to leave her hiding place. A lift arrives at the armory level with a ding. She steps in, clutching the ID card Donny gave her, and nearly loses her courage. She blocks the closing doors with her boot, then lets them try again. At last she swipes the card, the reader blinks green, and she presses thirty-four, the level for Admin and comms. She tucks loose hair under her cap. She is dressed as a man in red reactor coveralls with the name patch "Stan." Her tools show in her pockets as cover. A pistol from a storage bin hides in a pouch on her hip.

On thirty-four, a big guard sits at a gate. Charlotte uses a fake sick voice. She says there is a power drain on this level and she must check the comm room. He gives her directions. As she pushes through, he calls her back. She has to sign the work log. For a second she forgets her fake name, then glances at her chest and scrawls "Stan."

The halls are busier than she expected for the middle of the night. A man steps out of an office, and her legs go weak. It is Thurman, slimmer and older-looking. Suddenly she understands that the white-haired man who beat Donny was him. She knows his voice as well as she would know her parents'. He asks if she is a long way from home. She keeps walking and says she is checking a power drain. He tells her to see to it. Looking back from the end of the hall, she sees him talking with the guard.

In the comm room, a heavy radio operator with a mug and a few combed-over hairs sits among half a dozen radio sets. Charlotte says she is there to fix a unit and asks which one has the bad microphone. She knows from experience that there is always one problem machine. He points to number two, with a sticky button. She opens its side panel and takes the microphone, its cord and a circuit board. She says she will bring it back tomorrow. He mentions that he once ate across from her in the cafeteria. She just nods. Then she leaves fast, forgetting to put the panel back on.

The walk back to the gate feels endless. She expects Thurman and guards around every corner, but only the guard is there. She marks her time out on the log, and he says that was quick. She hurries to the lift and jabs the button. As the doors open, boots clomp behind her and someone yells, "Hey!" She steps in without turning. Someone comes through the gates and asks her to hold the lift.

The chapter

In silo 1, still in the middle of the night, a man throws his hand between Charlotte's closing lift doors and crowds in beside her, out of breath. His gray coveralls carry the name Eren. Charlotte's hands shake so badly that it takes her two tries to scan her card. She almost presses fifty-four, her hidden home level, then stops. No one is supposed to go there. She can't remember the reactor level either, so she presses one of the lowest floors. She hopes Eren will get off first. He presses forty-two.

Eren chats. He asks if she is just coming out of freeze, because he hasn't seen her around. He says he is the head on shift right now, for another week. Then he tells her to look at him. Charlotte looks up, feeling her hair slipping out, her smooth chin, everything that shows she is a woman. He swears in shock.

Charlotte knees him, but he twists, and she only hits his thigh. Her pistol is stuck in a snapped pouch. By the time she frees it, he slams into her, and the gun and radio parts fall to the floor. He grips her wrists. She screams, and her high voice gives her away. At forty-two he tries to drag her out, shouting for help down an empty hall. She bites his hand hard, kicks him out and loses her cap. But he lunges back in before the doors close, and the lift carries on down.

Eren punches her jaw and ribs, then grabs her throat and lifts her off the floor. He seems terrified and furious, fighting something he doesn't understand. As her vision fades, Charlotte finds the screwdriver in her pocket. She swings it at his face, hoping only to scare him. He turns his head, and it sinks into his neck instead. The lift stops on another level. Blood sprays over her. Down a gleaming hall, men are laughing at a joke. Charlotte drags the dying Eren out into the hallway and dives back into the lift as the doors close.

Then she sees the pistol is gone. There is a deafening bang. Eren, dying in the hallway, has shot her. Fire bursts in her shoulder. One arm won't work. Reaching across her body, she scans her card and presses fifty-four. The circuit board lies cracked under someone's boot, so she keeps only the microphone, hanging it around her neck by its cord. Her blood blends with her red coveralls.

On fifty-four, she staggers out, then realizes the bloody fingerprint on button fifty-four will show where she went. Wiping it with her elbow doesn't work. So she smears blood over every button. Then she scans her card, sends the lift to the top level, and collapses on the floor as the doors close.

The chapter

In silo 1, back on her hidden level fifty-four, Charlotte knows they will hunt for her. She is a fugitive in one giant, closed building. If the man she stabbed lies unfound, she may have until the end of the shift. If someone heard the gunshot and helped him, she may have only hours. She hopes they save his life.

She finds a medical kit in a crate. Pulling her arms out of her coveralls, she sees the wound. The bullet went into her arm and out the back. Below it her arm is numb, and above it throbs. She wraps gauze around and around, under her armpit and over her other shoulder. She forgets a pad, and the dressing is a mess. Her army training has gone out the window. Then she sees blood on the crate's latch and tells herself to think clearly. She cleans the latch, then scrubs the floor by the lifts with alcohol and an industrial cleaner, taking her time.

Next she hides every sign that she lives here. In the barracks, she washes the blood off herself, cleans the sink and changes into fresh coveralls. The bloody red ones go into her footlocker. She strips her cot so it looks like all the others. Then she opens the small door of the drone lift in the warehouse. It is knee-high and the same color as the wall, almost invisible. She puts her bedding, food, water, a small medical kit, two flashlights and spare batteries inside. She also finds the microphone, which she had dropped in the first-aid bin. She could hide in the drone lift now and wait out the first search. But she wants to try the radio first. Surely she has a few hours.

Dizzy from pain and lack of sleep, she goes to the flight room. She opens the radio's side panel with a new screwdriver and plugs in the microphone. She isn't an electrician and can't tell if anything else is missing. She tunes to channel 18. When she squeezes the microphone, the static stops, which is a good sign. She asks if anyone can hear her. Only static answers. She pictures the operators in silo 18 slumped dead. She remembers Donny once telling her, eyes shining, how he had ended a silo with one button.

To test the microphone, she switches to channel 17. She and Donny used to listen to a few survivors there playing radio games like Hide and Find. Out of habit she uses her old Air Force call sign, "charlie two-four." A shaky voice answers. He is frantic. There is rubble in the tunnel, no one will answer, and they are trapped in a rusted place where people are panicking. He asks if she is Shirly.

Before Charlotte can reply, a woman's voice cuts in. That's not Shirly, she says. Shirly is dead. Charlotte forgets her pain and listens. The man asks who is speaking. The tired woman answers that she is Juliette. He asks what she means. Juliette says they are all dead, and so are the people on this side. Then she says she killed them all.

The chapter

In silo 17, Juliette wakes on damp steel plating with someone's undershirt under her head. Her father is shining a light in her eyes. Faces in blue, white and yellow coveralls peer down. Slowly the nightmare turns into memory. Her silo was shut down, its doors opened, and everyone left behind is dead. The last thing she remembers is holding a radio and saying she had killed them all. Her empty stomach heaves. Raph keeps asking if she is all right. She wants to scream at everyone to leave her alone.

The room is dark, lit by a homemade biodiesel torch and swinging flashlights. Small groups huddle in a stunned silence broken by weeping. Raph says one of the boys found her curled up in the back of the digger. Her father listens to her heart. From the pipes and ducts overhead, Juliette knows where she is. It is the big pump room next to silo 17's generator room. The floor is wet because water still leaks from somewhere above. She once swam past this room in a cleaning suit.

Her father says the kids went with Solo, who was taking them home. Juliette remembers who she saw come through the dig: Courtnee, Walker, Erik, Dawson, Fitz, families, classroom kids, and the young boy from the bazaar in brown. But Shirly is gone, and so are Lukas, Nelson and Peter. Raph says no one knows how many made it. A priest and his congregation came through earlier, before the panic, then more people, and then her. Her father says some friends want to turn the digger around and dig back. Raph adds that some are already digging with hands and shovels.

Juliette grabs her father's coveralls. If they dig, she says, everyone here will die. Bobby arrives with a dented canteen of water. Juliette sees the madness of it. Not long ago, people warned her not to dig into a poisoned silo. Now they want to tunnel toward their deaths, as badly as she once wanted to reach this place. She asks about Father Wendel. Bobby says his people were seen heading up out of Mechanical to find somewhere to worship. Others went to the farms, worried about food until they are rescued.

Juliette knows what they don't. She walked over the bones of this silo's dead and heard Solo's story. There will be no rescue. These few hundred people are probably all that is left of silo 18. They think this is a short spot of trouble. They don't understand that they are the ones who were saved. She gets up, insisting they must stop the digging, and asks which way to the dig.

On the way she finds Jomeson, the old pump repairman, sobbing against a row of rusted pumps. His hands hold a pile of chits, months of pay. He grabbed them from the mess hall till as everyone ran. He keeps saying he saved this. Her father shakes his head. Nothing can be done for him. Nearby, a mother rocks and wails with a silent baby. Everyone has only what they could carry. Water drips from the ceiling, as if the silo itself is crying.

The chapter

In silo 17, Juliette leans on her father and follows Raph and Bobby through the digger and back down the tunnel. They climb over rock slides and pass dropped clothes, a boot and a blanket. Ahead, torches light a fresh cave-in where Shirly brought the roof down. Juliette pictures Shirly dead on the far side, and Lukas lying still with his radio. In the night, a radio call from someone above woke her, and she ended it by saying everyone was dead. Since then she has called Lukas over and over, but the static hurt too much. She switched the radio off. She thought about yelling at silo 1 on channel 1, but she doesn't want them to know anyone survived.

She is sure of one thing. Joining the two silos again would kill them all. She saw the white mist coming down the stairwell and what it did to the gaskets and tape. It is how the outside air is kept poisoned, and how worlds are ended.

At the dig, Courtnee is shouting orders to the diggers. When she sees Juliette, her face hardens. Juliette can tell she is torn between slapping her and hugging her, and it stings that she does neither. Juliette notices the burning torches and worries about air. Can silo 17's thin farms make enough for hundreds of new lungs? She tells Courtnee this rock is keeping them alive. Their home was poisoned. Peter saw the doors open and people die.

Courtnee laughs. Safe here? She lists the problems. The gen room is a rusted wreck. They have little air, fuel, food or water. She gives them a few days if they don't dig home, and asks if Juliette knows what she has done. Juliette welcomes the attack. She turns and screams down the tunnel, again and again, that she did this. Then she admits her digging or her trip outside may be why they were poisoned. But the air here is clean, and their home is lost. She says a man did this, from one of the fifty silos.

Fitz, the oilman, doubts the maps. Juliette says she stood on a ridge and saw other silos herself. Asked if they should dig toward them, she says maybe one day, once they know what is there. Another digger asks whether she, who always goes to look, isn't curious what lies beyond the rubble. She says if all is well there, people will come for them. She wishes she were wrong, but digging would mean shoveling their own graves.

Fitz asks what she would have them do. She asks for a day or two. One silo thinks it is in charge and threatened to end them with a button, and she believes it did the same to silo 17. They can send her to clean later, and she will gladly go. First they must keep this silo from flooding, keep the farms wet and the lights on, and save air. There is clean power in the thirties, and they brought the backup generator. Courtnee calls it revenge. Juliette says no, it is prevention. They must stop these men from doing it again. Courtnee turns away. Then she tells Fitz to put out the torch. They are wasting air.

The chapter

In silo 17, Elise is climbing the stairwell and hears voices. There are strangers in her home. Rickson used to scare her and the twins with stories about strangers. In the old days, he said, anyone you didn't know wanted to kill you and take your things. He also told them how babies come. His father cut a "poisoned pill" out of his mother's hip. Sometimes, he said, strange men came and cut the pills out of women because they wanted babies. Elise doesn't have a pill in her hip. Hannah says they grow in later, like grown-up teeth. Rickson says that isn't true. Elise rubs her side, worried. With her tongue she feels a new tooth coming in, and it makes her want to cry that her body changes without asking her.

Puppy has squirmed loose again and run up the stairs. Elise keeps climbing after it, even though Solo told her to stick close. She has an excuse ready: she'll say Puppy should have stuck close. A man passes her carrying a coil of the black and yellow wire that hangs in the farms. Rickson always said never to touch it. But this stranger doesn't seem to want her things. Maybe Rickson was wrong, and Solo was right. Maybe strangers can be good, like Juliette, who made their home better.

Another man hurries past with a sack full of leaves, tomatoes and blackberries. That's too much to pick at once, Elise thinks, the way Hannah would say. These people don't know the rules. Thinking of food makes her very hungry. She wants to eat as much as she can, before it's all gone.

On the next landing, a man with a neat black beard and bright eyes calls to her. He wears brown coveralls, like the boy from the bazaar. He asks if she got separated from the flock. Elise says she can't be in a flock, because she isn't a sheep, and there aren't any sheep left. He asks what a sheep is. Then he realizes she is one of the children who lived here. He explains that a flock means a congregation, the members of a church. He asks if she goes to church. She shakes her head. Her memory book has a page about sheep, and she trusts her book more than him.

The man asks if she is hungry and invites her inside. He says they have found a church, and others will bring food down from the farms soon. He'll share what he picked. Elise says she needs to find Puppy. He promises they'll get her puppy. He tells her she is a miracle. Elise has never read that in her books, but she has missed a lot of pages. Her stomach grumbles, so she follows him into the dark hall, toward quiet humming and whispers.

The chapter

In silo 1, Charlotte is living in a box again. This time it isn't a freezing pod with a blue line in her vein. It is the hidden drone lift, a metal box too low to sit up in, pitch dark and silent. It dents and pings when she moves. Twice she has lain still, listening to the boots of men hunting her on the other side of the door. She stays inside all night. When she can't hold it any longer, she sneaks out to the bathroom. She wonders whether to flush, because the noise might give her away, but leaving evidence seems worse. She flushes.

At the end of the hall, she checks the radio. It is still there under its plastic sheet, and so are Donald's notes. She decides the folders are too precious to lose and takes them back to her hiding place. Curled up, she pictures boots landing on her brother. She remembers dark nights in Iraq, lying in a barracks full of men coming off shift. She felt more exposed there than her drone ever did in the sky. Hiding here feels the same.

She can't sleep, so she reads Donald's folders by flashlight, held between her cheek and shoulder. She keeps hearing the radio voices: outer doors opening, the gas, Juliette saying everyone was dead. In one folder she finds a chart of numbered circles, many crossed out. Each circle held people. She feels connected to silo 18, as Donald did. He once told her he didn't contact other silos because their leaders would turn him in. The more she reads, the better she understands his endless pacing and his wish to end the system that traps them all.

She eats and drinks in tiny amounts. After what may be days or only hours, she needs the bathroom again. She also badly wants news. She believes some of silo 18's people escaped over the hills to another silo, though she isn't sure how. After flushing, she goes to the flight room, leaving the light off. Channels 18 and 17 are silent. A dozen other channels have voices, so the radio works. It is just after three in the morning. She calls on 17 anyway. She almost says who she is, then worries her own silo might be listening. She starts searching for Donny's ranking list of destroyed silos.

A man answers and asks who she is. He thinks she is calling from Mechanical, and complains that it's the middle of the night. Charlotte realizes he is one of the survivors. To stay safe, she agrees she is in Mechanical. He says Court told them to keep the radio on. They have been struggling with the water lines, and people are staking claims on farm plots. Charlotte asks for Juliette. He says she isn't there and thought she was down with Charlotte. He tells her to try in the morning, and to ask Court for more workers, a farmer and a porter.

Charlotte wonders why she reached out at all. She can't help them, and they probably can't help her. Still, contact feels less frightening than being alone. She plans to try again in a few hours. She thinks about her old cot, but crawls back into the metal box to sleep.

The chapter

In silo 1, Donald is a prisoner in a small room. He has lost track of time. Only a clean circle and a screw on the wall show where a clock once hung. Yesterday they made him skip a meal, and boots stomped past at night to keep him awake. He thinks it is a trick to confuse him. Now breakfast arrives with company: Thurman and two security officers. Donald is in great pain but starving. There is no fork, so he eats the eggs with his fingers.

One officer is Brevard, the long-serving security chief, who is clearly not his friend. Brevard has the younger officer climb onto the dresser and check the ceiling panels. The space above is blocked. Donald already knew that. Thurman says the attacker wasn't Donald, because there was blood everywhere and he would be covered in it. Brevard suggests he could have washed and changed. Thurman then asks who it was. Someone dressed as a reactor tech came through security on this level the same night and went to comms. Thurman thinks Donald took someone in to help him, maybe someone from his last shift.

Donald chews a biscuit to keep his mouth busy. He thinks of Charlotte. Was she out searching for him? He says he knows nothing and asks who was attacked, his hand shaking. He fears the blood might be his sister's. Thurman says it was Eren, found thirty floors down in a pool of blood. Brevard says Eren is dead, with a screwdriver to the neck, and a lift is covered in his blood. Thurman sends the officers outside.

Alone with Donald, Thurman gives him a fresh rag and holds out a bag for the bloody old one. It is just a gesture, he says. He admits he tried to kill Donald, and that he was weak to try and weak to fail. Donald was right about Anna, he adds. Donald says he liked Eren. Thurman says Eren was one of his recruits and asks if Donald knows the killer. Donald suspects this kindness is a new tactic. He says he can't imagine anyone he knows killing a man like that, except Thurman. Donald will go under today. He keeps thinking he should tell Thurman about Charlotte so she won't be alone.

Thurman asks if Anna ever left the armory or talked about gas feeds. Donald says no. Thurman says someone tampered with the feeds between Medical and Population Control. Donald asks what is wrong with him. Thurman says his body is now a battlefield. Billions of tiny machines are at war inside him, some tearing him apart, others holding him together. Then Thurman coughs into his fist.

Donald says that on the day he went outside, he wasn't trying to be seen over the hill. He just wanted to die. Thurman says he guessed that later and should have let him. But alarms sounded, his men were fumbling with suits, and he threw himself on the grenade. Donald says he shouldn't have. Thurman agrees and leaves.

The chapter

In silo 1, Darcy, the young night guard, is on his hands and knees scrubbing blood out of the lift. He grumbles in a mocking copy of Brevard's voice about being told to take samples, clean up and fetch coffee. He misses his quiet night shifts. He has nearly stopped noticing the smell of copper, the way people here get used to everything. The daily pills in paper cups, the bland food and the buzzing of the jammed lift all fade.

Darcy barely remembers his old life. He has a feeling he once worked security, long ago. He has a recurring dream of jogging in the morning behind a balding older man, with an earpiece that kept slipping out. He remembers watching crowds and jumping at every bang, always ready to take a bullet for someone. Then he spots something shiny wedged in the crack between the lift floor and wall. It is a bullet.

He fetches the sample kit. The tweezers are missing from their place, and he grumbles about careless men on other shifts. He bags the bullet and sees pink blood smear the plastic. He checks that it isn't from his own scrubbing water. It isn't. All the earlier blood samples matched the victim, Eren, who was stabbed in the neck, though a gun was found nearby. So this blood probably came from the attacker. The proper thing would be to give it to Stevens. But Darcy found it, so he wants to see the results himself. He calls the night custodian to finish the cleaning and rides the express down two levels. He wishes the silo had stairs.

In Dr. Whitmore's crowded office lie two bodies: Anna, the woman found dead earlier, and Eren, the former silo head. A grumpy lab tech runs the bullet sample. The machine finds a match, but where the personnel details should be, it only says "Emer." The tech thinks it is a weird name. Darcy digs an earlier report out of the bin and compares the two. It isn't a name. It sits on the line for the freeze hall where the person is stored. "Emer" means Emergency Personnel.

Emergency Personnel is the smallest freeze hall, kept for the most extreme cases. Darcy's own code is refused at its door, but the master security code works. He feels both scared and excited. He remembers that many men in this hall were up recently. They were pilots, and he once felt the ripples in his coffee when drones dropped bombs. He wonders who could wake such people without anyone knowing. Whoever he reports to, the news might reach the very people responsible. The dead man was the head of the whole silo. This is huge. It might even free him from coffee duty for good.

Two thirds of the way through the rows of pods, he starts to doubt himself. Then he finds a pod with no face inside and no frost on the glass. It is switched off and only as cool as the room. Its display shows power, but no name, only a number. Darcy writes the number down. He believes he knows where the pilots spend their time on shift, and where his wounded "man" must be hiding.

The chapter

In silo 1, Charlotte waits until morning. Searchers have passed her hiding place in the drone lift again, and they have taken the rest of Donald's notes. But the radio is still under its plastic sheet. She changes the bandage on her scabbed arm, turns the radio on, and spreads out Donny's folders: the ranking of the silos, the Senator's note about the Pact, and the map with red lines. She remembers Donny saying they would not live long enough to see the results of what they did. Doing nothing still dooms so many silos. So she decides to speak.

On channel seventeen, she gives her real name. A man answers first. He is Tom Higgins, head of the Planning Committee, waiting at the deputy station on level seventy-five. He is confused and thinks she must be in his own silo. Then Juliette cuts in from Mechanical. She tells Tom bluntly that their old silo is gone and everyone there is dead. She tells him to stay off the air and asks Charlotte to switch to channel eighteen, where they can talk privately.

Charlotte explains that she is in Silo 1 and that Donald is her brother. Juliette turns fierce. She thinks Charlotte has called to gloat. She says her every thought is about killing Donald so this never happens again. Charlotte says Donny didn't do it, and that he may already be dead. Juliette accuses Silo 1 of poisoning the air through the cleanings and of making people fear each other. Charlotte says she remembers when the world outside was green and safe, and that there is hope. Juliette scorns this. She has seen the fake blue sky in the helmet, the lie that makes exiles clean.

So Charlotte tells Juliette her own hell. Her brother was beaten in front of her by a man who was like a father to them. She is being hunted. The women are kept frozen while men work in shifts. Computers will one day choose which single silo goes free, and the rest will die. Billions died, she says, not thousands, and the people in her silo did it. She names the man who ruined the world: Thurman, something like a mayor. Juliette says that world has been dead for thousands of years. Charlotte corrects her: hundreds. She has seen beyond the poisoned area with a drone camera, and she thinks the damage is held inside a great cloud, with blue sky beyond it.

The two women find a strange common ground. Both expect to be killed for what they have done. Juliette says she wants to believe Charlotte, because someone close to her believed Donald was trying to help. She says she has loved two men who both believed the world could be better, and both are dead. Then she lets slip the word "diggers" and that they tunneled between silos. Charlotte grabs the map. One red line leads to a point labeled SEED. Excited, she starts to explain that the digger was probably never meant to go between silos.

Before she can finish, the door bursts open. A lone guard points a gun at her and shouts. Juliette keeps asking what the diggers are for. Charlotte raises her hands, and she knows it is over.

The chapter

In silo 17, the backup generator inside the digger rumbles to life. Lights flicker on in the pump room, the generator room and the main hall. Tired mechanics cheer. For Juliette, every breath is a small win. The deaths of Lukas, Peter, Marsha, Nelson and so many others sit like weights on her chest. Courtnee has taken over the mechanics in Shirly's place. Juliette drifts around like a ghost. Only her father and a few loyal friends seem to see her.

She finds Walker at the back of the digger, where the tight space and steady power feel like home to him. He says her radio works but its battery is dead. She will find a charger up in the silo. Down the conveyor belt, which is now a workbench, the dig team is bent over the silo schematic. Erik, the old mine foreman, measures distances with dividers. He thinks they could reach silo 16 in two weeks. Bobby says it took longer than that to get here. Fitz asks what happens if it isn't safe over there. Juliette says it probably isn't.

Fitz sneers and asks if she has friends in all of these silos. Juliette taps one circle on the map. Erik reads it out: Silo 1. That would be much farther, he says. Juliette says she will go alone, overland, in a modified suit. She wants some of the leftover blast charges, enough to blow open the door of Silo 1. The people who did this live there, she says. They make the outside unlivable, and it's time they lived in it. Nobody argues. They start figuring. A man in mechanic's coveralls, a transfer from IT whom she doesn't know, says it would take twenty to thirty sticks. IT's men used eight to break the steel plate across the stairwell during the uprising.

Juliette promises to radio other silos first, to see if any would take the survivors in. But she warns that silo heads work for Silo 1 and might kill them instead. Bobby says their own silo would have let strangers in. Fitz snaps that Bobby already has two kids, unlike those still waiting on the lottery. Erik silences everyone. They will plan first and gather supports from the mines. To aim the digger, they will clear space around it so it can slowly turn in place. Raph steps up and says he is coming with her. It isn't a question, and she nods.

Erik pulls Juliette far away from the others. He says the talk blaming her is rubbish. His wife, Lesley, was on the one-twenties when the gas came. Everyone around her ran up, but she fought her way down to their kids. She was the only one from her level to make it. This morning, waking on cold steel with their kids, Lesley thanked God they had this place to come to. She hated the dig, he says, because he complained about it. Now he sees each morning next to her as a gift. This isn't hell, he says. It's what comes before, and Juliette gave them that. She cries and misses Lukas terribly. Erik tells her to take whatever she needs and get the people who did this.

The chapter

In silo 17, Juliette finds her father in a clinic he has set up in a rusty, cleared-out storeroom. Raylee, an electrician from silo 18, lies on a bedroll, nine months pregnant, with her husband beside her. Juliette realizes their baby may be the first ever born in a different silo from its parents. The child will never see the shining Mechanical they came from, or the bazaar, or a working wallscreen.

Juliette says goodbye to her father. He jokes that she says it as if they'll never meet again. She has made the others swear not to tell him or Courtnee about her plan. She asks him to help Solo look after the kids when she can't. They are the nearest thing to children she will ever have, and Solo is sometimes the biggest kid of all. Her father says he blames himself for Marcus. She begs him not to. She tells him she loves him and leaves quickly, before she gives herself away.

Raph is waiting with two heavy bags. They walk past the last string of lights into the dark, through the empty security station where Juliette once swam through the flood. The green emergency lights glow in the stairwell, and they start the long climb. Her list is clear in her head. First the kids and Solo at the lower farms, then a charger and maybe a radio at a deputy station. Then, if they're quick, the cleaning lab that night, to build one last suit. Raph has the detonators from Walker, batteries and full canteens. He asks how many suits are left. Juliette thinks of the storage under the floor between levels thirty-four and thirty-five. Two or three hundred, she guesses. She privately plans to tell him that two suits are plenty. She suspects he thinks he is coming all the way, and she is bracing for that fight.

Raph whistles. That's enough for a few hundred years of cleanings, at one a year, he says. Juliette thinks that was probably the plan: a steady stream of exiles. Not cleaning the world but dirtying it. Then Raph asks if she remembers Gina from Supply. Gina didn't make it. He and Gina were seeing each other, he says. Juliette didn't know, and says she's sorry.

Raph tells Gina's story. Supply had a computer that tracked every spare part. Once, after a run of broken server chips, Gina worked out when the chips would run out. The answer was 248 years. Later a bulb burned out in her office, so she checked the bulbs too: 251 years. Curious, she ran the numbers for fuel cells, pregnancy implants and timer chips. They all came to about two hundred and fifty years. Her friends laughed it off, but Gina said people would notice only near the end, finding empty storerooms. Raph points out that a few hundred suits fits the same count. It feels like a clock ticking down. Either the gods knew exactly how much to store, or they have no plans for the silo after a certain date.

Raph laughs that they'll be long dead by then. But the thought saddens Juliette. Their days are counted. No life is ever truly saved, she thinks. It is only made longer.

The chapter

In silo 17, the farm lights are off on their timers. Down a long, leafy hall, strangers from silo 18 argue as they claim grow plots for themselves. Things no one owned are suddenly owned. Hannah holds her baby close and sticks near Rickson. Young Miles leads with a dying flashlight, banging it in his palm to make it brighten. Solo has gone after Elise again, and Hannah is worried with so many strangers around.

The baby cries with hunger, and Hannah feeds it. She is hungry too. The plots that used to brush her arms with crops have been stripped bare. Rickson climbs into the rows to hunt for food. He brings her a small, underripe squash, which tastes bitter. Miles asks why the newcomers took so much at once. Because they aren't family, Rickson says. Miles points out that the kids aren't really family either, but they never did this. Rickson says they are family, because they live and work together. These strangers wear different colors so they can be told apart. He thinks they will fight over food and women, like the kids' parents did, until none are left. So the kids will have to fight back.

Hannah says she doesn't want to fight. Rickson says she won't have to. Miles remembers that the adults left the kids alone for years and even brought them things. Rickson says that was because the kids were young and belonged to them. Being left alone was a gift. Hannah mentions the adults bringing Elise and her sister. She realizes that she and Rickson have both just spoken of brothers and sisters who are dead. She tells Miles there will be fighting. She and Rickson aren't kids anymore. Miles wishes the strangers would leave and that Marcus were here. Rickson finds a tomato and cuts it into three with a knife. The red juice drips like blood.

Meanwhile, Jimmy climbs the stairs, cursing himself. Elise has slipped away again. He realizes she always came and went as she liked. He just never worried when the silo was empty. Maybe danger isn't about a place at all, he thinks. It's about the people in it.

On landing 122, a man in gold coveralls calls to him. Jimmy asks about a seven-year-old girl missing a tooth. The man hasn't seen her. He knows Jimmy is the survivor who used to live here. Then he cuts one of the hoses Jimmy and Juliette hung to drain the floods, and hauls it up. He introduces himself as Terry Harlson of the Planning Committee. He wants to know where the power comes from. Tom told him to look below, as in their own silo, but Terry saw the old flood line. As they talk, he saws through an electrical cord as well. He says the girl may be up with the chanters, who have found a chapel. Jimmy knows the place. As he leaves, Terry thanks him for saying the power comes from level thirty-four. Jimmy is startled. He doesn't think he said that, but Terry smiles and says he did.

The chapter

In silo 17, Elise has seen three groups of newcomers at work. One group is down where the floods used to be, digging and getting the power going. Another is at the farms, harvesting food. The third is in the room where she is now, sweeping floors and setting chairs and benches in straight lines. She has no idea what they're doing. The kind man with the dark whiskers, who said he'd help find Puppy, is arguing with a young man in a long white robe with a shaved circle on his head. Now and then they look at her.

The benches all face a wall with a colored glass picture, partly broken. Behind it, a man in coveralls runs a cord through, and a light bursts on. Colored rays fill the room. People stop and stare and whisper the same words. The man with the whiskers kneels beside Elise. He asks if she has heard of the Pact. She thinks he means a pack, like animals, deer or dogs. The man in white asks where she learned about deer. Real books, Elise says. The whiskered man, in orange coveralls, is Mr. Rash. She remembers his name now. He tells her the Pact is like a book, only smaller, the way she is like a woman, only smaller. She says she is seven. He touches her cheek, and she pulls back.

The man in white keeps asking about the books. Elise guards her Memory Book in her bag. He tells her it is her duty to God to tell them where the books are. She nods. Hannah and Rickson taught her about God and night prayers. She starts to cry. She thinks of the pages she cut from the books, the pictures and how-to pages, and of fishing with Solo. Mr. Rash introduces the man in white as Father Remmy. Their flock used to follow Father Wendel, he says. Some leave the flock, and some join, like her. Remmy seems hardly older than Rickson. He grips her hands, and his loud voice and green eyes make her want to answer. There is only one book, he says. All the others are lies. Scared, and hurt by his grip, she whispers that the books are on level thirty-four.

Then Mr. Rash shows her a sheet of paper, printed on one side and handwritten on the other. Two names are already signed at the bottom, and one line is blank. He asks her to write her name there in purple chalk. Elise wants Puppy, Solo, Jewel and even Rickson. Her eyes are too blurry to read the messy words. More people crowd in to watch. She hears a man say there are more men than women, and some will get left out. Mr. Rash holds her wrist over the line. She feels like a fish looking up through water at hungry faces. She prints her name, hoping they will leave her alone.

Mr. Rash calls her a good girl and kisses her cheek. People clap. Father Remmy chants in his booming voice, and pronounces someone husband and wife in the name of the Pact. Elise does not understand. But it seems the "someone" is her and Mr. Rash.

The chapter

In silo 1, Darcy rides the lift to the armory level. He has a hunch the missing pilot is hiding there. It is where they caught the man posing as the Shepherd, and where pilots worked a month ago. The lift even needed a security override to take him there. The level is full of ammunition crates, tarp-covered drones and racks of bombs. Outside the lift, he notices the floor shines more than it should, and it smells of lemon cleaner. Someone has scrubbed it recently. He should call Brevard for backup. But he suspects these murders lead to the very top. Files were changed and Deep Freeze was disturbed, things only high-ranking people could do. He also watched the real Shepherd kick the impostor, a man Darcy knew from late shifts. That felt personal, not proper. So he goes alone.

From a sealed bin he takes a .45 pistol, better than a night guard's gear. He checks under tarps and finds a drone half taken apart. Then he spots a low metal hatch near the barracks. Inside is a bedroll and more of the folders from the conference room. He guesses this is where the captured man hid. He sweeps the bunkrooms and bathrooms. At the end of the hall he hears a voice behind a door. He bursts in, gun raised, shouting at a young man in gray to freeze. Then he sees it isn't a man at all.

Charlotte raises her one good arm, begging him not to shoot. Juliette's voice keeps calling from the radio. Darcy orders her against the wall and ties her wrists with a plastic tie. He sees her bandage and knows Eren shot her. She killed a good man, he says. She says she didn't want to. She explains that her brother woke her, and Charlotte recognizes Darcy as the young guard who held up Thurman during the beating. Donny is alive, Darcy says, barely, and he is being put back under today.

Darcy doesn't take her in right away. He reads the map and the papers on the desk, and turns down the radio. Charlotte grows frightened. She thinks he means to hurt her in a terrible way. But he tells her his name and says he won't hurt her. He just wants to understand first. This seems bigger than his job, he says. For all he knows, they'll put him under instead. Charlotte asks if he knows what is planned for everyone after their last shift. He has never thought about it. The folders explain it, she says. Once she is frozen again, she'll never wake. Neither will his mother, sister or wife, if they're sleeping here. She dares him to keep asking his bosses. He unbuttons his coveralls, and she braces to fight. But he only tucks the folders inside his clothes to hide them, buttons up and says he'll look into it.

As he leads her toward the lift, Darcy says he knew her brother. Neither of them seems like a killer. Charlotte says they only wanted the truth. Both liars and honest men claim the truth, Darcy answers. Charlotte stops by the drones. If he wants the truth, she says, he should stop trusting what people tell him. She can show him what is outside.

The chapter

In silo 1, Donald lies on a cot in his locked room on the admin level. He is bruised from Thurman's kicks, and every cough brings blood. Then the door opens. It's Charlotte. A guard stands behind her. Donald thinks she has been caught, but she whispers to hurry. The guard is watching the hallway, not them. They are escaping.

Barefoot and limping, Donald follows her to a waiting lift. The guard slips in with a gun in his hand, so they aren't quite free. Donald recognizes him from the late shift. His name is Darcy. Charlotte tells Donald they flew another drone, and it made it through. She landed it in a sea of real grass, and she and Darcy watched it for half an hour. The world isn't gone, she says. Just their piece of it. Darcy says he isn't helping them, only hearing them out. He saw the beating, and it didn't sit right with him. His bosses shut him down whenever he asks questions.

In the armory's conference room, Donald pulls out an old crate of Anna's work. Her handwriting makes him cry. She loved him, and he killed her. He explains what he has pieced together, partly from Thurman. Long ago, Silo 40 went dark: its camera feeds cut out, and it stopped answering. Probably a quiet revolution. By the rules of the Order, Silo 1 gassed it and opened its doors. Then more silos nearby went dark too. So Silo 1 sent "collapse codes." Donald explains that he himself designed the silos, with thick concrete slabs between the levels. He was never told the real reason: so the silos could be brought down. Stairs instead of lifts made a silo easier to gas. When the codes didn't work, Anna was woken. She hacked the charges and brought those silos down.

Anna also found her father's plan. Every silo was a ticking bomb, and she would be frozen forever. So she put Donald in her father's place. Later, when Silo 40 turned out to be still standing, Donald, as acting head, ordered drones to bomb it. Then Donald points out that silo 1 has only lifts, no stairs. Darcy quickly guesses why: silo 1 is rigged to collapse too. In about two hundred years, all the silos but one will come down. The plan wipes the earth clean and sends one chosen group into the future. The tiny machines, the nanos, were first meant to target one race. A man named Erskine said someone would build such a weapon eventually.

Thurman had asked about Anna and the gas lines. Donald now thinks she secretly changed what gets pumped into a silo when it is shut down. Instead of the machines that break people down, she sent the kind that heal sleepers in the pods. He thinks this happened in silo 17. But its airlock still opened, and the poison outside killed most people anyway. Thurman said they "did it right" with silo 18. Charlotte tells Donald that Juliette and others are alive in silo 17. They tunneled there. Donald smiles. She let him think she was digging toward him. They must reach her, he says. But Darcy warns that his shift ends soon, and his boss will be furious when he learns a prisoner escaped.

The chapter

In silo 17, Juliette and Raph stop at the lower deputy station, hoping for a radio or a spare battery. They find neither. Then Raph hears something. Someone is crying in the holding cells. In the last cell sits a man in robes, sobbing by a small candle. It is Father Wendel. The cell door isn't shut. Juliette steps inside onto a carpet of loose pages. Every page has black bars across its lines, like the caged holy book she saw in his church.

Wendel tells her to leave him. He is sorting through the pages, looking for Isaiah, a part of the book. Everything is out of order, he says. His congregation isn't his anymore. He has no food or water. Raph wants to go, but she stays. She tells Wendel about the new dig, and says the people below could use him. Use him for what, he asks. Every page offers hellfire or hope, damnation or salvation. Take your pick. She gives him a sip from her canteen. He says he went into the dark to see the devil, and found another world. He led his flock to damnation, or salvation. He finds the Isaiah page and reads a line aloud in his Sunday voice. Then he sets the page alight and lets it float away burning.

Juliette crouches and rests a hand on his knee. Her anger at him is gone, both over Marcus and over how he turned people against her dig. In its place is guilt, because their fears turned out to be right. She tells him their people will need his guidance to reach the other side, since she won't be there. He says she will see them through. No, she says. He is their salvation. She is going to damn the people who did this. Wendel lays a hand on her head and blesses her journey.

The blessing makes the climb feel heavier. So does the dynamite on her back. It could have helped the diggers below, but she is using it for damnation instead. Like Wendel's pages, it can serve either side.

At the lower farms, opening the door lets out a blast of heat. Every grow light is on at once, and the plants are roasting. Lying across the hall by the security gates is Deputy Hank, stripped to his undershirt and holding a pistol. He says people have been fighting over plots. A man from Sanitation, Gene Sample, died when the lights went out. People even fought over the right to bury him. Some survivors hired Hank, paid in food, to keep order. He left the lights on to sweat people out and make them move on. Juliette warns him the wiring will overheat, and a breaker up on the thirties could leave them in the dark for good. She tells him to send people to the Mids farms or to work in Mechanical. Solo and the kids staked a plot here but left a few hours ago, Hank says. He asks the time. A quarter past two in the afternoon, she tells him. Then he asks what day it is. Does it matter, she replies. All the days are the same now, and every one is numbered.

The chapter

In silo 17, Jimmy decides to search two more levels for Elise before turning back. He suspects he has walked right past her. Then he spots a boy in brown coveralls waving down at him over the rail. The boy runs down after him. Up close, Jimmy knows him. He is the boy who chased Elise through the bazaar. The boy says he needs Jimmy's help. He followed Elise here through the mines. Some people from the church, where his dad goes on Sundays, won't let her go. He also found her dog trapped behind a broken door and penned it up. He tried to reach Elise, but a man told him to get lost. She is two levels up. His name is Shaw.

Jimmy praises him, then hurries down instead of up. He needs to grab something. Shaw follows and insists he was very hungry but would never have eaten the dog. He wants Elise to know that. Jimmy promises to tell her. Jimmy overshoots by a level and climbs back, struggling to remember his old hiding places. He hid a rifle on level fifty-one, but he left another on one-eighteen years ago, on the trip when he found his cat Shadow. Thinking of anyone hurting Elise, he remembers using a rifle on people when he was a boy. In the third apartment on the left, he climbs onto a dusty dresser, lifts a ceiling panel and takes down the black rifle.

Meanwhile, Elise sits in the church room. The flock has taken her coveralls, saying the color was wrong, and put her in a scratchy robe. Whenever she tries to leave or cries, Mr. Rash squeezes her wrist harder. Father Remmy has gone, and a new man reads from the book. People keep glancing at an unhappy woman at the side with two men. When the reading ends, everyone chants the same words in hollow voices.

The men lift the woman onto two tables near the colored window. The reader pulls out a long knife and reads lines about being fruitful and about a covenant with the people's seed. Then, while the men hold her down, he cuts into her leg. Elise suddenly understands. It is the same thing that happened to her mother and Hannah's mother: cutting out the "poisoned pill" so a woman can have babies. The woman screams and bleeds. Elise feels her own wrist gripped and knows that one day this will be her. The man holds up what he has cut out, and the crowd claps in rhythm. Another woman is waiting in line.

A huge bang silences everyone. Plaster dust falls from the ceiling. Solo stands in the doorway with the rifle, Shaw beside him. Politely, he says he'll be taking the young lady with him. Men shout. Mr. Rash yells about his wife and his property. The bloody man with the knife storms down the aisle, so Jimmy fires again, shattering the colored window. Everyone stops. When Elise moves, Mr. Rash grabs her, shouting that she is his wife. Jimmy remarks that they do marriages quickly, and asks if they do funerals too. He points the rifle at Mr. Rash. The grip loosens, and Elise runs past the bloody man, out to Solo and Shaw, and down the hall.

The chapter

In silo 17, Juliette and Raph climb the stairs toward level thirty-four. The silo is falling apart around them. Wire and pipe have been ripped out, and stolen plants leave trails of soil. People throw open doors to loot and claim space. Juliette worries about Solo and the kids, but the explosives in her pack give her a purpose. She wants to make sure this never happens again. Raph wheezes that he feels like a porter. He insists he can keep up.

As they climb, Juliette thinks about all the other silos still full of life, each one unaware of the rest. Somewhere a dreamer is being sent to clean. She thinks of silo 17's children, born into violence, and fears it will happen again here. She admits her own mechanics lashed out too. Maybe any group is just frightened people. When she pulls ahead of Raph, she slows down. She misses Lukas more than ever, and she feels sure she will join him soon.

At the second mids farm they find signs that people passed through only minutes ago. They take peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, an orange and blackberries. Juliette eats as many blackberries as she can, though she usually hates the stains. Climbing on, she realizes she is running away. She is fleeing the friends she feels she failed. Solo hid in a hole, but she wants to blast a crater on the heads of others.

On the landing of thirty-four, Raph finds a red smear on a step and tastes it. It's tomato. Someone is already here. Juliette remembers the first time she came, when Solo had jammed the doors with a broom. This time they open easily, and the lights are bright. At the end of the hall the server room door stands open. There are voices, and smoke hangs in the air. For a moment she wonders if she is imagining Lukas and the gas.

The smoke is real. It rises from the hatch behind the comm server, which leads to Solo's hidden rooms. Juliette pulls her undershirt over her face and slides down the ladder while Raph shouts at her not to go. Below, the books are burning. A young man in a white robe, with a bald patch on his head, is feeding books into a fuel-soaked fire. Juliette throws Solo's blanket over the pile and runs for the mattress. The man howls and attacks her. They wrestle as the flames climb. Then his robe catches fire, and Juliette is back in that burning airlock from her cleaning.

A boot flies past her face and strikes the young man. Raph pulls her free and pushes her up the ladder. She knows the radio below is lost. The hatch is only a grate and can't block the smoke. So Raph and Juliette shove against the comm server until its screws tear loose. The tall black machine crashes down over the hole. Coughing, they collapse on the floor. Far below, the screams slowly die away.

The chapter

In silo 1, Donald and Charlotte huddle in the dark drone lift, the low hidden space on the armory level. Boots tramp outside. Men are searching for them, calling out "clear." The pair have hidden there all day, since Darcy left to start his shift. Now the silo has a killer on the loose and an escaped prisoner too. Donald holds back a cough. Then a fist bangs on the hatch, and it is pulled open. A flashlight blinds them. "Clear!" shouts a voice, and Donald smells coffee on its breath. It's Darcy. He slams the hatch and slaps it twice.

After dinner time they crawl out, tired and starving. Donald coughs blood into the sink. Charlotte powers up the radio and calls on channels eighteen and seventeen. No one answers. Then she turns and asks a question he didn't expect. When did he go outside? She heard Darcy say Donald almost made it over a hill. Donald admits he went once, thinking he would never come back. He went out to die. Charlotte doesn't yell. She hugs him, and he cries. She makes him promise: not like that. He says he wanted to see where Helen had lived and died. It was a bad time, trapped down here with Anna.

Charlotte has an idea. The big bunker-buster bombs weigh sixty kilos. If they strip down a drone, it could carry Donald away while she stays and flies it. Donald says he is dying. Thurman gave him a day or two, and that was a day or two ago. He suggests waking another pilot at gunpoint so Charlotte and Darcy can escape. She refuses to leave him. She admits she's a hypocrite, and he jokes that must be why they recruited her.

They talk about the other silos. Donald thinks some people there are happy enough. They marry, work and have kids. But underneath, he believes, they carry a constant worry that something is wrong with how they live. He thinks some of the silos that went dark may be the luckiest. They may not be dead at all, just living quietly and freely, left alone. He thinks that is what Anna wanted for them. He realizes he misses Anna as much as Helen. She saved him, and he hated her for it.

Donald says he once believed in the project. Now he thinks its makers knew a war of invisible machines would leave scattered survivors. So they made the destruction complete, in order to control who lived. Charlotte says they wanted the survivors in their pockets. Donald agrees. They were saving themselves, not the world. Nature would have carried on anyway. Charlotte says people find a way too. She and Donald are like weeds, like the silos that wouldn't behave. They should just be left to grow.

Donald jumps to his feet. Leave us be, he repeats. That's it. He tells Charlotte to bring her tools, but not for a drone. They need to build another suit for going outside. Then he asks exactly how much a kilo is.

The chapter

In silo 1, on the armory level, Charlotte fixes a breathing hose to a suit helmet and an air bottle. She says it's not a good plan. What will they do out there? Die, Donald answers, but maybe a week from now, and not here. He packs two small army backpacks with ration packs, water, a first-aid kit, a flashlight, a pistol, ammunition, a flint and a knife. Donald tapes a folded map to the sleeve of Charlotte's suit. She's the better navigator, he says, and he'll follow her.

The lift dings. It's only Darcy with clean coveralls and leftovers from dinner. Charlotte hugs him. Darcy says he sympathizes. He doesn't like what's going on either, and the more he remembers of his past, the more he feels he'd be on their side. But the suits don't look smart to him. As they eat, he says he has stopped taking his pills. He thinks he was once in the Secret Service. Charlotte was Air Force. Donald was a congressman, and really an architect. He designed this place.

Darcy asks who did this to them. The Chinese? We did, Donald says. The silos weren't built just in case. They were built for exactly this. Darcy thought it was like the mountain bunker where the government hides in an emergency. Charlotte says it is, except this way they got the timing just right. Slowly Darcy accepts it. A few shifts ago he put a man from accounting into Deep Freeze for yelling "crazy" things. Now he thinks that man was sane. Donald notices the bullet hole in the sleeve of Charlotte's coveralls, which he is wearing.

Donald wheels out a hand truck carrying a bunker buster. Charlotte has stripped its safety controls, making it a "dumb bomb," armed by pulling a plastic tag. When Darcy blocks the way, Charlotte points a gun at him and apologizes. Donald takes Darcy's pistol and his ID card. He explains: the reactor below powers the servers, and the servers control everyone's lives. They pick the lottery numbers and shape who lives. He wants to set people free. Darcy says three people can't decide something this big. Donald answers that a handful of men built all this, so a handful can bring it down.

Donald kisses Charlotte's cheek and tells her to suit up. Then he tells Darcy to get dressed too. He holds up a hammer. He won't risk the bomb failing to go off. Charlotte realizes he means to set it off by hand. He had said he'd do it remotely. Remotely from her, he says. Darcy lunges for a gun, but Charlotte grabs it first and aims it at her brother. He promised, she cries. You're a hypocrite and I'm a liar, Donald says. Her gun isn't loaded. He gives them half an hour. The drone lift takes twenty minutes to reach the top, and they can jam its door with the empty bin he left.

Donald knows Charlotte would never leave him unless forced, so he is leaving Darcy with her. Darcy is a hero who will save them both. Charlotte kicks off her half-on suit and runs toward him. "I love you," Donald says as the doors close. He scans the ID, and the lift starts to move.

The chapter

In silo 17's server room, the fallen comm server cools while the fire burns below it. Raph worries the power could fail, since it runs under the floor down there. He goes to fetch their bags. Juliette fears the big schematics in Solo's rooms are ash, and with them any way to choose a silo to dig toward. Then she looks at the fallen server, collapsed like her home. She remembers that the servers are laid out exactly like the silos. On the back of one is a plate with the silo symbol and the number 29.

Under the floor grates, among the black wires, she spots a run of red ones. "A map," she says. Raph thinks the smoke has made her loopy. She explains. The woman from silo 1 talked about a map with red lines that all met at one point, and she got excited when Juliette mentioned the digger. She finds servers seventeen and eighteen. The red lines must be tunnels. The diggers were never meant to go from silo to silo. They were aimed somewhere. Raph remembers Courtnee saying they would never use up the digger's fuel. So it was built to go much further. If they check where silo 17's own digger points and draw both lines on a map, the lines should cross at that "seed" place.

Voices come from the hall, then a tapping of claws. A brown puppy lifts its leg on Juliette's boot. Elise screams its name. Juliette hugs the kids and Solo, and her rage melts. These people are what's worth saving, more than revenge is worth chasing. Father Wendel had learned the same thing, she thinks. Solo, holding his rifle, wants to lock the door and wait for the others to kill each other. His father hid him away, and that kept him alive. Juliette says someone did the same to all of them long ago. But hiding won't work. Solo's pantry holds three or four years of food for one man. For two hundred people, that's maybe five days.

Juliette decides they need a Town Hall: a meeting of everyone, to choose between hiding and leaving. She doesn't want to dig. There's no time, and the farms are stripped. She has a quicker idea. And they will meet right here, so everyone can see this room. Solo, alarmed, fetches her tool bag. Soon they are cutting wires and unbolting servers, then shoving them over. The boys whoop. Elise perches on top with wire cutters, snipping like a barber. Raph drops more than a hundred notes down the stairwell, promising food up here.

Juliette and Raph push the comm server off the hatch. The trapped smoke clears, and she goes down first. The young man's body lies in the middle of the floor. All the books are gone, turned to smoke and black ash. The radio is melted, and her boot soles soften on the hot floor. Raph finds cans in the pantry, but most of its shelves are bare. It's enough for a few days at most. But the fire never got into the next room. The huge schematics still hang on the wall. Juliette tears down the ones she needs as another server crashes overhead.

The chapter

In silo 17's IT level, people answer Raph's notes. They come in a trickle, then clumps, then crowds. None of them has ever been inside IT. After only a few days in this silo, they look ragged, thin and tired. Juliette can see they have only a few more days before things turn desperate. Early arrivals help push over the last servers. Two of the hottest, numbers 40 and 38, still have power, so open cans of soup simmer on their sides.

Hannah helps Juliette pin the two schematics to the wall, marking lines with thread and charcoal, while Rickson minds the baby. Juliette remembers that her first Town Hall went badly. This one, she thinks, will probably be her last. Tom Higgins and the Planning Committee arrive, and one man climbs on a server to count heads. The count matters. They will need to know how many suits. An empty cleaning suit lies at her feet as a prop. Then, to her surprise, Courtnee pushes through the crowd. Juliette hugs her. Courtnee says the note called it life or death. Raph just shrugs.

Solo opens cans with an electric gadget. Juliette begins. Their silo was poisoned, she says. Everyone left behind is gone. It was done by the same people who put them underground long ago, so their ancestors could wait for the world to heal. She went outside and sampled the air, and she believes it gets better farther away. She has also heard from another silo about blue skies. "Ratshit!" an old porter yells. He'd heard that was a lie put in her head before her cleaning. Father Wendel slips in at the back. Bobby roars for quiet.

Juliette asks them to take some things on faith. They could stay, she says, but they would always live in fear. The people who did this can open their doors, poison their air and end their lives without warning. The other choice is to leave, with no coming back. Someone asks if she means another silo. Not another silo, she answers. She shows them the map of the fifty silos, their old home and where they are now. One line shows their tunnel. Another shows where their digger was pointing. It runs off the map, and Elise presses her finger to the marked spot on the wall.

She doesn't want to dig either. There isn't enough fuel or food. But the schematic of this silo's digger matches the real machine exactly, right down to its direction. Its line passes between the silos, touching none, and meets Elise's finger. The diggers held just enough fuel, plus a little extra, to reach that point, and they are angled slightly up. Juliette thinks they were placed to take people out. Someone says she only hopes it's safer. Yes, she admits. She hopes. She has a stranger's word, a gut feeling and lines on a map. But the life waiting here isn't worth living. She'll go only if enough of them come.

Raph says he's with her. Solo raises his hand. Elise takes Juliette's hand, and Shaw raises his while holding the squirming puppy. A miner asks how they'll get there without digging. Juliette wipes her eyes and lifts a cleaning suit and helmet. "We're going outside," she says.

The chapter

In silo 17, the food runs low while the survivors prepare to leave. Not everyone joins in. Many skipped the Town Hall, and some rush off to grab the abandoned farm plots. A few mechanics go down to Mechanical to persuade those who stayed below, and to try to rouse Walker. The server room becomes a huge workshop. Nearly a hundred and fifty cleaning suits are laid out to be sized. It's more than they need, which is both sad and a relief. Juliette shows a dozen mechanics how to fit the air valves. Porters are sent down to Supply for valves, seals, gaskets, heat tape and welding kits with oxygen bottles. Erik works out the distance and says a dozen people could share one bottle. Juliette says ten, to be safe.

Then she takes a small group up to the cafeteria for a grim job: her father, Raph, Dawson and two older porters. On the way they collect five dozen black body bags from the coroner's office. Silo 17 no longer has a working airlock. Its outer door has stood cracked open since the silo fell, decades ago. Only the inner airlock door and the sheriff's office door stand between them and the outside. Wearing masks and rubber gloves, they open the office. The bodies are just as Juliette remembers. The smell reminds her of the rotten soup she once poured over herself.

They lift the bodies into the bags, careful to grip at the armpits and knees. Most lie piled by the door, as if they tried to crawl back inside. A few rest peacefully, like a man slumped on an old cot frame and a woman with her arms crossed. Her father stares at them, wide-eyed. This isn't right, he says. Juliette thinks he means the rough handling. But he means the bodies themselves. They look only three to five weeks dead, he says. Juliette insists they were here when she arrived, and Solo found them years before that.

Her father has more. Elise had a twin sister. Marcus and Miles were twins. Rickson thinks he had a brother. Juliette thinks it's a lot of dying, but her father says it's a lot of living. Three sets of twins in six births. Kids healthy with no care. Solo has no rotten teeth and can't remember being sick. Juliette rolls up her sleeve. Some of her scars have vanished, she tells him, just as Lukas noticed. Her father once called her survival from the burns a miracle. And Fitz says her deep dive to fix the pump should have killed her.

For a dizzy moment, Juliette wonders if she really died on that hill during her cleaning, and all of this is a dream. Her father suggests something in the water. She hugs him, and he comforts her. She isn't dead, but something is wrong. Not the water, she says. Maybe the air. Maybe this is what happens when a silo isn't gassed. Either way, it's time to leave. Her father asks if she's sure. She would rather die trying out there than killing each other in here. Then she realizes she sounds like every dreamer who was ever sent to clean.

The chapter

In silo 1, Charlotte slaps the closed lift door, her suit only half on. Darcy asks if Donald will really do it. She knows he will. This was his plan all along. For a moment she just sinks to the floor. Darcy can't work out his suit at all. Then the express lift dings. She had pressed the call button. Two men in light blue coveralls stare at her, puzzled, before the doors close again. Now they must hurry. Charlotte zips Darcy into his suit and he zips hers. She sends him to jam the drone lift's hatch open with the bin, then runs to the control station and switches the drone lift on. As she runs back, boots are storming in, and Darcy is yelling at her to get inside.

Meanwhile Donald rides his lift down toward the reactor level. Just past floor sixty-one he hits the emergency stop. He pulls the tag off the bomb and waits, hammer in hand, to give his sister time. For fifteen minutes he doesn't cough once. He wonders if he's getting better, then remembers relatives who seemed to improve the day before they died. Finally he starts the lift again before he loses his nerve.

Charlotte tumbles into the drone lift, but the bin is wedged tight and won't let the hatch close. Men in silver coveralls open fire from behind the drones. Darcy shoots back, then crawls outside to kick the bin in from the other side. He is hit and drops to his knees. Charlotte grabs his arm, begging him to come. He pushes her hands back inside and smiles. It's okay, he tells her. He remembers who he is now. Then he shoves the bin in, and the lift begins to climb.

On the reactor level, a bored guard swipes Darcy's ID and waves Donald and his bomb right through. Nobody notices the bullet holes or old bloodstains on his coveralls. Outside the main reactor room, Donald raises the hammer. He thinks of Helen, who died the way people should. You live, do your best, then step aside and let the next people choose. A shot rings out. Fire spreads through his chest. He falls, and the bomb rolls away out of reach.

At the top, Charlotte crawls out of the drone lift alone. Black clouds swirl overhead. She climbs the ramp she knows from her drone flights and drops down into the dirt. Using the map taped to her arm, she heads for the hills. She remembers this exact slope from long ago, when she arrived late from the airport and Donald ran out to hug her. Back then the world was whole. Now she sees no reason to go on.

Donald lies bleeding as Thurman marches toward him with two armed guards. Donald weeps for everyone who will go on living under this system. With the last of his strength he lifts his pistol six inches. It's enough. He aims at the bomb and fires.

The ground lurches beneath Charlotte. Cracks open across the flat earth, and the concrete tower tilts. The land caves into a giant sinkhole, with plumes of white concrete dust shooting up. Charlotte scrambles to the top of the hill and collapses. "Donny," she whispers, as the dust covers her visor.

The chapter

The book's heading for this chapter names the place as Fulton County, Georgia. Juliette is outside, walking in a cleaning suit through wind and hissing sand. She remembers her cleaning day, when the lying visor showed green fields that faded to gray at the top of the hill. Now the opposite happens. She walks in the lead group with Raph, her father and seven others, all tied by hoses to one shared air bottle. Slowly, hints of pale blue appear. Then, as if stepping through a wall, the haze lifts and the wind stops. Bright green, blue and white burst around her. Green grass ripples ahead, and white clouds drift across the sky. The picture books of her childhood look faded next to this.

Her group stares. Raph shields his eyes from the sun. Hannah smiles down at the baby tucked inside her suit, with Rickson's arm around her. Elise and Shaw throw their hands up at the clouds. Bobby and Fitz set down the air bottle and gape. More groups stumble out of the dust behind them. Looking back, Juliette sees a wall of dust rising into the sky. Grass that grows too close to it crumbles to powder. A bird circles, then glides away into the blue.

Juliette waves everyone down the slope. One group is carrying a limp suit, someone who didn't survive the walk. Everywhere else there is joy. When a man starts fiddling with his helmet latches, she signals for his group to stop him. The woman on the radio told the truth, she thinks. Donald really was trying to help them. She checks her map and leads them toward a big, gentle hill. Elise races ahead, kicking up insects, with Shaw chasing her. Juliette hears herself laugh.

At the top she finds a ring of mounded earth around a single bowl, separate from the fifty silos. Looking back, she sees the dark clouds form a giant dome over the silos. The other way lies a forest like those in the Legacy books. Juliette taps her helmet and points to birds in the sky. Her father asks her to wait. He will go first. Raph helps with his latches. The helmet comes off. Her father takes a breath, smiles, takes a deeper one, and lets the helmet fall into the grass.

Then everyone is tearing at each other's collars. When Juliette's helmet comes off, she hears laughter first, then smells soil like the farms, then feels warm light all around. They never planned to take the suits off, so they have no knives. They work zippers and tear gloves with their teeth. Barefoot children tumble in the grass. Elise sets down her puppy, which vanishes into the tall grass, and Shaw pulls her book from his suit. Juliette thinks they should save seeds. They might last more than a day. Raph kisses her cheek, and Bobby spins, roaring with delight.

Her father points down into the bowl. A concrete tower stands there, half hidden by vines, with a flat silvery roof. Juliette lifts her bag, heavy with dynamite, and weighs their salvation.

The chapter

Outside, in the green bowl that the book's heading calls Fulton County, Georgia, the survivors unpack the concrete tower. They blasted its door open, though it was built to open from inside. Now supplies cover the grass: clothes, tools, canned food and sealed bags of seeds, many from plants Juliette has never heard of. "No more than what we need," she warns. Solo and Walker wrestle with a tent, arguing over the poles. Walker is much better now. He stayed in his suit until his air ran out, then burst out gasping. Elise chases her puppy, Shaw chases Elise, and Hannah nurses her baby beside Rickson. Fitz cooks over a fire lit with an oxygen bottle, which Juliette thinks is very dangerous.

Courtnee comes out smiling, and suddenly the lights inside are on. The tower is twenty levels deep, but packed so tightly it's more like seven. At the bottom is a big, empty cavern where two stairways end on bare rock. Someone guessed it is a landing place for a digger, a spot to welcome new arrivals. There's no generator. Courtnee has traced the power to silver sheets on the roof. Soon a moving platform in the stairwell is working too, run by cables and a small motor. The kids won't get off it. Juliette wants to leave plenty behind for whoever might arrive next.

Some people want to stay. There are seeds, soil and storerooms that could become homes. Elise settles the matter. She opens her book to a map, uses the sun to find north, and says they should walk to the sea. She knows how to catch wild fish, there are worms in the ground, and Solo knows how to bait hooks. Juliette agrees. This is just a warehouse, she says, in the shadow of that dome of dust. Someone asks about others who might show up. Rickson says that's more reason not to be here. There are just over a hundred of them now. Juliette nearly points out that fighting only starts when things run short, and here there is room for everything. Raph asks what it will be, Mayor.

Then someone shouts and points. A figure in a silver suit is stumbling down the hill. Juliette runs toward it, thinking someone from their silo changed their mind. The figure collapses and fumbles at the helmet. Juliette unclips it. Inside is a gasping, sweaty woman she doesn't recognize. The stranger thanks her and looks up at the sky with relief, watching a bird.

Juliette asks if she's from their silo. Her first thought is that this is a cleaner from a nearby silo. Her second thought seems impossible, and it is right. The woman says she's from somewhere quite different. Her name is Charlotte.

Juliette feels no anger, only warmth. This woman told her the truth. She shakes Charlotte's gloved hand and gives her own name. "You're her," Charlotte says, and asks what this place is. A second chance, Juliette answers. But they're heading to the water, and it's a long way. Charlotte smiles. She has already come a long way.

The chapter

It is night in a forest, a few days after the survivors left the silos. They sit around a campfire under the trees. Raph holds a branch and can't bring himself to burn it. It's wood, he says, as if it were precious. Bobby laughs and waves at the huge trunks all around them. There's more than they'll ever need. Erik tells him to go on, and Raph finally tosses it in. From her bedroll, Juliette hears an animal in the woods. It sounds like a crying child, deep and sad. People trade guesses. Solo describes animals he read about in the Legacy books, and others crowd around Elise's book with flashlights. Everything is a mystery and a wonder.

Through the leaves overhead, the clouds part. Juliette sees hundreds of stars, then thousands. She thinks of Lukas, and a new purpose hardens in her: to reach the water on Elise's map, plant their seeds and build a home above the ground. Elise comes over with Puppy and snuggles against her. Juliette tells her each star is a sun, far away. Elise says some stars have names. She finds a group that looks like a puppy, and names it Puppy. Then she traces one shaped like a man and tells Juliette she can name him. Through tears, Juliette says no. That one already has a name.

The fires burn low, and the children go to their tents. Someone is still cooking meat from the deer Solo shot with his rifle. Juliette has watched Solo change over these three days. The man who grew up alone is now a leader, better prepared for this world than any of them. She plans to ask for another vote soon. Solo would make an excellent mayor. She notices that clouds and fire, the two things her people always feared, now bring comfort. The clouds are like a roof, and the fire gives warmth. She remembers Lukas with his star chart, telling her each star might hold worlds of its own. She couldn't imagine it then.

A stick cracks behind her. She expects Elise, or perhaps Charlotte, who sat with her earlier and seemed to have a lot she wanted to say. Instead it's Courtnee, carrying a steaming mug. Juliette says she was thinking about Luke. Courtnee puts an arm around her. Juliette tries to explain how the stars help. There is so much land out here, more than they have people or time to fill. She has come to believe the people sent out to clean were the good ones. Many other good people stayed quiet out of fear. Even the mayors probably wanted more room and an end to the lottery, but they were never really in charge. Lukas was different. He backed her even when it was dangerous. And so here they are.

Juliette sips from the mug. The taste explodes in her mouth, rich like the bazaar's flower stalls and fresh soil, like a first kiss. She asks if it came from the tower's supplies. Courtnee jokes about going back for more. Then she asks if Juliette thinks they'll make it. Juliette thinks of the world they could build, with no one to crush their dreams. She thinks they will. She thinks they can make anything they like.