Wool (27 page)

And then, after some consideration:

“I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

It was the morning of the worst cleaning of Lukas’s life—and for once he considered going into work, ignoring the paid holiday, to pretend it was a day like any other. He sat at the foot of his bed as he worked up the courage to move, one of his many star charts in his lap. Lightly with his fingers, so as not to smear the marks away, he caressed the charcoal outline of one star in particular.

It wasn’t a star like the others. Those were simple dots on a meticulous grid with details of date sighted, location, and intensity. This wasn’t that kind of star—not one that lasted nearly so long. It was the five-pointed kind, the outline of a sheriff’s badge. He remembered drawing the shape while she was talking to him one night, the steel on her chest glowing faintly as it caught the weak light from the stairwell. He remembered her voice being magical, the way she carried herself mesmerizing, and her arrival into his boring routine had been as unexpected as the parting of clouds.

He also remembered how she had turned away from him in her cell two nights ago, had tried to save his feelings by pushing him away.

Lukas had no more tears. He had spent most of the night shedding them for this woman he hardly knew. And now he wondered what he would do with his day, with his life. The thought of her out there, doing anything for them—cleaning—made him sick. He wondered if that was why he’d had no appetite for two days. Some deep part of his gut must have known he’d never keep anything down, even if he forced himself to eat.

He set the star chart aside and dropped his face into his palms. He rested there, so tired, trying to convince himself to just get up and go to work. If he went to work, at least he’d be distracted. He tried to remember where he’d left off in the server room last week. Was it the number eight tower that had gone down again? Sammi had suggested he swap out the control board, but Lukas had suspected a bad cable. That’s what he’d been doing, he remembered now: toning out the Ethernet runs. It’s what he should have been doing right then, that very day. Anything but sitting around on a holiday, feeling like he could be physically ill over a woman about whom he’d done little more than tell his mother.

Lukas stood and shrugged on the same pair of overalls he’d worn the day before. He remained there a moment, staring at his bare feet, wondering why he’d gotten up. Where was he going? His mind was completely blank, his body numb. He wondered if he could stand there, unmoving, his stomach twisted in knots, for the rest of his life. Someone would eventually find him, wouldn’t they? Dead and stiff, standing upright, a statue of a corpse.

He shook his head and these black thoughts loose and looked for his boots.

He found them; it was an accomplishment. Lukas had done something by getting himself dressed.

He left his room and ambled toward the landing, weaving around kids squealing from another day off school, parents trying to corral them and get their boots and overalls on. The commotion was little more than background noise for Lukas. It was a hum, like the aches in his legs from the long climb down to see her and the even longer climb back up. He stepped out onto the apartment’s landing and felt a habitual tug upward toward the cafeteria. All he could think about was all he had thought of for the past week: making it through another day so he could go up top for the chance to see her.

It suddenly occurred to Lukas that he still could. He wasn’t one for sunrises—he much preferred the twilight and the stars—but if he wanted to see her, all he had to do was climb to the cafeteria and scan the landscape. There would be a new body there, a new suit with the shine still on it glimmering in whatever weak rays the sun dribbled through those blasted clouds.

He could see the image clearly in his head: her uncomfortable sprawl—legs twisted, arm pinned, helmet turned to the side, gazing back at the silo. Sadder still, he saw himself decades later, a lonely old man sitting in front of that gray wallscreen and drawing not star charts but landscapes. The same landscapes over and over, looking up at a wasting might-have-been, sketching that same still pose while weeping tears that dripped and turned charcoal to mud.

He would be like Marnes, that poor man. And thinking of the deputy, who died with no one to bury him, it reminded Lukas of the last thing Juliette had told him. She had begged him to find someone, to not be like her, to never be alone.

He gripped landing fifty’s cool steel railing and leaned over. Looking down, he could watch the stairwell drill its way deep into the earth. The landing for fifty-six was visible below, the several landings between jutting off at unseen angles. It was hard to gauge the distance but he figured it was more than enough. No need to walk down to eighty-two, which most jumpers preferred for its long clear path down to ninety-nine.

Suddenly, he saw himself in flight, tumbling down, arms and legs splayed. He reckoned he would just miss the landing. One of the railings would catch him and saw him near in half. Or maybe if he jumped out a little further, maybe if he aimed his head, he could make it quick.

He straightened, feeling a twinge of fear and a rush of adrenaline from picturing the fall, the end, so vividly. He glanced around and checked the morning traffic to see if anyone was watching him. He had seen other adults peer over railings before. He’d always assumed bad thoughts were going through their heads. Because he knew, growing up in the silo, that only children dropped physical things from the landings. By the time you got older, you knew to keep a grip on all that you could. Eventually, it was something else that slipped away, something else you lost that tumbled down through the heart of the silo, that made you ponder leaping after—

The landing shivered with the beat of a hurrying porter; the sound of bare feet slapping against steel treads came next and spiraled closer. Lukas slid away from the railing and tried to focus on what he was doing that day. Maybe he should just crawl back into bed and sleep, kill some hours with unconsciousness.

As he attempted to summon some sliver of motivation, the speeding porter flew past, and Lukas caught a glimpse of the boy’s face twisted in consternation. Even as he sped out of sight—his pace swift and reckless—the image of his worry remained vividly lodged in Lukas’s mind.

And Lukas knew. As the rapid patter of the boy’s feet wound deeper into the earth, he knew something had happened that morning, something up top, something newsworthy about the cleaning.

A seed of hope. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loath to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout. Maybe the cleaning never happened. Was it possible her banishment had been reconsidered? The people of Mechanical had sent up a petition. Hundreds of daring signatures, risking their own necks to save hers. Had the mad gesture from the down deep worn the judges down?

That tiny seed of hope sprang roots. It grew vinelike through Lukas’s chest, filling him with an urgency to run up and see for himself. He left the railing, and the dream of leaping after his worries, and pushed his way through the morning crowd. Whispers, he noticed, were already foaming in the porter’s wake. He wasn’t the only one who had noticed.

As he joined the up-bound traffic, he realized the aches in his legs from the days before had vanished. He prepared to pass the slow-moving family in front of him—when he heard the loud squawk of a radio behind him.

Lukas turned to find Deputy Marsh a few treads back fumbling for the radio on his hip, a small cardboard box clutched to his chest, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Lukas stopped and held the railing, waiting for the mids deputy to reach him.

“Marsh!”

The deputy finally got the volume down on his radio and glanced up. He nodded to Lukas. The both of them squeezed against the railing as a worker and his shadow passed them, heading upward.

“What’s the news?” Lukas asked. He knew the deputy well, and he knew he might spill it for free.

Marsh swiped his forehead and moved the box into the crook of his other arm. “That Bernard is whoopin’ my ass this mornin’,” he complained. “Done climbed
enough
this week!”

“No, what of the
cleaning
?” Lukas asked. “A porter just hurried by like he’d seen a ghost.”

Deputy Marsh glanced up the steps. “I was told to bring her things to thirty-four as quick as grease. Hank nearly killed himself bringing ’em partway up to me.” He started up the stairs as if he couldn’t afford to stay. “Look, I’ve gotta keep movin’ if I wanna keep my job.”

Lukas held his arm, and traffic swelled below them as annoyed climbers squeezed past and against the occasional traveler heading down. “Did the cleaning go through or not?” Lukas demanded.

Marsh sagged against the railing. Quiet chatter popped through his radio.

“No,” he whispered, and Lukas felt as though he could fly. He could fly straight up the space between the stairs and the concrete heart of the silo, could soar around the landings, could go fifty levels at a leap—

“She went out, but she didn’t clean,” Marsh said, his voice low but laced with words sharp enough to pierce Lukas’s dreams. “She wandered over them hills—”

“Wait. What?”

Marsh nodded, and sweat dripped from the deputy’s nose. “Plumb out of sight,” he hissed, like a radio turned down low. “Now I’ve got to get her things up to Bernar—”

“I’ll do it,” Lukas said, reaching out his hands. “I’m going to thirty-four anyway.”

Marsh shifted the box. The poor deputy seemed liable to collapse at any moment. Lukas begged him, just as he had two days earlier in order to see Juliette in her cell. “Let me take them up for you,” he said. “You know Bernard won’t mind. He and I are good friends, just like you and I have always been …”

Deputy Marsh wiped his lip and nodded ever so slightly, thinking on this.

“Look, I’m going up anyway,” Lukas said. He found himself slowly taking the box from an exhausted Marsh, even though the waves of emotion surging through his own body made it difficult to focus. The traffic on the stairs had become background noise. The idea that Juliette might still be in the silo had slipped away, but the news that she hadn’t cleaned, that she had made it over the hills—this filled him with something else. It touched the part of him that yearned to map the stars. It meant no one would ever have to watch her waste away.

“You’ll be careful with that,” Marsh said. His eyes were on the box, now tucked into Lukas’s arms.

“I’ll guard it with my life,” Lukas told him. “Trust me.”

Marsh nodded to let him know he did. And Lukas hurried up the stairs, ahead of those rising to celebrate the cleaning, the weight of Juliette’s belongings rattling softly in a box tucked tightly against his chest.

Walker the electrician bent over a cluttered workbench and adjusted his magnifier. The great bulbous lens was attached to his head with a hoop that might’ve been uncomfortable had he not been wearing it for most of his sixty-two years. As he pushed the glass into position, the small black chip on the green electronics board came into crystal focus. He could see each of the silver metal legs bent out from its body like the limbs of a spider, the tiny feet seemingly trapped in silver puddles of frozen steel.

With the tip of his finest soldering iron, Walker prodded a spot of silver while he worked the suction bulb with his foot. The metal around the chip’s tiny foot melted and was pulled through a straw, one little leg of sixteen free.

He was about to move to the other—he had stayed up all night pulling fried chips to distract his mind from other things—when he heard the recognizable patter of that new porter skittering down his hall.

Walker dropped the board and hot iron on the workbench and hurried to his door. He held the jamb and leaned out as the kid ran past.

“Porter!” he yelled, and the boy reluctantly stopped. “What news, boy?”

The kid smiled, revealing the whites of youth. “I’ve got
big
news,” he said. “Cost you a chit, though.”

Walker grunted with disgust but dug into his coveralls. He waved the kid over. “You’re that Sampson boy, right?”

The kid bobbed his head, his hair dancing around his youthful face.

“Shadowed under Gloria, didn’t you?”

The kid nodded again as his eyes followed the silver chit drawn from Walker’s rattling pockets.

“You know, Gloria used to take pity on an old man with no family and no life. Trusted me with news, she did.”

“Gloria’s dead,” the boy said, lifting his palm.

“That she is,” Walker said with a sigh. He dropped the chit into the child’s outstretched palm, then waved his aged and spotted own for the news. He was dying to know everything and would have gladly paid ten chits. “The details, child. Don’t skip a one.”

“No cleaning, Mr. Walker!”

Walker’s heart missed a beat. The boy turned his shoulder to run on.

“Stay, boy! What do you mean, no cleaning? She’s been set free?”

The porter shook his head. His hair was long, wild, and seemingly built for flying up and down the staircase. “Nosir. She
refused
!”

The child’s eyes were electric, his grin huge with the possession of such knowledge. No one had ever refused to clean in his lifetime. In Walker’s, either. Maybe not ever. Walker felt a surge of pride in his Juliette.

The boy waited a moment. He seemed eager to run off.

“Anything else?” Walker asked.

Samson nodded and glanced at Walker’s pockets.

Walker let out a long sigh of disgust for what had become of this generation. He dug into his pocket with one hand and waved impatiently with the other.

“She’s
gone,
Mr. Walker!”

He snatched the chit from Walker’s palm.