Hugh Howey - Dust

The comm hub cooled, even as the fire raged below. Wisps of smoke curled out from underneath it. Juliette studied the interior of the great black machine and saw a ruin of broken circuit boards. The long row of headset jacks had shattered, and several of the wires at the base of the machine had stretched and snapped when it tipped over.

“Will it burn out?” Raph asked, eyeing the wisps of smoke.

Juliette coughed. She could still feel the smoke in her throat, could taste those burning pages. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She watched the lights overhead for any sign of faltering. “What power this silo has runs beneath the grates down there.”

“So this silo could go dark as the mines at any time?” Raph scrambled to his feet. “I’m gonna get our bags, have our flashlights handy. And you need to drink some more water.”

Juliette watched him trot off. She could feel those books burning beneath her. She could feel the wires inside the radio melting. She didn’t think the power would go — hoped it wouldn’t go — but so much else was being lost. The large schematics that had helped her find the digger might be ash already. The schematics to help her choose which silo to reach out to, which silo to dig for, gone.

Tall black machines hummed and whirred all around her, those square-shouldered and unmoved giants. Unmoved save for one. Juliette rose to her feet and studied the fallen server, and the link between those machines and the silos became even more obvious. Here was one collapsed like her home. Like Solo’s home. She studied the arrangement of the servers and remembered that their layout was identical to the layout of the silos. Raph returned with both of their bags. He handed Juliette her canteen of water. She took a sip, lost in thought.

“I’ve got your flashli—”

“Wait,” Juliette said. She twisted the cap back onto her canteen and walked between the servers. She went to the back of one and studied the silver plate above the nest of wires. There was a silo symbol there with its three downward-pointing triangles. The number “29” was etched in the center.

“What’re you looking for?” Raph asked.

Juliette tapped the plate. “Lukas used to say he needed to work on server six or server thirty or whatever. I remember him showing me how these things were laid out like the silos. We have a schematic right here.”

She set off in the direction of servers seventeen and eighteen. Raph followed along. “Should we worry about the power?” he asked.

“There’s nothing we can do about that. The decking and walls down there shouldn’t get hot enough to catch. When it burns out, we’ll go see—” Something caught Juliette’s eye as she traced a route between the servers. The wires underneath the floor grates darted in and out of their chutes, running to the bases of the machines. It was a series of red wires amid all the black ones that stopped her.

“What now?” Raph asked. He was watching her as though he were worried. “Hey, are you feeling okay? Because I’ve seen miners get a rock to their crowns and act loopy for a day—”

“I’m fine,” Juliette said. She pointed to the run of wires, turned and imagined those wires leading from one server to another. “A map,” she said.

“Yes,” Raph agreed. “A map.” He took her by the arm. “Why don’t you come sit down? You breathed a lot of smoke—”

“Listen to me. The girl on the radio, the one from Silo 1, she said there was a map with these red lines on it. It came up after I told her about the digger. She seemed really excited, said she understood why all the lines went off and converged. This was before the radio stopped working.”

“Okay.”

“These are the silos,” Juliette said. She held out her hands to the tall servers. “C’mere. Look.” She hurried around the next row, studied the plates as she searched. Fourteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. “Here we are. And this is where we tunneled. And that’s our old silo.” She pointed to the next server.

“So you’re saying we can choose which of these to call on the radio by seeing who’s close? Because we have a map just like this down below. Erik’s got one.”

“No, I’m saying those red lines on her map are like these wires. See? Tunneling deep underground down there. The diggers weren’t meant to go from one silo to the next. Bobby was the one who told me how difficult that thing was to turn. It was aimed somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I would need that map to tell. Unless—” She turned to Raph, whose pale face she saw was smudged with smoke and soot. “You were on the dig team. How much fuel did that tank in the digger hold?”

He shrugged. “We never measured in gallons. Just topped it up. Court had the tank dipped a few times to see how much we were burning. I remember her saying we would never use up what was in there.”

“That’s because it was designed to go further. Much further. We need to dip the tank again to get an idea. And Erik’s map should show which way that digger was pointing to begin with. If only—” She snapped her fingers. “We’ve got the other digger.”

“I’m not following. Why would we need two diggers? We’ve only got one generator that works.”

Juliette squeezed his arm, could feel herself beaming, her mind racing. “We don’t need the other one to dig. We just need to see where it’s pointing. If we trace that line on a map and project out where our own digger should’ve gone, those two lines should cross. And if the fuel supply matches that distance, that’s like a confirmation. We can see where and how far this place is that she was telling me about. This seed place. She made it sound like another silo, but one out where the air was—”

There were voices at the other end of the room, someone entering from the hall. Juliette pulled Raph against one of the servers and threw her finger over her mouth. But someone could be heard coming straight for them, a quiet clicking, like fingers tapping on metal. Juliette fought the urge to run, and then a brown shape emerged at her feet, and there was a hiss as a leg was lifted, a stream of urine spattering her boot.

“Puppy!” she heard Elise scream.

Juliette hugged the kids and Solo. She hadn’t seen them since her silo fell. They reminded her why she was doing this, what she was fighting for, what was worth fighting for. A rage had built up inside of her, a single-minded pursuit of digging through the earth down below and digging for answers outside. And she had lost sight of this, these things worth saving. She had been too concerned with those who deserved to be damned.

This anger melted as Elise clung to her neck and Solo’s beard scratched her face. Here was what was left, what they still had, and protecting it was more important than vengeance. That’s what Father Wendel had discovered. He had been reading the wrong passages in his book, passages of hate rather than hope. And Juliette had been just as blind. She had been prepared to rush off and leave everyone behind.

Raph joined her and the kids, and they huddled together around one of the servers and discussed what they’d seen of the violence below. Solo had a rifle with him and kept saying they needed to secure the door, needed to hunker down.

“We should hide in here and wait for them to kill each other,” he said, a wild look in his eyes.

“Is that how you survived all the years over here?” Raph asked.

Solo nodded. “My father put me away. It was a long time before I left. It was safer that way.”

“Your father knew what was going to happen,” Juliette said. “He locked you away from it all. It’s the same reason we’re down here, all of us, living like this. Someone did the same thing a long time ago. They put us away to save us.”