19

　　Days Earlier

　　Juliette sat on the floor of the holding cell, her back against the tall rows of steel bars, a mean worlddisplayed on the wallscreen before her. For the past three days, while she had attempted to teachherself how to be silo sheriff, she had studied this view of the outside and wondered what the fusswas all about.

　　All she saw out there were dull slopes of ground, these gray hills rising up toward grayer clouds,dappled sunlight straining to illuminate¹ the land with little success. Across it all were the terriblewinds, the frenzied² gusts³ that whipped small clouds of soil into curls and whorls that chased oneanother across a landscape meant only for them.

　　For Juliette, there was nothing inspiring about the view, nothing that aroused her curiosity. It wasan uninhabitable wasteland devoid⁴ of anything useful. There were no resources beyond the taintedsteel of crumbling⁵ towers visible over the hills, steel it would no doubt cost more to reclaim,transport, smelt⁶, and purify than it would to simply pull new ore from the mines beneath the silo.

　　The forbidden dreams of the outside world, she saw, were sad and empty. They were deaddreams. The people of the up top who worshipped this view had it all backward—the future wasbelow. That’s where the oil that provided their power came from, the minerals that became anythinguseful, the nitrogen that renewed the soil in the farms. Any who shadowed in the footsteps ofchemistry and metallurgy knew this. Those who read children’s books, those who tried to piecetogether the mystery of a forgotten and unknowable past, remained deluded⁷.

　　The only sense she could make of their obsession⁸ was the open space itself, a feature of thelandscape that frankly⁹ terrified her. Perhaps it was something wrong with her that she loved the wallsof the silo, loved the dark confines of the down deep. Was everyone else crazy to harbor thoughts ofescape? Or was it something about her?

　　Juliette looked from the dry hills and the fog of soil to the scattered¹⁰ folders¹² around her. It was herpredecessor’s unfinished work. A shiny star sat balanced on one of her knees, not yet worn. Therewas a canteen sitting on one of the folders, safe inside a plastic reusable evidence bag. It lookedinnocent enough lying there, having already done its deadly deed. Several numbers written withblack ink on the bag had been crossed out, cases long since solved or abandoned. A new numberstood to one side, a case number matching a folder¹¹ not present, a folder filled with page after page oftestimony and notes dealing¹³ with the death of a mayor whom everyone had loved — but whomsomeone had killed.

　　Juliette had seen some of those notes, but only from a distance. They were written in DeputyMarnes’s hand, hands that would not relinquish¹⁴ the folder, hands that clutched it madly. She hadtaken peeks¹⁵ at the folder from across his desk and had seen the spattered tears that smearedoccasional words and caused the paper to pucker¹⁶. The writing amid those drying tears was a scrawl,not as neat as his notes in the other folders. What she could see seemed to crawl angrily across thepage, words slashed¹⁷ out violently and replaced. It was the same ferocity Deputy Marnes displayed allthe time now, the boiling anger that had driven Juliette away from her desk and into the holding cellto work. She had found it impossible to sit across from such a broken soul and be expected to think.

　　The view of the outside world that loomed¹⁸ before her, however sad, cast a far less depressingshadow.

　　It was in the holding cell that she killed time between the static-filled calls on her radio and thejaunts down to some disturbance¹⁹. Often, she would simply sit and sort and resort her foldersaccording to perceived severity. She was sheriff of all the silo, a job she had not shadowed for butone she was beginning to understand. One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had provedtruer than she could imagine: people were like machines. They broke down. They rattled²¹. They couldburn you or maim²² you if you weren’t careful. Her job was not only to figure out why this happenedand who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being amechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after abreakdown.

　　The folders scattered on the floor were sad cases of the latter: complaints between neighbors thatgot out of hand; reported thefts; the source of a poisonous batch²³ of amateur tub gin; several morecases stemming from the trouble this gin had caused. Each folder awaited more findings, morelegwork, more hikes down the twisting stairs to engage in twisted dialogue, sorting lies from truth.

　　Juliette had read the Law portion of the Pact²⁴ twice in preparation for the job. Lying in her bed inthe down deep, her body exhausted²⁵ from the work of aligning²⁶ the primary generator²⁷, she had studiedthe proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogousto some part of her old job as mechanic. Approaching the scene of a crime or an active dispute wasno different from walking into a pump room where something was broken. Someone or somethingwas always at fault. She knew to listen, to observe, to ask questions of anyone who could have hadanything to do with the faulty equipment or the tools they had used, following a chain of events allthe way down to the bedrock itself. There were always confounding variables—you couldn’t adjustone dial without sending something else off-kilter—but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knowing whatwas important and what could be ignored.

　　She assumed it was this talent that Deputy Marnes had originally seen in her, this patience andskepticism she employed to ask one more stupid question and stumble eventually onto the answer. Itwas a boost to her confidence that she had helped solve a case before. She hadn’t known it then, hadbeen more concerned with simple justice and her private grief, but that case had been an interviewand job training all in one.

　　She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading closed inbold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped²⁸ through the notes. Manyof them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward- slanting²⁹ print she recognized from just abouteverything on and inside her desk, a desk that had once been his. She read his notes about her,refamiliarized herself with a case that had seemed an obvious murder but had actually been a seriesof unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, gave birth to oldpains. And yet—she could also recall how comforting it had been to distract herself with the clues.

　　She could remember the rush of a problem solved, the satisfaction of having answers to offset³⁰ thehollowness left by her lover’s death. The process had been similar to fixing a machine on extra shifts.

　　There was the pain in her body from the effort and exhaustion³¹, offset slightly by the knowledge that arattle had been wrenched³² away.

　　She set the folder aside, not yet ready to relive it all. She picked up another and placed it in herlap, one hand falling to the brass³³ star on her knee.

　　A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall ofdirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot³⁵ seemed to shiver in the wind as it traveled toward sensorsshe had been trained to think of as important, sensors³⁶ that gave her a view of the outside world shehad been frightened as a child into believing was worth seeing.

　　But she wasn’t so sure, now that she was old enough to think for herself and near enough toobserve it firsthand. This up top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled³⁷ its way to the down deep,where true cleaning kept the silo humming and everyone alive. But even down there, her friends inMechanical had been told since birth not to speak of the outside. It was an easy enough task whenyou never saw it, but now, walking by it to work, sitting before this view of a vastness one’s braincould not comprehend, she saw how the inevitable³⁸ questions must have surfaced. She saw why itmight be important to squelch³⁹ certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questionsfoamed on people’s mad lips and brought an end to them all.

　　She flipped opened Holston’s folder. Behind the bio tab was a thick stack of notes about his lastdays as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of thepiece of paper blank and wasted. A single paragraph simply explained that he had reported to the up-top holding cell and had expressed an interest in the outside. That was it. A few lines to spell a man’sdoom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping⁴⁰ the page over.

　　Underneath⁴¹ was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service tothe silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone whowas also recently deceased. It was strange to think of people she knew that she could never see again.

　　Part of the reason she had avoided her father all these years was because he was, simply put, stillthere. There was never the threat of her not being able to change her mind. But it was different withHolston and Jahns: they were gone forever. And Juliette was so used to rebuilding devices thoughtbeyond repair that she felt if she concentrated enough, or performed the correct series of tasks in theright order, she should be able to bring the deceased back, be able to re-create their wasted forms. Butshe knew that wasn’t the case.

　　She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very firsttime. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks couldasphyxiate and broken flood pumps could drown everyone she knew, now loomed large before her.

　　What was it all about, this life they lived in underground confines? What was out there, over thosehills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in thedistance? What for? And most vexing⁴² of all: what had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife forthat matter—been thinking to want to leave?

　　Two folders to keep her company, both marked closed. Both belonging in the mayor’s office,where they should have been sealed up and filed away. But Juliette kept finding herself returning tothem rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a manshe had loved, whose death she had helped unravel⁴³ in the down deep. In the other lived a man shehad respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed⁴⁴ over the two folders,especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studyingthe details of Mayor Jahns’s death, going over the depositions⁴⁵, convinced he had a killer⁴⁶ but with noevidence to corner the man.

　　Someone knocked on the bars above Juliette’s head. She looked up, expecting to find DeputyMarnes telling her it was time to call it a day, but saw a strange man peering down at her instead.

　　“Sheriff?” he said.

　　Juliette set the folders aside and palmed the star off her knee. She stood up and turned around,facing this small man with a protruding⁴⁷ gut⁴⁸, glasses perched at the end of his nose, his silver IToveralls snugly⁵⁰ tailored and freshly pressed.

　　“Can I help you?” she asked.

　　The man stuck his hand between the bars. Juliette moved the star from one palm to the other andreached out to accept it.

　　“Sorry I’m late getting up here,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on, what with the ceremonies,that generator nonsense, and all the legal wrangling⁵¹. I’m Bernard, Bernard Holland.”

　　Juliette felt her blood run cold. The man’s hand was so small, it felt like it was missing a finger.

　　Despite this, his grip was solid. She tried to pull back, but he refused to let go.

　　“As sheriff, I’m sure you already know the Pact inside and out, so you know that I’ll be actingmayor, at least until we can arrange a vote.”

　　“I’d heard,” Juliette said coolly. She wondered how this man had gotten past Marnes’s deskwithout some sort of violence. Here was their prime suspect in Jahns’s death—only he was on thewrong side of the bars.

　　“Doing some filing, are you?” He relinquished⁵² his grip, and Juliette pulled her hand away. Hepeered down at the paperwork strewn across the floor, his eyes seeming to settle on the canteen in itsplastic bag, but Juliette couldn’t be sure.

　　“Just familiarizing myself with our ongoing⁵³ cases,” she said. “There’s a little more room in hereto … well, think.”

　　“Oh, I’m sure a lot of deep thought has taken place in this room.” Bernard smiled, and Juliettenoticed his front teeth were crooked⁵⁴, one of them overlapping⁵⁵ the other. It made him look like thestray mice she used to trap in the pump rooms.

　　“Yes, well, I’ve found the space conducive⁵⁶ to sorting my thoughts out, so maybe there’ssomething to that. And besides”—she leveled her eyes at him—“I don’t expect it to remain empty forlong. And once it’s occupied, I’ll be able to take leave of all this deep thought for a day or two whilesomeone is put to cleaning—”

　　“I wouldn’t count too much on that,” Bernard said. He flashed his crooked teeth again. “The worddown below is that the poor mayor, rest her soul, plumb⁵⁷ wore herself out with that crazy climb ofhers. I believe she was hiking down to see you, isn’t that right?”

　　Juliette felt a sharp sting in her palm. She loosened her grip on the brass star, the knuckles⁵⁸ on bothhands white from making fists.

　　Bernard adjusted his glasses. “But now I hear you’re investigating for foul⁵⁹ play?”

　　Juliette continued to level her eyes at him, trying not to be distracted by the reflection of the dullhills visible in his spectacles. “I suppose you should know, as acting³⁴ mayor, that we’re treating thisvery much as a murder,” she said.

　　“Oh my.” His eyes widened over a limp smile. “So the rumors⁶⁰ are true. Who would do such athing?” The smile grew, and Juliette realized she was dealing with a man who felt himselfinvulnerable. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered a dirty and outsized ego⁶¹ such as his. Her timeas a shadow in the down deep had been spent surrounded by them.

　　“I believe we’ll find the party responsible was the one with the most to gain,” she said dryly. Aftera pause, she added: “Mayor.”

　　The crooked smile faded. Bernard let go of the bars and stepped back, his hands tucking into hisoveralls. “Well, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name. I’m aware that you haven’t spent muchtime out of the down deep—and to be honest I’ve stayed much too insulated in my own office—butthings are changing around here. As mayor and sheriff, we will be working together a lot, you andme.” He glanced down at the files at her feet. “So I expect you to keep me posted. About everything.”

　　With that, Bernard turned and left, and it required a concerted effort for Juliette to relax her fists.

　　When she finally peeled her fingers away from the star, she found its sharp edges had gouged⁶² into herpalm, cutting her and drawing blood. A few drops caught the light on the edge of the brass, lookinglike wet rust⁶³. Juliette wiped the star clean on her new overalls⁴⁹, a habit born of her previous lifeamong the sludge and grease. She cursed herself when she saw the dark spot the blood had left on hernew clothes. Turning the star over, she peered at the stamped insignia on its face. There were thethree triangles of the silo and the word Sheriff arched over the top of them. She turned it over againand fingered the clasp that held the sharp spike⁶⁴ of the pin. She opened the clasp and let the pin hingefree. The stiff needle had been bent⁶⁵ and straightened in several places over the years, giving it a hand-forged look. It wobbled on its hinge—echoing her hesitation⁶⁶ to wear the thing.

　　But as Bernard’s footsteps receded⁶⁷, as she heard him say something indecipherable to DeputyMarnes, she felt a new resolve steel her nerves. It was like encountering a rusted⁶⁸ bolt that refused tobudge. Something about that intolerable stiffness, that reluctance⁶⁹ to move, set Juliette’s teeth on edge.

　　She had come to believe that there were no fasteners she couldn’t unstick, had learned to attack themwith grease and with fire, with penetrating⁷⁰ oil and with brute⁷¹ strength. With enough planning andpersistence, they always gave. Eventually.

　　She forced the wavy⁷² needle through the breast of her overalls and clasped the catch on the back.

　　Looking down at the star was a little surreal. There were a dozen folders at her feet demanding herattention, and Juliette felt, for the first time since arriving at the up top, that this was her job. Herwork at Mechanical was behind her. She had left that place in far better condition than she’d found it,had stayed long enough to hear the near-silent hum of a repaired generator, to see a shaft⁷³ spin in suchperfect alignment⁷⁴ that one couldn’t tell if it was moving at all. And now she had traveled to the uptop to find here the rattle²⁰ and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a misalignment that waseating away at the true engine of the silo, just as Jahns had forewarned.

　　Leaving most of the folders where they were, she picked up Holston’s, a folder she shouldn’t evenhave been looking at but couldn’t be without, and pulled the cell door open. Rather than turn to heroffice, she first walked the other way toward the yellow steel entrance to the airlock. Peering throughthe triple-paned glass for the dozenth time in several days, she imagined the man she had replacedstanding inside, wearing one of those ridiculously bulky suits, waiting for those far doors to open.

　　What went through a man’s thoughts as he waited there alone to be cast off? It couldn’t have beenmere fear, for Juliette had tasted that well enough. It had to be something beyond that, a whollyunique sensation, the calm beyond the pain, or the numbness⁷⁵ past the terror. Imagination, she figured,just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how todampen or augment⁷⁶ what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or anorgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of thisnew sensation.

　　It was the same as color. You could describe a new color only in terms of hues⁷⁷ previously⁷⁸ seen.

　　You could mix the known, but you couldn’t create the strange out of nothing. So maybe it was onlythe cleaners who understood what it felt like to stand there, trembling—or perhaps not afraid one bit—as they waited for their death.

　　The obsession with why played out in whispers through the silo—people wanting to know whythey did what they did, why they left a shiny and polished gift to those who had exiled them—butthat did not interest Juliette at all. She figured they were seeing new colors, feeling the indescribable,perhaps having a religious experience that occurred only in the face of the reaper⁷⁹. Wasn’t it enough toknow that it happened without fail? Problem solved. Take it as an axiom. Move on to a real issue,like what it must feel like to be the one going through it. That was the real shame of the taboos⁸⁰: notthat people couldn’t pine for the outside world, but that they weren’t even allowed to commiseratewith the cleaners during the weeks after, to wonder what they had suffered, to properly express theirthanks or regrets.

　　Juliette tapped the yellow door with the corner of Holston’s folder, remembering the man in bettertimes, back when he was in love, a lottery⁸¹ winner, telling her about his wife. She nodded to his ghostand stepped away from the imposing⁸² metal door with its small panes⁸³ of thick glass. There was akinship she felt from working in his post, now wearing his star, even sitting in his cell. She had loveda man once and knew what that felt like. She had loved in secret, not involving the silo in theirrelationship, ignoring the Pact. And so she also knew what it meant to lose something so precious.

　　She could imagine, if her old lover was out there on that hill—wasting away in plain sight rather thanfeeding the roots—that she could be driven to cleaning, to wanting to see those new colors forherself.

　　She opened Holston’s file again as she wandered back toward her desk. His desk. Here was oneman who knew of her secret love. She had told him, once the case was settled in the down deep, thatthe man who had died, whose case she had helped solve, had been her lover. Maybe it was how hehad gone on and on about his wife the days before. Maybe it was his trustworthy smile that made himsuch a good sheriff, engendering⁸⁴ this baffling urge to divulge⁸⁵ secrets. Whatever the cause, she hadadmitted something to a man of the law that could have gotten her in trouble, an affair completely offthe books, a wanton disregard for the Pact, and all he had said, this man entrusted⁸⁶ with upholdingthose laws, was: “I’m sorry.”

　　Sorry for her loss. And he had hugged her. Like he knew what she was holding inside, this secretgrief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay.

　　And she had respected him for that.

　　Now she sat at his desk, in his chair, across from his old deputy, who held his head in his handsand peered down, unmoving, at an open folder dotted with tears. All it took was a glance for Julietteto suspect that some forbidden love lay between him and the contents of that folder as well.

　　“It’s five o’clock,” Juliette said as quietly and gently as she could.

　　Marnes lifted his face out of his hands. His forehead was red from resting it there so long. Hiseyes were bloodshot, his gray mustache shimmering⁸⁷ with fresh tears. He looked so much older thanhe had a week ago in the down deep, when he had come to recruit her. Swiveling in his old woodenchair, the legs squeaking⁸⁸ as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wallbehind him and surveyed the time imprisoned⁸⁹ behind its yellowed and aged⁹⁰ plastic dome⁹¹. He noddedsilently at the ticking of the hand, stood up, his back stooping for a moment as he fought to straightenit. He ran his hands down his overalls, reached to the folder, closed it tenderly, and tucked it underhis arm.

　　“Tomorrow,” he whispered, nodding to Juliette.

　　“See you in the morning,” she said as he staggered out toward the cafeteria.

　　Juliette watched him go, feeling sorry for him. She recognized the love behind his loss. It waspainful to imagine him back in his small apartment, sitting on a cot wide enough for one, sobbingover that folder until he finally collapsed⁹² into his fitful dreams.

　　Once alone, she placed Holston’s folder on her desk and slid her keyboard closer. The keys hadbeen worn bare long ago, but someone in recent years had neatly⁹³ reprinted the letters in black ink.

　　Now even these handwritten faces were fading and would soon need another coat. Juliette wouldhave to see to that—she couldn’t type without looking at her keyboard like all these office workerscould.

　　She slowly pecked out a request to wire down to Mechanical. After another day of getting littledone, of being distracted by the mystery of Holston’s decision, she had come to a realization⁹⁴: therewas no way she could perform this man’s job until she first understood why he had turned his backon it, and on the silo itself. It was a nagging⁹⁵ rattle keeping her from other problems. So instead ofkidding herself, she was going to embrace the challenge. Which meant that she needed to know morethan his folder contained.

　　She wasn’t sure how to get the things she needed, how to even access them, but she knew peoplewho might. This was what she missed most about the down deep. They were family there, all withuseful skills that overlapped⁹⁶ and covered one another. Anything she could do for any of them, shewould. And she knew they would do the same, even be an army for her. This was a comfort shesorely missed, a safety net that felt all too far away.

　　After sending the request, she sat back with Holston’s folder. Here was a man, a good man, whohad known her deepest secrets. He was the only one who ever had. And soon, God willing, Juliettewould uncover his.

 

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