Wool (23 page)

Rather than chase pointless sleep, she keyed the monitor awake to check the work logs for the next day, anything to get her mind off the past week. But before she could open her task manager, she saw that she had over a dozen wires in her inbox. She’d never seen so many. Usually people just slid recycled notes under each other’s doors—but then, she had been a long way away when the news of her arrest had hit, and she hadn’t been able to get to a computer since.

She logged on to her e-mail account and pulled up the most recent wire. It was from Knox. Just a semicolon and a parenthesis—a half-chit smile.

Juliette couldn’t help it; she smiled back. She could still smell Knox on her skin and realized, as far as the big brute was concerned, that all the troubles and problems percolating in whispers down the stairwell about her paled in comparison to her return. To him, the worst thing that had happened in the last week was probably the challenge of replacing her on first shift.

Jules went to the next message, one from the third-shift foreman welcoming her home—probably because of the extra time his crew was putting in to help cover her old shift.

There was more. A day’s pay of a note from Shirly, wishing her well on her journey. These were all notes they had hoped she would receive up top, to make the trip down easier, hoping she wouldn’t loathe herself or feel humiliated, or even a failure. Juliette felt tears well up at how considerate it all was. She had an image of her desk, Holston’s desk, with nothing but unplugged wires snaking across its surface, her computer removed. There was no way she could’ve gotten these messages when they were meant to be read. She wiped her eyes and tried not to think of the wired notes as money wasted, but rather as extravagant tokens of her friendships in the down deep.

Reading each one, trying to hold it together, made the last message she came to doubly jarring. It was paragraphs long. Juliette assumed it was an official document, maybe a list of her offenses, a formal ruling against her. She had seen such messages only from the mayor’s office, usually on holidays, notes that went out to every silo member. But then she saw that it was from Scottie.

Juliette sat up straight and tried to clear her head. She started from the beginning, damning her blurred vision.

J—

I lied. Couldn’t delete this stuff. Found more. That tape I got you? Your joke was truth. And the program—NOT for big screen. Pxl density not right. 32,768 x 8,192! Not sure what’s that size. 8’ x 2’? So many pxls if so.

Putting more together. Don’t trust porters, so wiring this. Screw cost, wire me back. Need transfr to Mech. Not safe here.

—S

Juliette read it a second time, crying now. Here was the real voice of a ghost warning her of something, all of it too late. And it wasn’t the voice of someone who was planning his own death—she was sure of that. She checked the time stamp of the wire; it was sent before she had even arrived back at her office the day before, before Scottie had died.

Before he had been
killed,
she corrected herself. They must have found him snooping, or maybe her visit had alerted them. She wondered what IT could see, if they could break into her wire account, even. They must not have yet, or the message wouldn’t have been there, waiting for her.

She leapt suddenly from her bed and grabbed one of the folded notes by the door. Digging a charcoal from her daypack, she sat back down on the bed. She copied the entire wire, every odd spelling, double-checking each number, and then deleted the message. She had chills up and down her arms by the time she finished, as if some unseen person was racing toward her, hoping to break into her computer before she dispensed with the evidence. She wondered if Scottie had been cautious enough to have deleted the note from his sent wires, and assumed, if he’d been thinking clearly, that he would.

She sat back on her bed, holding the copied note, thoughts about the work log for the next day gone. Instead, she studied the sinister mess revolving around her, spiraling through the heart of the silo. Things were bad, from top to bottom. A great set of gears had been thrown out of alignment. She could hear the noise from the past week, this thumping and clanging, this machine lumbering off its mounts and leaving bodies in its wake.

And Juliette was the only one who could hear it. She was the only one who knew. And she didn’t know who she could trust to help set things right. But she did know this: it would require a diminishing of power to align things once again. And there would be no way to call what happened next a “holiday.”

Juliette showed up at Walker’s electronics workshop at five, worried she might find him asleep on his cot, but smelling instead the distinctive odor of vaporized solder wafting down the hallway. She knocked on the open door as she entered, and Walker looked up from one of his many green electronics boards, corkscrews of smoke rising from the tip of his soldering iron.

“Jules!” he shouted. He lifted the magnifying lens off his gray head and set it and the soldering iron down on the steel workbench. “I heard you were back. I meant to send a note, but …” He waved around at the piles of parts with their work-order tags dangling from strings. “Super busy,” he explained.

“Forget it,” she said. She gave Walker a hug, smelling the electrical-fire scent on his skin that reminded her so much of him. And of Scottie. “I’m going to feel guilty enough taking some of your time with this,” she said.

“Oh?” He stepped back and studied her, his bushy white brows and wrinkled skin furrowed with worry. “You got something for me?” He looked her up and down for something broken, a habit formed from a lifetime of being brought small devices that needed repairing.

“I actually just wanted to pick your brain.” She sat down on one of his workbench stools, and Walker did the same.

“Go ahead,” he said. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, and Juliette saw how old Walker had become. She remembered him without so much white in his hair, without the wrinkles and splotchy skin. She remembered him with his shadow.

“It has to do with Scottie,” she warned him.

Walker turned his head to the side and nodded. He tried to say something, tapped his fist against his chest a few times and cleared his throat. “Damn shame,” was all he could manage. He peered down at the floor for a moment.

“It can wait,” Juliette told him. “If you need time—”

“I
convinced
him to take that job,” Walker said, shaking his head. “I remember when the offer came, being scared he’d turn it down. Because of me, you know? That he’d be too afraid of me bein’ upset at him for leaving, that he might just stay forever, so I urged him to take it.” He looked up at her, his eyes shining. “I just wanted him to know he was free to choose. I didn’t mean to push him away.”

“You didn’t,” Juliette said. “Nobody thinks that, and neither should you.”

“I just don’t figure he was happy up there. That weren’t his home.”

“Well, he was too smart for us. Don’t forget that. We always said that.”

“He loved you,” Walker said, and wiped his eyes. “Damn, how that boy looked up to you.”

Juliette felt her own tears welling up again. She reached into her pocket and brought out the wire she’d transcribed onto the back of the note. She had to remind herself why she was there, to hold it together.

“Just don’t seem like him to take the easy way—” Walker muttered.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Walker, I need to discuss some things with you that can’t leave this room.”

He laughed. Mostly, it seemed, to keep from sobbing. “Like I ever leave this room,” he said.

“Well, it can’t be discussed with anyone else. No one. Okay?”

He bobbed his head.

“I don’t think Scottie killed himself.”

Walker threw up his hands to cover his face. He bent forward and shook as he started to cry. Juliette got off her stool and went to him, put her arm around his trembling back.

“I knew it,” he sobbed into his palms. “I knew it, I knew it.” He looked up at her, tears coursing through several days of white stubble. “Who did this? They’ll pay, won’t they? Tell me who did it, Jules.”

“Whoever it was, I don’t think they had far to travel,” she said.

“IT? Goddamn them.”

“Walker, I need your help sorting this out. Scottie sent me a wire not long before he … well, before I think he was killed.”

“Sent you a wire?”

“Yeah. Look, I met with him earlier that day. He asked me to come down to see him.”

“Down to IT?”

She nodded. “I’d found something in the last sheriff’s computer—”

“Holston.” He dipped his head. “The last cleaner. Yeah, Knox brought me something from you. A program, looked like. I told him Scottie would know better than anyone, so we forwarded it along.”

“Well, you were right.”

Walker wiped his cheeks and bobbed his head. “He was smarter than any of us.”

“I know. He told me this thing, that it was a program, one that made very detailed images. Like the images we see of the outside—”

She waited a beat to see how he would respond. It was taboo even to use the word in most settings. Walker was unmoved. As she had hoped, he was old enough to be beyond childhood fears—and probably lonely and sad enough not to care anyway.

“But this wire he sent, it says something about p-x-l’s being too dense.” She showed him the copy she’d made. Walker grabbed his magnifiers and slipped the band over his forehead.

“Pixels,” he said, sniffing. “He’s talking about the little dots that make up an image. Each one is a pixel.” He took the note from her and read some more. “He says it’s not safe there.” Walker rubbed his chin and shook his head. “Damn them.”

“Walker, what kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” Juliette looked around at all the boards, displays, and coils of loose wire strewn about his workshop. “Do you have anything like that?”

“Eight by two? Maybe a readout, like on the front of a server or something. Be the right size to show a few lines of text, internal temps, clock cycles …” He shook his head. “But you’d never make one with this kind of pixel density. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t make sense. Your eye couldn’t make out one pixel from its neighbor if it were right at the end of your nose.”

He rubbed his stubble and studied the note some more. “What’s this nonsense about the tape and the joke? What’s that mean?”

Juliette stood beside him and looked over the note. “I’ve been wondering about that. He must mean the heat tape he scored for me a while back.”

“I think I remember something about that.”

“Well, do you remember the problems we had with it? The exhaust we wrapped in it almost caught fire. The stuff was complete crap. I think he sent a note asking if the tape had gotten here okay, and I sorta recall writing back that it did, and thanks, but the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been
engineered
to.”

“That was your joke?” Walker swiveled in his stool and rested his elbows on the workbench. He kept peering over the copied charcoal letters like they were the face of Scottie, his little shadow coming back one last time to tell him something important.

“And he says my joke was truth,” Juliette said. “I’ve been up the last three hours thinking about this, dying to talk to someone.”

Walter looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised.

“I’m not a sheriff, Walk. Never born to be one. Shouldn’t have gone. But I know, as sure as everyone, that what I’m about to say should send me to cleaning …”

Walker immediately slid off his stool and walked away from her. Juliette damned herself for coming, for opening her mouth, for not just clocking into first shift and saying to hell with it all—

Walker shut the door to his workshop and locked it. He looked at her and lifted a finger, went to his air compressor and pulled out a hose. Then he flipped the unit on so the motor would start to build up pressure, which just leaked out the open nozzle in a steady, noisy hiss. He returned to the bench, the clatter from the noisy compressor engine awful, and sat down. His wide eyes begged her to continue.

“There’s a hill up there with a crook in it,” she told him, having to raise her voice a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen this hill, but there are two bodies nestled together in it, man and wife. If you look hard, you can see a dozen shapes like this all over the landscape, all the cleaners, all in various states of decay. Most are gone, of course. Rotted to dust over the long years.”

Walker shook his head at the image she was forming.

“How many years have they been improving these suits so the cleaners have a chance? Hundreds?”

He nodded.

“And yet nobody gets any further. And never once have they
not
had enough time to clean.”

Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”

Juliette pursed her lips. “That’s what I’m thinking. But not just the tape. Remember those seals from a few years back? The ones from IT that went into the water pumps, that were delivered to us by accident?”

“So we’ve been making fun of IT for being fools and dullards—”

“But
we’re
the fools,” Juliette said. And it felt so damned good to say it to another human being. So good for these new ideas of hers to swim in the air. And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.

“You think they have us down here to be near the oil?” she asked Walker. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. I think they’re keeping anyone with a lick of mechanical sense as far from them as possible. There’re two supply chains, two sets of parts being made, all in complete secrecy. And who questions them? Who would risk being put to cleaning?”

“You think they killed Scottie?” he asked.

Juliette nodded. “Walk, I think it’s worse than that.” She leaned closer, the compressor rattling, the hiss of released air filling the room. “I think they kill
everybody
.”