Dust

The prologue is a call in Silo 18’s server room. Lukas Kyle, now head of IT, works through server six with passcodes from a voice in Silo 1: Donald Keene, still passing as the man in charge over there. Lukas reads him a Legacy entry about a fungus that rewires an ant’s brain; it means none of them are free, the voice says. Lukas admits that Juliette doesn’t trust the caller and is working on something he won’t describe.

That something is a hole. Juliette is mayor now but still a mechanic, at the controls of an excavator hammering Silo 18’s concrete outer wall inch by inch, the vibration in her teeth. Behind the wall a machine lies buried: a tower of grease-caked axles with treads on its sides and ceiling as well as underneath, built to dig its own way out. Its engine mounts are empty. Juliette works out that Mechanical’s backup generator was built to power it.

Her plan, drawn on a layout stolen from Lukas’s hidden office, is an arc from Silo 18 to Silo 17, generator room to generator room, steered with iron wedges, no blasting. Shirly, her old friend and now Chief of Mechanical, hates the project but helps anyway. Her friends in 17, she says, are living among the dead. Over there Jimmy Parker, the man she knew as Solo, nurses the pumps that keep the flooded lower levels dry, and the children who survived with him wait for the dig: Rickson, the eldest; Hannah and her baby; the twins Marcus and Miles; and Elise, with her memory book of pages cut from the Legacy and stitched together.

Silo 18 does not want a hole in its wall. Sheriff Peter Billings has had a dozen complaints; some say the digging will let the outside in. Walker, the old electrician who stays out of open spaces, builds a portable radio and patches Juliette through to Solo. Climbing Up Top, she crosses the patchwork bridge over the gap a bomb tore in the stairs during the uprising, the names of the dead written on its metal, and meets hostile stares. Outside the chapel, Father Wendel calls the dig blasphemy. Juliette answers that the gods who made the towers beyond the hills left the digger as a tool. He replies:

“There are no gods like those you speak of, only demons.”

Lukas gets her to the monthly Town Hall. Her speech sets the room off, the crowd surges, and she is hustled into the judge’s chambers, where her father begs her not to go outside. Meanwhile Donald orders Lukas to stop the digging, because Silo 1 can detect the vibrations. He thinks they are digging toward him, and Juliette has Lukas keep that lie going to protect Silo 17.

In Silo 1, Charlotte Keene, Donald’s sister and an Air Force drone pilot woken illegally from the deep freeze, lives hidden on a warehouse level among the drones, exercising and swapping their batteries. She finds Donald cutting apart a cleaning suit and coughing blood into a rag, and realizes he is getting ready to die. Elsewhere, Captain Brevard, three shifts from retirement, looks into blood on a cryopod lid with Deputy Stevens and the young night guard Darcy: a man was shot, tied up and sealed in a pod bearing Anna’s name, an IV keeping him alive. In the operating room the old man tests his leather cuffs. He is Paul Thurman.

Part I ends in Silo 17’s generator room: a crack, then a circular gash, then cutting teeth bursting through from the ceiling. Jimmy grabs Elise. Courtnee climbs out of the dust, shakes his hand, greets the children, and tells him that Juliette has gone outside.

Juliette stands in the airlock in a rebuilt suit while the gas pumps in, then walks up the rise with Lukas’s voice in her helmet, taking samples: the airlock gas, the surface soil, soil from deeper down, and a square cut from the suit of a long-dead cleaner gone as grey as the dirt. When the burn starts on her way back in, she lowers herself into a tub of water, boots hooked under a bar welded to its bottom, and rides out the flames. The others scrub her down. The dig has broken through.

The survivors of 17 come through the tunnel into Mechanical, Solo carrying Elise, and 18’s workers stop and stare. Dr. Nichols, Juliette’s father, examines the children. Hannah refuses the contraceptive implant, and Elise falls for a puppy from a litter meant to be put down weeks ago. Walker and Jimmy, two bearded loners, size each other up.

Then Juliette and Nelson open the samples in the Suit Lab. The ramp outside the airlock has done more damage than the hills, and the control, the airlock’s own argon, has eaten a seal clean away. The argon pumped in at every cleaning is the poison, and each cleaning lets another puff of it into the world. Juliette calls Silo 1, demands to know what they are pumping into the airlocks, calls Donald a liar, tells him she is cutting off their cameras, power and gas, and hangs up. Soon after, Thurman’s men drag Donald out and beat him while Charlotte hides under a drone’s tarp.

Silo 18 starts to come apart. A mob runs into Dr. Nichols’s party on the stairs: Marcus goes over the rail and dies, Rickson is hurt, and Elise goes missing. Lost in the bazaar, she makes a friend, Shaw, a stallholder’s son. When a dog-seller grabs her and her book, Shaw knocks him down and runs off with Puppy upside down in his arms, and Solo finds them. Shirly radios that two or three dozen more people are heading through the tunnel.

Thurman, fitter now, visits Donald on his cot (cracked ribs): Silo 18 will be shut down today. They trade answers. Rebel silos have cut their camera feeds before, then hacked their gas lines, then their bombs; Anna helped Donald because she feared being put under for good; a lottery will pick the one silo that survives. Then Thurman calls Silo 18 and demands its head, Bernard. Lukas puts Sims, the old Security chief, on the line to pass as him, but Thurman knows Bernard is dead. A thick white fog pours into the server room. Sims dies. Lukas, bleeding, radios Juliette that they are shutting the silo down, and goes into the pantry.

Up top the inner airlock door has opened by itself, and fog is coming down the stairwell. Juliette sends Deputy Hank to get everyone down to Mechanical and goes last herself, herding the crowd into the tunnel while Shirly directs traffic from the digger. Then Shirly’s fist drops her. Shirly takes her place in the control room and fires the charges she rigged in case of contamination, sealing the survivors off from Silo 18 and herself in with it. Juliette comes to in the dark with chalk dust in her mouth and the radio in her hands:

“This is it. This is it. I love you, Jules.”

About two hundred people make it through to Silo 17.

In Silo 1, Charlotte has heard Silo 18 die over the radio. She finds a map, a grid of circles with red lines radiating out to a single point, then disguises herself in reactor-red coveralls with someone else’s name on the patch and rides the lifts with Donald’s ID card and a pistol, looking for a microphone. In a lift, a security man named Eren recognizes her; when the fight is over, Eren is dead and Charlotte has been shot. Back with a microphone and a wound in her arm, she listens in on Silo 17’s channel and hears Juliette, weary, say that Shirly and everyone else are dead, and that she killed them all.

In 17’s Mechanical, lit by a homemade torch burning biodiesel, Juliette’s father listens to her lungs. The diggers want to dig back to 18. Juliette stands at the tunnel screaming that she did this, and stops them, because clearing the collapse would let the poison through. Courtnee bitterly asks whether the dig was ever about revenge. Not revenge, Juliette says: prevention. She sets everyone to getting 17’s power back on, while upstairs the refugees strip its farms. On a landing a bearded man is waiting for Elise, and asks if she got separated from the flock.

Charlotte, sleeping in the drone lift, creeps out to the radio she has hidden and raises Tom Higgins of 17’s Planning Committee, then Juliette. She admits what Silo 1 has done and describes the map, whose red lines run out to a point labeled SEED. Thurman questions Donald about Eren’s killing and tells him he will be put back under. Darcy finds a bullet in the lift, and the attacker’s blood leads him to an empty pod in the Emergency Personnel freeze hall.

Silo 17’s backup generator brings the power back. Juliette decides to go overland to Silo 1 with dynamite, and Raph insists on coming. She tells him 17’s stores hold two or three hundred suits. He passes on a theory from Gina in Supply, the woman he was seeing, who didn’t make it out: fuel cells, implants and timer chips all run out at about two hundred and fifty years. Juliette says goodbye to her father and starts up the stairs with Raph and the explosives. Below, Jimmy can’t find Elise. She has gone with the kind-seeming Mr. Rash, who introduces her to Father Remmy, Wendel’s old acolyte, now leading a breakaway flock of his own. Between them they coax out of her where Solo keeps his food.

Darcy rides up to the armory and finds Charlotte. He sees the bandage, tells her Eren was a good man, and cuffs her; then he reads Donald’s files and changes sides. Together they free Donald and spread what he calls Anna’s work on a glass-topped table over a schematic of the silos scratched with old wax notes. Anna, Donald tells them, had tried to save Silo 17.

In 17, Juliette and Raph, climbing, find Father Wendel by candlelight with Hank guarding him. He went into the dark to see the devil, he says; he reads her a passage from Isaiah and blesses her journey. Below, Jimmy fetches a rifle he hid years ago behind a dresser and, with Shaw, finds Elise in a makeshift chapel, wrapped in a blanket sewn up the front, being married to Mr. Rash. Jimmy fires the rifle, breaks the ceremony up and takes her home. After Juliette and Raph fill their bags on the upper farm, smoke pours from the hatch behind the comm server: Remmy is burning the Legacy books in Solo’s old hideout. He goes for Juliette and dies in the flames, and they seal the fire in.

Hiding in Silo 1’s drone lift, Donald tells Charlotte that he once went outside to see his wife Helen’s grave because he wanted to die, and lay on the grass looking up at the stars. Now he is dying for real; Thurman has given him a day or two. Charlotte strips a sixty-kilo bunker-buster of its altimeter and safeties, a dumb bomb, she calls it. When Darcy balks, she holds a gun on him while Donald takes his pistol and ID card. The reactor powers the servers, and the servers run everyone’s lives.

In 17’s server room, half choking on the smoke, Juliette realizes the servers are laid out like a map of the silo field. The diggers were never meant to go silo to silo: 18’s, so hard to turn, was aimed somewhere else, its fuel tank built to go much farther. Solo, wild-eyed, wants to bar the door and wait for everyone else to kill each other. Instead she calls a Town Hall among the servers, an empty cleaning suit at her feet. Digging would take weeks and the farms are stripped, so they will walk. Solo and Shaw put their hands up, and Elise takes Juliette’s hand. Many drift off to claim grow plots. Nearly a hundred and fifty suits are laid out, more than they need. Bagging the bodies in 17’s airlock, Juliette’s father is puzzled: the dead look a few weeks gone at most, though they died long ago. Juliette shows him the crook of her arm. Some of her scars have disappeared.

Silo 1 ends in a single chapter. Charlotte, half into a silver suit, escapes in the drone lift under fire; Darcy fires back to cover her and gives his life to get her away. Donald, in reactor-red coveralls, wheels the bomb through the reactor gates on Darcy’s ID. He is shot in the chest and goes down beside the bomb. Thurman, the man Donald had already killed once, comes at him. Donald aims the pistol at the bomb’s nose cone and pulls the trigger. On the slick hillside above, Charlotte scrambles back as the ground opens into a widening pit and Silo 1 falls into it.

Then the walk. Tied together in groups by air hoses, sharing oxygen bottles, the walkers head into the toxic wind. They break through a veil of dust into colour; behind them, where grass meets the wall, it crumbles to powder. A bird circles. From one last ring of mounded earth, Juliette looks back at a huge dome of dark cloud, the silos at its center. Ahead is a forest like the ones in the Legacy books. Her father unlatches his helmet first and breathes. Elise sets Puppy down, and the dog vanishes into the tall grass. Ahead stands a concrete tower, its silvery roof half covered in vines, and the dynamite Juliette carried for Silo 1 blows open its door instead. Inside is a bunker only twenty levels deep, packed with seeds, soil, tools and stores; Courtnee gets the power running. There are just over a hundred of them. Elise, pointing to her book, says they should walk to the sea; some want to stay and farm, but Juliette calls the bunker a warehouse in the shadow of the dome. Then a stranger staggers in through the grass, a woman Juliette has never seen. It is Charlotte, and Juliette takes her in.

The epilogue skips ahead a few days, to a camp among the trees. Bobby and Raph argue about burning wood when there is more than they will ever need. In three days Solo has become a leader of men, and he has shot a deer. Elise names a pattern of stars Puppy, and under a gap in the clouds Juliette thinks of Lukas and his star charts. Courtnee brings her a hot mug, and they talk about all this land, too few people to fill it, and the people in charge who kept a lid on their ambitions. Courtnee asks whether they will make it.

“I think we can make any damn thing we like.”