Wool (22 page)

Juliette nodded, but mostly for his benefit. She wasn’t so sure. She hated to voice why, but she couldn’t help herself.

“But what if it’s for a different reason? What if someone made it expensive on
purpose
?”

“What? To make money?” Peter snapped his fingers. “To keep the porters employed with running notes!”

Juliette shook her head. “No, what if it’s to make conversing with each other more difficult? Or at least costly. You know, separate us, make us keep our thoughts to ourselves.”

Peter frowned. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Shrugging, Juliette looked back at her computer screen, her hand creeping to the scroll hidden in her lap. She reminded herself that she no longer lived among people she could implicitly trust. “I don’t know,” she said. “Forget about it. It’s just a silly thought.”

She pulled her keyboard toward her and was just glancing up at her screen when Peter saw the emergency icon first.

“Wow. Another alert,” he said.

She started to click on the flashing icon, heard Peter blow out his breath.

“What the hell’s going on around here?” he asked.

She pulled the message up on her screen and read it quickly, disbelieving what she was seeing. Surely this wasn’t the way of the job. Surely people didn’t die this often. Had she simply not heard about it before, with her nose always buried in some crankcase or under an oil pan?

The blinking number code above the message was one she recognized without even needing her cheat sheet. It was becoming sadly familiar. Another suicide. They didn’t give the victim’s name, but there was an office number. And she knew the floor and address. Her legs were still sore from her trip down there.

“No—” she said, gripping the edge of her desk.

“You want me to—?” Peter reached for his radio.

“No, damn it, no.” Juliette shook her head. She pushed herself away from her desk, knocking over the recycling bin, which spilled all the pardoned folders across the floor. The scroll from her lap rolled into them.

“I can—” Peter began.

“I got this,” she said, waving him away. “Damn it.” She shook her head. The office was spinning around her head, the world getting blurry. She staggered for the door, arms wide for balance, when Peter snapped back to his computer screen, dragging his mouse with its little cord behind, clicking something.

“Uh, Juliette—?”

But she was already stumbling out the door, bracing herself for the long and painful descent.

“Juliette!”

She turned to find Peter running behind her, his hand steadying the radio attached to his hip.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m sorry— It’s— I don’t know how to do this—”

“Spit it out,” she said impatiently. All she could think of was little Scottie, hanging by his neck. It was electrical ties in her imagination. That’s how her waking nightmare, her morbid thoughts, crafted the scene of his death in her head.

“It’s just that I got a private wire and—”

“Keep up if you want, but I’ve got to get down there.” She spun toward the stairwell.

Peter grabbed her arm. Roughly. A forceful grip.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m supposed to take you into custody—”

She whirled on him and saw how unsure of himself he looked.

“What did you say?”

“I’m just doing my duty, Sheriff, I swear.” Peter reached for his metal cuffs. Juliette stared at him, disbelieving, as he snapped one link around her wrist and fumbled for the other.

“Peter, what’s going on? I’ve got a friend I need to see to—”

He shook his head. “The computer says you’re a suspect, ma’am. I’m just doing what it tells me to do—”

And with that, the second link clicked around her other wrist and Juliette looked down at her predicament, dumbfounded, the image of her young friend hanging by his neck unable to be shaken loose from her mind.

She was allowed a visitor, but who would Juliette want to see her like this? No one. So she sat with her back against the bars, the bleak view outside brightening with the rising of an unseen sun, the floor around her bare of folders and ghosts. She was alone, stripped of a job she wasn’t sure she had ever wanted, a pile of bodies in her wake, her simple and easily understood life having come unraveled.

“I’m sure this will pass,” a voice behind her said. Juliette leaned away from the steel rods and looked around to find Bernard standing behind her, his hands wrapped around the bars.

Juliette moved away from him and sat on the cot, turning her back to the gray view.

“You know I didn’t do this,” she said. “He was my friend.”

Bernard frowned. “What do you think you’re being held for? The boy committed suicide. He seems to have been distraught from recent tragedies. This is not unheard of when people move to a new section of the silo, away from friends and family, to take a job they’re not entirely suited for—”

“Then why am I being held here?” Juliette asked. She realized suddenly that there might be no double cleaning after all. Off to the side, down the hallway, she could see Peter shuffling back and forth as if a physical barrier prevented him from coming any closer.

“Unauthorized entry on the thirty-fourth,” Bernard said. “Threatening a member of the silo, tampering with IT affairs, removing IT property from secured quarters—”

“That’s ratshit,” Juliette said. “I was summoned by one of your workers. I had every right to be there!”

“We will look into that,” Bernard said. “Well, Peter here will. I’m afraid he’s had to remove your computer for evidence. My people down below are best qualified to see if—”

“
Your
people? Are you trying to be mayor or IT head? Because I looked into it, and the Pact clearly states you can’t be both—”

“That will be put to a vote soon enough. The Pact has changed before. It’s designed to change when events call for it.”

“And so you want me out of the way.” Juliette stepped closer to the bars so she could see Peter Billings, and have him see her. “I suppose you were to have this job all along? Is that right?”

Peter slunk out of sight.

“Juliette. Jules.” Bernard shook his head and clicked his tongue at her. “I don’t want you out of the way. I wouldn’t want that for any member of the silo. I want people to be in their
place
. Where they fit in. Scottie wasn’t cut out for IT. I see that now. And I don’t think you were meant for the up top.”

“So, what, I’m banished back to Mechanical? Is that what’s going on? Over some ratshit charges?”

“
Banished
is such a horrible word. I’m sure you didn’t mean that. And don’t you want your old job back? Weren’t you happier then? There’s so much to learn up here that you’ve never shadowed for. And the people who thought you best fit for this job, who I’m sure hoped to ease you into it …”

He stopped right there, and it was somehow worse that he left the sentence hanging like that, forcing Jules to complete the image rather than just hear it. She pictured two mounds of freshly turned soil in the gardens, a few mourning rinds tossed on top of them.

“I’m going to let you gather your things, what isn’t needed for evidence, and then allow you to see yourself back down. As long as you check in with my deputies on the way and report your progress, we’ll drop these charges. Consider it an extension of my little …
forgiveness
holiday.”

Bernard smiled and straightened his glasses.

Juliette gritted her teeth. It occurred to her that she had never, in her entire life, punched someone in the face.

And it was only her fear of missing, of not doing it correctly and cracking her knuckles on one of the steel bars, that stopped her from putting an end to that streak.

It was just about a week since she had arrived at the up top, and Juliette was leaving with fewer belongings than she’d brought. A blue Mechanical overall had been provided, one much too big for her. Peter didn’t even say good-bye—Juliette thought more from shame than anger or blame. He walked her through the cafeteria to the top of the stairs, and as she turned to shake his hand, she found him staring down at his toes, his thumbs caught in his overalls, her sheriff’s badge pinned at an angle over his left breast.

Juliette began her long walk down through the length of the silo. It would be less physically taxing than her walk up had been, but more draining in other ways. What exactly had happened to the silo, and why? She couldn’t help but feel in the middle of it all, that she should shoulder some of the blame. None of this would have happened had they left her in Mechanical, had they never come to see her in the first place. She would still be bitching about the alignment of the generator, not sleeping at night as she waited for the inevitable failure and a descent into chaos as they learned to survive on backup power for the decades it would take to rebuild the thing. Instead, she had been witness to a different type of failure: a throwing not of switches but of bodies. She felt the worst for poor Scottie, a boy with so much promise, so many talents, gone before his prime.

She had been sheriff for a short time, a star appearing on her breast for but a wink, and yet she felt an incredible urge to investigate Scottie’s death. There was something not right about the boy having killed himself. The signs were there, sure. He had been afraid to leave his office—but then, he’d also shadowed under Walker and had maybe picked up the habit of reclusiveness from the old man. Scottie had also been harboring secrets too big for his young mind, had been fearful enough to wire her to come quickly—but she knew him like her own shadow and knew he didn’t have it in him. She suddenly wondered if Marnes had ever had it in him as well. If Jahns were here beside her, would the old mayor be screaming for Jules to investigate both their deaths? Telling her that none of this fit?

“I can’t,” Juliette whispered to the ghost, causing an up-bound porter to turn his head as he passed.

She kept further thoughts to herself. As she descended toward her father’s nursery, she paused at the landing, contemplating longer and harder the idea of going in to see him than she had on her way up. Pride had prevented her the first time. And now shame set her feet into motion once again as she spiraled down away from him, chastising herself for thinking on the ghosts from her past that had long ago been banished from memory.

At the thirty-fourth, the main entrance to IT, she again considered stopping. There would be clues in Scottie’s office, maybe even some they hadn’t managed to scrub away. She shook her head. The conspiracies were already forming in her mind. And as hard as it was to leave the scene of the crime behind, she knew she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near his office.

She continued down the staircase and thought, as she considered IT’s location in the silo, that this couldn’t be an accident either. She had another thirty-two floors to go before she checked in with the first deputy, who was located near the center of the mids. The sheriff’s office was thirty-three floors above her head. IT, then, was as far as it could get from any deputy station in the silo.

She shook her head at this paranoid thinking. It wasn’t how diagnoses were made. Her father would have told her so.

After meeting with the first deputy around noon, and accepting a piece of bread and fruit, along with a reminder to eat, she made good time down through the mids, wondering as she passed the upper apartments which level Lukas lived on, or if he even knew of her arrest.

The weight of the past week seemed to pull her down the stairwell, gravity sucking at her boots, the pressures of being sheriff dissipating as she left that office far behind. Those pressures were slowly replaced with an eagerness to return to her friends, even in shame, as she got closer and closer to Mechanical.

She stopped to see Hank, the down-deep deputy, on level one-twenty. She had known him for a long time, was becoming surrounded with familiar faces, people who waved hello, their moods somber, as if they knew every detail of her time away. Hank tried to get her to stay and rest awhile, but she only paused long enough to be polite, to refill her canteen, and then to shuffle the remaining twenty floors to the place she truly belonged.

Knox seemed thrilled to have her back. He wrapped her up in a crippling hug, lifting her feet off the ground and roughing up her face with his beard. He smelled of grease and sweat, a mix Juliette had never fully noticed in the down deep because she had never been free from it.

The walk to her old room was punctuated by slaps on her back, well-wishes, questions about the up top, people calling her sheriff in jest, and the sort of rude frivolities she had grown up in and grown used to. Juliette felt more saddened by it all than anything. She had set out to do something and had failed. And yet her friends were just happy to have her back.

Shirly from second shift spotted her coming down the hallway and accompanied Juliette on the rest of the walk to her room. She updated Juliette on the status of the generator and the output from the new oil well, as if Juliette had simply been on vacation for a short while. Juliette thanked her at the door to her room, stepped inside, and kicked her way through all the folded notes slipped under the door. She lifted the strap of her day pack over her head and dropped it, then collapsed onto her bed, too exhausted and upset at herself to even cry.

She awoke in the middle of the night. Her small display terminal showed the time in green blocky numbers: 2:14 a.m.

Juliette sat at the edge of her old bed in overalls that weren’t truly hers and took stock of her situation. Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt that way. Tomorrow, even if they didn’t expect her to, she would be back at work in the pits, keeping the silo humming, doing what she did best. She needed to wake up to this reality, to set other ideas and responsibilities aside. Already, they felt so far away. She doubted she would even go to Scottie’s funeral, not unless they sent his body down to be buried where it belonged.

She reached for the keyboard slotted into the wall rack. Everything was covered in a layer of grime, she saw. She had never noticed it before. The keys were filthy from the dirt she had brought back from each shift. The monitor’s glass was limned with grease. She fought the urge to wipe the screen and smear the shiny coat of oil around, but she would have to clean her place a little deeper, she decided. She was viewing things with untainted and more critical eyes.