Page 28 (1/2)
Juliette Nichols stuck one boot through that narrow gap The doors only opened partway to hold back the deadly toxins, to force the argon through with pent-up pressure, so she had to turn sideways to squeeze through, her bulky suit rubbing against the thick doors All she could think of was the raging fire that would soon fill the airlock Its fla her to flee
She pulled her other boot through--and Juliette was suddenly outside
Outside
There was nothing above her helmeted head but clouds, sky, and the unseen stars
She luon to find herself on a sloping rah ind-trapped dirt It was easy to forget that the top floor of the silo was belowground The view from her old office and the cafeteria created an illusion of standing on the surface of the earth, head up in the wild air, but that was because the sensors were located there
Juliette looked down at the numbers on her chest and reed up the ra on her boots She wasn’t sure how she even moved, if it was the numbness one succumbed to in the face of execution--or if it was just auto inferno in the airlock, her body delaying the inevitable because it couldn’t think or plan beyond the next fistful of seconds
As Juliette reached the top of the raeous untruth Green grass covered the hills like newly painted carpet The skies were intoxicatingly blue, the clouds bleached white like fancy linen, the air peppered with soaring things
She spun in place and took in the spectacular fabrication It was as if she’d been dropped into a book from her youth, a book where anirays were never found
Even knowing it wasn’t real, knowing that she was looking through an eight by two inch fib, the te to believe She wanted to She wanted to forget what she knew of IT’s devious progra she and Walker had discussed, and to fall instead to the soft grasses that weren’t there, to roll around in the life that wasn’t, to strip off the ridiculous suit and go screa landscape
She looked down at her hands, clenched and unclenched theloves would allow This was her coffin Her thoughts scattered as she fought to rely world she had always knoas real And then, for just asoazed at the sensor tower, seeing it for the first time It was a sturdy block of steel and concrete with a rusted and pitted ladder running up one side The bulges of sensor pods were stuck like warts on the faces of the tower Juliette reached for her chest, grabbed one of the scrubbing pads, and tore it loose The note froh her mind: Don’t be afraid
She took the coarse wool pad and rubbed it against the ar did not peel, did not flake away like the stuff she had once stolen froineered to fail This was the brand of heat tape Juliette was used to working with, Mechanical’s design
They are good in Supply, Walker’s note had said The good had referred to the people of Supply After years of helping Juliette score spares when she needed the extraordinary for her While she had spent three days clihts in three different holding cells on her way to banishment, they had replaced IT’s materials with those from Mechanical They had fulfilled their orders for parts in a most devious way, and it ly and for once--built a suit designed to last, not disintegrate
Juliette smiled Her death, however certain, was delayed She took a long look at the sensors, relaxed her fingers, and dropped the wool pad into the fake grass Turning for the nearest hill, she tried her best to ignore the false colors and the layers of life projected on top of as truly there Rather than give in to the euphoria, she concentrated on the way her boots clory wind buffeting against her suit, listened for the faint hiss as grains of sand pelted her hel world around her, one she could be dih, a world she knew but could no longer see
She started up the steep slope and headed vaguely toward the gleaht ofit there All she wanted was to die beyond the hills where no one would have to watch her rot away, so that Lukas the starhunter would not be afraid to co her still for, to have soht It was a oal than that false city, which she knew to be crue rocks Juliette started to dodge around them before she realized where she was, that she had followed theslopes, and here lay the most horrible lie of theic of the visor Covered in ato see, nothing to say She glanced down the hill and spotted sporadic other boulders resting in the grasses, their arrangement not random at all but where cleaners of old had collapsed
She turned away, leaving such sad things behind It was i in order to hide her body froht s still sore fro the silo, Juliette witnessed the first rips in IT’s deceitful veil New portions of the sky and the distant city came into view, parts that had been obscured by the hill froram, a limit to its lies While the upper levels of the distant ht, below these sharp panes of glass and bright steel lay the rotted dinginess of an abandoned world She could see straight through the bottos, and with their heavy tops projected onto them, they seemed liable to topple at any s had no supports at all, no foundations They hung in the air with dark sky beneath theray clouds and lifeless hills stretched out across the low horizon, a hard line of painted blue where the visor’s program met its end
Juliette puzzled over the incompleteness of IT’s deceit Was it because they themselves had no idea what lay beyond the hills, and so couldn’t guess what tonobody would ever ical nature of the view left her dizzy if she studied it too closely She concentrated instead on her feet, taking those last dozen steps up the painted green hill until she reached the crest
At the top, she paused while heavy gusts of wind buffeted against her, causing her to lean into their turbulence She scanned the horizon and saw that she stood on the divide between torlds Down the slope before her, on a landscape her eyes had never before seen, lay a bare world of dust and parched earth, of wind flurries and small tornadoes, of air that could kill Here was new land, and yet it lookedshe’d encountered thus far
She turned and peered back along the path she had just clientle breeze, at occasional flowers dipping their heads at her, at the bright blue and brilliant white overhead It was an evil concoction, inviting but false
Juliette gave this illusion one last adaze She noted how the round depression in the center of the hills seemed to mark the outline of her silo’s flat roof, the rest of her habitable home nestled deep in the belly of the soil The way the land rose up all around e bite of the earth With a heavy heart, she realized that the world she had grown up in was now closed off to her, that her home and her people were safe behind bolted doors, and she ned to her fate She had been cast off Her ti view and bright colors to face the dusty, the dead, and the real