Wool (11 page)

He squeezed her shoulder as he walked past, and Jahns forgave him instantly for laughing at her. She hurried after him and Knox’s young shadow.

“The generator is that thrumming you hear,” Marnes said. “The pump brings up oil, they do something to it in a plant a few floors down, and then it’s ready to burn.”

Jahns vaguely knew some of this, possibly from a committee meeting. She was amazed, once again, at how much of the silo was alien to even her, she who was supposed to be—nominally at least—running things.

The persistent grumbling in the walls grew louder as they neared the end of the hall. When the boy with the orange hair pulled open the doors, the sound was deafening. Jahns felt wary about approaching further, and even Marnes seemed to stall. The kid waved them forward with frantic gestures, and Jahns found herself willing her feet to carry her toward the noise. She wondered, suddenly, if they were being led
outside
. It was an illogical, senseless idea, born of imagining the most dangerous threat she could possibly summon.

As she broke the plane of the door, cowering behind Marnes, the boy let the door slam shut, trapping them inside with the onslaught. He pulled headphones—no wires dangling from them—from a rack by the wall. Jahns followed his lead and put a pair over her own ears. The noise was deadened, remaining only in her chest and nerve endings. She wondered why, for what cause, this rack of ear protection would be located
inside
the room rather than outside.

The boy waved and said something, but it was just moving lips. They followed him along a narrow passageway of steel grating, a floor much like the landings on each silo floor. When the hallway turned, one wall fell away and was replaced with a railing of three horizontal bars. A machine beyond reckoning loomed on the other side. It was the size of her entire apartment and office put together. Nothing seemed to be moving at first, nothing to justify the pounding she could feel in her chest and across her skin. It wasn’t until they fully rounded the machine that she saw the steel rod sticking out of the back of the unit, spinning ferociously and disappearing into another massive metal machine that had cables as thick as a man’s waist rising up toward the ceiling.

The power and energy in the room were palpable. As they reached the end of the second machine, Jahns finally saw a solitary figure working beside it. A young-looking woman in overalls, a hard hat on, brown braided hair hanging out the back, was leaning into a wrench nearly as long as she was tall. Her presence gave the machines a terrifying sense of scale, but she didn’t seem to fear them. She threw herself into her wrench, her body frightfully close to the roaring unit, reminding Jahns of an old children’s tale where a mouse pulled a barb out of an imaginary beast called an elephant. The idea of a woman this size fixing a machine of such ferocity seemed absurd. But she watched the woman work while the young shadow slipped through a gate and ran up to tug on her overalls.

The woman turned, not startled, and squinted at Jahns and Marnes. She wiped her forehead with the back of one hand, her other hand swinging the wrench around to rest on her shoulder. She patted the young shadow on the head and walked out to meet them. Jahns saw that the woman’s arms were lean and well defined with muscle. She wore no undershirt, just blue overalls cut high up over her chest, exposing a bit of olive skin that gleamed with sweat. She had the same dark complexion as the farmers who worked under grow lights, but it could have been as much from the grease and grime if her denims were any indication.

She stopped short of Jahns and Marnes, and nodded at them. She smiled at Marnes with a hint of recognition. She didn’t offer a hand, for which Jahns was grateful. Instead, she pointed toward a door by a glass partition and then headed that way herself.

Marnes followed on her heels like a puppy, Jahns close behind. She turned to make sure the shadow wasn’t underfoot, only to see him scurrying off the way he had come, his hair glowing in the wan overhead lights of the generator room. His duty, as far as he was concerned, was done.

Inside the small control room, the noise lessened. It dropped almost to nothing as the thick door was shut tight. Juliette pulled off her hard hat and earmuffs and dropped them on a shelf. Jahns took hers away from her head tentatively, heard the noise reduced to a distant hum, and removed them all the way. The room was tight and crowded with metal surfaces and winking lights unlike anything she had ever seen. It was strange to her that she was mayor of this room as well, a thing she hardly knew existed and certainly couldn’t operate.

While the ringing in Jahns’s ears subsided, Juliette adjusted some spinning knobs, watching little arms waver under glass shields. “I thought we were doing this tomorrow morning,” she said, concentrating intently on her work.

“We made better time than I’d hoped.”

Jahns looked to Marnes, who was holding his ear protection in both hands, shifting uncomfortably.

“Good to see you again, Jules,” he said.

She nodded and leaned down to peer through the thick glass window at the gargantuan machines outside, her hands darting over the large control board without needing to look, adjusting large black dials with faded white markings.

“Sorry about your partner,” she said, glancing down at a bank of readouts. She turned and studied Marnes, and Jahns saw that this woman, beneath the sweat and grime, was beautiful. Her face was hard and lean, her eyes bright. She had a fierce intelligence you could measure from a distance. And she peered at Marnes with utmost sympathy, visible in the furrow of her brows. “Really,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. He seemed like a good man.”

“The best,” Marnes sputtered, his voice cracking.

Juliette nodded as if that was all that needed saying. She turned to Jahns.

“That vibration you feel in the floor, Mayor? That’s a coupling when it’s barely two millimeters off. If you think it feels bad in here, you should go put your hands on the casing. It’ll jiggle your fingers numb immediately. Hold it long enough, and your bones will rattle like you’re coming apart.”

She turned and reached between Jahns and Marnes to throw a massive switch, then turned back to the control board. “Now imagine what that generator is going through, shaking itself to pieces like that. Teeth start grinding together in the transmission, small bits of metal shavings cycle through the oil like sandpaper grit. Next thing you know, there’s an explosion of steel and we’ve got no power but whatever the backup can spit out.”

Jahns held her breath.

“You need us to get someone?” Marnes asked.

Juliette laughed. “None of this is news or different from any other shift. If the backup unit wasn’t being torn down for new gaskets, and we could go to half power for a week, I could pull that coupler, adjust the mounts, and have her spinning like a top.” She shot a look at Jahns. “But since we have a mandate for full power, no interruptions, that’s not happening. So I’m going to keep tightening bolts while they keep trying to shake loose, and try to find the right revolutions in here to keep her fairly singing.”

“I had no idea, when I signed that mandate—”

“And here I thought I’d dumbed down my report enough to make it clear,” Juliette said.

“How long before this failure happens?”

Jahns suddenly realized she wasn’t here interviewing this woman. The demands were heading in the opposite direction.

“How long?” Juliette laughed and shook her head. She finished a final adjustment and turned to face them with her arms crossed. “It could happen right now. It could happen a hundred years from now. The point is: it’s
going
to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. The goal shouldn’t be to keep this place humming along for our lifetimes”—she looked pointedly at Jahns—“or our current term. If the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.”

Jahns saw Marnes stiffen at this. She felt her own body react, a chill coursing across her skin. This last line was dangerously close to treason. The metaphor only half saved it.

“I could declare a power holiday,” Jahns suggested. “We could stage it in memory of those who clean.” She thought more about this. “It could be an excuse to service more than your machine here. We could—”

“Good luck getting IT to power down shit,” Juliette said. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, then wiped this on her overalls. She looked down at the grease transferred to the denim. “Pardon my language, Mayor.”

Jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her too much of a former self that she could just barely recall. A younger woman who dispensed with niceties and got what she wanted. She found herself glancing over at Marnes. “Why do you single out their department? For the power, I mean.”

Juliette laughed and uncrossed her arms. She tossed her hands toward the ceiling. “Why? Because IT has, what, three floors out of one-forty-four? And yet they use up over a quarter of all the power we produce. I can do the math for you—”

“That’s quite all right.”

“And I don’t remember a server ever feeding someone or saving someone’s life or stitching up a hole in their britches.”

Jahns smiled. She suddenly saw what Marnes liked about this woman. She also saw what he had once seen in her younger self, before she married his best friend.

“What if we had IT ratchet down for some maintenance of their own for a week? Would that work?”

“I thought we came down here to recruit her
away
from all this,” Marnes grumbled.

Juliette shot him a look. “And I thought I told you— or your secretary—not to bother. Not that I’ve got anything against what you do, but I’m needed down here.” She raised her arm and checked something dangling from her wrist. It was a timepiece. But she was studying it as if it still worked.

“Look, I’d love to chat more.” She looked up at Jahns. “Especially if you can guarantee a holiday from the juice, but I’ve got a few more adjustments to make and I’m already into my overtime. Knox gets pissed if I push into too many extra shifts.”

“We’ll get out of your hair,” Jahns said. “We haven’t had dinner yet, so maybe we can see you after? Once you punch out and get cleaned up?”

Juliette looked down at herself, as if to confirm she even needed cleaning. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “They’ve got you in the bunkhouse?”

Marnes nodded.

“All right. I’ll find you later. And don’t forget your muffs.” She pointed to her ears, looked Marnes in the eye, nodded, then returned to her work, letting them know the conversation, for now, was over.

Marnes and Jahns were guided to the mess hall by Marck, a mechanic just getting off second shift. Marnes seemed to take umbrage at needing a tour guide. The deputy possessed that distinctly male quality of pretending to know where he was, even when he didn’t. Walking slightly ahead in an attempt to prove this, he would pause at some intersection, point questioningly in one direction, only to have Marck laugh and correct him.

“But it all looks the same,” he grumbled as he continued to forge ahead.

Jahns laughed at the manly display and hung back to bend the young mechanic’s ear, recognizing that he worked on Juliette’s shift. He smelled of the down deep, that odor that wafted in whenever a mechanic came up to repair something in her offices. It was the blend born of their work, a mix of perspiration, grease, and vague chemicals. But Jahns was learning to ignore that. She saw that Marck was a kind and gentle man, a man who took her by the arm when a trolley of rattling parts was hurried past, a man who acknowledged every single person they passed in those dim corridors of jutting pipes and drooping wires. He lived and breathed well above his lot in life, Jahns thought. He radiated confidence. Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.

“How well do you know Juliette?” she asked him, once the noisy cart rattled out of earshot.

“Jules? I know her like a sister. We’re all family down here.”

He said this as though he assumed the rest of the silo operated differently. Ahead of them, Marnes scratched his head at the next intersection before guessing correctly. A pair of mechanics crowded around the corner from the other direction, laughing. They and Marck exchanged a snippet of conversation that sounded to Jahns like a foreign language. She suspected Marck was right, that perhaps things did work differently in the deepest depths of the silo. People down there seemed to wear their thoughts and feelings on the outside, seemed to say exactly what they meant, much as the pipes and wires of the place lay exposed and bare.

“Through here,” Marck said, pointing across a wide hall toward the sound of overlapping conversations and the tinking of knives and forks on metal plates.

“So, is there anything you can tell us about Jules?” Jahns asked. She smiled at Marck as he held the door for her. “Anything you think we should know?” The two of them followed Marnes to a handful of empty seats. The kitchen staff bustled among the tables, actually serving the food rather than having the mechanics line up for it. Before they’d even situated themselves on the dented aluminum benches, bowls of soup and glasses of water with lime slices bobbing on top were being set out, and hunks of bread torn from loaves and placed directly on the beaten-up surface of the table.

“Are you asking me to vouch for her?” Marck sat down and thanked the large man who portioned out their food and spoons. Jahns looked around for a napkin and saw most of the men and women using the greasy rags that dangled from their back or breast pockets.

“Just anything we should know,” she said.

Marnes studied his bread, sniffed it, then dunked one corner into his soup. A neighboring table erupted with laughter at the conclusion of some story or joke being told.

“I know she can do any job thrown at her. Always could. But I figure you don’t need me to talk you into something you’ve already walked this far to get. I’d imagine your minds are already made up.”

He sipped on a spoonful of soup. Jahns picked up her utensil and saw that it was chipped and twisted, the butt of the spoon scratched like it’d been used to gouge at something.