Dust

In the silo’s mechanical department, Mayor Juliette Nichols uses a digger to attempt to break through the concrete wall of Silo 18, to the disapproval of the miners. She has only recently learned that other silos exist and wants to reach Silo 17, which is almost entirely empty except for a few survivors. She breaks down the wall just as the excavator experiences mechanical issues.

On the other side of the wall is a bizarre, ancient machine. Juliette leaves Dawson, the third-shift foreman, to manage expanding the dig and helps the head of Mechanical, Shirly, clean the generator. Their interactions are tense because Juliette’s rebellions have recently led to the death of Shirly’s husband. Nevertheless, breaking through the wall has given the miners new energy and hope.

Juliette manages to get through the hole in the wall and examines the enormous machine. She suspects it comes from a previous generation of humans with greater capabilities than they have now. As she and the miners explore, they discover that the mysterious machine, which the miners decide is an excavator, is hydraulic and thus possibly repairable. Juliette surmises that someone meant for them to discover the machine; this might be why they left it near the generator room.

Juliette and the others discover that the backup generator for the silo is meant to power the gigantic excavator. Lukas, the head of Silo 18 IT and Juliette’s lover, comes down from IT to warn her that the population of the silo is getting anxious and that her actions could lead to more violence. She tries to convince him, to no avail, that saving the people in Silo 17 is vital. They eventually compromise, with Juliette agreeing to do her work less publicly; she still intends to get to the bottom of everything.

Jimmy Parker, or Solo, sits alone on the grave of his cat, Shadow, in Silo 17 until a young girl named Elise finds him. Elise tugs him on Jimmy’s arm to try and get him to leave, and Jimmy fights off his fear of no longer being alone. As they await their rescue, Jimmy tearfully tells Elise that she will soon need to learn to see the bad in people.

Lost in thought, Jimmy activates the pump that will drain the flood in Silo 17. He prepares with Elise and the surviving children to wait for Juliette.

As Juliette and Shirly get into an argument about the generator, Juliette makes plans for shoring up the tunnel to Silo 17. A miner named Bobby warns her that changing the distribution of their resources to accommodate Silo 17’s survivors could cause a war. Juliette leaves for the top of the silo to address the populace, keep the peace, and act as mayor. Bobby will keep up the work while she is gone.

Juliette goes to visit her friend Walker in his workshop. Walker has nearly completed a portable radio that will let her contact other silos.

Juliette gathers her meager belongings and begins the journey up the stairs to the Top, the upper part of the silo 144 floors away. The people she passes seem to be afraid of her. She stops at a station before reaching the Mids, the middle part of the silo, and shakes hands with Hank, the deputy who sent her outside (to what should have been her death) in the first novel in the trilogy. She asks him to keep an eye on the stairs for trouble.

As Juliette walks, she notices signs of war in the silo and contemplates how much everyone needs each other alive. She passes by a religious service called a Sunday. The priest, Father Wendel, tells her that they have added another service to the weekly schedule and reminds her that she has not attended a religious service in a long time. When she talks about the other silos, he accuses her of blasphemy for suggesting that other silos exist, and they argue about the state of the silo and its people. When she leaves, he does not bless her journey.

Lukas finds Juliette when she reaches the upper levels. In his apartment, Juliette contemplates finding a way to reveal the truth about the silos to its inhabitants, telling Lukas that she wants to show the people what is really going on instead of telling them. Lukas begins to undress and touch her but notices that his favorite scar is gone from her body. This offends her at first, as it bothers her that he has mapped them, but she eventually gives in and offers him a scar on her forearm to kiss.

In Silo 1, Charlotte exercises using batteries from drones as weights. Her brother, Donald, has recently woken her up; both are from the world before the silos. Charlotte is out of shape after being cryogenically preserved for over 200 years; now that she has woken up, she wants to be fit again. Donald brings them breakfast. He has recently run into a man he knew from a previous shift, which worries him.

They look over data of the remaining silos, formulated into percentage-based rankings. Donald believes that only the highest-ranking silo will survive a planned extermination, and he worries for Silo 18, which he is fond of and believes represents hope. Charlotte notices Donald’s increasing illness and begs him to stop so they can go back to cryosleep, but he refuses.

Charlotte has nightmares about flying and falling. She dresses and goes to the drone warehouse, where she finds Donald bent over an empty hazmat suit. Donald claims to be going through supplies, but Charlotte realizes from his evasive conversation that he is hiding something. When they were teenagers, Charlotte used to pin Donald to the couch and put a pillow over his face, unlocking his primal fear of being buried alive. She realizes that since he is dying, he is likely making plans to escape the silo so that he isn’t buried in it.

Juliette builds a cleaning suit while her assistant, Marsha, tries to get her engaged in mayoral tasks. Marsha discusses the lottery (which allows residents to have children), and Juliette suggests they suspend it to account for the population dip of Silo 17—when they access it, they will have double the space so they can fit more people. Marsha points out that the heads of the silo’s other departments do not believe in the other silo. Lukas appears and tries to convince her to come to a town hall meeting, reminding her that her position as mayor is on the line. She replies that they are likely to vote her out but reluctantly agrees to go anyway.

Lukas walks past an empty server room, noting that a lot of his IT staff have been sent to the Deep to fill in gaps left from the war that deposed former Mayor Bernard in the second book of the series. He contemplates what would happen if Silo 18 put a new mayor in place, knowing it would likely change his and Juliette’s relationship. Lukas arrives at his office and looks at the books around him, realizing that what he thought were fictional tales are mostly true.

Lukas takes a call from Donald in Silo 1. Donald immediately begs him to stop digging, as the people in Silo 1 can sense it and will retaliate. Donald calls Lukas every day to help him learn about the mistakes of the past so that the future world can be better.

At the town hall, the sections of the silo are unequally represented, as those from the Deep cannot often make the hard journey up to the Top. Juliette starts to make a speech to her community, but people heckle her with questions and accusations until Sheriff Peter Billings manages to calm the crowd down. When she tells them that they have been lied to their entire lives, there is another uproar.

Juliette is taken to the judge’s quarters for her safety. There, her father begs her to stop constructing a suit to send people outside of the silo so that they can see the truth—and to stop planning to go back out there herself. However, she convinces him to support her. She asks him if scars ever go away, and he tells her that they never do.

Captain Brevard, a soldier and de facto policeman, is through his seventh shift out of cryosleep, meaning he has three more to go before an undefined retirement. He surveys a cryopod that’s supposed to contain a different person than the one currently in it. The body in the pod is seemingly dead from a gunshot. A cadet named Darcy has been DNA sequencing blood found on the pod; the blood matches the person who is supposed to be frozen in the pod, but not the ostensible corpse. Moreover, the blood found outside the pod has saliva in it, as if from a cough. Darcy concludes that this isn’t a murder—the DNA matches that of a man who has been in cryostasis the entire time, and the body in the cryopod is still alive.

Brevard notes that cryopod technology might be able to preserve a body, even after death, since it preserves and repairs frozen cells. However, that’s not the case here: The victim, an old man who holds high silo rank, is now awake and angry.

After investigating a series of unscheduled cryo awakenings, Brevard and a doctor put together a theory of what happened: Someone from Deep Freeze woke up, shot this administrator and put him in their pod, and took the administrator’s credentials to wake up several women from Deep Freeze. One of these was Anna Thurman, the daughter of Senator Thurman, the creator of the silo program and the leader of Silo 1. An assistant informs Brevard that Anna has died in her pod.

The old man tells Brevard that his would-be killer was Donald and identifies himself as Senator Paul Thurman. Brevard is shocked to see Thurman, whom he knows as the Shepherd in charge of the silo system.

Jimmy and the kids—Elise, Ricky, Hannah, and twins Miles and Marcus—wait at the bottom of Silo 17 for 18 to break through. As the digger breaks through the wall with terrible noise and comes to a stop, a woman appears and greets Jimmy/Solo. She introduces herself as Courtnee; when he asks where Juliette is, Courtnee is confused and says that Juliette went outside.