Wool (21 page)

“Do you have an appointment?” the man asked.

Juliette narrowed her eyes at the man.

“I’m the sheriff. Since when do I need appointments?” Again with the card, and again the gate buzzed at her. The young man did not move to help.

“Please do not do that,” he said.

“Look, son, I’m in the middle of an investigation here. And you’re impeding my progress.”

He smiled at her. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the unique position we maintain here and that your powers are—”

Juliette put her ID away and reached over the gate to grab the straps of his overalls with both hands. She pulled him almost clear over the gates, her arms bulging with the sinewy muscles that had freed countless bolts.

“Listen here, you blasted runt, I’m coming
through
these gates or I’m coming over them and then through
you
. I’ll have you know that I report directly to Bernard Holland, acting mayor, and your goddamned boss. Do I make myself clear?”

The kid’s eyes were wide and all pupil. He jerked his chin up and down.

“Then move it,” she said, letting go of his overalls with a shove.

He fumbled for his ID—swiped it through the scanner.

Juliette pushed through the spinning arms of the turnstile and past him. Then stopped.

“Uh, which way, exactly?”

The boy was still trying to get his ID back into his chest pocket, his hand trembling. “Th-thataway, ma’am.” He pointed to the right. “Second hall, take a left. Last office.”

“Good man,” she said. She turned and smiled to herself. It seemed that the same tone that got bickering mechanics to snap to back home worked here just as well. And she laughed to herself to think of the argument she had used: your boss is also my boss, so open up. But then, with eyes that wide and that much fear in his veins, she could’ve read him Mama Jean’s bread recipe in the same tone and gotten through the gates.

She took the second hallway, passing by a man and woman in IT silver as they walked the other way. They turned to watch her pass. At the end of the hall, she found offices on both sides and didn’t know which one was Scottie’s. She peeked first into the one with the open door, but the lights were off. She turned to the other one and knocked.

There was no answer at first, but the light at the bottom of the door dimmed, as if someone had walked across it.

“Who’s there?” a familiar voice whispered through the door.

“Open this damn thing,” Juliette said. “You know who this is.”

The lever dipped, the door clicking open. Juliette pushed her way inside, and Scottie shoved the door closed behind her, engaging the lock.

“Were you seen?” he asked.

She looked at him incredulously. “Was I seen? Of
course
I was seen. How do you think I got in? There’re people everywhere.”

“But did they see you come in
here
?” he whispered.

“Scottie, what the hell is going on?” Juliette was beginning to suspect she had hurried all this way for nothing. “You sent me a wire, which already seemed desperate enough, and you told me to come now. So here I am.”

“Where did you get this stuff?” he asked. Scottie grabbed a spool of printout from his desk and held it in trembling hands.

Juliette stepped beside him. She placed a hand on his arm and looked at the paper. “Just calm down,” she said quietly. She tried to read a few lines and immediately recognized the gibberish she had sent to Mechanical earlier that day. “How did you get this?” she asked. “I just wired this to Knox a few hours ago.”

Scottie nodded. “And he wired it to me. But he shouldn’t have. I can get into a lot of trouble for this.”

Juliette laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

She saw that he wasn’t.

“Scottie, you’re the one who pulled all this stuff for me in the first place.” She stepped back and looked hard at him. “Wait, you know what this nonsense is, right? You can read it?”

He bobbed his head. “Jules, I didn’t know what I was grabbing for you at the time. It was gigs of crap. I didn’t look at it. I just grabbed it and passed it on—”

“Why is this so dangerous?” she asked.

“I can’t even talk about it,” Scottie said. “I’m not cleaning material, Jules. I’m not.” He held out the scroll. “Here. I shouldn’t have even printed it, but I wanted to delete the wire. You’ve got to take it. Get it out of here. I can’t be caught with it.”

Juliette took the scroll, but just to calm him down. “Scottie, sit down. Please. Look, I know you’re scared, but I need you to sit and talk to me about this. It’s very important.”

He shook his head.

“Scottie, sit the hell down right now.” She pointed at the chair, and Scottie numbly obeyed. Juliette sat on the corner of his desk and noted that the cot at the back of the room had been recently slept on, and felt pity for the young man.

“Whatever this is”—she shook the roll of paper—“it’s what caused the last two cleanings.”

She told him this like it was more than a rapidly forming theory, like it was something she knew. Maybe it was the fear in his eyes that cemented the idea, or the need to act strong and sure to help calm him. “Scottie, I need to know what it is. Look at me.”

He did.

“Do you see this star?” She flicked it with her finger, causing a dull ring.

He nodded.

“I’m not your shift foreman anymore, lad. I’m the law, and this is very important. Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you can’t get into any trouble for answering my questions. In fact, you’re obliged to answer them.”

He looked up at her with a twinge of hope. He obviously didn’t know that she was making this up. Not lying—she would never turn Scottie in for all the silo—but she was pretty sure there was no such thing as immunity, not for anyone.

“What am I holding?” she asked, waving the scroll of printout.

“It’s a program,” he whispered.

“You mean like a timing circuit? Like a—?”

“No, for a computer. A programming language. It’s a—” He looked away. “I don’t want to say. Oh, Jules, I just want to go back to Mechanical. I want none of this to have happened.”

These words were like a splash of cold water. Scottie was more than frightened—he was terrified. For his
life
. Juliette got off the desk and crouched beside him, placed her hand on the back of his hand, which rested on his anxiously bouncing knee.

“What does the program do?” she asked.

He bit his lip and shook his head.

“It’s okay. We’re safe here. Tell me what it does.”

“It’s for a display,” he finally said. “But not for like a readout, or an LED, or a dot matrix. There are algorithms in here I recognize. Anyone would …”

He paused.

“Sixty-four-bit color,” he whispered, staring at her. “Sixty-four bit. Why would anyone need that much
color
?”

“Dumb it down for me,” Juliette said. Scottie seemed on the verge of going mad.

“You’ve seen it, right? The view up top?”

She dipped her head. “You know where I work.”

“Well, I’ve seen it too, back before I started eating every meal in here, working my fingers to the bone.” He rubbed his hands up through his shaggy, sandy-brown hair. “This program, Jules—what you’ve got, it could make something like that wallscreen look
real
.”

Juliette digested this, then laughed. “But wait, isn’t that what it does? Scottie, there are sensors out there. They just take the images they see, and then the screen has to display the view, right? I mean, you’ve got me confused, here.” She shook the printed scroll of gibberish. “Doesn’t this just do what I think it does? Put that image on the display?”

Scottie wrung his hands together. “You wouldn’t need anything like this. You’re talking about passing an image
through
. I could write a dozen lines of code to do that. No, this, this is about
making
images. It’s more complex.”

He grabbed Juliette’s arm.

“Jules, this thing can make brand-new views. It can show you anything you
like
.”

He sucked in his breath, and a slice of time hung in the air between them, a pause where hearts did not beat and eyes did not blink.

Juliette sat back on her haunches, balancing on the toes of her old boots. She finally settled her butt on the floor and leaned back against the metal paneling of his office wall.

“So now you see—” Scottie started to say, but Juliette held up her hand, hushing him. It had never occurred to her that the view could be fabricated. But why not? And what would be the point?

She imagined Holston’s wife discovering this. She must’ve been at least as smart as Scottie—she was the one who came up with the technique he had used to find this in the first place, right? What would she have done with this discovery? Say something out loud and cause a riot? Tell her husband, the sheriff? What?

Juliette could know only what she herself would do in that position, if she were almost convinced. She was by nature too curious a person to doubt what she might do. It would gnaw at her, like the rattling innards of a sealed machine or the secret workings of an unopened device. She would have to grab a screwdriver and a wrench and have a peek …

“Jules—”

She waved him off. Details from Holston’s folder flooded back. Notes about Allison, how she suddenly went crazy, almost out of nowhere. Her curiosity must have driven her there. Unless—unless Holston didn’t know. Unless it was all an act. Unless Allison had been shielding her husband from some horror with a mock veil of insanity.

But would it have taken Holston three years to piece together what she had figured out in a
week
? Or did he already know and it just took three years to summon the courage to go after her? Or did Juliette have an advantage he didn’t? She had Scottie. And she was, after all, following the bread crumbs of someone else following more bread crumbs, a much easier and more obvious trail.

She looked up at her young friend, who was peering worriedly down at her.

“You have to get those out of here,” he said, glancing at the printouts.

Juliette nodded. She pushed up from the floor and tucked the scroll into the breast of her overalls. It would have to be destroyed; she just wasn’t sure how.

“I deleted my copies of everything I got for you,” he said. “I’m done looking at them. And you should do the same.”

Juliette tapped her chest pocket, felt the hard bulge of the flash drive there.

“And Jules, can you do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“See if there’s any way I can transfer back to Mechanical, will you? I don’t want to be up here anymore.”

She nodded and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promised, feeling a knot in her gut for getting the poor kid involved at all.

The next morning, exhausted, Juliette arrived late at her desk, her legs and back sore from the climb down to IT and from not getting an ounce of sleep. She had spent the entire night tossing and turning, wondering if she’d discovered a box that was better left unopened, worried she might be raising questions that promised nothing but bad answers. If she went out into the cafeteria and looked in a direction she normally avoided, she would be able to see the last two cleaners lying in the crook of a hill, almost as if in one another’s arms. Did those two lovers throw themselves into the rotting wind over the very thing Juliette was now chasing? The fear she’d seen in Scottie’s eyes made her wonder if she wasn’t being careful enough. She looked across her desk at her new deputy, greener even at this job than she, as he transcribed data from one of the folders.

“Hey, Peter?”

He looked up from his keyboard. “Yeah?”

“You were in Justice before this, right? Shadowing a judge?”

He tilted his head to the side. “No, I was a court assistant. I actually shadowed in the mids’ deputy office until a few years ago. I wanted that job, but none came up.”

“Did you grow up there? Or the up top?”

“The mids.” His hands fell away from his keyboard to his lap. He smiled. “My dad was a plumber in the hydroponics. He passed away a few years ago. My mom, she works in the nursery.”

“Really? What’s her name?”

“Rebecca. She’s one of the—”

“I know her. She was shadowing when I was a kid. My father—”

“He works in the upper nursery, I know. I didn’t want to say anything—”

“Why not? Hey, if you’re worried about me playing favorites, I’m guilty. You’re my deputy now, and I’ll have your back.”

“No, it’s not that. I just didn’t want you to hold anything against me. I know you and your father don’t—”

Juliette waved him off. “He’s still my father. We just grew apart. Tell your mom I said hi.”

“I will.” Peter smiled and bent over his keyboard.

“Hey. I’ve got a question for you. Something I can’t figure.”

“Sure,” he said, looking up. “Go ahead.”

“Can you think of why it’s cheaper to porter a paper note to someone than it is to just wire them from a computer?”

“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “It’s a quarter chit per character to wire someone. That adds up!”

Juliette laughed. “No, I know what it costs. But paper isn’t cheap, either. And neither is porting. But it seems like sending a wire would be practically free, you know? It’s just information. It weighs nothing.”

He shrugged. “It’s been a quarter chit a character since I’ve been alive. I dunno. Besides, we’ve got a fifty-chit-per-day allowance from here, plus unlimited emergencies. I wouldn’t stress.”

“I’m not stressed, just confused. I mean, I understand why everyone can’t have radios like we carry, because only one person can transmit at a time, so we need the air open for emergencies, but you’d think we could all send and receive as many wires as we wanted.”

Peter propped his elbows up and rested his chin on his fists. “Well, think about the cost of the servers, the electricity. That means oil to burn and all the maintenance of the wires and cooling and whatnot. Especially if you have a ton of traffic. Factor that against pressing pulp on a rack, letting it dry, scratching some ink on it, and then having a person who’s already heading that way walk it up or down for you. No wonder it’s cheaper!”