An IT technician initiated as Silo Eighteen’s successor, Lukas survived condemnation to cleaning and remains a close ally of Juliette.
Lukas worked on computers and lived in the upper mids, spending long evenings charting stars from the cafeteria wallscreen. He hoped a future shadow would continue observations that might take lifetimes. Meeting Juliette turned those evenings into companionship; he visited her during imprisonment and told her that friends were petitioning against her sentence. Distraught before her cleaning, he later guarded and secretly searched her possessions, keeping her ID, multi-tool, watch, and ring as reminders. Bernard Holland drew him into the secured server rooms and training for a new responsibility. Lukas discovered the existence of other silos and The Order, including its instruction to prepare for war after a failed cleaning. During the attack on IT he shot an older woman preparing to throw a bomb and continued firing while crying.
Confined beneath the servers, Lukas read the history preserved in Legacy, often preferring it to his prescribed studies. Secret calls through the line to the neighboring silo brought him into repeated conversation with Juliette, but he refused her demand that he kill Bernard and withheld parts of the uprising from her. He questioned why the Order omitted the silos’ origins and came to distinguish an unchangeable past from a future people could still influence. In his initiation he recited duties to the Order and to Life and Legacy, passed despite borderline readings of his nervous responses, and was confirmed as next in line to control Silo Eighteen. He asked how the silos began, concluded that their own side had caused the catastrophe, and heard that conclusion confirmed. The knowledge left him questioning his participation in the system. Searching records after finding Juliette’s poem to George, he discovered evidence that George had been murdered.
Bernard accused Lukas of betrayal for speaking with Juliette and ordered him sent to cleaning. During the march upward, Lukas again considered suicide, but hearing Juliette argue with Bernard over Peter Billings’s radio made him decide against jumping. He was not the cleaner who died when Juliette returned through the airlock. Alive beside her in the infirmary, he held her hand, comforted her, and told Peter he had proof that Bernard had killed a man. He and Peter withheld some of Juliette’s incoming notes, a decision Lukas later admitted. He urged her to fill the leadership vacuum, confessed that he had delayed her departure because he did not want her to leave, kissed her, and padded her bag strap to protect her wounds. Donald Keene is now accustomed to speaking with Lukas on calls to the mayor’s silo.
Lukas is twenty-five, with light brown hair and eyes that seem older than his face. Juliette initially found him handsome and thought him older. His working appearance includes overalls, a lapboard, and charcoal for observations.
An IT technician formally initiated as the next person in line to control Silo Eighteen, Lukas is also Juliette’s close companion and a familiar voice on calls from Donald Keene.
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