Story so far
Juliette grew up to become a shift foreman in Mechanical, which she regarded as her family. Her father said her baby brother died when she was thirteen; after her mother’s death, she blamed the poor condition of the incubator and demanded an early apprenticeship in Mechanical. Marck remembered her learning to rewind motors herself during an initiation intended to make her haul heavy pumps upstairs. She helped investigate the death of her former lover, whose apparently murderous death proved to result from unlikely events. Initially reluctant to become sheriff, she accepted Jahns’s offer in exchange for a power holiday and successfully refurbished the generator before moving up.
As sheriff, Juliette treated Jahns’s death as murder and investigated why Holston had chosen to leave. She found Marnes dead and increasingly questioned the deaths around her. With Scottie’s help, she realized the wallscreen view could be fabricated; after losing her office and reading his final wire, she became convinced Scottie had been killed. She suspected that IT deliberately supplied failing heat tape and killed cleaners. Arrested and sent outside, she refused to clean, resisted the beautiful image projected by her visor, and crossed the hill without collapsing. Beyond it she found another silo surrounded by bodies. Using a broken pipe for leverage, she forced its inner airlock open and survived on its foul but breathable air.
Juliette descended in search of water and food and followed a fleeing survivor to Solo. His stored knowledge and silo schematic confronted her with the possibility of roughly fifty silos. She wanted to return home and tell its residents what she had learned. She and Solo spent nearly three weeks pumping floodwater into treatment tanks, but she refused to wait the estimated years needed to drain it. Her conversations with Lukas helped her feel connected to home. Hoping to stop the fighting there, she imagined restoring a digger, tunneling into her own silo, and bringing her people into the neighboring one.
She adapted a suit for diving and descended to power the submerged sump pumps. Her air supply stopped while she worked. After improvising the remaining electrical connection, she cut off her leg weights, followed the air hose through darkness, and escaped by breathing air trapped beneath submerged stair treads. Above water she found Solo badly injured. She burned the compressor for warmth and refused to abandon him during their climb. At the lower farms, a wrench-wielding attacker struck her shoulder; she cut his leg before realizing he was a boy she estimated at fourteen or fifteen. She recovered her stolen gear bag and decided to take the children home with her and Solo. At that point she had not switched on the pump she had wired and did not know whether it would work.
Through the radio, Juliette urged Walker and Shirly to stop the fighting and the diversion of exhaust toward the server cooling vents. After contact failed, she left Solo to guide the children toward food and struggled upward to call home. She reached Bernard Holland and asked him to stop the fighting. Preparing to return outside, she replaced weak suit components with better parts and promised to come back for Solo and the survivors. She crossed the surface with no air for a return trip, recognized her love for Lukas, and reached her own airlock as a cleaning began. Mistaking the kneeling cleaner for Lukas, she tried to shelter them both beneath a heat-tape blanket. She survived the fire with severe burns and afterward learned the dead cleaner was not Lukas.
During recovery, Juliette read notes from down deep to discover who had survived, mourned Deagan Knox and Marck, and was forbidden to visit Shirly. Weeks later, still troubled by painful wounds and raised scars, she received medical permission to travel down. She learned that residents had voted for her to become mayor and made truthful government a condition of accepting: people must understand the threats facing them, and she would spread the truth from inside or outside the leadership. She agreed to avoid rash action until another meeting with Peter Billings and Lukas, returned Lukas’s kiss, and chose to visit her father before her friends. Meanwhile, Solo expects her to be especially excited by news that the other silo’s floodwater is receding.
Appearance
Thirty-four years old, with olive skin, lean muscular arms, and long brown hair she has worn in a braid. Weeks after the airlock fire, she is still recovering from painful wounds and raised scars.
Role
A mechanic and former sheriff whom residents have voted to make mayor. She demands truthful government and has medical permission to travel down to her family and friends.
Relationships
Lukas — Her conversations with Lukas sustained her connection to home; she has recognized her love for him and returned his kiss.
Solo — Solo worked with her on draining his silo; she refused to abandon him injured and promised to return for him and the other survivors.
Shirly — She urged Shirly to stop the fighting, then wanted to visit her but was forbidden during recovery.
Bernard Holland — After suspecting deliberate failures in IT’s cleaning equipment, she later reached Bernard Holland by radio and asked him to stop the fighting.
Sources — 493 recorded facts, by chapter
Chapter 8
- Juliette works in Mechanical.
- Marnes thinks Juliette prefers to be called Jules.
- Marnes praises Juliette’s help in a death investigation, including her attention to detail and handling of people.
- Marnes believes Juliette rarely travels above the eighties.
- Juliette’s file lists her as a shift foreman with good marks.
- Juliette has no recorded history in the lottery.
- Marnes confirms that Juliette has never married.
- Marnes describes Juliette as someone who prefers being alone despite making a strong impression.
Chapter 9
- According to Jahns’s research, Juliette has kept every vacation chit she has earned.
- Jahns reports that Juliette neither travels out nor receives visitors.
- Dr. Nichols says Juliette was thirteen when her baby brother died.
- Juliette had been due to begin apprenticing with her mother as a delivery nurse the following year.
- Dr. Nichols says Juliette initially blamed the delivery nurse Rhoda for her brother’s death.
- Dr. Nichols says Juliette later blamed the incubator’s poor condition after her mother died.
- Dr. Nichols believes Juliette understood that her mother had killed herself despite the false death certificate.
- Juliette demanded a transfer to Mechanical as an apprentice a year younger than normally permitted.
- Dr. Nichols says Juliette returned for her mother’s funeral, hugged him, and went back down.
- Dr. Nichols predicts that Juliette will refuse the sheriff’s job.
Chapter 10
- Bernard alleges that the preferred sheriff candidate has rerouted IT supplies through improper requisitions.
- Bernard claims the preferred sheriff candidate uses more electricity than her allowance.
Chapter 11
- Jahns regards Juliette as the right person for sheriff.
- Juliette’s father has warned Jahns that his daughter will not accept the position.
Chapter 12
- Juliette Nichols is the mechanic Jahns has come to interview.
- Juliette works on the generator with a wrench nearly as long as she is tall.
- Juliette wears her brown hair in a braid under a hard hat.
- Juliette has lean, muscular arms and olive skin.
- Juliette expected the interview to take place the following morning.
- Juliette tells Marnes that she is sorry about his partner.
- Juliette says a slightly misaligned coupling causes the generator’s vibration.
- Juliette warns that the generator’s vibration can ultimately cause a destructive failure.
- Juliette says she could repair the coupling during a week at half power if the backup generator were available.
- Juliette keeps tightening bolts and adjusting the generator’s speed because the full-power mandate prevents repairs.
- Juliette says the generator’s eventual failure is preventable but cannot predict when it will happen.
- Juliette believes the silo should be maintained to last forever rather than for a current lifetime or term.
- Juliette doubts IT will agree to reduce its power consumption.
- Juliette says she already told Marnes or his secretary not to recruit her because Mechanical needs her.
- Juliette is already working overtime when Jahns and Marnes visit.
- Juliette agrees to find Jahns and Marnes later after finishing work.
Chapter 13
- Marck recalls that Juliette was thirteen and very skinny when she brought her first pump to Walker’s shop.
- Marck says Juliette’s initiation required her to deliver ten heavy pumps for motor respooling.
- Marck says Juliette was expected to move the pumps onto carts and take them up four flights of stairs alone.
- Marck recalls that Juliette finished her pump assignment in six days.
- Marck says Juliette actually moved only one pump upstairs during her initiation.
- Marck recalls that Juliette secretly taught herself to rewire a motor in the tool lock-up.
- Marck confirms that Juliette repeatedly presented the same pump while rewinding the others downstairs herself.
- Shirly recalls that Juliette earned a day off as a shadow.
- Marck says Juliette spent her day off sweeping Walker’s shop and asking how things worked.
Chapter 14
- Juliette initially refuses the sheriff’s job because she believes nobody in Mechanical can replace her.
- Juliette considers the people of Mechanical her family.
- Juliette blames her work schedule for not visiting her father.
- Juliette recalls meeting Holston when he and Marnes investigated George’s death.
- Juliette says she does not know how to be sheriff and only knows how to fix things.
- Juliette learns that the sheriff’s pay exceeds her current earnings, including extra shifts.
- Juliette admits arranging the interception of heat tape intended for IT.
- Juliette says she needed heat tape for a leaking heat exchanger a few months earlier.
- Juliette assures Jahns that all the supplies she diverted were necessary.
- Juliette offers to bring IT some of Mechanical’s spare heat tape as a peace offering.
- Juliette accepts the sheriff’s job on condition that Jahns grants a power holiday.
- Juliette requires a week to sort out the generator before taking up her new job.
- Juliette says she will always consider herself part of Mechanical.
- Juliette has promoted preventive maintenance instead of waiting for machinery to break.
- Juliette partly accepts the sheriff’s job because she has seen the consequences of ignoring problems.
Chapter 15
- Juliette stays in Mechanical to oversee repairs during the power holiday.
- Juliette warns Jahns that the backup generator will make the lights flicker.
- Juliette objects to servers receiving power priority over grow lights.
- Juliette proceeds with realigning the main generator despite IT’s power exemptions.
- Juliette regards accepting IT’s exemptions as weakness rather than political compromise.
Chapter 16
- Juliette insists that Jahns and Marnes call her Jules.
- Jahns and Marnes have secured Juliette as their new sheriff.
Chapter 17
- Juliette builds an optical alignment device using mirrors and narrow slits.
- Juliette aims to align the generator and dynamo to within one thousandth of an inch.
- Juliette has been working eighteen-hour shifts on the refit.
- Juliette originated the generator refit project.
- Juliette considers an extended power holiday preferable to a catastrophic generator failure in later years.
- Juliette reassures herself about difficult repairs by looking at the watch she fixed.
- Juliette fears leaving her friends and family to face politics up top.
- Juliette regards Jahns and Marnes as allies who make her future up top seem manageable.
- Juliette restarts the refurbished generator.
- Juliette initially fails to recognize that the rebuilt generator is running because its starter is louder than the generator.
- Juliette finds little to adjust in the initial temperature and pressure readings after the restart.
- The successful generator refit increases Juliette’s confidence about her future up top.
- Juliette realizes something is wrong when the generator celebration turns into sobbing and disbelief.
Chapter 18
- Juliette is sealed inside the airlock while wearing a suit and helmet.
- Juliette feels lost and trapped between the airlock’s two doors.
- Juliette understands the argon entering the airlock as a sign that her end is approaching.
- Juliette reflects that she has only broken minor laws.
- Juliette reflects that she would have been content to spend her life repairing things deep underground.
- Juliette reflects that she had never cared about the outside.
Chapter 19
- Juliette has spent three days teaching herself to be sheriff.
- Juliette finds the outside wasteland uninspiring and its open space frightening.
- Juliette believes the silo’s future lies underground, where its essential resources originate.
- Juliette works in the holding cell because Marnes’s grief and anger make sharing the office unbearable.
- Juliette read the Law portion of the Pact twice to prepare for becoming sheriff.
- Juliette helped solve the death of her former lover, which appeared to be murder but resulted from unlikely events.
- Juliette had concealed her relationship with her former lover in violation of the Pact.
- Juliette told Holston about her secret relationship after the investigation of her lover’s death ended.
- Juliette treats Jahns’s death as murder.
- Juliette suspects a forbidden love between Marnes and Jahns.
- Juliette puts on the sheriff’s badge after confronting Bernard.
- Juliette sends a request to Mechanical for help investigating Holston’s decision to leave.
- Juliette feels unable to do Holston’s job until she understands why he abandoned it and the silo.
Chapter 20
- Juliette works past ten at night and misses dinner for the third consecutive night.
- Juliette feels she has no one to guide her in learning the sheriff’s job.
- Juliette carries a master key supplied with her new job.
- Juliette’s work reading criminal case files has made her increasingly suspicious of unusual behavior.
- Juliette takes cold stew and juice from the cafeteria kitchen after missing dinner.
- Juliette sees a star for the first time while watching the wallscreen with Lukas.
- Juliette wonders whether collecting information about the outside violates the taboos.
- Juliette intends to ask Marnes about the permissibility of observing the outside.
- Juliette meets Lukas in the cafeteria while he observes stars.
Chapter 21
- Juliette arrives at work before five in the morning after barely more than four hours of sleep.
- Juliette preserves the electrical ties and wrapping from a package for reuse.
- Juliette receives a data drive concealed beneath cookies from home.
- Juliette deletes Scottie’s unsigned message and empties the computer trash to remove the identifying trace.
- Juliette hopes Holston’s computer records will explain his decision to go to cleaning.
- Juliette uses the hours gained by sleeping little to investigate Holston and teach herself her new job.
- Juliette becomes concerned when Marnes has not arrived by ten minutes past eight.
- Juliette goes to Marnes’s apartment to check on him.
- Juliette lifts Marnes to relieve the belt around his neck and frees him from the bathroom door.
- Juliette confirms that Marnes is dead after checking for a pulse.
Chapter 22
- Juliette struggles to work after Marnes’s death.
- Juliette runs a global spell-check on Holston’s data to search for names that might provide clues.
- Juliette arranges for Marnes to be buried near the mayor the following day.
- Juliette believes Marnes and Jahns were secret lovers or comparably close.
- Juliette objects to needing permission from the Pact or a woman’s father to be in love.
- Juliette lies to Lukas that she has never found the right partner.
- Juliette is thirty-four years old.
- Juliette feels less lonely in Lukas’s company.
- Juliette has spent spare time hunting for pretty rocks in the mines.
Chapter 23
- Juliette attends Marnes’s funeral at the upper dirt farm.
- Juliette has been sheriff for less than a week.
- Juliette assigns Peter Billings to handle complaints and radio calls.
- Juliette suspects the strange text on Holston’s computer is encoded and important.
- Juliette sends a copy of the strange computer text to Mechanical for help interpreting it.
- Juliette suspects the same discovery drove both Holston and Allison to seek cleaning.
- Juliette blames herself for failing to anticipate Marnes’s suicide.
- Juliette takes the data drive with her when she leaves to answer Scottie’s request.
- Juliette considers taking Marnes’s gun but leaves it behind.
Chapter 24
- Juliette identifies herself to IT’s gate attendant as Sheriff Nichols.
- Juliette’s ID fails to open the security gate into IT.
- Juliette physically intimidates the IT gate attendant into admitting her.
- Juliette invokes her reporting relationship to Bernard Holland to demand entry into IT.
- Juliette tells Scottie her theory that the computer material caused the last two cleanings as though it were established fact.
- Juliette invents an assurance that Scottie cannot be punished for answering her questions.
- Juliette was formerly Scottie’s shift foreman.
- Juliette realizes that the view shown on the wallscreen could be fabricated.
- Juliette takes Scottie’s printout and believes it must be destroyed.
- Juliette promises to look into transferring Scottie back to Mechanical.
Chapter 25
- Juliette fears her investigation may concern the same thing that led the last two cleaners outside.
- Juliette says she and her father have grown apart.
- Juliette suspects wire messages may be deliberately expensive to discourage communication.
- Juliette recognizes the office address in a suicide alert and fears Scottie has died.
- Juliette imagines Scottie hanged with electrical ties without having seen his body.
- Peter handcuffs Juliette after receiving a private wire identifying her as a suspect.
Chapter 26
- Juliette is detained and has lost her job as sheriff.
- Juliette denies Bernard’s accusations and says an IT worker summoned her.
- Juliette leaves the up top about a week after arriving, wearing oversized Mechanical overalls.
- Juliette doubts that Scottie killed himself.
- Juliette begins to question whether Marnes could have killed himself.
- Juliette considers visiting her father but passes his nursery out of shame.
- Juliette returns to her old room in Mechanical.
- Juliette finds more than a dozen wires waiting in her inbox.
- After reading Scottie’s wire, Juliette becomes convinced he was killed.
- Juliette wonders whether IT can access her wire account.
- Juliette copies Scottie’s entire wire by hand and deletes the electronic message.
Chapter 27
- Juliette visits Walker’s electronics workshop at five to discuss Scottie.
- Juliette asks Walker to keep their discussion secret.
- Juliette tells Walker that she does not believe Scottie killed himself.
- Juliette says she met Scottie at his request earlier on the day he sent his wire.
- Juliette suspects the IT heat tape was deliberately engineered to fail.
- Juliette believes high wire charges are intended to prevent people from exchanging ideas.
- Juliette suspects mechanically skilled people are kept far from IT deliberately.
- Juliette believes there are two secret supply chains producing different sets of parts.
- Juliette suspects IT kills all the cleaners, as well as Scottie.
Chapter 28
- Juliette returns to first-shift work in Mechanical at six.
- Juliette believes Scottie was strangled by someone larger than him or by multiple attackers.
- Juliette considers rallying mechanics against the upper levels but keeps her thoughts to herself.
- Juliette was on the first team to drill below ten thousand feet and discover new oil reserves.
- Juliette believes the unfamiliar animals in the children’s books exist somewhere or existed in the past.
- Juliette develops a plan involving replacement parts to help the next person sent outside.
- Juliette works two full shifts before returning her tools and showering.
- Juliette tells Knox not to intervene in her arrest because she does not want anyone else hurt.
Chapter 29
- Juliette’s escorted journey to the top takes three days because of arrest protocols.
- Juliette tells Lukas to let her go and find someone else.
- Juliette spends the night in the mids without being told the specific reason for her arrest.
- Juliette believes most of the computer evidence presented against her belongs to Holston.
- Juliette believes the verdict against her was decided before the judge heard the charges.
- Juliette resolves to refuse to clean when she is sent outside.
- Juliette leaves the airlock and steps into the outside world.
Chapter 30
- Juliette leaves the outside sensors uncleaned and starts climbing the hill.
- Juliette briefly pauses by the bodies of two other cleaners.
- Juliette climbs to the crest of the hill and disappears from view without collapsing.
Chapter 31
- Juliette is five years old when her parents take her to see the play that inspired her name.
- As a young child, Juliette can count to one hundred.
- Juliette travels to the hundredth landing with her parents as a child.
- Juliette is named after the female character in a play her parents saw when they began dating.
- Juliette enjoys the jugglers who entertain the audience before the play.
- Juliette falls asleep during the play.
- The actress playing Juliette gives the young Juliette an autographed script.
- Young Juliette recognizes her own name in the script she receives.
Chapter 32
- Juliette urged Lukas to find companionship instead of being alone like her.
- Marsh reports that Juliette went outside without cleaning.
- Marsh reports that Juliette went over the hills and disappeared from view.
Chapter 33
- Samson reports that Juliette walked over the hill without cleaning and disappeared from view.
Chapter 34
- Juliette leaves the silo through the partially opened steel doors in her cleaning suit.
- Juliette resists the urge to believe the beautiful landscape projected by her visor.
- Juliette tests her suit wrapping with a wool pad and finds that the heat tape does not flake away.
- Juliette drops the wool pad and leaves the sensors uncleaned.
- Juliette wants to die beyond the hills so Lukas will not have to see her body.
- Juliette reaches the far side of the hill and passes beyond the sensors’ view.
- Juliette has experience clearing drains underwater in flooded basins.
- Juliette realizes that the sensor tower in the next hollow belongs to another silo.
Chapter 35
- Juliette’s possessions include dozens of vacation vouchers.
- Juliette’s notepad contains to-do lists with every item crossed out.
- Lukas remembers Juliette braiding her long hair while studying folders.
Chapter 36
- Juliette discovers hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bodies around the other silo.
- Juliette realizes that people have lived in another silo close to her own without her knowing.
- Juliette concludes that the bodies piled at the other silo’s airlock belonged to people trying to get back inside.
- Juliette removes a corpse wedged in the partially open outer doors.
- Juliette gets stuck between the outer doors with her helmet and torso wedged in the opening.
- Juliette’s frantic breathing while trapped consumes her remaining air.
- Juliette forces her way through the outer doors into the airlock.
- Juliette becomes confused enough to wonder whether she died in her own silo’s airlock.
- Juliette suspects dwindling air and her own exhalations are impairing her thinking.
- Juliette bangs on the inner airlock door hoping a sheriff or cafeteria worker will hear.
- Juliette cannot initially turn the wheel securing the inner door.
- Juliette needs air and hopes to find it inside the silo.
- As a young shadow, Juliette earned a reputation for freeing stuck fasteners.
- Juliette remembers grease, heat, and leverage as ways to free stuck metal.
- Juliette tears loose a corroded pipe that she thinks supplied argon to the airlock.
- Juliette repeatedly bends the loosened pipe until it breaks free at its base.
- Juliette uses the detached pipe as a lever through the door wheel.
- Juliette applies her weight in jerks to free the stuck wheel.
- Juliette finally gets the inner door’s wheel to move.
Chapter 37
- Walker reports that Jules came to him with a theory about the cleaning suits and IT.
- According to Walker, Jules concluded that the heat tape’s deterioration was deliberate.
Chapter 38
- Juliette’s possessions are searched by Bernard and Sims for evidence explaining her survival.
Chapter 39
- Juliette enters the other silo and seals its inner airlock door behind her.
- Juliette grows dizzy as the air in her suit becomes stale.
- Juliette crawls over several bodies in the dark sheriff’s office.
- Juliette forces her way through the barricaded office doorway and shuts it behind her.
- Juliette briefly considers allowing her air to run out, but curiosity keeps her from giving up.
- As a shadow in Mechanical, Juliette habitually dismantled things even when they worked.
- Juliette suspects the intact bodies in the office may belong to people who starved or suffocated.
- Juliette wants to wash possible toxins from her suit before removing her helmet.
- Juliette cannot obtain water from the cafeteria kitchen’s sink or dish-station hose.
- Juliette coats her suit in soup in an uncertain attempt to deal with contamination.
- Juliette uses a kitchen knife to release the catches on her helmet.
- Juliette retches after breathing the air outside her helmet.
- Juliette discovers that the other silo’s foul-smelling air contains enough oxygen to keep her alive.
- Juliette heads toward the illuminated stairwell after removing her helmet.
Chapter 40
- Juliette’s disappearance sparks widespread gossip on the landings.
- Marck believes Juliette is dead.
Chapter 42
- Juliette leaves her soup-covered helmet behind in the cafeteria.
- Juliette experiences a burning throat and itching skin near the top of the unfamiliar silo.
- Juliette cuts herself free of her suit’s outer layers and boots on level two.
- Juliette’s throat burns less as she descends.
- Juliette removes the remaining undersuit and helmet collar on level six.
- Juliette chooses to keep descending because the upper levels feel unsafe to her.
- Juliette hopes that lower mess halls will contain preserved food like the upper kitchen.
- Juliette considers both stored air and a continuing air source as possible explanations for the silo’s breathable atmosphere.
- Juliette initially descends naked with only a chef’s knife.
- Juliette checks level thirteen to compare the unfamiliar silo’s layout with her own.
- Juliette regrets failing to visit her father on recent trips past his nursery.
- Juliette wants to estimate how long the silo has been abandoned from the remaining battery power.
- Juliette fears she may be alone in a dying silo.
- Juliette props open the door to level fourteen with her knife to light her search of the rooms.
- Juliette makes clothing from a purple tablecloth found in a conference room.
- Juliette cuts strips from the tablecloth to make a belt and head covering.
- Juliette remains thirsty and without boots after making clothes.
- Juliette sleeps on landing fifteen after exhaustion nearly makes her collapse.
Chapter 44
- Juliette wakes on the stairwell grating and resumes descending without knowing how long she slept.
- Juliette enters the hydroponic farms on level thirty after hearing machinery inside.
- Juliette’s experience in Mechanical and inside machines helps her see in low light.
- Juliette estimates from the rotted hydroponic plants that their decline occurred neither days nor hundreds of years ago.
- Juliette drinks stale, foul-tasting water directly from a hydroponic pipe.
- Juliette remains afraid of contamination from outside and washes her hands and arms with the pipe water.
- Juliette believes the hydroponic water could sustain her for a long time.
- Juliette considers boiling the water if she can find fuel and start a fire.
- Juliette finds and bites into a not-quite-ripe tomato in the dirt farm.
- Juliette questions how long the dirt farm could survive without human care.
- Juliette mistakes a turnstile bar for an attacker while feeling her way through the dark.
- Juliette plans to return for more food once she has a light.
- Juliette’s fear of dying gives way to fear of losing her sanity.
- Juliette hears someone running down the stairwell after discovering her knife and flask are missing.
Chapter 46
- Juliette pursues the fleeing person because she fears being left isolated among other survivors.
- Juliette breaks the broomstick barricading the door on level thirty-four.
- Juliette forces her way past a filing cabinet used to barricade a heavy metal door.
- Juliette initially mistakes the servers for possible power equipment or batteries.
- Juliette recognizes the machines as servers and realizes she has entered the other silo’s IT department.
- Juliette suffers a cut finger while preventing Solo from closing the floor hatch.
- Juliette bandages her wounded hand with part of her garment.
- Juliette tells Solo she came from another silo.
- Juliette tells Solo that she survived the short journey outside by wearing a suit.
Chapter 48
- Juliette follows Solo into the hidden part of level thirty-five through the server-room floor.
- Juliette’s cut has almost stopped bleeding when she reaches Solo’s home.
- Juliette eats a raw green bean offered by Solo.
- Juliette calculates that Solo has been alone since he was sixteen.
- Juliette confirms that she saw the bodies of those who escaped the silo.
- Juliette doubts Solo’s account of aboveground grain-storage silos.
- Juliette questions whether the vivid photograph Solo shows her might be false.
Chapter 50
- Juliette studies pictures of butterflies but cannot determine how large the animals are.
- Juliette recognizes that Solo’s decades of reading have given him knowledge she lacks.
- Juliette is overwhelmed by the possibility that roughly fifty silos occupy only a tiny part of the world.
- Juliette identifies power lines on Solo’s silo schematic.
- Juliette wonders whether a machine used to excavate a silo could dig between silos.
- Juliette wants to return home despite Solo’s wish that she stay.
- Juliette wants her silo’s residents to learn about the other silos and the space beyond them.
- Juliette realizes that the man who sent her to die already knows the secrets she has discovered.
- Juliette demands every detail of Solo’s communication with another silo because she wants to make a call herself.
Chapter 52
- The voice on line 17 accuses Bernard of sending the caller outside to die.
- The caller threatens to return home and come for Bernard.
Chapter 54
- Marck remembers that Shirly had remained composed even when Juliette was sent to cleaning.
Chapter 55
- Walker remembers sending a message to Supply as a favor for Juliette to test her theory.
Chapter 56
- Juliette repairs a loose wire splice for the pumping system and secures the wires to the railing.
- Juliette and Solo have spent nearly three weeks building a system to pump floodwater into water-treatment tanks.
- Juliette estimates that adding three more pumps would still leave about two years of work to drain the silo.
- Juliette has begun hearing whispers, misplacing things, and finding lights on that she believes she switched off.
- Juliette wonders whether she is losing her sanity or Solo is making her doubt it.
- Juliette worries that pumping out the flood will expose submerged machinery to corrosion before she can preserve it.
- Juliette considers salvaging the backup generator because it would require less work while supplying ample power.
- Juliette refuses to wait two years for the pumps to drain the silo.
- Juliette plans to visit the farms for lunch and Supply for materials before making a private call from the server room.
- Juliette begins her fifth climb to IT in three weeks.
- Juliette feels that the headset’s connection to a living world helps her stay sane.
Chapter 59
- Juliette conserves electricity because she does not know its source and fears it may run out.
- Juliette is living and working in the Suit Lab.
- Juliette compares good seals and washers from Supply with defective ones from the lab to understand the suit system.
- Juliette locks the Suit Lab’s dead bolts every night before sleeping.
- Juliette has taught Solo to bake flatbread.
- Juliette plans to breathe underwater so she can work on the pumps at the bottom of the silo.
- Juliette intends to bring electricity from IT down to the submerged sump pumps.
- Juliette estimates that restoring the sump pumps could drain the silo in weeks or months instead of years.
- Juliette plans to install a portable deputy radio in her suit helmet to communicate with Solo.
- Juliette feels at home talking to Lukas behind an empty server.
- Juliette thinks Solo is worried about her underwater plan despite his denial.
Chapter 60
- Juliette says she has made roughly six trips between the thirties and Supply in the past week.
- Juliette urges Lukas to kill Bernard.
- Juliette insists that she did nothing wrong to deserve being sent away.
- Juliette argues that her people had reasons to act and that Lukas is in a position to help.
- Juliette tells Lukas that their actions after fate places them in a situation are what they control.
- Juliette plans to test her suit and warns Lukas that she may not call for a day or so if it works.
Chapter 62
- Juliette experiences unexpected dread when she puts on the cleaning suit for her dive.
- Juliette plans to restart the large pumps to send the floodwater through the concrete walls into the surrounding earth.
- Juliette regards diverting the flood into the treatment plant as only a temporary solution.
- Juliette thinks the danger of slowly going mad outweighs the risk of diving.
- Juliette feels connected to home through Lukas.
- Juliette starts her dive from four levels above Mechanical.
- Juliette panics as Solo helps her weighted legs over the railing into the water.
- Juliette begins descending along the rope into the flooded stairwell.
Chapter 63
- Lukas recalls something Juliette repeatedly tells him while considering the difference between the past and the Legacy.
Chapter 64
- Juliette descends through the flooded staircase toward Mechanical in a diving suit.
- Juliette believes cutting her boot weights free would allow her to float back to the surface.
- Juliette sees a bloated corpse beyond the damaged entrance to level 139.
- Juliette wants to return home to stop the fighting.
- Juliette dreams of using a repaired digger to tunnel into silo eighteen’s down deep.
- Juliette hopes to break the blockade and bring her people into the restored neighboring silo.
- Juliette struggles to climb over Mechanical’s security turnstile because her boots are too heavily weighted.
- Juliette descends six more floors before friction makes the hose and wire difficult to pull.
- Juliette attaches the new positive power wire to the sump pump.
- Juliette notices that fresh air has stopped entering her helmet while she tightens the positive terminal.
- Juliette cannot loosen the pump’s negative terminal.
- Juliette improvises a connection by putting the black wire into a cowling vent and securing it around a bolt.
- Juliette loses the remaining pressure in her diving suit.
Chapter 65
- Juliette’s radio call to Solo is heard by Shirly and Walker.
Chapter 66
- Juliette confirms that the air hose has lost its pressure.
- Juliette fears Solo has stopped the compressor to refuel it and will not know how to restart it.
- Juliette has only the air trapped in her suit and hose left to breathe.
- Juliette leaves the sump pump without securing the loose power wires against vibration or accidental pulls.
- Juliette cannot reach the Velcro straps holding her leg weights.
- Juliette uses her knife to cut the first exercise weight loose.
- Juliette cuts the second weight free while trying to avoid puncturing her suit.
- Juliette rises feet first and strikes her helmet against overhead pipes after removing the weights.
- Juliette loses her flashlight and is left in complete darkness.
- Juliette becomes disoriented while trapped against the ceiling.
- Juliette fears that her air hose may have been cut on the staircase.
- Juliette pulls in the slack air hose until she finds a taut section leading toward the exit.
- Juliette uses the air hose to pull herself through the flooded corridor in darkness.
Chapter 67
- Lukas longs to speak with Juliette after the formal appointment conversation.
Chapter 68
- Juliette’s voice is heard over the radio asking Solo to respond.
- Walker and Shirly recognize Juliette’s voice and conclude she survived her cleaning.
Chapter 69
- Juliette strikes her nose against the inside of her helmet when she collides with submerged stairs.
- Juliette follows the deflated air hose toward safety after it stops supplying air.
- Juliette exhausts the breathable air left in her suit while escaping the flooded lower levels.
- Juliette tries unsuccessfully to reach Solo over the radio during her escape.
- The rope Juliette reaches in the stairwell comes loose when she pulls on it.
- Juliette uses her knife to release her helmet as suffocation overwhelms her judgment.
- Juliette begins sinking after water floods her opened suit.
- Juliette grabs the air hose to stop her descent after losing her helmet.
- Juliette discovers breathable air trapped beneath the submerged stair treads.
- Juliette climbs toward the surface by breathing from air pockets under successive stair treads.
- Juliette reaches the surface through a layer of oil and gas.
- Juliette survives the dive but emerges shivering, numb, and struggling to breathe.
- Juliette initially asks the injured Solo for help getting out of her freezing suit.
- Juliette recognizes Solo’s serious injuries and urges him to remain still.
Chapter 71
- Walker believes he may be able to speak to Juliette using the modified transmitters.
Chapter 72
- Juliette cuts herself out of her flooded suit while dangerously cold.
- Juliette initially cannot tell whether Solo has a pulse because her fingers are too cold.
- Juliette recognizes that falling asleep in the cold would kill her.
- Juliette uses her knife to loosen the fuel-can cap because her hands cannot grip it.
- Juliette pours fuel over the compressor to make a fire for warmth.
- Juliette decides she never wants to depend on the compressor for air again.
- Juliette strips off her wet clothing and warms herself beside the burning compressor.
- Juliette fears being trapped between other survivors and the freezing floodwater.
- Juliette puts on the less-wet undersuit as the fire burns out.
- Juliette discovers that Solo is alive when she feels a weak pulse in his neck.
- Juliette uses water squeezed from her wet undersuit to moisten Solo’s lips and examine his head wound.
- Juliette wants to take Solo upward to warmth so they can clean his wound and dry her clothing.
Chapter 73
- Juliette’s official records show no sanctioned relationship, according to Lukas’s earlier check.
- Juliette is thirty-four years old.
- Juliette’s poem to George describes a hidden love.
- Lukas recalls rumors that Juliette’s help on an earlier case contributed to her selection as sheriff.
Chapter 74
- Juliette is exhausted and chilled after her swim, with her black undersuit still wet.
- Juliette helps the injured Solo climb the stairs.
- Juliette refuses to leave Solo behind when he asks her to continue without him.
- Juliette changes their immediate destination to the lower farms for food, water, and dry clothing.
- Juliette has not switched on the new pump she wired and does not know whether it will work.
- Juliette plans to reach the mids deputy station the next day to obtain weapons and recover.
- Juliette turns on the lower farm’s grow lights by adjusting a makeshift timer.
- Juliette collects drinking water from the circulation pump’s drain plug.
- Juliette finds a cultivated section of the farm that indicates other survivors are living there.
- Juliette is struck in the shoulder with a wrench when she tries a locked door.
- Juliette cuts her attacker’s leg with her knife.
- Juliette realizes her attacker is a boy she estimates to be fourteen or fifteen.
- Juliette concludes that Solo described the young attacker as his own age because Solo still sees himself as the child he was when left alone.
- Juliette recovers her stolen gear bag from the children’s room.
- Juliette decides to take the children home with her and Solo.
- Juliette associates the attack with the noise from her machinery after Rickson demands that she take it away.
- Juliette has an implant beneath the skin near her hip.
- Juliette tells the young mother that she previously worked caring for newborns.
- Juliette puts down her knife before approaching the young mother and baby.
Chapter 75
- Juliette tells Walker that she is in another silo.
- Juliette says she already knows about the fighting in Mechanical.
- Juliette urges Shirly to stop the exhaust diversion because the cooling vents serve the servers.
- Juliette says the silo she occupies has the same layout as her home silo.
- Juliette tells her friends that she has only one man and some children with her and cannot provide help.
- Juliette pleads with her friends to stop the fighting and not let it continue because of her.
- Juliette urgently asks Walker for a way to speak to the deputies Peter and Hank.
Chapter 76
- Lukas knows Juliette is alive and wonders why she has not called for so long.
Chapter 77
- Juliette cannot reestablish portable radio contact with Walker and Shirly after hearing gunfire during her last contact.
- Juliette anticipates becoming a mother figure to the surviving orphans.
- Juliette leaves Solo and the children to hurry ahead and contact her friends.
- Juliette suspects her underwater ordeal may have damaged her lungs.
- Juliette has a birth-control implant under the skin of her hip.
- Juliette concludes that costly messages, silo architecture, job colors, and divisions between residents were deliberately designed.
- Juliette reaches level thirty-four in a state of extreme exhaustion.
- Juliette cuts the hinges and bends aside the cage protecting the radio beneath the servers.
- Juliette selects channel eighteen on the caged radio to call home.
- Juliette reaches Bernard instead of Walker or Shirly.
- Juliette asks Bernard to stop the fighting.
Chapter 78
- Lukas hears Juliette and Bernard expose forbidden secrets over the radio.
Chapter 79
- Juliette wakes exhausted on the floor beside Solo’s desk.
- Juliette selects a small cleaning suit to make passage through the airlock easier.
- Juliette will travel without a radio because she lacks time to make another suit switch.
- Juliette replaces deliberately weak cleaning-suit components with better parts from Supply.
- Juliette intends to reach her home silo when its doors open for a cleaning in six or seven hours.
- Juliette believes most of her people are too frightened to take sides in the fighting.
- Juliette hopes her return alive will win enough popular support to make the fighting pointless.
- Juliette promises to return for Solo and the other survivors.
- Juliette stops the children below level three because she worries about the air higher up.
- Juliette delays putting on her helmet for another flight of stairs to conserve air.
Chapter 80
- Juliette leaves the neighboring silo and navigates by walking away from the distant ruined city.
- Juliette sees fifty evenly spaced depressions matching the silo schematic.
- Juliette realizes other silos may contain people living ordinary lives nearby.
- Juliette recognizes that she has concealed her love for Lukas even from herself.
- Juliette reaches her home silo’s ramp before the cleaning begins.
- Juliette has not brought enough air for a return trip.
- Juliette enters silo eighteen through the opening airlock doors amid a blast of argon.
- Juliette initially mistakes the kneeling cleaner for Lukas.
- Juliette covers herself and the cleaner with the heat-tape blanket as the flames start.
- Juliette tries to stop the cleaner from escaping the protective blanket.
- Juliette suffers widespread burns while sheltering alone beneath the blanket.
- Juliette survives the airlock fire until its fuel runs out.
- Juliette discovers that the dead cleaner is not Lukas.
Chapter 81
- Juliette is rescued from the airlock and has her melted suit cut away.
- Juliette has severe burns across her body.
- Painkillers repeatedly cloud Juliette’s awareness during her recovery.
- Juliette receives many notes from down deep while visitors from there are prohibited.
- Juliette prefers enduring some pain to having her mind dulled by medication.
- Juliette repeatedly reads the notes to work out who has survived.
- Juliette mourns Knox and Marck.
- Juliette is forbidden to see Shirly despite wanting to visit her.
- Juliette repeatedly thanks Peter for his decision.
Chapter 82
- Juliette is still recovering from painful wounds and raised scars weeks after her return.
- Juliette has medical permission to travel down the silo.
- Juliette learns that residents voted for her to become mayor after her return.
- Juliette makes truthful government a condition of accepting the mayoralty.
- Juliette wants residents to understand the threats facing them and act from knowledge.
- Juliette vows to spread the truth whether she joins the leadership or opposes it.
- Juliette agrees to avoid rash action until she meets Peter and Lukas again.
- Juliette returns Lukas’s kiss.
- Juliette chooses to visit her father before going down to see her friends.
Chapter 83
- Solo expects Juliette to be especially excited by the news that the water is receding.