羊毛战记 Part 3 Casting Off 23

　　23

　　The next morning, instead of climbing to her office, Juliette descended² five flights to the upper dirtfarm for Marnes’s funeral. There would be no folder³ for her deputy, no investigation⁴, just thelowering of his old and tired body into the deep soil where it would decompose⁵ and feed the roots. Itwas a strange thought, to stand in that crowd and think of him as a folder or not. Less than a week onthe job, and she already saw the manila jackets as places where ghosts resided. Names and casenumbers. Lives distilled⁶ onto twenty or so sheets of recycled pulp⁷ paper, bits of string and darts⁸ ofrandom color woven beneath the black ink in which their sad tale had been jotted⁹.

　　The ceremony was long but didn’t feel so. The earth nearby was still mounded where Jahns hadbeen buried. Soon, the two of them would intermingle inside the plants, and these plants wouldnourish the occupants of the silo.

　　Juliette accepted a ripe tomato as the priest and his shadow cycled among the thick crowd. Thetwo of them, draped in red fabric¹¹, chanted as they went, their voices sonorous¹² and complementingone another. Juliette bit into her fruit, allowing a polite amount of juice to spatter her overalls¹³;chewed; and swallowed. She could tell the tomato was delicious, but only in a mechanical way. Itwas hard to truly enjoy it.

　　When it became time for the soil to be shoveled¹⁴ back into the hole, Juliette watched the crowd.

　　Two people dead from the up top in less than a week. There had been two other deaths elsewhere inthe silo, making it a very bad week.

　　Or good, depending on who you were. She noticed childless couples biting vigorously into theirfruit, their hands intertwined, silently doing the math. Lotteries¹⁶ followed too closely after deaths forJuliette’s tastes. She always thought they should fall on the same dates in the year, just to look asthough they were going to happen anyway, whether anyone died or not.

　　But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meantto hammer this home: the cycle of life is here; it is inescapable; it is to be embraced, cherished,appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance¹⁷, of life. They make room for thenext generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone.

　　All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.

　　Before the hole was completely filled, members of the feast stepped up to the edge of the farm’ssoil and tossed what remained of their fruit into the hole. Juliette stepped forward and added the restof her tomato to the colorful hail of rind and pulp. An acolyte¹⁸ leaned on his too-large shovel¹⁵ andwatched the last of the fruit fly. Those that missed, he knocked in with scoops¹⁹ of dark, rich soil,leaving a mound¹⁰ that would, in time and with a few waterings, settle.

　　After the funeral, Juliette began the climb back to her office. She could feel the flights of stairs inher legs, even though she prided herself on being in shape. But walking and climbing were differentsorts of exercise. It wasn’t turning wrenches²⁰ or loosening stubborn bolts, and the endurance was of adifferent kind than merely staying up and alert for an extra shift. She decided²¹ it was unnatural²², thisclimbing. Humans weren’t meant for it. She doubted they were engineered to travel much beyond asingle level of a silo. But then another porter flew down the steps past her, a smile of quick greetingon his fresh face, his feet dancing across steel treads, and she wondered if perhaps it was somethingthat just took practice.

　　When she finally made it back to the cafeteria, it was lunchtime, and the room was buzzing withnoisy chatter²³ and the clinking of metal forks on metal plates. The pile of folded notes outside heroffice door had grown. There was a plant in a plastic bucket, a pair of shoes, a small sculpture madeof colorful wire. Juliette paused over the collection. As Marnes didn’t have any family, she supposedit would be up to her to go through it all, to make sure the items went to those who would use thembest. She bent²⁴ down and picked up one of the cards. The writing was in unsure print, scrawled²⁵ withcrayon. She imagined the upper-grade school had spent craft time that day making cards for DeputyMarnes. This saddened Juliette more than any of the ceremonies. She wiped tears out of her eyes anddamned the teachers who thought to get the kids involved in the nastiness of it all.

　　“Leave them out of it,” she whispered to herself.

　　She replaced the card and composed herself. Deputy Marnes would have liked to have seen this,she decided. He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in hisheart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.

　　Inside her office, she was surprised to find she had company. A stranger sat at Deputy Marnes’sdesk. He looked up from the computer and smiled at her. She was about to ask who he was whenBernard—she refused to think of him as even interim²⁶ mayor—stepped out of the holding cell, afolder in hand, smiling at Juliette.

　　“How were the services?” he asked.

　　Juliette crossed the office and snatched the folder out of his hand. “Please don’t tamper²⁷ withanything,” she said.

　　“Tamper?” Bernard laughed and adjusted his glasses. “That’s a closed case. I was going to take itback to my offices and refile it.”

　　Juliette checked the folder and saw that it was Holston’s.

　　“You do know that you report to me, right? You were supposed to have at least glanced over thePact before Jahns swore you in.”

　　“I’ll hold on to this, thanks.” Juliette left him by the open cell and went to her desk. She shovedthe folder in the top drawer, checked that the data drive was still jutting²⁸ out from her computer, andlooked up at the guy across from her.

　　“And you are?”

　　He stood, and Deputy Marnes’s chair let out its customary squeak²⁹. Juliette tried to force herselfnot to think of it as his anymore.

　　“Peter Billings, ma’am.” He held out his hand. Juliette accepted it. “I was just sworn in myself.”

　　He pinched the corner of his star and held it away from his overalls for her to see.

　　“Peter here was actually up for your job,” Bernard said.

　　Juliette wondered what he meant by that, or what the point was in even mentioning it. “Did youneed something?” she asked Bernard. She waved at her desk, which had piled up the day before asshe had spent most of her time managing Marnes’s affairs. “Because anything you need doing, I canadd it to the bottom of one of these piles, here.”

　　“Anything I give you goes on top,” Bernard said. He slapped his hand down on the folder withJahns’s name on it. “And I’m doing you a favor by coming up and having this meeting here ratherthan have you come down to my office.”

　　“What meeting is this?” Juliette asked. She didn’t look up at him but busied herself sorting papers.

　　Hopefully he would see how busy she was and leave, and she could start getting Peter up to speed onwhat little she herself had figured out.

　　“As you know, there’s been quite a bit of … turnover³⁰ these past weeks. Unprecedented³¹, really, atleast since the uprising. And that’s the danger, I’m afraid, if we aren’t all on the same page.” Hepressed his finger onto the folder Juliette was trying to move, pinning it in place. She glanced up athim.

　　“People want continuity. They want to know tomorrow will be a lot like yesterday. They wantreassurances. Now, we’ve just had a cleaning, and we’ve suffered some losses, so the mood isnaturally a bit raucous³².” He waved at the folders³³ and piles of pulp paper spilling from Juliette’s deskand onto Marnes’s. The young man across from her seemed to eye the mound warily³⁴, like more ofthe pile could shift toward him, giving him more of it to work through. “Which is why I am going toannounce a forgiveness moratorium³⁵. Not only to strengthen the spirits of the entire silo, but to helpyou two clear the slate³⁶ so you don’t get overwhelmed while you’re getting up to speed on yourduties.”

　　“Clear the slate?” Juliette asked.

　　“That’s right. All these drunken misdemeanors. What’s this one for?” He picked up a folder andstudied the name on the label. “Oh, now what’s Pickens done this time?”

　　“He ate a neighbor’s rat,” Juliette said. “Family pet.”

　　Peter Billings chuckled³⁷. Juliette squinted³⁸ at him, wondering why his name seemed familiar. Thenshe placed it, recalling a memo³⁹ he had written in one of the folders. This kid, practically a boy, hadbeen shadowing a silo judge, she remembered. She had a difficult time imagining that, looking athim. He seemed more the IT type.

　　“I thought owning rats as pets was illegal,” Bernard said.

　　“It is. He’s the claimant. It’s a countersuit in retaliation”—she sorted through her folders—“forthis one right here.”

　　“Let’s see,” Bernard said. He grabbed the other folder, held the two of them together, and thendropped them both into her recycle bin¹, all the carefully organized papers and notes spilling out andintermingling in a jumbled⁴⁰ pile on top of other scraps⁴¹ of paper to be repulped.

　　“Forgive and forget,” he said, wiping his palms together. “That’s going to be my election motto.

　　The people need this. This is about new beginnings, forgetting the past during these tumultuoustimes, looking to the future!” He slapped her on the back, hard, nodded to Peter, and headed for thedoor.

　　“Election motto?” she asked before he could get away. And it occurred to her that one of thefolders he was suggesting could be forgiven was the one wherein he was the prime suspect.

　　“Oh yes,” Bernard called over his shoulder. He grabbed the jamb and looked back at her. “I’vedecided, after much deliberation, that there is no one better qualified⁴² for this job than me. I don’t seeany problem with continuing my duties in IT while performing the role as mayor. In fact, I alreadyam!” He winked⁴³. “Continuity, you know.” And then he was gone.

　　????

　　Juliette spent the rest of that afternoon, well past what Peter Billings considered “sensible workinghours,” getting him up to speed. What she needed most of all was someone to field complaints and torespond to the radio. This was Holston’s old job, ranging the top forty-eight and calling on anydisturbance. Deputy Marnes had hoped to see Juliette fill that role with her younger, fresher legs. Healso had said that a pretty female might “do the public will some good.” Juliette had other ideas abouthis intentions. She suspected Marnes had wanted her away so he could spend time alone with hisfolder and its ghost. And she well understood that urge. So as she sent Peter Billings home with a listof apartments and merchants to call on the next day, she finally had time to sit down at her computerand see the results from the previous night’s search.

　　The spell-checker had turned up interesting results. Not so much the names she had hoped for, butrather these large blocks of what looked like coded text: gibberish with strange punctuation,indentation, and embedded⁴⁴ words she recognized but that seemed out of place. These massiveparagraphs were spread throughout Holston’s home computer, first showing up just over three yearsago. That made it fit the timeline, but what really caught Juliette’s eye was how often the dataappeared in nested directories, sometimes a dozen or more folders deep. It was as if someone hadtaken pains to keep them hidden but had wanted multiple copies stashed⁴⁶ away, terrified of losingthem.

　　She assumed it was encoded, whatever it was, and important. She tore off bites of a small loaf ofbread and dipped these in corn spread while she gathered a full copy of this gibberish to send down toMechanical. There were a few guys perhaps smart enough to make some sense of the code, startingwith Walker. She chewed her food and spent the next hours going back over the trail she hadmanaged to tease out of Holston’s final years on the job. It had been difficult to narrow his activitiesdown, to figure out what was important and what was noise, but she had approached it as logically asany other breakdown⁴⁷. Because that’s what she was dealing⁴⁸ with, she decided. A breakdown. Gradualand interminable. Almost inevitable⁴⁹. Losing his wife had been like a seal or a gasket cracking.

　　Everything that had rattled⁵⁰ out of control for Holston could be traced back, almost mechanically, toher death.

　　One of the first things she’d realized was that his activity on the work computer held no secrets.

　　Holston had obviously become a night rat, just like her, staying up for hours in his apartment. It wasyet another commonality she felt between them, further strengthening her obsession⁵¹ with the man.

　　Sticking to his home computer meant she could ignore over half the data. It also became apparent thathe had spent most of his time investigating his wife, just as Juliette was now prying⁵² into him. Thiswas their deepest shared bond, Juliette’s and Holston’s. Here she was, looking into the last voluntarycleaner as he had looked into his wife, hoping to discover what torturous⁵³ cause might lead a person tochoose the forbidden outside.

　　And it was here that Juliette began to find clues almost eerie⁵⁴ in their connection. Allison,Holston’s wife, seemed to be the one who had unlocked the mysteries of the old servers. The verymethod that had made Holston’s data available to Juliette had at some point brought some secret toAllison, and then to Holston. By focusing on deleted e-mails between the couple, and noting theexplosion of communication around the time she had published a document detailing someundeletion method, Juliette stumbled onto what she felt was a valid⁵⁵ trail. She became more certainthat Allison had found something on the servers. The trouble was determining what it was—andwhether she’d recognize it herself even if she found it.

　　She toyed with several ideas, even the chance that Allison had been driven to rage by infidelity,but Juliette had enough of a feel for Holston to know that this wasn’t the case. And then she noticedeach trail of activity seemed to lead back to the paragraphs of gibberish, an answer Juliette keptlooking for any excuse to reject because she couldn’t make sense of it. Why would Holston, andAllison especially, spend so much time looking at all that nonsense? The activity logs showed herkeeping them open for hours at a time, as if the scrambled⁵⁶ letters and symbols could be read. ToJuliette, it looked like a wholly new language.

　　So what was it that had sent Holston and his wife to cleaning? The common assumption aroundthe silo was that Allison had gotten the stirs, had gone crazy for the out-of-doors, and that Holstoneventually succumbed⁵⁷ to his grief. But Juliette had never bought that. She didn’t like coincidences.

　　When she tore a machine down to repair it, and a new problem surfaced a few days later, all sheusually had to do was go back through the steps from the last repair. The answer was almost alwaysthere. She saw this riddle⁵⁸ the same way: it was a much simpler diagnosis⁵⁹ if both of them were drivenout by the same thing.

　　She just couldn’t see what it might be. And part of her feared that finding it could drive her crazyas well.

　　Juliette rubbed her eyes. When she looked at her desk again, Jahns’s folder caught her attention.

　　On top of her folder sat the doctor’s report for Marnes. She moved the report aside and reached forthe note underneath⁶⁰, the one Marnes had written and left on his small bedside table:

　　It should have been me.

　　So few words, Juliette thought. But then, who remained in the silo for him to speak to? Shestudied the handful of words, but there was little to squeeze from them. It was his canteen that hadbeen poisoned, not Jahns’s. It actually made her death a case of manslaughter, a new term for Juliette.

　　Marnes had explained something else about the law: the worst offense⁶¹ they could hope to pin onanyone was the attempted and unsuccessful murder of him, rather than the botched accident that hadclaimed the mayor. Which meant, if they could nail the act on a guilty party, that person could be putto cleaning for what they had failed to accomplish with Marnes, while only getting five years’

　　probation⁶² and silo service for what had accidentally happened to Jahns. Juliette thought it was thiscrooked sense of fairness as much as anything else that had worn down poor Marnes. There wasnever any hope for true justice, a life for a life. These strange laws, coupled with the agonizingknowledge that he had carried the poison on his own back, had gravely wounded him. He had to livewith being the poison’s porter, with the hurtful knowledge that a good deed, a shared walk, had beenhis love’s death.

　　Juliette held the suicide note and cursed herself for not seeing it coming. It should have been aforeseeable breakdown, a problem solved by a little preventive maintenance. She could have saidmore, reached out somehow. But she had been too busy trying to stay afloat those first few days tosee that the man who had brought her to the up top was slowly unraveling right before her eyes.

　　The flash of her inbox icon⁶³ interrupted these disturbing thoughts. She reached for the mouse andcursed herself. The large chunk⁶⁴ of data she had sent down to Mechanical some hours earlier must’vebeen rejected. Maybe it was too much to send at once. But then she saw that it was a message fromScottie, her friend in IT who had supplied the data drive.

　　“Come now,” it read.

　　It was an odd request. Vague and yet dire⁴⁵, especially given the lateness of the hour. Juliettepowered down her monitor, grabbed the drive from the computer in case she had more visitors, andbriefly considered strapping⁶⁵ Marnes’s ancient gun around her waist. She stood, went to the keylocker, and ran her hand down the soft belt, feeling the indention where the buckle⁶⁶ had, for decades,worn into the same spot on the old leather. She thought again of Marnes’s terse⁶⁷ note and looked at hisempty chair. She decided in the end to leave the gun hanging where it was. She nodded to his desk,made sure she had her keys, and hurried out the door.

 

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