Status Updates From Dust (Silo, #3)

'What lasts forever?' she obliged [...] 'Our decisions,' he said. [...] Lukas turned to face her. 'Yeah. Our actions, you know? They last for ever. Whatever we do, it'll always be what we did. There is no taking them back.'

'It doesn't bother me that I won't be around one day,' Lukas said after a while. 'I don't stress about the fact that I wasn't here 100 years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. 100 years from now my life will be just like it was 100 years ago.'

As she turned, the woman rubbed the cross and kissed it and Juliette thought of Father Wendel and the idea that she was bringing fear, not hope, to the silo. Hope was what he and the church offered, some place to exist after death. Fear came from the chance that changing the world for the better could possibly make it worse.

For all they knew, these were the first tests made of the outside air. Reams & reams of bogus reports from previous cleanings had been nothing but numbers used to uphold & justify fears. It was a charade of progress, of efforts being made to right the world, when all they ever cared about was selling the story of how wrong it was.