Juliette wiped the tears from her cheeks. Some part of her hated herself for crying in front of him. Another part wanted to throw her arms around his neck and sob. She missed Lukas more powerfully in that moment than she thought herself capable.
“I don’t know about this fool’s errand you’re setting off on, but you take whatever of mine you need. If that means more digging with my bare hands, so be it. You get those fuckers. I want to see them in hell by the time I get there.”
48
Juliette found her father in the makeshift clinic he had set up in a cleared-out and rusted storeroom. Raylee, a second-shift electrician nine months pregnant, rested on a bedroll, her husband at her side, both of them with their hands on her belly. Juliette acknowledged the couple and realized their child would be the first — maybe ever — to be born in a different silo from its parents. That child would never know the gleaming Mechanical in which they worked and lived, would never travel up to the bazaar and hear music or see a play, may never gaze at a functioning wallscreen to know the outside world. And if it was a girl, she would face the danger of having children of her own like Hannah had, with no one to tell her otherwise.
“You setting off?” Juliette’s father asked.
She nodded. “Just came to tell you goodbye.”
“You say that like I’ll never see you again. I’ll be up to check on the kids once I get things sorted down here. Once we have our new arrival.” He smiled at Raylee and her husband.
“Just goodbye for now,” Juliette said. She had made the others swear not to tell anyone, especially Court and her father, about what she had planned. As she gave her father a final squeeze, she tried not to let her arms betray her.
“And just so you know,” she told him, letting go, “those kids are the nearest thing I’ll ever have to children of my own. So whenever I’m not there to look after them, if you can lend Solo a hand… Sometimes I think he’s the biggest kid of the lot.”
“I will. And I know. And I’m sorry about Marcus. I blame myself.”
“Don’t, Dad. Please don’t. Just… look after them when I’m too busy to. You know how I can get into some fool project.”
He nodded.
“I love you,” she said. And then she turned to go before she betrayed herself and her plans any further. In the hallway, Raph shouldered a heavy bag. Juliette grabbed the other. The two of them walked beyond the current string of lights and into the near-darkness, neither of them employing their flashlights, the halls familiar enough, their eyes soon adjusting.
They passed through an unmanned security station. Juliette spotted the breathing hose doubling back on itself, remembered swimming through that very spot. Ahead, the stairwell glowed a dull green from resilient emergency lights, and she and Raph began the long slog up. Juliette had a list in her head of who she needed to see and what she needed to grab on the way. The kids would be in the lower farms, back at their old home. Solo as well. She wanted to see them, and then head up and grab a charger and hopefully another radio at the deputy station. If they were lucky and made good time, she’d be in her old home in the cleaning lab later that night, assembling one last suit.
“You remember to grab the detonators from Walker?” Juliette asked. She felt as though she was forgetting something.
“Yup. And the batteries you wanted. And I topped up our canteens. We’re good.”
“Just checking.”
“How about for modding the suits?” Raph asked. “You sure you have everything up there you need? How many of them are left, anyway?”
“More than enough,” Juliette said. She wanted to tell him right then that two suits would be more than enough. She was pretty sure Raph thought he was coming with her the whole way. She was steeling herself for that fight.
“Yeah, but how many? I’m just curious. Nobody was allowed to talk about those things before…”
Juliette thought of the stores between thirty-four and thirty-five, the in-floor bunkers that seemed to go on forever. “Two… maybe three hundred suits,” she told him. “More than I could count. I only modded a couple.”
Raph whistled. “That’s enough for a few hundred years of cleanings, eh? Assuming you were sending ’em out one a year.”
Juliette thought that was about right. And she supposed, now that she knew how the outside air got poisoned, that this was probably the plan: a steady flow of the exiled. Not cleaning, but doing the exact opposite. Making the world dirty.
“Hey, do you remember Gina from Supply?”
Juliette nodded, and the past tense was a busted knuckle. Quite a few from Supply had made it down, but Gina hadn’t.
“Did you know we were seeing each other?”
Juliette shook her head. “I didn’t. I’m sorry, Raph.”
“Yeah.”
They made a turn of the staircase.
“Gina did an analysis once of a bunch of spares. You know they had this computer just to tally everything, where it was located, how many were on order, all of that? Well, IT had burned through a few chips for their servers, bang, bang, bang, just one of those weeks where failures crop up all in a row—”
“I remember those weeks,” Juliette said.
“Well, Gina wondered how long before they were gonna run out of these chips. This was one of those parts they couldn’t make more of, you know? Intricate things. So she looked at the average failure rate, how many they had in the pens, and she came up with two hundred and forty-eight years.”
Juliette waited for him to continue. “That number mean something?” she asked.
“Not at first, no. But the number got her curious because she’d run a similar report a few months prior, again out of curiosity, and the number had been close to that. A few weeks later, a bulb goes out in her office. Just a bulb. It winks out while she’s working on something, and it got her thinkin’. You’ve seen the storehouse of bulbs they’ve got, right?”
“I haven’t, actually.”
“Well, they’re vast. She took me down there once. And…”
Raph fell quiet for a few treads.
“Well, the storehouse is about half empty. So Gina runs the figures for a simple bulb for the whole silo and comes up with two hundred and fifty-one years’ supply.”
“About the same number.”
“That’s right. And now she’s real curious — you’d have loved this about her — she started running reports like this in her spare time, big-ticket items like fuel cells and pregnancy implants and timer chips. And they all converge at right about two-fifty. And that’s when she figures we’ve got that much time left.”
“Two hundred and fifty years,” Juliette said. “She told you this?”
“Yeah. Me and a few others over drinks. She was pretty drunk, mind you. And I remember…” Raph laughed. “I remember Jonny saying that she was remembering the hits and forgetting the misses, and speaking of forgetting the missus, he needed to get back to his. And one of Gina’s friends from Supply says that people’ve been saying stuff like this since her grandmother was around, and they would always be saying that. But Gina says the only reason this wasn’t occurring to everyone at once is because it’s early. She said to wait two hundred years or so, and people would be going down into empty caverns to get the last of everything, and then it would be obvious.”
“I’m truly sorry she’s not here,” Juliette said.
“Me too.” They climbed a few steps. “But that’s not why I’m bringing this up. You said there were a couple hundred suits. Seems like the same count, don’t it?”