Wool (55 page)

Lukas looked up at the overhead lights, steady and constant, unblinking. Why hadn’t she called?

His fingernail caught on one of the red marks and flaked a piece of it away. The wax stuck under his fingernail, the paper beneath still stained blood red. There was no taking it back, no cleaning it off, no making it whole again—

Gunfire erupted from the radio. Lukas went to the shelf where the little unit was mounted and listened to orders being barked, men being killed. His forehead went clammy with sweat. He knew how that felt, to pull that trigger, to end a life. He was conscious of an emptiness in his chest and a weakness in his knees. Lukas steadied himself with the shelf, palms slick, and looked at the transmitter hanging there inside its locked cage. How he longed to call those men and tell them not to do it, to stop all the insanity, the violence, the pointless killing. There could be a red X on them all.
This
was what they should fear, not each other.

He touched the metal cage that kept the radio controls locked away from him, feeling the truth of this and the silliness of broadcasting it to everyone else. It was naïve. It wouldn’t change anything. The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.

His hand drifted across the metal grating. He peered inside at one of the dials, the arrow pointing to the number “18.” There were fifty numbers in a dizzying circle, one for each silo. Lukas gave the cage a futile tug, wishing he could listen to something else. What was going on in all those other distant lands? Harmless things, probably. Jokes and chatter. Gossip. He could imagine the thrill of breaking in on one of those conversations and introducing himself to people who weren’t in the know. “I am Lukas from silo eighteen,” he might say. And they would want to know why silos had numbers. And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.

He left the radio alone, left it to its war, and walked past the desk and its eager pool of light spilling across that dreary book. He checked the tins for something that might hold his attention. He felt restless, pacing like a pig in its pen. He knew he should go for another jog among the servers, but that would mean showering, and somehow showering had begun to feel like an insufferable chore.

Crouching down at the far end of the shelves, he sorted through the loose, untinned stacks of paper there. Here was where the handwritten notes and the additions to the Legacy had amassed over the years. Notes to future silo leaders, instructions, manuals, mementos. He pulled out the generator control-room manual, the one Juliette had written. He had watched Bernard shelve the papers weeks ago, saying it might come in handy if the problems in the down deep went from bad to worse.

And the radio was blasting the worse.

Lukas went to his desk and bent the neck of the lamp so he could read the handwriting inside. There were days that he dreaded her calling, dreaded getting caught or Bernard answering or her asking him to do things he couldn’t, things he would never do again. And now, with the lights steady overhead and nothing buzzing, all he wanted was a call. His chest ached for it. Some part of him knew that what she was doing was dangerous, that something bad could’ve happened. She was living beneath a red X, after all, a mark that meant death for anyone below it.

The pages of the manual were full of notes she’d made with sharp lead. He rubbed one of them, feeling the grooves with his fingers. The actual content was inscrutable. Settings for dials in every conceivable order, valve positions, electrical diagrams. Riffling through the pages, he saw the manual as a project not unlike his star charts, created by a mind not unlike his own. This awareness made the distance between them worse. Why couldn’t they go back? Back to before the cleaning, before the string of burials. She would get off work every night and come sit with him while he gazed into the darkness, thinking and watching, chatting and waiting.

He turned the manual around and read some of the printed words from the play, which were nearly as indecipherable. In the margins sat notes from a different hand. Lukas assumed Juliette’s mother, or maybe one of the actors. There were diagrams on some pages, little arrows showing movement. An actor’s notes, he decided. Directions on a stage. The play must’ve been a souvenir to Juliette, this woman he had feelings for whose name was in the title.

He scanned the lines, looking for something poetic to capture his dark mood. As the text flowed by, his eyes caught a brief flash of familiar scrawl, not the actor’s. He flipped back, looking for it a page at a time until he found it.

It was Juliette’s hand, no mistaking. He moved the play into the light so he could read the faded marks:

George:

There you lay, so serene. The wrinkles in your brow and by your eyes, nowhere seen. A touch when others look away, look for a clue, but only I know what happened to you. Wait for me. Wait for me. Wait there, my dear. Let these gentle pleas find your ear, and bury them there, so this stolen kiss can grow on the quiet love that no other shall know.

Lukas felt a cold rod pierce his chest. He felt his longing replaced by a flash of temper. Who was this George? A childhood fling? Juliette was never in a sanctioned relationship; he had checked the official records the day after they’d met. Access to the servers afforded certain guilty powers. A crush, perhaps? Some man in Mechanical who was already in love with another girl? To Lukas, this would have been even worse. A man she longed for in a way she never would feel for him. Was that why she’d taken a job so far from home? To get away from the sight of this George she couldn’t have, these feelings she’d hidden in the margins of a play about forbidden love?

He turned and plopped down in front of Bernard’s computer. Shaking the mouse, he logged in to the upstairs servers remotely, his cheeks feeling flush with this sick feeling, this new feeling, knowing it was called jealousy but unfamiliar with the heady rush that came with it. He navigated to the personnel files and searched the down deep for “George.” There were four hits. He copied the ID number of each and put them in a text file, then fed them to the ID department. While the pictures of each popped up, he skimmed their records, feeling a little guilty for the abuse of power, a little worried about this discovery, and a lot less agonizingly bored having found something to do.

Only one of the Georges worked in Mechanical. Older guy. As the radio crackled behind him, Lukas wondered what would become of this man if he was still down there. There was a chance that he was no longer alive, that the records were a few weeks out of date, the blockade a barrier to the truth.

A couple of the hits were too young. One wasn’t even a year old yet. The other was shadowing a porter. It left one man, thirty-two years old. He worked in the bazaar, occupation listed as “other,” married with two kids. Lukas studied the blurry image of him from the ID office. Mustache. Receding hair. A sideways smirk. His eyes were too far apart, Lukas decided, his brows too dark and much too bushy.

Lukas held up the manual and read the poem again.

The man was dead, he decided.
Bury these pleas
.

He did another search, this time a global one that included the closed records. Hundreds of hits throughout the silo popped up, names from all the way back to the uprising. This did not dissuade Lukas. He knew Juliette was thirty-four, and so he gave her an eighteen-year window, figured if she were younger than sixteen when she’d had this crush, he wouldn’t stress, he would let go of the envious and shameful burn inside him.

From the list of Georges, there were only three deaths in the down deep for the eighteen-year period. One was in his fifties, the other in his sixties. Both died of natural causes. Lukas thought to cross-reference them with Juliette, see if there had been any work relations, if they shared a family tree perhaps.

And then he saw the third file.
This
was his George.
Her
George. Lukas knew it. Doing the math, Lukas saw he would be thirty-eight if he were still alive. He had died just over three years earlier, had worked in Mechanical, had
never married
.

He ran the ID search, and the picture confirmed his fears. He was a handsome man, a square jaw, a wide nose, dark eyes. He was smiling at the camera, calm, relaxed. It was hard to hate the man. Difficult, especially, since he was dead.

Lukas checked the cause and saw that it was investigated and then listed as an industrial accident.
Investigated
. He remembered hearing something about Jules when the up top got its new sheriff. Her qualifications had been a source of debate and tension, a wind of whispers. Especially around IT. But there had been chatter that she’d helped out on a case a long time ago, that this was why she’d been chosen.

This was the case. Was she in love with him before he died? Or did she fall for the memory of the man after? He decided it had to be the former. Lukas searched the desk for a charcoal, found one, and jotted down the man’s ID and case number. Here was something to occupy his time, some way of getting to know her better. It would distract him, at least, until she finally got around to calling him back. He relaxed, pulled the keyboard into his lap, and started digging.

Juliette shivered from the cold as she helped Solo to his feet. He wobbled and steadied himself, both hands on the railing.

“Do you think you can walk?” she asked. She kept an eye on the empty stairs spiraling down toward them, wary of whoever else was out there, whoever had attacked him and nearly gotten her killed.

“I think so,” he said. He dabbed at his forehead with his palm, studied the smear of blood he came away with. “Don’t know how far.”

She guided him toward the stairs, the smell of melted rubber and gasoline stinging her nose. The black undersuit was still damp against her skin, her breath billowed out before her, and whenever she stopped talking, her teeth chattered uncontrollably. She bent to retrieve her knife while Solo clutched the curved outer railing. Looking up, she considered the task before them. A straight run to IT seemed impossible. Her lungs were exhausted from the swim, her muscles cramped from the shivering and cold. And Solo looked even worse. His mouth was slack, his eyes drifting to and fro. He seemed barely cognizant of where he was.

“Can you make it to the deputy station?” she asked. Juliette had spent nights there on supply runs. The holding cell made for an oddly comfortable place to sleep. The keys were still in the box—maybe they could rest easy if they locked themselves inside and kept the key with them.

“That’s how many levels?” Solo asked.

He didn’t know the down deep of his own silo as well as Jules. He rarely risked venturing so far.

“A dozen or so. Can you make it?”

He lifted his boot to the first step, leaned into it. “I can try.”

They set off with only a knife between them, which Juliette was lucky to have at all. How it had survived her dark pull through Mechanical was a mystery. She held it tightly, the handle cold, her hand colder. The simple cooking utensil had become her security totem, had replaced her watch as a necessary thing she must always have with her. As they made their way up the stairs, its handle clinked against the inner railing each time she reached over to steady herself. She kept her other arm around Solo, who struggled up each step with grunts and groans.

“How many of them do you think there are?” she asked, watching his footing and then glancing nervously up the stairway.

Solo grunted. “Shouldn’t be any.” He wobbled a little, but Juliette steadied him. “All dead. Everyone.”

They stopped to rest at the next landing. “
You
made it,” she pointed out. “All these years, and you survived.”

He frowned, wiped his beard with the back of his hand. He was breathing hard. “But I’m Solo,” he said. He shook his head sadly. “They were all gone. All of them.”

Juliette peered up the shaft, up the gap between the stairs and the concrete. The dim green straw of the stairwell rose into a tight darkness. She pinned her teeth together to keep them from chattering while she listened for a sound, for any sign of life. Solo staggered ahead for the next flight of stairs. Juliette hurried beside him.

“How well did you see him? What do you remember?”

“I remember— I remember thinking he was just like me.”

Juliette thought she heard him sob, but maybe it was the exertion from tackling more of the steps. She looked back at the door they were passing, the interior dark, no power being leached from IT. Were they passing Solo’s assailant? Were they leaving some living ghost behind?

She powerfully hoped so. They had so much further to go, even to the deputy station, much less to anyplace she might call home.

They trudged in silence for a level and a half, Juliette shivering and Solo grunting and wincing. She rubbed her arms now and then, could feel the sweat from the climb and from helping to steady him. It was nearly enough to warm her but for the damp undersuit, and she was so hungry by the time they cleared three levels that she thought her body was simply going to give out. It needed fuel, something to burn and keep itself warm.

“One more level and I’m going to need to stop,” she told Solo. He grumbled his agreement. It felt good to have the reward of a rest as their goal—the steps were an easier climb when they were countable, finite. At the landing of one-thirty-two, Solo used the railing to lower himself to the ground, hand over hand like the bars of a ladder. When his butt hit the decking, he laid out supine and folded his hands over his face.

Juliette hoped it was nothing more than a concussion. She’d seen her fair share of them working around men who were too tough to wear helmets—but not so tough when a tool or a steel beam caught them on the head. There was nothing for Solo but to rest.