Better to join a ghost than be haunted by them, Jahns now knew. Better no life than an empty one—

And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.

“Good luck getting IT to power down shit,” Juliette said. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, then wiped this on her coveralls. She looked down at the grease transferred to the denim. “Pardon my language, Mayor.” Jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her too much of a former self

One of the things she loved about having Marnes around was that his thoughts could be so black as to make hers shine gray.

ablative

“It could happen right now. It could happen a hundred years from now. The point is: it’s going to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. The goal shouldn’t be to keep this place humming along for our lifetimes—” She looked pointedly at Jahns. “—or our current term. If the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.”

Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.

Juliette nodded and loosened the belt from around Marnes’s neck. The flesh was purple beneath it. She felt for a pulse, remembering Roger looking just like this when she’d found him down in Mechanical, completely still and unresponsive. It took her a moment to be sure that she was looking at the second dead body she had ever seen.

It was strange to talk like this with someone his senior, someone who knew so much more, was so much wiser. He imagined this was the sort of conversation a man had with his father—only not about the planned and carried out destruction of the entire world.