Dust

Using a stolen ID, Charlotte takes an elevator to Level 34. She manages to get past the Comms guard in her disguise but runs into Thurman, who doesn’t recognize her but causes her to panic. In Comms, she passes off her presence successfully and steals a microphone, promising the worker in Comms she will return to fix a broken part tomorrow. A man named Eren joins her on the elevator as she leaves.

In the elevator, Charlotte’s hesitation arouses Eren’s suspicion and causes him to realize that she is out of place. They scuffle. Charlotte tries to access her gun, but Eren gets the upper hand repeatedly during the fight. As he lifts her up, she inadvertently forces a screwdriver into his neck; he drops her and collapses, thrashing and choking. She abandons him on a random level and then slips back into the bloody elevator, but Eren manages to grab her pistol from the floor and shoots her in the shoulder as the elevator closes. Charlotte returns to her hiding place on Level 54, smearing the elevator buttons in blood so nobody can tell where she went.

Charlotte finds a medical kit and binds her wound; then, she tries to cover her tracks and erase her presence in the warehouse. She attempts to contact Silo 18 via radio but only hears static. On a whim, she contacts Silo 17 and gets a shaky, confusing response from three people until Juliette gets on the radio. Juliette confesses that everyone is dead and that she is responsible for it.

Juliette wakes up some time after the call with Charlotte and sees her father tending to her and the other survivors. Many of her friends—Lukas, Shirly, Nelson, Peter, and others—are dead. Her father tells her that people are trying to dig back to Silo 18, and she insists that someone must stop them. When she first got into Silo 17 during her near execution, she passed many dead bodies—now, that’s what Silo 18 looks like. As Juliette walks to the collapsed tunnel people are trying to re-dig, she sees grieving, sobbing adults and calm children and thinks about what they have lost.

At the dig, Juliette imagines Shirly’s and Lukas’s dead bodies beyond the rubble. She confronts Courtnee and explains that the air beyond the rubble is completely poisoned, making only Silo 17 safe. Courtnee explodes, demanding to know how the wreck of Silo 17 could possibly be safe. Acknowledging her responsibility for the terrible situation they are in, Juliette explains that there are 50 other silos and that she is certain that Silo 18 is no longer habitable. They need to use the backup generator to power Silo 17 so that they don’t drown or lose oxygen. Then, they need to go after Silo 1 to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. Courtnee is angry but agrees to cooperate.

Elise listens to the voices of people from Silo 18 and thinks about the stories she’s heard about outsiders. She watches strangers go by, some carrying too much food from Silo 17 gardens in sacks. A man stops her and asks if she has lost her flock; she says no, but he invites her to go to the church with him. He tells her that she is a miracle and lures her with food.

Charlotte camps out in the drone lift, which is so small that she can hardly move inside. She listens to radio chatter, reads her brother’s notes, and observes the map of all the silos, with some crossed out to indicate their extermination. After some time, she goes to the control room and radios out, asking if anyone can hear her. She reaches Silo 17 and talks to an unknown man, who tells her that Juliette isn’t available. Charlotte decides to call again later and tries to sleep.

Donald loses track of time during his imprisonment. Thurman and two other men arrive and check the ceiling panels, revealing that they are hunting for someone who attacked and killed Eren. Donald realizes the culprit is Charlotte but pretends to not know anything, even as Thurman cajoles him to confess. Thurman admits that Donald was right about Anna’s actions. Before leaving, he adds that Donald has both the helpful and the dangerous kinds of nanobots inside him, warring for dominance and killing him in the process.

A low-ranking security officer named Darcy remembers only snippets of his past life. Darcy grudgingly cleans up the blood from Eren’s murder. He finds the bullet and takes it as evidence—it has Charlotte’s blood on it, making it an invaluable clue to her identity. Darcy takes it to Medical, hoping to see the results himself. The DNA identifies it as someone from Emergency Personnel—primarily soldiers and pilots. Darcy searches Emergency Personnel for an empty cryopod, wondering if he is in over his head. He decides to press on, deducing that the unauthorized person awake is a pilot and realizing where a pilot would hide.

Charlotte wakes up and tries the radio again, wondering how so many people from Silo 18 managed to survive. After Charlotte identifies herself, Juliette takes the mic and responds with fury, blaming her for the tragedy. Charlotte tries to tell her that Donald wasn’t responsible, but Juliette refuses to listen, yelling that Charlotte doesn’t know the first thing about what the silos have gone through. Charlotte confesses to Juliette that Silo 1 is hunting her and Donald might be dead. However, Charlotte’s attempts to explain the history of their world—that Thurman killed everyone on the planet except for the silos and that she has been alive since that time hundreds of years ago—only makes Juliette angrier. Eventually, though, the two women bond over having done things that make their people hate them. Charlotte tells Juliette about a place called Seed on her map—seemingly a location outside the silo system that could be habitable. Just as she is about to give directions, the door flies open and a man aims a gun at Charlotte, silencing her.

The survivors get the generator working, allowing everyone to breathe easier. They plan to dig to the other silos, but Juliette warns them that Silo 1 might kill them in response. Instead, Juliette wants to take a suit overland to Silo 1, pop it open with dynamite, and kill everyone inside for what they did. Raph decides to come with her. Before they leave, Erik tells Juliette that he is grateful she helped everyone survive because every day they all get to live is a gift, even if others don’t recognize it. He encourages her to take Silo 1 down.

Juliette finds her father tending to a young pregnant couple in the clinic. She says goodbye and asks him to tend to the kids rescued from Silo 17.

As Juliette and Raph suit up to go outside, Raph talks about how his girlfriend, who died in Silo 18, calculated how long it would take for the silo’s supplies to run out—250 years. Juliette realizes that “no life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind” (340).

Hannah, Rickson, and Miles, the children originally from Silo 17, observe as Silo 18’s newcomers unnecessarily ravage their food supplies. Hannah grows worried about Jimmy and Elise. Rickson believes that fighting will begin again soon. They find a tomato and eat it.

Elsewhere, Jimmy hunts for Elise. He runs into a man named Terry, who demands to know about the location of the silo’s power source and any other secrets about how the silo operates. Terry tricks Jimmy into revealing some information and then tells him that Elise is probably in the chapel.

The chapel is in chaos. Rash, the man who brought Elise to the chapel, talks to a priest and then asks her if she has heard of the Pact. Elise doesn’t understand. A priest interrogates her, claiming that her knowledge of animals is forbidden and that it is her godly duty to give up the location of any books she has seen. After the priest forces Elise to confess that there are books on Level 34, Rash convinces her to sign a piece of paper, ignoring her confused crying. The priest declares them husband and wife.