Juliette approaches the sensor tower and the neighboring silo through a landscape covered with bodies. As the corpses become too numerous to avoid, Juliette realizes they are not from her own silo, which means other people lived nearby all along. Near the ramp down to the silo, Juliette first thinks the dead had been trying to flee, but the crush of bodies at the steel airlock shows they were desperately trying to get back inside.

Although Juliette knows her own death may be close, fear gives way to curiosity and grim determination. She pushes through the piled remains to a narrow gap in the outer airlock door, pulls away a body wedged there, and tries to squeeze through. Juliette becomes trapped when her helmet catches between the doors, and the panic of wasting her air makes her fight harder. By straining against the steel with both hands and twisting her body, Juliette finally pops free and falls into the airlock.

Inside, Juliette finds a burned chamber full of ash and bones from those caught in the airlock fire. Exhausted and oxygen-starved, she momentarily wonders if she is hallucinating or already dead, but she forces herself to focus on the sealed inner door. Juliette bangs on the glass and tries the wheel, hoping someone inside will hear, yet the silo remains dark and silent. Remembering Marnes's lessons about the airlock, Juliette suspects the mechanism is simply stuck rather than impossible to open.

Because she cannot force the wheel by hand and cannot go back out, Juliette searches the room for a way to create leverage. She rips loose the corroded argon pipe feeding the vents, breaks off a usable length, and threads it through the spokes of the wheel as a lever. When the pipe seems to give way, Juliette thinks she has failed, but then she realizes the pipe has not snapped. She grips the wheel itself and discovers it has finally budged, giving her the first real sign that she may be able to enter the dead silo.