Wool (16 page)

Juliette had read the Law portion of the Pact twice in preparation for the job. Lying in her bed in the down deep, her body exhausted from the work of aligning the primary generator, she had studied the proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogous to some part of her old job as mechanic. Approaching the scene of a crime or an active dispute was no different from walking into a pump room where something was broken. Someone or something was always at fault. She knew to listen, to observe, to ask questions of anyone who could have had anything to do with the faulty equipment or the tools they had used, following a chain of events all the way down to the bedrock itself. There were always confounding variables—you couldn’t adjust one dial without sending something else off-kilter—but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knowing what was important and what could be ignored.

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

She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading closed in bold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped through the notes. Many of them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward-slanting print she recognized from just about everything 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 series of unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, gave birth to old pains. 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 offset the hollowness 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 exhaustion, offset slightly by the knowledge that a rattle had been wrenched away.

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

A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall of dirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot seemed to shiver in the wind as it traveled toward sensors she had been trained to think of as important, sensors that gave her a view of the outside world she had 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 to observe it firsthand. This up top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled its way to the down deep, where
true
cleaning kept the silo humming and everyone alive. But even down there, her friends in Mechanical had been told since birth not to speak of the outside. It was an easy enough task when you never saw it, but now, walking by it to work, sitting before this view of a vastness one’s brain could not comprehend, she saw how the inevitable questions must have surfaced. She saw why it might be important to squelch certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questions foamed 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 last days as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of the piece 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’s doom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping the page over.

Underneath was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service to the silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone who was 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,
still there
. There was never the threat of her not being able to change her mind. But it was different with Holston and Jahns: they were gone forever. And Juliette was so used to rebuilding devices thought beyond repair that she felt if she concentrated enough, or performed the correct series of tasks in the right order, she should be able to bring the deceased back, be able to re-create their wasted forms. But she knew that wasn’t the case.

She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very first time. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks could asphyxiate 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 those hills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in the distance? What for? And most vexing of all: what had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife for that 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 to them rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a man she had loved, whose death she had helped unravel in the down deep. In the other lived a man she had respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed over the two folders, especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studying the details of Mayor Jahns’s death, going over the depositions, convinced he had a killer but with no evidence to corner the man.

Someone knocked on the bars above Juliette’s head. She looked up, expecting to find Deputy Marnes 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 protruding gut, glasses perched at the end of his nose, his silver IT overalls snugly 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 and reached 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 wrangling. 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 acting mayor, at least until we can arrange a vote.”

“I’d heard,” Juliette said coolly. She wondered how this man had gotten past Marnes’s desk without some sort of violence. Here was their prime suspect in Jahns’s death—only he was on the wrong side of the bars.

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

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

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

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

“I wouldn’t count too much on that,” Bernard said. He flashed his crooked teeth again. “The word down below is that the poor mayor, rest her soul, plumb wore herself out with that crazy climb of hers. 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 knuckles on both hands white from making fists.

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

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

“Oh my.” His eyes widened over a limp smile. “So the rumors are true. Who would do such a thing?” The smile grew, and Juliette realized she was dealing with a man who felt himself invulnerable. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered a dirty and outsized ego such as his. Her time as 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. After a pause, she added: “
Mayor
.”

The crooked smile faded. Bernard let go of the bars and stepped back, his hands tucking into his overalls. “Well, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name. I’m aware that you haven’t spent much time out of the down deep—and to be honest I’ve stayed much too insulated in my own office—but things are changing around here. As mayor and sheriff, we will be working together a lot, you and me.” 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 gouged into her palm, cutting her and drawing blood. A few drops caught the light on the edge of the brass, looking like wet rust. Juliette wiped the star clean on her new overalls, a habit born of her previous life among the sludge and grease. She cursed herself when she saw the dark spot the blood had left on her new clothes. Turning the star over, she peered at the stamped insignia on its face. There were the three triangles of the silo and the word
Sheriff
arched over the top of them. She turned it over again and fingered the clasp that held the sharp spike of the pin. She opened the clasp and let the pin hinge free. The stiff needle had been bent and straightened in several places over the years, giving it a hand-forged look. It wobbled on its hinge—echoing her hesitation to wear the thing.

But as Bernard’s footsteps receded, as she heard him say something indecipherable to Deputy Marnes, she felt a new resolve steel her nerves. It was like encountering a rusted bolt that refused to budge. Something about that intolerable stiffness, that reluctance 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 them with grease and with fire, with penetrating oil and with brute strength. With enough planning and persistence, they always gave. Eventually.

She forced the wavy 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 her attention, and Juliette felt, for the first time since arriving at the up top, that this was her job. Her work 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 shaft spin in such perfect alignment that one couldn’t tell if it was moving at all. And now she had traveled to the up top to find here the rattle and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a misalignment that was eating 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 even have been looking at but couldn’t be without, and pulled the cell door open. Rather than turn to her office, she first walked the other way toward the yellow steel entrance to the airlock. Peering through the triple-paned glass for the dozenth time in several days, she imagined the man she had replaced standing 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 been mere fear, for Juliette had tasted that well enough. It had to be something beyond that, a wholly unique sensation, the calm beyond the pain, or the numbness past the terror. Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.

It was the same as color. You could describe a new color only in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn’t create the strange out of nothing. So maybe it was only the 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 why they did what they did, why they left a shiny and polished gift to those who had exiled them—but that 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 reaper. Wasn’t it enough to know 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 taboos: not that people couldn’t pine for the outside world, but that they weren’t even allowed to commiserate with the cleaners during the weeks after, to wonder what they had suffered, to properly express their thanks or regrets.