50

　　Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.

　　“It would take ten lifetimes to read all these.”

　　Juliette looked up from the pile of scattered tins and stacks of thick books. There was more tomarvel at in their text-heavy pages than in any of the children’s books of her youth.

　　Solo turned from the stove, where he was heating soup and boiling water. He waved a drippingmetal spoon at the scattered mess she’d made. “I don’t think they were meant to be read,” he told her.

　　“At least, not like I’ve been reading them, front to back.” He touched his tongue to the spoon, thenstuck it back in the pot and stirred. “Everything’s out of order. It’s more like a backup to the backup.”

　　“I don’t know what that means,” Juliette admitted. She looked down at her lap, where pictures ofanimals called “butterflies” filled the pages. Their wings were comically bright. She wondered if theywere the size of her hands or the size of people. She had yet to find any sense of scale for the beasts.

　　“The servers,” Solo said. “What did you think I meant? The backup.”

　　He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic,and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decadesof reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as herexperience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow ignorant savages?

　　She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect hisfingernail.

　　“The backup of what exactly?” she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answer to come.

　　Solo found two bowls. He began wiping one out with the fabric in the belly of his overalls. “Thebackup of everything,” he said. “All that we know. All that ever was.” He set the bowls down andadjusted a knob on the stove. “Follow me,” he said, waving his arm. “I’ll show you.”

　　Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin. She rose and followed Solo out of the room andinto the next one.

　　“Don’t mind the mess,” he said, gesturing at a small hill of trash and debris piled up against onewall. It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and smelled like ten thousand. Juliette wrinkledher nose and fought the reflex to gag. Solo seemed unaffected. He stood beside a small wooden deskand flipped through diagrams hanging from the wall on enormous sheets of paper.

　　“Where’s the one I want?” he wondered aloud.

　　“What are these?” Juliette asked, entranced. She saw one that looked like a schematic of the silo,but unlike any they’d had in Mechanical.

　　Solo turned. He had several sheets flopped over one shoulder, his body practically disappearingbetween the layers of them. “Maps,” he said. “I want to show you how much is out there. You’ll shityourself.”

　　He shook his head and muttered something to himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to say that.”

　　Juliette told him it was fine. She held the back of her hand to her nose, the stench of rotting foodintolerable.

　　“Here it is. Hold this end.” Solo held out the corner of a half-dozen sheets of paper. He took theother side and they lifted them away from the wall. Juliette felt like pointing out the grommets at thebottom of the maps and how there were probably sticks or hooks around here somewhere forpropping them up, but held her tongue. Opening her mouth just made the smell of the rotting cansworse.

　　“This is us,” Solo said. He pointed to a spot on the paper. Dark, squiggly lines were everywhere. Itdidn’t look like a map or schematic of anything Juliette had ever seen. It looked like children haddrawn it. Hardly a straight line existed anywhere.

　　“What’s this supposed to show?” she asked.

　　“Borders. Land!” Solo ran his hands over one uninterrupted shape that took up nearly a third ofthe drawing. “This is all water,” he told her.

　　“Where?” Juliette’s arm was getting tired of holding up her end of the sheet. The smell and theriddles were getting to her. She felt a long way from home. The thrill of survival was in danger ofbeing replaced with the depression of a long and miserable existence looming for years and yearsbefore her.

　　“Out there! Covering the land.” Solo pointed vaguely at the walls. He narrowed his eyes atJuliette’s confusion. “The silo, this silo, would be as big around as a single hair on your head.” Hepatted the map. “Right here. All of them. Maybe all of us left. No bigger than my thumb.” He placeda finger in a knot of lines. Juliette thought he seemed so sincere. She leaned closer to see better, buthe pushed her back.

　　“Let those go,” he said. He slapped at her hand holding the corners of paper and smoothed themaps against the wall. “This is us.” He indicated one of the circles on the top sheet. Juliette eyeballedthe columns and rows, figured there were four dozen or so of them. “Silo seventeen.” He slid hishand up. “Number twelve. This is eight. And silo one up here.”

　　“No.”

　　Juliette shook her head and reached for the desk, her legs weak.

　　“Yes. Silo one. You’re probably from sixteen or eighteen. Do you remember how far youwalked?”

　　She grabbed the small chair and pulled it out. Sat down heavily.

　　“How many hills did you cross?”

　　Juliette didn’t answer. She was thinking about the other map and comparing the scales. What ifSolo was right? What if there were fifty or so silos and all of them could be covered by a thumb?

　　What if Lukas had been right about how far away the stars were? She needed something to crawlinside, something to cover her. She needed some sleep.

　　“I once heard from silo one,” Solo said. “A long time ago. Not sure how well any of these othersare doing—”

　　“Wait.” Juliette sat up straight. “What do you mean, you heard from them?”

　　Solo didn’t turn from the map. He ran his hands from one circle to another, a childlike expressionon his face. “They called. Checking in.” He looked away from the map and her, toward the far cornerof the room. “We didn’t talk for long. I didn’t know all the procedures. They weren’t happy.”

　　“Okay, but how did you do this? Can we call someone now? Was it a radio? Did it have a littleantenna, a small black pointy thing—” Juliette stood and crossed to him, grabbed his shoulder, andturned him around. How much did this man know that could help her but that she couldn’t get out ofhim? “Solo, how did you talk to them?”

　　“Through the wire,” he said. He cupped his hands and covered his ears with them. “You just talkin it.”

　　“You need to show me,” she said.

　　Solo shrugged. He flipped up a few of the maps again, found the one he wanted, and pressed theothers against the wall. It was the schematic of the silo she had seen earlier, a side-on view of itdivided into thirds, each third side by side with the others. She helped him hold the other sheets outof the way.

　　“Here are the wires. They run every which way.” He traced thick branches of lines that ran fromthe exterior walls and off the edges of the paper. They were labeled with minuscule print. Julietteleaned closer to read; she recognized many of the engineering marks.

　　“These are for power,” she said, pointing at the lines with the jagged symbols above them.

　　“Yup.” Solo nodded. “We don’t get our own power anymore. Borrow it from others, I think. Allautomatic.”

　　“You get it from others?” Juliette felt her frustration rise. How many crucial things did this manknow that he considered trifling? “Anything else you want to add?” she asked him. “Do you have aflying suit that can whisk me back to my silo? Or are there secret passages beneath all the floors sowe can just stroll there as easy as we like?”

　　Solo laughed and looked at her like she was crazy. “No,” he said. “Then it would be one seed, notmany. One bad day would ruin us all. Besides, the diggers are dead. They buried them.” He pointedat a nook, a rectangular room jutting off from the edge of Mechanical. Juliette peered closer. Sherecognized every floor of the down deep at a glance, but this room wasn’t supposed to exist.

　　“What do you mean, the diggers?”

　　“The machines that removed the dirt. You know, that made this place.” He ran his hand down thelength of the silo. “Too heavy to move, I guess, so they poured the walls right over them.”

　　“Do they work?” Juliette asked. An idea formed. She thought of the mines, of how she’d helpedexcavate rock by hand. She thought of the sort of machine that could dig out an entire silo, wonderedif it could be used to dig between them.

　　Solo clicked his tongue. “No way. Nothing down there does. All toast. Besides—” He chopped hishand partway up the down deep. “There’s flooding up to—” He turned to Juliette. “Wait. Are youwanting out? To go somewhere?” He shook his head in disbelief.

　　“I want to go home,” Juliette said.

　　His eyes widened. “Why would you go back? They sent you away, didn’t they? You’ll stay here.

　　We don’t want to leave.” He scratched his beard and shook his head side to side.

　　“Someone has to know about all of this,” Juliette told him. “All these other people out there. Allthat space beyond. The people in my silo need to know.”

　　“People in your silo already do,” he said.

　　He studied her quizzically, and it dawned on Juliette that he was right. She pictured where theycurrently stood in this silo. They were in the heart of IT, deep inside the fortress room of the mythicalservers, below the servers in a hidden passage, hidden probably even from the people who had accessto the innermost kernels of the silo’s mysteries.

　　Someone in her own silo did know. He had helped keep these secrets for generations. Haddecided, alone and without input from anyone, what they should and should not know. It was thesame man who had sent Juliette to her death, a man who had killed who knew how many more …“Tell me about these wires,” Juliette said. “How did you talk to the other silo? Give me everydetail.”

　　“Why?” Solo asked, seemingly shrinking before her. His eyes were wet with fear.

　　“Because,” she said. “I have someone I very much wish to call.”