Wool (12 page)

“How long have you known her?” Marnes asked. The deputy chewed on his soggy bread and was doing a heroic job of blending in with his surroundings, of looking like he belonged.

“I was born down here,” Marck told them, raising his voice over the din-filled room. “I was shadowing in Electrical when Jules showed up. She was a year younger than me. I gave her two weeks before I figured she’d be kicking and screaming to get out of here. We’ve had our share of runaways and transfers, kids from the mids thinking their problems wouldn’t dare follow them—”

He left the sentence short, his eyes lighting up as a demure woman squeezed in next to Marnes on the other side of the table. This new arrival wiped her hands with her rag, stuffed it into her breast pocket, and leaned over the table to kiss Marck on the cheek.

“Honey, you remember Deputy Marnes.” Marck gestured to Marnes, who was wiping his mustache with the palm of his hand. “This is my wife, Shirly.” They shook hands. The dark stains on Shirly’s knuckles seemed permanent, a tattoo from her work.

“And your mayor. This is Jahns.” The two women shook hands as well. Jahns was proud of herself for accepting the firm grip without caring about the grease.

“Pleased,” Shirly said. She sat. Her food had somehow materialized during the introductions, the surface of her soup undulating and throwing off steam.

“Has there been a crime, officer?” Shirly smiled at Marnes as she tore off a piece of her bread, letting him know it was a joke.

“They came to harangue Jules into moving up top with them,” Marck said, and Jahns caught him lifting an eyebrow at his wife.

“Good luck,” she said. “If that girl moves a level, it’ll be down from here and into the mines.”

Jahns wanted to ask what she meant, but Marck turned and continued where he’d left off.

“So I was working in Electrical when she showed up—”

“You boring them with your shadow days?” Shirly asked.

“I’m tellin’ them about when Jules arrived.”

His wife smiled.

“I was studying under old Walk at the time. This was back when he was still moving around, getting out and about now and then—”

“Oh yeah, Walker.” Marnes jabbed a spoon at Jahns. “Crafty fellow. Never leaves his workshop.”

Jahns nodded, trying to follow. Several of the revelers at the neighboring table got up to leave. Shirly and Marck waved good-bye and exchanged words with several of them, before turning their attention back to the table.

“Where was I?” Marck asked. “Oh, so the first time I met Jules was when she arrived at Walk’s shop with this pump.” Marck took a sip of his water. “One of the first things they have her doing—now, keep in mind this is just a waif of a girl, right? Thirteen years old. Skinny as a pipe. Fresh from the mids or somewhere up there.” He waved his hand like it was all the same. “They’ve got her hauling these massive pumps up to Walk’s to have him respool the motors, basically unwrap a mile of wire and lay it back in place.” Marck paused and laughed. “Well, to have Walk make
me
do all the work. Anyway, it’s like this initiation, you know? You all do that sort of thing to your shadows, right? Just to break ’em down a little?”

Neither Jahns nor Marnes moved. Marck shrugged and continued. “Anyway, these pumps are heavy, okay? They had to weigh more than she did. Maybe double. And she’s supposed to wrestle these things onto carts by herself and get them up four flights of stairs—”

“Wait. How?” Jahns asked, trying to imagine a girl that age moving a hunk of metal twice her weight.

“Doesn’t matter. Pulleys, ropes, bribery, whatever she likes. That’s the point, right? And they’ve got ten of these things set aside for her to deliver—”

“Ten of them,” Jahns repeated.

“Yeah, and probably
two
of them actually needed respooling,” Shirly added.

“Oh, if that.” Mark laughed. “So Walk and I are taking bets on how long before she cuts and runs back to her old man.”

“I gave her a week,” Shirly said.

Marck stirred his soup and shook his head. “The thing was, after she pulled it off, none of us had any idea how she’d done it. It was years later that she finally told us.”

“We were sitting over at that table.” Shirly pointed. “I’d never laughed so hard in my life.”

“Told you what?” Jahns asked. She had forgotten her soup. The steam had long stopped swirling from its surface.

“Well, sure enough, I wound the coils on ten pumps that week. The whole time, I’m waiting for her to break. Hoping for it. My fingers were sore. No way she could move all of them.” Marck shook his head. “No way. But I kept winding them, she kept hauling them off, and a while later she’d bring another. Got all ten of them done in six days. The little snot went to Knox, who was just a shift manager back then, and asked if she could take a day off.”

Shirly laughed and peered into her soup.

“So she got someone to help her,” Marnes said. “Somebody probably just felt sorry for her.”

Marck wiped his eyes and shook his head. “Aw, hell no. Somebody would’ve seen, would’ve said something. Especially when Knox demanded to know. Old man nearly blew a fuse asking her what she’d done. Jules just stands there, calm as a dead battery, shrugging.”

“How did she do it?” Jahns asked. Now she was dying to know.

Marck smiled. “She only moved the one pump. Nearly broke her back getting it up here, but only moved the one.”

“Yeah, and you rewound that thing ten times,” Shirly said.

“Hey, you don’t have to tell me.”

“Wait.” Jahns held up her hand. “But what about the others?”

“Done them herself. I blame Walk, talking his head off while she swept the shop that first night. She was asking questions, badgering me, watching me work on that first pump. When I got done, she pushed the pump down the hall, didn’t bother with the stairs, and stowed it in the paint shop right on the trolley. Then she went downstairs, got the next pump, and hauled it around the corner into the tool lock-up. Spent the entire night in there teaching herself how to rewire a motor.”

“Ah,” Jahns said, seeing where this was going. “And the next morning she brought you the same pump from the day before, from just around the corner.”

“Right. Then she went and wound copper four levels below while I was doing the same thing up here.”

Marnes erupted with laughter and slapped the table, bowls and bread hopping.

“I averaged two motors a day that week, a brutal pace.”

“Technically, it was only one motor,” Shirly pointed out, laughing.

“Yeah. And she kept up with me. Had them all back to her caster with a day to spare, a day she asked to take off.”

“A day she got off, if I remember right,” Shirly added. She shook her head. “A shadow with a day off. The damnedest thing.”

“The point is, she wasn’t ever supposed to get the task done in the first place.”

“Smart girl,” Jahns said, smiling.

“Too smart,” Marck said.

“So what did she do with her day off?” Marnes asked.

Marck pushed his lime down beneath the surface of his water with his finger and held it there a moment.

“She spent the day with me and Walk, sweeping the shop, asking how things worked, where these wires went to, how to loosen a bolt and dig inside something, that kind of stuff.” He took a sip of water. “I guess what I’m sayin’ is that if you want to give Jules a job, be very careful.”

“Why be careful?” Marnes asked.

Marck gazed up at the confusion of pipes and wires overhead.

“’Cause she’ll damn well do it. Even if you don’t really expect her to.”

After their meal, Shirly and Marck gave them directions to the bunk room. Jahns watched as the young married couple exchanged kisses. Marck was coming off his shift while Shirly was going onto hers. The shared meal was breakfast for one and supper for the other. Jahns thanked them both for their time and complimented the food, then she and Marnes left a mess hall nearly as noisy as the generator room had been and followed the winding corridors toward their beds for the night.

Marnes would be staying in the communal bunk room used by junior first-shift mechanics. A small cot had been made up for him that Jahns gauged to be half a foot too short. Down the hall from the bunk room, a small apartment had been reserved for Jahns. The two of them decided to wait there, biding their time in private, rubbing the aches in their legs, talking about how different everything in the down deep was, until there was a knock on their door. Juliette pushed it open and stepped inside.

“They got you both in one room?” Juliette asked, surprised.

Jahns laughed. “No, they’ve got the deputy in the bunk room. And I would’ve been happy staying out there with the others.”

“Forget it,” Juliette said. “They put up recruits and visiting families in here all the time. It’s nothing.”

Jahns watched as Juliette placed a length of string in her mouth, then gathered her hair, still wet from a shower, and tied it up in a tail. She had changed into another pair of overalls, and Jahns guessed the stains in them were permanent, that the fabric was actually laundered and ready for another shift.

“So how soon could we announce this power holiday?” Juliette asked. She finished her knot and crossed her arms, leaning back against the wall beside the door. “I would think you’d wanna take advantage of the post-cleaning mood, right?”

“How soon can
you
start?” Jahns asked. She realized, suddenly, that part of the reason she wanted this woman as her sheriff was that she felt unattainable. Jahns glanced over at Marnes and wondered how much of his attraction to her, all those many years ago when she was young and with Donald, had been as simply motivated.

“I can start tomorrow,” Juliette said. “We could have the backup generator online by morning. I could work another shift tonight to make sure the gaskets and seals—”

“No,” Jahns said, raising her hand. “How soon can you start as sheriff?” She dug through her open bag, sorting folders across the bed, looking for the contract.

“I’m—I thought we discussed this. I have no interest in being—”

“They make the best ones,” Marnes said. “The ones who have no interest in it.” He stood across from Juliette, his thumbs tucked into his overalls, leaning against one of the small apartment’s walls.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no one down here who can just slip into my boots,” Juliette said, shaking her head. “I don’t think you two understand all that we do—”

“I don’t think you understand what we do up top,” Jahns said. “Or why we need you.”

Juliette tossed her head and laughed. “Look, I’ve got machines down here that you can’t possibly—”

“And what good are they?” Jahns asked. “What do these machines do?”

“They keep this whole goddamned place running!” Juliette declared. “The oxygen you breathe? We recycle that down here. The toxins you exhale? We pump them back into the earth. You want me to write up a list of everything oil makes? Every piece of plastic, every ounce of rubber, all the solvents and cleaners, and I’m not talking about the power it generates, but everything else!”

“And yet it was all here before you were born,” Jahns pointed out.

“Well, it wouldn’t have lasted my lifetime, I’ll tell you that. Not in the state it was in.” She crossed her arms again and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t think you get what a mess we’d be in without these machines.”

“And I don’t think you get how pointless these machines are going to become without all these people.”

Juliette looked away. It was the first time Jahns had seen her flinch.

“Why don’t you ever visit your father?”

Juliette snapped her head around and looked at the other wall. She wiped some loose hair back from her forehead. “Go look at my work log,” she said. “Tell me when I’d fit it in.”

Before Jahns could reply, could say that it was family, that there’s always time, Juliette turned to face her. “Do you think I don’t care about people? Is that it? Because you’d be wrong. I care about every person in this silo. And the men and women down here, the forgotten floors of Mechanical,
this
is my family. I visit with them every day. I break bread with them several times a day. We work, live, and die alongside one another.” She looked to Marnes. “Isn’t that right? You’ve seen it.”

Marnes didn’t say anything. Jahns wondered if she was referring specifically to the “dying” part.

“Did you ask him why he never comes to see me? Because he has all the time in the world. He has
nothing
up there.”

“Yes, we met with him. Your father seemed like a very busy man. As determined as you.”

Juliette looked away.

“And as stubborn.” Jahns left the paperwork on the bed and went to stand by the door, just a pace away from Juliette. She could smell the soap in the younger woman’s hair. Could see her nostrils flare with her rapid, heavy breathing.

“The days pile up and weigh small decisions down, don’t they? That decision not to visit. The first few days slide by easy enough; anger and youth power them along. But then they pile up like unrecycled trash. Isn’t that right?”

Juliette waved her hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about days becoming weeks becoming months becoming years.” She almost said that she’d been through the same exact thing, was still piling them up, but Marnes was in the room, listening. “After a while, you’re staying mad just to justify an old mistake. Then it’s just a game. Two people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that chance—”

“It wasn’t like that,” Juliette said. “I don’t want your job. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of others who do.”

“If it’s not you, it’s someone I’m not sure I can trust. Not anymore.”

“Then give it to the next girl.” She smiled.

“It’s you or him. And I think he’ll be getting more guidance from the thirties than he will from me, or from the Pact.”

Juliette seemed to react to this. Her arms loosened across her chest. She turned and met Jahns’s gaze. Marnes was studying all this from across the room.

“The last sheriff, Holston, what happened to him?”