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Solo helped with her weighted feet He splashed down onto the first wet step to assist her Juliette threw her leg over the railing as he lifted Suddenly, she was straddling that narrow bar of slippery steel, wondering if the water would truly hold her, if it would catch and slow her fall And there was a moment of raw panic, the taste ofof her stomach and the dire need to urinate, all while Solo heaved her other foot over the railing, her gloved hands clawingnoisily and violently into the silvery skin of the flooded waters

"Shit!"

She blew her breath out into the hel in so quickly, her hands and knees wrapping around the twisting rope, her body e skin had become detached

"You okay?" Solo shouted, his hands cupped around his beard

She nodded, her helhts on her shins, trying to drag her down There were a dozen things she wanted to say to Solo, re too fast to think of using the radio Instead, she loosened her grip with her gloves and knees, felt the rope slide against her body with a distant squeak, and she began her long plummet down

11

• Silo 18 •

Lukas sat at the little desk constructed from an embarrassment of wood and stared down at a book stuffed with a fortune in crisp paper The chair beneath him was probably worthon it If hetwisted and squeaked, like it could come apart at any moment

He kept his boots firht on his toes, just in case

Lukas flipped a page, pretending to read It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reading, he just didn’t want to be reading this Entire shelves ofworks see out to be perused, for hi, bulleted lists, and internal labyrinth of page references that led in reat stairwell itself

Each entry in the Order pointed to another page, every page another entry Lukas flipped through a few and wondered if Bernard was keeping tabs on him The head of IT sat on the other side of the small study, just one room of many in the well-stocked hideaway beneath the servers While Lukas pretended to shadow for his new job, Bernard alternated between fiddling with the s over to the radio ive instructions to the security forces in the down deep

Lukas pinched a thick chunk of the Order and flopped it to the side He skipped past all the recipes for averting silo disasters and checked out some of the more academic reference : chapters on group persuasion, on raphs and tables dealing with population growth--

He couldn’t take it He adjusted his chair and watched Bernard for a while as the head of IT and acting Mayor scrolled through screen after screen of text, his head notching back and forth as he scanned the words there

After a moment, Lukas dared to break the silence:

"Hey, Bernard?"

"H in here about how all this came to be?"

Bernard’s office chair squealed as he swiveled it around to face Lukas "I’m sorry, what?"

"The people who made all this, the people rote these books Why isn’t there anything in the Order about them? Like how they built all this stuff in the first place"

"Why would there be?" Bernard half turned back to his computer

"So ould know I dunno, like all the stuff in the other books--"

"I don’t want you reading those other books Not yet" Bernard pointed to the wooden desk "Learn the Order first If you can’t keep the silo together, the Legacy books are pulp They’re as good as processed wood if no one’s around to read them"

"Nobody can read them but the two of us if they stay locked up down here--"

"No one alive Not today But one day, there’ll be plenty of people who’ll read them But only if you study" Bernard nodded toward the thick and dreadful book before turning back to his keyboard and reaching for hisat Bernard’s back, the knotted cord of hisout of the top of his undershirt

"I figure they ," Lukas said, unable to stop hi about it He had alondered about these things, had suppressed theether the distant stars that were so far away as to be immune to the hillside taboos And now he lived in this vacuum, this hollow of the silo no one knew about where forbidden topics didn’t dare tread and he had access to a man who see," Bernard said His head remained bent over his keyboard, but he see hiht?" Lukas lifted his chair and turned it around a little ot so bad out there--"

Bernard turned his head to the side, his jaw clenching and unclenching His hand fell away from the s you want to kno it happened?"

"Yes" Lukas nodded He leaned forward, elbows on his knees "I want to know"

"Do you think it matters? What happened out there?" Bernard turned and looked up at the schematics on the wall, then at Lukas "Why would it matter?"

"Because it happened And it only happened one way, and it kills ht? It would take years to build all--"

"Decades," Bernard said