Page 39 (1/2)

Knox lifted his boots fros Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of soht So necessary What if that former clash had felt the same? Had felt the saed it?

19

"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 es than in any of the children’s books of her youth

Solo turned fro water He waved a dripping metal 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 theue to the spoon, then stuck it back in the pot and stirred "Everything’s out of order It’s more like a backup to the backup"

"I don’t knohat that means," Juliette admitted She looked down at her lap where pictures of anis were coht She wondered if they were 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 norant, not hi history, the coine What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages?

She tried to reer in his ear and then inspect his fingernail

"The backup of what exactly?" she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answers to co one out with the fabric in the belly of his coveralls "The backup of everything," he said "All that we know All that ever was" He set the bowls down and adjusted a knob on the stove "Followhis arm "I’ll show you"

Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin She rose and followed Solo out of the rooesturing at a sainst one wall It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and sht the reflex to gag Solo seemed unaffected He stood beside a s 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 disappearing between the layers of them "Maps," he said "I want to show you how much is out there You’ll shit yourself"

He shook his head andto 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 food intolerable

"Here it is Hold this end" Solo held out the corner of a half dozen sheets of paper He took the other side and they lifted therommets at the bottom of the maps and how there were probably sticks or hooks around here so hercans worse

"This is us," Solo said He pointed to a spot on the paper Dark, squiggly lines were everywhere It didn’t look like aJuliette had ever seen It looked like children had drawn 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 of the drawing "This is all water," he told her

"Where?" Juliette’s ar up her end of the sheet The s way fro replaced with the depression of a long andfor years and years before her

"Out there! Covering the land" Solo pointed vaguely at the walls He narrowed his eyes at Juliette’s confusion "The silo, this silo, would be as big around as a single hair on your head" He patted the er than er in a knot of lines Juliette thought he seemed so sincere She leaned closer to see better, but he pushed her back

"Let those go," he said He slapped at her hand holding the corners of paper He sainst the wall "This is us" He indicated one of the circles on the top sheet Juliette eyeballed the coluured there were four dozen or so of them "Silo seventeen" He slid his hand up "Nuht And silo one up here"

"No"

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