Wool (19 page)

As her mind roamed, she glanced occasionally out the door, watching the clouds slide across the distant wallscreen. She debated with herself on whether they appeared light or dense, if tonight would be a good one for viewing stars. It was another guilt-ridden thought, but she felt powerfully alone, a woman who prided herself on needing no one.

She played some more with the maze of files as the light of an unseen sun diminished in the cafeteria, as two shifts of lunch and two shifts of dinner vibrated and then subsided around her, all the while watching the roiling sky and hoping, for no real logical reason, for another chance encounter with the strange star hunter from the night before.

And even sitting there, with the sounds and scents of everyone on the upper forty-eight eating, Juliette forgot to grab a bite for herself. It wasn’t until the second-shift staff was leaving, the lights cut down to quarter power, that Pam came in with a bowl of soup and a biscuit. Juliette thanked her and reached into her overalls for a few chits, but Pam refused. The young woman’s eyes—red from crying—drifted to Marnes’s empty chair, and Juliette realized the cafeteria staff had probably been as close to the deputy as anyone.

Pam left without a word, and Juliette ate with what little appetite she could manage. She eventually thought of one more search she could try on Holston’s data, a global spell-check to look for names that might offer clues, and eventually figured out how to run it. Meanwhile, her soup grew cold. While her computer began to churn through the hills of data, she took her bowl and a few folders and left her office to sit at one of the cafeteria tables near the wallscreen.

She was looking for stars on her own when Lukas appeared silently at her side. He didn’t say anything, just pulled up a chair, sat down with his board and paper, and peered up at the expansive view of the darkened outside.

Juliette couldn’t tell if he was being polite by honoring her silence, or if he was being rude by not saying hello. She finally settled on the former, and eventually the quiet felt normal. Shared. A peace at the end of a horrible day.

Several minutes passed. A dozen. There were no stars and nothing was said. Juliette held a folder in her lap, just to give her fingers something to do. There was a sound from the stairwell, a laughing group moving between the apartment levels below, and then a return to the quiet.

“I’m sorry about your partner,” Lukas finally said. His hands smoothed the paper on the board. He had yet to make a single mark or note.

“I appreciate that,” Juliette said. She wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was, but this seemed the least wrong. “I’ve been looking for stars but haven’t seen any,” she added.

“You won’t. Not tonight.” He waved his hand at the wallscreen. “These are the worst kinds of clouds.”

Juliette studied them, barely able to make them out with the last of the twilight’s distant glow. They looked no different to her than any others.

Lukas turned almost imperceptibly in his seat. “I have a confession, since you’re the law and all.”

Juliette’s hand groped for the star on her chest. She was often in danger of forgetting what she was.

“Yeah?”

“I knew the clouds were gonna be bad tonight. But I came up anyway.”

Juliette trusted the darkness to conceal her smile.

“I’m not sure the Pact has much to say on such duplicity,” she told him.

Lukas laughed. It was strange how familiar it already sounded, and how badly she needed to hear it. Juliette had a sudden urge to grab him, to tuck her chin into his neck, and to cry. She could almost feel her body begin to piece the moves together—even though her skin would not budge. It could never happen. She knew this, even as the sensation vibrated within her. It was just the loneliness, the horror of holding Marnes in her arms, of feeling that lifeless heft of a body that has lost whatever animates it. She was desperate for contact, and this stranger was the only person she knew little enough to want it from.

“What happens now?” he asked, his laughter fading.

Juliette almost blurted out, inanely,
Between
us?
but Lukas saved her.

“Do you know when the funeral will be? And where?” he asked.

She nodded in the darkness.

“Tomorrow. There’s no family to travel up, no investigation to make.” Juliette choked back the tears. “He didn’t leave a will, so they left it up to me to make arrangements. I decided to lay him to rest near the mayor.”

Lukas looked to the wallscreen. It was dark enough that the bodies of the cleaners couldn’t be seen, a welcome relief. “As he should be,” he said.

“I think they were lovers in secret,” Juliette blurted out. “If not lovers, then just as close.”

“There’s been talk,” he agreed. “What I don’t get is why keep it a secret. Nobody would’ve cared.”

Somehow, sitting in the darkness with a complete stranger, these things were more easily aired than in the down deep among friends.

“Maybe
they
would have minded people knowing,” she said, thinking out loud. “Jahns was married before. I suspect they chose to respect that.”

“Yeah?” Lukas scratched something on his paper. Juliette looked up but was sure there hadn’t been a star. “I can’t imagine loving in secret like that,” he said.

“I can’t imagine needing someone’s permission, like the Pact or a girl’s father, to be in love in the first place,” she replied.

“No? How else would it work? Just any two people any time they liked?”

She didn’t say.

“How would anyone ever enter the lottery?” he asked, persisting in the line of thought. “I can’t imagine it not being out in the open. It’s a celebration, don’t you think? There’s this ritual, a man asks a girl’s father for permission—”

“Well, aren’t you with anyone?” Juliette asked, cutting him off. “I mean … I’m just asking because it sounds like, like you have strong opinions but maybe haven’t—”

“Not yet,” he said, rescuing her again. “I have a little strength left yet for enduring my mom’s guilt. She likes to remind me every year how many lotteries I’ve missed out on, and what this has done to her overall chances for a bevy of grandchildren. As if I don’t know my statistics. But hey, I’m only twenty-five.”

“That’s all?” Juliette said.

“What about you?”

She nearly told him straightaway. Nearly blurted out her secret with almost no prompting. As if this man, this boy, a stranger to her, could be trusted.

“Never found the right one,” she lied.

Lukas laughed his youthful laugh. “No, I mean, how old are you? Or is that impolite?”

She felt a wave of relief. She thought he’d been asking her about being with anyone.

“Thirty-four,” she said. “And I’m told it’s impolite to ask, but I’ve never been one for rules.”

“Says our sheriff,” Lukas said, laughing at his own joke.

Juliette smiled. “I guess I’m still getting used to that.”

She turned back to the wallscreen, and they both enjoyed the silence that formed. It was strange, sitting with this man. She felt younger and somehow more secure in his presence. Less lonely, at least. She pegged him as a loner as well, an odd-sized washer that didn’t fit any standard bolt. And here he had been, at the extreme other end of the silo, searching for stars, while she’d been spending what spare time she could down in the mines, as far away as possible, hunting for pretty rocks.

“It’s not going to be a very productive night for either of us, looks like,” she eventually said, ending the silence, rubbing the unopened folder in her lap.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lukas told her. “That depends on what you came up here for.”

Juliette smiled. And across the wide room, barely audible, the computer on her desk beeped, a search routine having finally pawed through Holston’s data before spitting out its results.

The next morning, instead of climbing to her office, Juliette descended five flights to the upper dirt farm for Marnes’s funeral. There would be no folder for her deputy, no investigation, just the lowering of his old and tired body into the deep soil where it would decompose and feed the roots. It was a strange thought, to stand in that crowd and think of him as a folder or not. Less than a week on the job, and she already saw the manila jackets as places where ghosts resided. Names and case numbers. Lives distilled onto twenty or so sheets of recycled pulp paper, bits of string and darts of random color woven beneath the black ink in which their sad tale had been jotted.

The ceremony was long but didn’t feel so. The earth nearby was still mounded where Jahns had been buried. Soon, the two of them would intermingle inside the plants, and these plants would nourish the occupants of the silo.

Juliette accepted a ripe tomato as the priest and his shadow cycled among the thick crowd. The two of them, draped in red fabric, chanted as they went, their voices sonorous and complementing one another. Juliette bit into her fruit, allowing a polite amount of juice to spatter her overalls; chewed; and swallowed. She could tell the tomato was delicious, but only in a mechanical way. It was hard to truly enjoy it.

When it became time for the soil to be shoveled back into the hole, Juliette watched the crowd. Two people dead from the up top in less than a week. There had been two other deaths elsewhere in the silo, making it a very bad week.

Or good, depending on who you were. She noticed childless couples biting vigorously into their fruit, their hands intertwined, silently doing the math. Lotteries followed too closely after deaths for Juliette’s tastes. She always thought they should fall on the same dates in the year, just to look as though they were going to happen anyway, whether anyone died or not.

But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meant to hammer this home: the cycle of life is here; it is inescapable; it is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.

Before the hole was completely filled, members of the feast stepped up to the edge of the farm’s soil and tossed what remained of their fruit into the hole. Juliette stepped forward and added the rest of her tomato to the colorful hail of rind and pulp. An acolyte leaned on his too-large shovel and watched the last of the fruit fly. Those that missed, he knocked in with scoops of dark, rich soil, leaving a mound that would, in time and with a few waterings, settle.

After the funeral, Juliette began the climb back to her office. She could feel the flights of stairs in her legs, even though she prided herself on being in shape. But walking and climbing were different sorts of exercise. It wasn’t turning wrenches or loosening stubborn bolts, and the endurance was of a different kind than merely staying up and alert for an extra shift. She decided it was unnatural, this climbing. Humans weren’t meant for it. She doubted they were engineered to travel much beyond a single level of a silo. But then another porter flew down the steps past her, a smile of quick greeting on his fresh face, his feet dancing across steel treads, and she wondered if perhaps it was something that just took practice.

When she finally made it back to the cafeteria, it was lunchtime, and the room was buzzing with noisy chatter and the clinking of metal forks on metal plates. The pile of folded notes outside her office door had grown. There was a plant in a plastic bucket, a pair of shoes, a small sculpture made of colorful wire. Juliette paused over the collection. As Marnes didn’t have any family, she supposed it would be up to her to go through it all, to make sure the items went to those who would use them best. She bent down and picked up one of the cards. The writing was in unsure print, scrawled with crayon. She imagined the upper-grade school had spent craft time that day making cards for Deputy Marnes. This saddened Juliette more than any of the ceremonies. She wiped tears out of her eyes and damned the teachers who thought to get the kids involved in the nastiness of it all.

“Leave them out of it,” she whispered to herself.

She replaced the card and composed herself. Deputy Marnes would have liked to have seen this, she decided. He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.

Inside her office, she was surprised to find she had company. A stranger sat at Deputy Marnes’s desk. He looked up from the computer and smiled at her. She was about to ask who he was when Bernard—she refused to think of him as even
interim
mayor—stepped out of the holding cell, a folder in hand, smiling at Juliette.

“How were the services?” he asked.

Juliette crossed the office and snatched the folder out of his hand. “Please don’t tamper with anything,” she said.

“Tamper?” Bernard laughed and adjusted his glasses. “That’s a closed case. I was going to take it back to my offices and refile it.”

Juliette checked the folder and saw that it was Holston’s.

“You do know that you report to me, right? You were supposed to have at least glanced over the Pact before Jahns swore you in.”

“I’ll hold on to this, thanks.” Juliette left him by the open cell and went to her desk. She shoved the folder in the top drawer, checked that the data drive was still jutting out from her computer, and looked up at the guy across from her.

“And you are?”

He stood, and Deputy Marnes’s chair let out its customary squeak. Juliette tried to force herself not to think of it as his anymore.

“Peter Billings, ma’am.” He held out his hand. Juliette accepted it. “I was just sworn in myself.” He pinched the corner of his star and held it away from his overalls for her to see.

“Peter here was actually up for
your
job,” Bernard said.

Juliette wondered what he meant by that, or what the point was in even mentioning it. “Did you need something?” she asked Bernard. She waved at her desk, which had piled up the day before as she had spent most of her time managing Marnes’s affairs. “Because anything you need doing, I can add it to the bottom of one of these piles, here.”