In the aftermath of the uprising, the people of Silo 18 are coming to terms with a new order.
Some embrace the change, others fear the unknown; none have control of their fate.
The Silo is still in danger.
There are those set on its destruction.
Jules knows they must be stopped.
The battle has been won.
The war is just beginning.
Hugh Howey spent eight years living on boats and working as a yacht captain for the rich and famous. It wasn’t until the love of his life carried him away from these vagabond ways that he began to pursue literary adventures, rather than literal ones.
Hugh wrote and self-published his first adult novel, Wool, which won rave reviews and praise from readers. Dust is the final part of the trilogy.
Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida, with his wife Amber and their dog Bella.
Wool
Shift
In July of 2011, I wrote and published a short story that brought me into contact with thousands of readers, took me around the world on book tours and changed my life. I couldn’t have dreamed that any of this was about to happen the day I published Wool. Two years have passed, and now the publication of this book completes an amazing journey. I thank you for making that journey possible and for accompanying me along the way.
This is not the end, of course. Every story we read, every film we watch, continues on in our imaginations if we allow it. Characters live another day. They grow old and die. New ones are born. Challenges crop up and are dealt with. There is sadness, joy, triumph and failure. Where a story ends is nothing more than a snapshot in time, a brief flash of emotion, a pause. How and if it continues is up to us.
My only wish is that we leave room for hope. There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful. The future is bright. There are good things to come.
What do you see?
Lukas and Juliette don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to her plans for the future. Were you backing Juliette all the way in her decisions? Or did you disagree with anything she did?
Donald soon discovers that Anna was working against her father, in order to help the people of silo forty. Have your feelings changed towards Anna since Shift? Do you think she could have helped Donald in Dust? How?
In an exchange with Nelson, Juliette considers how someone ‘just doing their job’ can lead them to doing some very nasty things. Other than Nelson, are there any other characters in the trilogy that you can relate this to? Would you consider Thurman to be one of these people?
Solo places a lot of trust in Jules – not only that she will come back for him, but that she will give him a better life than the one he currently has. Why does he trust her so completely? Should he have trusted her?
Juliette’s decisions lead her to the truth, but they also result in numerous deaths. Would silo eighteen have been a better place if Juliette had never returned?
Shirly seals the entrance to silo seventeen, ensuring her death in the poisoned silo. Did she really not know what she was doing? Or did she want to end life without her husband? Was this her way of choosing her own fate?
Through Elise’s eyes, we see how people turn to religion in times of fear and the unknown. What does this say about the power of religion? Can you relate this to our society’s relationship with religion?
Darcy gives Charlotte the benefit of the doubt, and risks his life on what she tells him. Would Charlotte and Donald have succeeded without him? Why do you think he believes her so quickly? Would you have believed her?
Juliette has had quite a difficult relationship with her father throughout the trilogy. Once they reach the outside, he wants to be the first to take his helmet off and Juliette agrees. How do you feel their relationship has changed from Wool to this point? Why?
Ultimately, Donald is the one who causes the fall of silo one, and destroys what he first created. Is this him killing himself before Thurman can kill him? Or is this his way of atoning for his sins?
Juliette realises at the end that in asking people to believe in what she had seen, she wasn’t being fair – knowing that if the roles were reversed, she would not believe it herself. How would you feel if you were in her position? What about if you were a member of silo eighteen? Would you believe her?
Throughout the trilogy, a number of the characters stand up for what they believe is right, even if it means going against the rules, from Juliette and Lukas, to Donald and Charlotte – and even Shaw in his own way. Who do you believe is the true hero of the trilogy? Why?
www.hughhowey.com
Books are largely solitary endeavours, but life is not. I would like to thank my wife for always inspiring and supporting me and for making me a better person, my mother for instilling in me a love of the written word, my father for his encouragement and good example. My sister for her friendship and early fandom, and my brother for his kindness. Without you all in my life, there would be nothing to write about.
Authors frequently mention their agents in these acknowledgements, and now I know why. These are the engines behind a writing career, and I am fortunate to have the best in the business. That’s no exaggeration, and there’s no shame in all the other agents who rank slightly below the incomparable Kristin Nelson. You rock. Thanks also to Jenny Meyer, Kassie Evashevski, and Gray Tan, who have been amazing in their support and friendship. I love you all.
To the team at Random House UK: Thank you for taking a chance on me. You were one of the first to believe, and I will always consider you my publisher. Thanks especially to my editor, Jack Fogg, for making my work stronger and for being such an awesome caravaner. Thanks to Jason for the incredible cover art, Natalie for amplifying the signal, Jennifer for her creativity and those killer proofs, and the sales team that makes sure books find readers.
My final thanks go to those readers. Your support and love of this series mean more than you’ll ever know. Thank you for the reviews, for spreading the word, for taking this to such heights. I never thought I’d do much with my life. Because of you, I did this. I look forward to whatever you make possible next.
STARLIGHT GUIDED THEM through the valley of dunes and into the northern wastes. A dozen men walked single file, kers tied around their necks and pulled up over their noses and mouths, leather creaking and scabbards clacking. The route was circuitous, but a direct line meant summiting the crumbling sand and braving the howling winds at its peaks. There was the long way and there was the hard way, and the brigands of the northern wastes rarely chose the hard way.
Palmer kept his thoughts to himself while the others swapped lewd jokes and fictitious tales of several kinds of scored booty. His friend Hap walked further ahead, trying to ingratiate himself with the older men. It was more than a little unwise to be wandering the wastes with a band of brigands, but Palmer was a sand diver. He lived for that razor-thin line between insanity and good sense. And besides, these braggarts with their beards and foul odours were offering a month’s pay for two days of work. A hike into the wastes and a quick dive were nothing before a pile of coin.
The noisy column of men snaked around a steep dune, out of the lee and into the wind. Palmer adjusted his flapping ker. He tucked the edge of the cloth underneath his goggles to keep it in place. Sand peppered the right side of his face, telling him they were heading north. He could know without glancing up at the stars, know without seeing the high peaks to the west. The winds might abate or swell in fury, but their direction was as steady as the course of the sun. East to west, with the sand that rode along lodging in Palmer’s hair, filling his ears, stacking up in curving patterns of creeping dunes, and burying the world in a thousand metres of hellish grit.
As the piratical laughter from the column died down, Palmer could hear the other voices of the desert chorus. There was the moaning of the winds, and a shushing sound as waves of airborne sand crashed into dunes and raked across the men like gritpaper. Sand on sand made a noise like a hissing rattler ready to strike. Even as he thought this, a wrinkle in the dune beside him turned out to be more than a wrinkle. The serpent slithered and disappeared into its hole, as afraid of Palmer as he was of it.
There were more sounds. There was the clinking of the heavy gear on his back: the dive bottles and dive suit, the visor and fins, his regulator and beacons, all the tools of his trade. There was the call of coyotes singing to the west, their piercing wails uniquely able to travel into the wind to warn neighbouring packs to stay away. They were calling out that men were coming.
And beyond these myriad voices was the heartbeat of the desert sands, the thrumming that never ceased and could be felt day and night in a man’s bones, day and night from womb to grave. It was the deep rumble that emanated from No Man’s Land far to the east, that rolling thunder or those rebel bombs or the farting gods – whichever of the many flavours of bullshit one believed.
Palmer homed in on those distant grumbling sounds and thought of his father. His opinion of his dad shifted like the dunes. He sometimes counted him a coward for leaving in the night. He sometimes reckoned him a bold son of a bitch for setting off into No Man’s Land. There was something to be said for anyone who would venture into a place from where no soul had ever returned. Something less polite could be said about an asshole who could walk out on his wife and four kids to do so.
There was a break in the steep dune to the west, an opening in the sand that revealed a wide patch of star-studded sky. Palmer scanned the heavens, eager to dwell on something besides his father. The ridgeline of the impassable Stone Mountains could be seen even in the moon’s absence. Their jagged and daunting edge was marked by a black void where constellations suddenly ended.
Someone grabbed Palmer’s elbow. He turned to find that Hap had fallen back to join him. His friend’s face was underlit by the dive light dangling from his neck, set to dim.
‘You aiming for the strong and silent type?’ Hap hissed, his voice muffled by ker and wind.
Palmer hitched his heavy dive pack up his shoulders, could feel the sweat trapped between his shirt and the canvas sack. ‘I’m not aiming for anything,’ he said. ‘Just lost in thought.’
‘All right. Well, feel free to cut up with the others, huh? I don’t want them thinking you’re some kinda psycho or nuthin’.’
Palmer laughed. He glanced over his shoulder to see how far behind the next guy was and which way the wind was carrying their words. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘Because that’d be kinda boss, dontcha think?’
Hap seemed to mull this over. He grunted. Was probably upset he hadn’t come up with it first.
‘You’re sure we’re gonna get paid for this dive?’ Palmer asked, keeping his voice down. He fought the urge to dig after the sand in his ear, knowing it would just make it worse. ‘I don’t wanna get stiffed like last time.’
‘Fuck no, these guys have a certain code.’ Hap slapped him on the back of the neck, sand and sweat mixing to mud. ‘Relax, Your Highness. We’re gonna get paid. A quick dive, some sand in our lungs, and we’ll be sipping iced drinks at the Honey Hole by Sunday. Hell, I might even get a lap dance from your mom.’
‘Fuck off,’ Palmer said, knocking his friend’s arm away.
Hap laughed. He slapped Palmer again and slowed his pace to share another joke about Palmer’s mom with the others. Palmer had heard it before. It got less funny and grew more barbed every time. He walked alone in silence, thoughts flitting to his wreck of a family, the sweat on the back of his neck cooling in the breeze as it gathered sand, that iced drink at the Honey Hole not sounding all that bad, to be honest.
A CAMP HAD been made in the lee of a large dune, tents huddled together and flapping in the swirling wind. The marching men arrived to find a tall fire burning, its beating glow rising over the dunes and guiding their way in a dance of shadows. Other men emerged from the tents, and there were manly reunions of slapped backs and shoulders held, sand flying off with each violent embrace. The men stroked their long beards and swapped gossip and jokes as though they’d been apart for some time. Packs were dropped to the ground, canteens topped from a barrel. The two young divers were told to wait by the fire as some of the others ambled towards a large tent nestling between steep dunes.
Palmer was thankful for the chance to sit. He shrugged off his dive pack and arranged it carefully by the fire. Folding his aching legs beneath him, he sat and leaned against the pack and enjoyed the flickering warmth of the burning logs.
Hap settled down by the fire with two of the men he’d been chatting with during the hike. Palmer listened to them argue and laugh while he gazed into the fire, watching the logs burn. He thought of his home in Springston, where it would be a crime to fell a tree and light it on fire, where coals of hardened shit warmed and stunk up homes, where piped gas would burn one day but then silently snuff out a family in their sleep the next. In the wastes, such things didn’t matter. The scattered groves were there to be razed. The occasional animal to be eaten. Bubbling springs lapped up until they were dry.
Palmer wiggled closer to the flames and held out his palms. The sweat from the hike, the breeze, the thoughts of home had turned him cold. He smiled at an eruption of voices that bravely leapt through the tall flames. He laughed when the others laughed. And when his twisting stomach made noises, he lied and said it was because he was hungry. The truth was that he had a very bad feeling about this job.
To start with, he didn’t know any of these men. And his sister had warned him of the savages he did know, much less those strange to him. Hap had vouched for the group, whatever that was worth. Palmer turned and watched his friend share a joke in the firelight, his face an orange glow, his arms a blur of enthusiasm. Best friends since dive school. Palmer figured they would go deeper for each other than anyone else across the sands. That made the vouch count for something.
Beyond Hap, parked between two steep dunes, Palmer saw two sarfers with their sails furled and masts lowered. The wind-powered craft rocked on their sleek runners, the twin hulls cobbled together from scraps of tin raised from the depths. A knotted net of ropes spanned the bows of each craft – what his father called the trampoline – and Palmer thought of days spent riding with his dad east of the wall, whooping as one hull lifted from the sand in a fierce gust, a glimpse of his father’s grin behind his flapping ker as if all was completely under control. Palmer missed that sensation of speed. Life had become a slow crawl across the sand. He wondered if after this job, maybe these guys would give him and Hap a ride back into town. Anything to avoid the night hikes and the bivouacking in the lee of blistering dunes.
A few of the men who had hiked with them from Springston dropped down and joined the loose circle around the fire. Many of them were old, in their late forties probably, more than twice Palmer’s age and about as long as anyone was meant to last. They had the leather-dark skin of nomads, of desert wanderers, of gypsies. Men who slept beneath the stars and toiled under the sun. Palmer promised himself he would never look like that. He would make his fortune young, stumble on that one cherry find, and he and Hap would move back to town as heroes and live in the shade. A dune of credits would absolve old sins. They would open a dive shop, make a living selling and repairing gear, equipping the unlucky saps who risked their lives beneath the sand. They would see steady coin from the fools chasing piles of it. Chasing piles just as he and Hap were right then.
A bottle was passed around. Palmer raised it to his lips and pretended to drink. He shook his head and wiped his mouth as he leaned to the side to pass the bottle to Hap. Laughter was thrown into the fire, sending sparks up towards the glittering heavens.
‘You two.’
A heavy hand landed on Palmer’s shoulder. He turned to see Moguhn, the black brigand who had led their march through the dunes. Moguhn gazed down at him and Hap, his silhouette blotting out the stars.
‘Brock will see you now,’ he said. The brigand turned and slid into the darkness beyond the fire.
Hap smiled, took another swig and passed the bottle to the bearded man at his side. Standing, he smiled at Palmer, an odd smile, cheeks full, then turned and spat into the flames, sending the fire and laughter higher. He slapped Palmer on the shoulder and hurried after Moguhn.
Palmer grabbed his gear before following along, not trusting anyone to watch after it. When he caught up, Hap grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him aside. Together they followed Moguhn down the packed sand path between the firepit and the cluster of tents.
‘Play it cool,’ Hap hissed. ‘This is our ticket to the big time.’
Palmer didn’t say anything. All he wanted was a score that could retire him, not to prove himself to this band and join them. He licked his lips, which still burned from the alcohol, and cursed himself for not drinking more when he was younger. He had a lot of catching up to do. He thought of his little brothers and how he’d tell them, when he saw them again, not to make the same mistakes he had. Learn to dive. Learn to drink. Don’t burn time learning wasteful stuff. Be more like their sister and less like him. That’s what he would say.
Moguhn was nearly invisible in the starlight, but came into relief against tents that glowed from the throb of flickering lamps. Someone threw a flap open, which let out the light like an explosion of insects. The thousands of stars overhead dimmed, leaving the warrior god alone to shine bright. It was Colorado, the great sword-wielding constellation of summer, his belt a perfect line of three stars aimed down the path as if to guide their way.
Palmer looked from that swathe of jewels to the dense band of frost fire that bloomed back into existence as the tent was closed. This band of countless stars stretched from one dune straight over the sky to the far horizon. It was impossible to see the frost fire in town, not with all the gas fires burning at night. But here was the mark of the wastes, the stamp overhead that told a boy he was very far from home, that let him know he was in the middle of the wastes and the wilds. And not just the wilds of sand and dune but the wilds of life, those years in a man’s twenties when he shrugs off the shelter of youth and before he has bothered to erect his own. The tent-less years. The bright and blinding years in which men wander as the planets do.
A bright gash of light flicked across those fixed beacons, a shooting star, and Palmer wondered if maybe he was more akin to this. Perhaps him and Hap both. They were going places, and in a hurry. A flash and then gone, off to somewhere new.
Stumbling a little, he nearly tripped over his own boots from looking up like that. Ahead of him, Hap ducked into the largest of the tents behind Moguhn. The canvas rustled like the sound of boots in coarse sand, the wind yelped as it leapt from one dune to the next, and the stars overhead were swallowed by the light.
THE MEN INSIDE the tent turned their heads as Hap and Palmer slipped inside the flap. The wind scratched the walls like playful fingernails, the breeze asking to be let in. It was warm from the bodies and smelled like a bar after a work shift: sweat and rough brew and clothes worn for months.
A dune of a man waved the two boys over. Palmer figured him for Brock, the leader of this band who now claimed the northern wastes, an imposing figure who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere as most brigand leaders do. Building bombs one year, serving someone else, until a string of deaths promotes a man to the top.
Palmer’s sister had warned him to steer clear of men like this. Vic claimed all men were a pack of liars but that those capable of leading – the men who could fool other men – were the worst kind. Instead of obeying his sister, Palmer steered towards the man. He set his gear down near a stack of crates and a barrel of water or grog. There were eight or nine men standing around a flimsy table set in the middle of the tent. A lamp had been hung from the centre support; it swayed with the push and pull of the wind on the tent frame. Thick arms plastered with tattoos were planted around the table like the trunks of small trees. The tattoos were decorated with raised scars made by rubbing grit into open wounds.
‘Make room,’ Brock said, his accent thick and difficult to place, perhaps a lilt of the gypsies south of Low-Pub or the old gardeners from the oasis to the west. He waved his hand between two of the men as though shooing flies from a plate of food, and with minimal grumbling, the two bearded men pressed to the side. Hap took a place at the waist-high table and Palmer joined him.
‘You’ve heard of Danvar,’ Brock said, forgoing introductions and formalities. It seemed like a question, but it was not spoken like one. It was an assumption, a declaration. Palmer glanced around the table to see quite a few men watching him, some rubbing their long and knotted beards. Here, the mention of legends did not elicit an eruption of laughter. Here, grown men looked at hairless youths as if sizing them up for dinner. But none of these men had the face-tats of the cannibals of the far north, so Palmer assumed he and Hap were being sized up for this job, being measured for their worthiness and not for some stew.
‘Everyone’s heard of Danvar,’ Hap whispered, and Palmer noted the awe in his friend’s voice. ‘Will this lead us there?’
Palmer turned and surveyed his friend, then followed Hap’s gaze down to the table. The four corners of a large piece of parchment were pinned down by meaty fists, sweating mugs and a smoking ashtray. Palmer touched the edge of the parchment closest to him and saw that the mottled brown material was thicker than normal parchment. It looked like the stretched and tanned hide of a coyote, and felt brittle to the touch, as though it were very old.
One of the men laughed at Hap’s question. ‘You already are here,’ he roared.
An exhalation of smoke drifted across the old drawing like a sandstorm seen from up high. One of Brock’s sausage fingers traced the very constellation Palmer had been staring at dizzily just moments before.
‘The belt of the great warrior, Colorado.’ The men around the table stopped their chattering and drinking. Their boss was speaking. His finger found a star every boy knew. ‘Low-Pub,’ he said, his voice as rough as the sand-studded wind. But that wasn’t the name of the star, as Palmer could tell him. Low-Pub was a lawless town to the south of Springston, an upstart town recently in conflict with its neighbour, as the two wrestled over wells of water and oil. Palmer watched as Brock traced a line up the belt, his fingertip like a sarfer sailing the winds between the two towns and across all that contested land. It was a drawn-out gesture, as though he was trying to show them some hidden meaning.
‘Springston,’ he announced, pausing at the middle star. Palmer’s thought was: Home. His gaze drifted over the rest of the map, this maze of lines and familiar clusters of stars, of arrows and hatch marks, of meticulous writing built up over the years in various fades of ink, countless voices marked down, arguing in the margins.
The fat finger resumed its passage due north – if those stars really might be taken to represent Low-Pub and Springston.
‘Danvar,’ Brock announced, thumping the table with his finger. He indicated the third star in the belt of great Colorado. The map seemed to suggest that the buried world of the gods was laid out in accordance with their heavenly stars. As if man were trapped between mirrored worlds above and below. The tent swayed as Palmer considered this.
‘You’ve found it?’ Hap asked.
‘Aye,’ someone said, and the drinking and smoking resumed. The curled hide of the map threatened to roll shut with the rise of a mug.
‘We have a good guess,’ Brock said in that strange accent of his. ‘You boys will tell us for sure.’
‘Danvar is said to be a mile down,’ Palmer muttered. When the table fell silent, he glanced up. ‘Nobody’s ever dived half of that.’
‘Nobody?’ someone asked. ‘Not even your sister?’
Laughter tumbled out of beards. Palmer had been waiting for her to come up.
‘It’s no mile down,’ Brock told them, waving his thick hand. ‘Forget the legends. Danvar is here. More plunder than in all of Springston. Here lies the ancient metropolis. The three buried towns of this land are laid out according to the stars of Colorado’s belt.’ He narrowed his eyes at Hap and then at Palmer. ‘We just need you boys to confirm it. We need a real map, not this skin.’
‘How deep are we talking?’ Hap asked.
Palmer turned to his friend. He had assumed this had already been discussed. He wondered if the wage he’d been promised had been arrived at, or if his friend had just been blowing smoke. They weren’t here for a big scavenge; they were here to dive for ghosts, to dig for legends.
‘Eight hundred metres.’
The answer quietened all but the moaning wind.
Palmer shook his head. ‘I think you vastly overestimate what a diver can—’
‘We dug the first two hundred metres,’ Brock said. He tapped the map again. ‘And it says here on this map that the tallest structures rise up another two hundred fifty.’
‘That leaves . . .’ Hap hesitated, waiting no doubt for someone else to do the maths.
The swinging lamp seemed to dim, and the edges of the map went out of focus as Palmer arrived at the answer. ‘Three hundred fifty metres,’ he said, feeling dizzy. He’d been down to two fifty a few times on twin bottles. He knew people who’d gone down to three. His sister, a few others, could do four – some claimed five. Hap hadn’t warned him that they were diving so deep, nor that they were helping more gold-diggers waste their time looking for Danvar. Palmer had feared for a moment there that they were working for rebels, but this was worse. This was a delusion of wealth rather than power.
‘Three fifty is no problem,’ Hap said. He spread his hands out on the map and leaned over the table, looking like he was studying the notes. Palmer reckoned his friend was feeling dizzy as well. It would be a record for them both.
‘I just wanna know it’s here,’ Brock said, thumping the map. ‘We need exact coordinates before we dig any more. The damn hole we have here is a bitch to maintain.’
There were grumbles of agreement from the men that Palmer figured were doing the actual digging. One of them smiled at Palmer. ‘Your mom would know something about maintaining holes,’ he said, and the grumbles turned into laughter.
Palmer felt his face burn. ‘When do we go?’ he shouted over this sudden eruption.
And the laughter died down. His friend Hap turned from the dizzying map, his eyes wide and full of fear, Palmer saw. Full of fear and with a hint of an apology for bringing them this far north for such madness, a glimmer in those eyes of all the bad that was soon to come.
DUST RAINED IN the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. Wires overhead swung gently in their harnesses. Pipes rattled. And from the generator room, staccato bangs filled the air, bounced off the walls, and brought to mind a time when unbalanced machines spun dangerously.
At the locus of the horrible racket, Juliette Nichols stood with her overalls zipped down to her waist, the loose arms knotted around her hips, dust and sweat staining her undershirt with mud. She leaned her weight against the excavator, her sinewy arms shaking as the digger’s heavy metal piston slammed into the concrete wall of silo eighteen over and over.
The vibrations could be felt in her teeth. Every bone and joint in her body shuddered, and old wounds ached with reminders. Off to the side, the miners who normally manned the excavator watched unhappily. Juliette turned her head from the powdered concrete and saw the way they stood with their arms crossed over their wide chests, their jaws set in rigid frowns, angry perhaps for her appropriating their machine. Or maybe over the taboo of digging where digging was forbidden.
Juliette swallowed the grit and chalk accumulating in her mouth and concentrated on the crumbling wall. There was another possibility, one she couldn’t help but consider. Good mechanics and miners had died because of her. Brutal fighting had broken out when she’d refused to clean. How many of these men and women watching her dig had lost a loved one, a best friend, a family member? How many of them blamed her? She couldn’t possibly be the only one.
The excavator bucked and there was the clang of metal on metal. Juliette steered the punching jaws to the side as more bones of rebar appeared in the white flesh of concrete. She had already gouged out a veritable crater in the outer silo wall. A first row of rebar hung jagged overhead, the ends smooth like melted candles where she’d taken a blowtorch to them. Two more feet of concrete and another row of the iron rods had followed, the silo walls thicker than she’d imagined. With numb limbs and frayed nerves she guided the machine forward on its tracks, the wedge-shaped piston chewing at the stone between the rods. If she hadn’t seen the schematic for herself – if she didn’t know there were other silos out there – she would’ve given up already. It felt as though she were chewing through the very earth itself. Her arms shook, her hands a blur. This was the wall of the silo she was attacking, ramming it with a mind to pierce through the damn thing, to bore clear through to the outside.
The miners shifted uncomfortably. Juliette looked from them to where she was aiming as the hammer bit rang against more steel. She concentrated on the crease of white stone between the bars. With her boot, she kicked the drive lever, leaned into the machine, and the excavator trudged forward on rusted tracks one more inch. She should’ve taken another break a while ago. The chalk in her mouth was choking her; she was dying for water; her arms needed a rest; rubble crowded the base of the excavator and littered her feet. She kicked a few of the larger chunks out of the way and kept digging.
Her fear was that if she stopped one more time, she wouldn’t be able to convince them to let her continue. Mayor or not – a shift head or not – men she had thought fearless had already left the generator room with furrowed brows. They seemed terrified that she might puncture a sacred seal and let in a foul and murderous air. Juliette saw the way they looked at her, knowing she’d been on the outside, as though she were some kind of ghost. Many kept their distance as if she bore some disease.
Setting her teeth, foul-tasting grit crunching between them, she kicked the forward plate once more with her boot. The tracks on the excavator spun forward another inch. One more inch. Juliette cursed the machine and the pain in her wrists. God damn the fighting and her dead friends. God damn the thought of Solo and the kids all alone, a for ever of rock away. And God damn this mayor nonsense, people looking at her as though she suddenly ran all the shifts on every level, as though she knew what the hell she was doing, as though they had to obey her even as they feared her—
The excavator lurched forward more than an inch and the pounding hammer bit screamed with a piercing whine. Juliette lost her grip with one hand and the machine revved up as if fit to explode. The miners startled like fleas, several of them running towards her, shadows converging. Juliette hit the red kill switch, which was nearly invisible beneath a dusting of white powder. The excavator kicked and bucked as it wound down from a dangerous runaway state.
‘You’re through! You’re through!’
Raph pulled her back, his pale arms, strong from years of mining, wrapping around her numb limbs. Others shouted at her that she was done. Finished. The excavator had made a noise as if a connecting rod had shattered; there had been that dangerous whine of a mighty engine running without friction, without anything to resist. Juliette let go of the controls and sagged into Raph’s embrace. A desperation returned, the thought of her friends buried alive in that tomb of an empty silo and her unable to reach them.
‘You’re through – get back!’
A hand that reeked of grease and toil clamped down over her mouth, protecting her from the air beyond. Juliette couldn’t breathe. Ahead of her, a black patch of empty space appeared, the cloud of concrete dissipating.
And there, between two bars of iron, stood a dark void. A void between prison bars that ran two layers deep and all around them, from Mechanical straight to the up top.
She was through. Through. She now had a glimpse of some other, some different, outside.
‘The torch,’ Juliette mumbled, prising Raph’s calloused hand from her mouth and hazarding a gulp of air. ‘Get me the cutting torch. And a flashlight.’
‘DAMN THING’S RUSTED to hell.’
‘Those look like hydraulic lines.’
‘Must be a thousand years old.’
Fitz muttered the last, the oilman’s words whistling through gaps left by missing teeth. The miners and mechanics who had kept their distance during the digging now crowded against Juliette’s back as she aimed her flashlight through a lingering veil of powdered rock and into the gloom beyond. Raph, as pale as the drifting dust, stood beside her, the two of them crammed into the conical crater chewed out of the five or six feet of concrete. The albino’s eyes were wide, his translucent cheeks bulging, his lips pursed together and bloodless.
‘You can breathe, Raph,’ Juliette told him. ‘It’s just another room.’
The pale miner let out his air with a relieved grunt and asked those behind to stop shoving. Juliette passed the flashlight to Fitz and turned from the hole she’d made. She wormed her way through the jostling crowd, her pulse racing from the glimpses of some machine on the other side of the wall. What she had seen was quickly confirmed by the murmuring of others: struts, bolts, hose, plate steel with chips of paint and streaks of rust – a wall of a mechanical beast that went up and to the sides as far as their feeble flashlight beams could penetrate.
A tin cup of water was pressed into her trembling hand. Juliette drank greedily. She was exhausted, but her mind raced. She couldn’t wait to get back to a radio and tell Solo. She couldn’t wait to tell Lukas. Here was a bit of buried hope.
‘What now?’ Dawson asked.
The new third-shift foreman, who had given her the water, studied her warily. Dawson was in his late thirties, but working the dim time with thinly manned shifts had saddled him with extra years. He had the large knotted hands that came from busting knuckles and breaking fingers, some of it from working and some from fighting. Juliette returned the cup to him. Dawson glanced inside and stole the last swig.
‘Now we make a bigger hole,’ she told him. ‘We get in there and see if that thing’s salvageable.’
Movement on top of the humming main generator caught Juliette’s eye. She glanced up in time to spy Shirly frowning down at her. Shirly turned away.
Juliette squeezed Dawson’s arm. ‘It’ll take for ever to expand this one hole,’ she said. ‘What we need are dozens of smaller holes that we can connect. We need to tear out entire sections at a time. Bring up the other excavator. And turn the men loose with their picks, but keep the dust to a minimum if you can help it.’
The third-shift foreman nodded and rapped his fingers against the empty cup. ‘No blasting?’ he asked.
‘No blasting,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to damage whatever’s over there.’
He nodded, and she left him to manage the dig. She approached the generator. Shirly had her overalls stripped down to her waist as well, sleeves cinched together, her undershirt wet with the dark inverted triangle of sweat. With a rag in each hand, she worked across the top of the generator, wiping away both old grease and the new film of powder kicked up by the day’s digging.
Juliette untied the sleeves of her overalls and shrugged her arms inside, covering her scars. She climbed up the side of the generator, knowing where she could grab, which parts were hot and which were merely warm. ‘You need some help?’ she asked, reaching the top, enjoying the heat and thrum of the machine in her sore muscles.
Shirly wiped her face with the hem of her undershirt. She shook her head. ‘I’m good,’ she said.
‘Sorry about the debris.’ Juliette raised her voice over the hum of the massive pistons firing up and down. There was a day not too long ago when her teeth would’ve been knocked loose to stand on top of the machine, back when it was unbalanced six ways to hell.
Shirly turned and tossed the muddy white rags down to her shadow, Kali, who dunked them into a bucket of grimy water. It was strange to see the new head of Mechanical toiling away at something so mundane as cleaning the genset. Juliette tried to picture Knox up there doing the same. And then it hit her for the hundredth time that she was mayor, and look how she spent her time, hammering through walls and cutting rebar. Kali tossed the rags back up and Shirly caught them with wet slaps and sprays of suds. Her old friend’s silence as she bent back to her work said plenty.
Juliette turned and surveyed the digging party she’d assembled as they cleared debris and worked to expand the hole. Shirly hadn’t been happy about the loss of manpower, much less the taboo of breaking the silo’s seal. The call for workers had come at a time when their ranks were already thinned by the outbreak of violence. And whether or not Shirly blamed Juliette for her husband’s death was irrelevant. Juliette blamed herself, and so the tension stood between them like a cake of grease.
It wasn’t long before the hammering on the wall resumed. Juliette spotted Bobby at the excavator’s controls, his great muscled arms a blur as he guided the wheeled jackhammer. The sight of some strange machine – some artefact buried beyond the walls – had energised her reluctant crew. Fear and doubt had morphed into determination. A porter arrived with food, and Juliette watched the young man with his bare arms and legs study the work intently. The porter left his load of fruit and hot lunches behind and took with him his gossip.
Juliette stood on the humming generator and allayed her doubts. They were doing the right thing, she told herself. She had seen with her own eyes how vast the world was, had stood on a summit and surveyed the land. All she had to do now was show others what was out there. And then they would lean into this work rather than fear it.
A HOLE WAS made big enough to squeeze through, and Juliette took the honours. A flashlight in hand, she crawled over a pile of rubble and between bent fingers of iron rod. The air beyond the generator room was cool like the deep mines. She coughed into her fist, the dust from the digging tickling her throat and nose. She hopped down to the floor beyond the gaping hole.
‘Careful,’ she told the others behind her. ‘The ground’s not even.’
Some of the unevenness was from the chunks of concrete that’d fallen inside – the rest was just how the floor stood. It appeared as though it’d been gouged out by the claws of a giant.
Shining the light from her boots to the dim ceiling high above, she surveyed the hulking wall of machinery before her. It dwarfed the main generator. It dwarfed the oil pumps. A colossus of such proportions was never meant to be built, much less repaired. Her stomach sank. Her hopes of restoring this buried machine diminished.
Raph joined her in the cool and dark, a clatter of rubble trailing him. The albino had a condition that skipped generations. His eyebrows and lashes were gossamer things, nearly invisible. His flesh was as pale as pig’s milk. But when he was in the mines, the shadows that darkened the others like soot lent him a healthful complexion. Juliette could see why he had left the farms as a boy to work in the dark.
Raph whistled as he played his flashlight across the machine. A moment later, his whistle echoed back, a bird in the far shadows, mocking him.
‘It’s a thing of the gods,’ he wondered aloud.
Juliette didn’t answer. She never took Raph as one to listen to the tales of priests. Still, there was no doubting the awe it inspired. She had seen Solo’s books and suspected that the same ancient peoples who had built this machine had built the crumbling but soaring towers beyond the hills. The fact that they had built the silo itself made her feel small. She reached out and ran her hand across metal that hadn’t been touched or glimpsed for centuries, and she marvelled at what the ancients had been capable of. Maybe the priests weren’t that far off after all . . .
‘Ye gods,’ Dawson grumbled, crowding noisily beside them. ‘What’re we to do with this?’
‘Yeah, Jules,’ Raph whispered, respecting the deep shadows and the deeper time. ‘How’re we supposed to dig this thing outta here?’
‘We’re not,’ she told them. She scooted sideways between the wall of concrete and the tower of machinery. ‘This thing is meant to dig its own way out.’
‘You’re assuming we can get it running,’ Dawson said.
Workers in the generator room crowded the hole and blocked the light spilling in. Juliette steered her flashlight around the narrow gap that stood between the outer silo wall and the tall machine, looking for some way around. She worked to one side, into the darkness, and scrambled up the gently sloping floor.
‘We’ll get it running,’ she assured Dawson. ‘We just gotta figure out how it’s supposed to work.’
‘Careful,’ Raph warned as a rock kicked loose by her boots tumbled towards him. She was already higher up than their heads. The room, she saw, didn’t have a corner or a far wall. It just curled up and all the way around.
‘It’s a big circle,’ she called out, her voice echoing between rock and metal. ‘I don’t think this is the business end.’
‘There’s a door over here,’ Dawson announced.
Juliette slid down the slope to join him and Raph. Another flashlight clicked on from the gawkers in the generator room. Its beam joined hers in illuminating a door with pins for hinges. Dawson wrestled with a handle on the back of the machine. He grunted with effort, and then metal cried out as it reluctantly gave way to muscle.
The machine yawned wide once they were through the door. Nothing prepared Juliette for this. Thinking back to the schematics she’d seen in Solo’s underground hovel, she now realised that the diggers had been drawn to scale. The little worms jutting off the low floors on that drawing were in fact a level high and twice that in length. Massive cylinders of steel, this one sat snug in a circular cave, almost as if it had buried itself. Juliette told her people to be careful as they made their way through the interior. A dozen workers joined her, their voices mingling and echoing in the maze-like guts of the machine, taboo dispelled by curiosity and wonder, the digging forgotten for now.
‘This here’s for moving the tailings,’ someone said. Beams of light played on metal chutes of interlocking plates. There were wheels and gears beneath the plates and more plates on the other side that overlapped like the scales on a snake. Juliette saw immediately how the entire chute moved, the plates hinging at the end and wrapping around to the beginning again. The rock and debris could ride on the top as it was pushed along. Low walls of inch-thick plate were meant to keep the rock from tumbling off. The rock chewed up by the digger would pass through here and out the back, where men would have to wrestle it with barrows.
‘It’s rusted all to hell,’ someone muttered.
‘Not as bad as it should be,’ Juliette said. The machine had been there for hundreds of years, at least. She expected it to be a ball of rust and nothing more, but the steel was shiny in places. ‘I think the room was airtight,’ she wondered aloud, remembering a breeze on her neck and the sucking of dust as she pierced through the wall for the first time.
‘This is all hydraulic,’ Bobby said. There was disappointment in his voice, as though he were learning that the gods cleaned their asses with water too. Juliette was more hopeful. She saw something that could be fixed, so long as the power source was intact. They could get this running. It was made to be simple, as if the gods knew that whoever discovered it would be less sophisticated, less capable. There were treads just like on the excavator but running the length of the mighty machine, axles caked in grease. More treads on the sides and ceiling that must push against the earth as well. What she didn’t understand was how the digging commenced. Past the moving chutes and all the implements for pushing crushed rock and tailings out the back of the machine, they came to a wall of steel that slid up past the girders and walkways into the darkness above.
‘That don’t make a lick of sense,’ Raph said, reaching the far wall. ‘Look at these wheels. Which way does this thing run?’
‘Those aren’t wheels,’ Juliette said. She pointed with her light. ‘This whole front piece spins. Here’s the pivot.’ She pointed to a central axle as big around as two men. ‘And those round discs there must protrude through to the other side and do the cutting.’
Bobby blew out a disbelieving breath. ‘Through solid stone?’
Juliette tried to turn one of the discs. It barely moved. A barrel of grease would be needed.
‘I think she’s right,’ Raph said. He had the lid raised on a box the size of a double bunk and aimed his flashlight inside. ‘This here’s a gearbox. Looks like a transmission.’
Juliette joined him. Helical gears the size of a man’s waist lay embedded in dried grease. The gears matched up with teeth that would spin the wall. The transmission box was as large and stout as that of the main generator. Larger.
‘Bad news,’ Bobby said. ‘Check where that shaft leads.’
Three beams of light converged and followed the driveshaft back to where it ended in empty space. The interior cavern of that hulking machine, all that emptiness in which they stood, was a void where the heart of the beast should lie.
‘She ain’t going nowhere,’ Raph muttered.
Juliette marched back to the rear of the machine. Beefy struts built for holding a power plant sat bare. She and the other mechanics had been milling about where an engine should sit. And now that she knew what to look for, she spotted the mounts. There were six of them: threaded posts eight inches across and caked in ancient, hardened grease. The matching nut for each post hung from hooks beneath the struts. The gods were communicating with her. Talking to her. The ancients had left a message, written in the language of people who knew machines. They were speaking to her across vast stretches of time, saying: This goes here. Follow these steps.
Fitz, the oilman, knelt beside Juliette and rested a hand on her arm. ‘I am sorry for your friends,’ he said, meaning Solo and the kids, but Juliette thought he sounded happy for everyone else. Glancing at the rear of the metal cave, she saw more miners and mechanics peering inside, hesitant to join them. Everyone would be happy for this endeavour to end right there, for her to dig no further. But Juliette was feeling more than an urge; she was beginning to feel a purpose. This machine hadn’t been hidden from them. It had been safely stowed. Protected. Packed away. Slathered in grease and shielded from the air for a reason beyond her knowing.
‘Do we seal it back up?’ Dawson asked. Even the grizzled old mechanic seemed eager to dig no further.
‘It’s waiting for something,’ Juliette said. She pulled one of the large nuts off its hook and rested it on top of the grease-encased post. The size of the mount was familiar. She thought of the work she’d performed a lifetime ago of aligning the main generator. ‘She’s meant to be opened,’ she said. ‘This belly of hers is meant to be opened. Check the back of the machine where we came through. It should come apart so the tailings can get out, but also to let something in. The motor isn’t missing at all.’
Raph stayed by her side, the beam of his flashlight on her chest so he could study her face.