Wool (6 page)

“You know,” she told Marnes, “we could do this different this time. You could let me promote you to sheriff, hire yourself a deputy, and do this proper.”

Marnes laughed. “I’ve been deputy almost as long as you’ve been mayor, ma’am. Don’t figure on being nothing else but dead one day.”

Jahns nodded. One of the things she loved about having Marnes around was that his thoughts could be so black as to make hers shine gray. “I fear that day is rapidly approaching for us both,” she said.

“Truer than true, I reckon. Never figured to outlive so many. Sure as sin don’t see me outliving you.” Marnes rubbed his mustache and studied the view of the outside. Jahns smiled at him, opened the folder on top, and studied the first bio.

“That’s three decent candidates,” Marnes said. “Just like you asked for. Be happy to work with any of them. Juliette, I think she’s in the middle there, would be my first pick. Works down in Mechanical. Don’t come up much, but me and Holston …” Marnes paused and cleared his throat.

Jahns glanced over and saw that her deputy’s gaze had crept toward that dark crook in the hill. He covered his mouth with a fist of sharp knuckles and faked a cough.

“Excuse me,” he said. “As I was sayin’, the sheriff and me worked a death down there a few years back. This Juliette—I think she prefers Jules, come to think of it—was a right shiner. Sharp as a tack. Big help on this case, good at spotting details, handling people, being diplomatic but firm, all that. I don’t think she comes up past the eighties much. A down-deeper for sure, which we ain’t had in a while.”

Jahns sorted through Juliette’s folder, checking her family tree, her voucher history, her current pay in chits. She was listed as a shift foreman with good marks. No history in the lottery.

“Never married?” Jahns asked.

“Nope. Something of a johnboy. A wrencher, you know? We were down there a week, saw how the guys took to her. Now, she could have her pick of them boys but chooses not to. Kind of person who leaves an impression but prefers to go it alone.”

“Sure seems like she left an impression on you,” Jahns said, regretting it immediately. She hated the jealous tone in her own voice.

Marnes shifted his weight to his other foot. “Well, you know me, Mayor. I’m always sizing up candidates. Anything to keep from bein’ promoted.”

Jahns smiled. “What about the other two?” She checked the names, wondering if a down-deeper was a good idea. Or possibly worried about Marnes’s having a crush. She recognized the name on the top folder. Peter Billings. He worked a few floors down in Judicial, as a clerk or a judge’s shadow.

“Honestly, ma’am? They’re filler to make it seem fair. Like I said, I’d work with them, but I think Jules is your girl. Been a long time since we had a lass for a sheriff. Be a popular choice with an election comin’ up.”

“That won’t be why we choose,” Jahns said. “Whoever we decide on will probably be here long after we’re gone—” She stopped herself as she recalled having said the same thing about Holston, back when he’d been chosen.

Jahns closed the folder and returned her attention to the wallscreen. A small tornado had formed at the base of the hill, the gathering dust whipped into an organized frenzy. It built some steam, this small wisp, as it swelled into a larger cone, spinning and spinning on a wavering tip like a child’s top as it raced toward sensors that fairly sparkled in the wan rays of a clear sunrise.

“I think we should go see her,” Jahns finally said. She kept the folders in her lap, fingers like rolled parchment toying with the rough edges of handmade paper.

“Ma’am? I’d rather us fetch her up here. Do the interview in your office like we’ve always done. It’s a long way down to her and an even longer way back up.”

“I appreciate the concern, Deputy, I do. But it’s been a long while since I’ve been much past the fortieth. My knees are no excuse not to see my people—” The mayor stopped. The tornado of dust wavered, turned, and headed straight for them. It grew and grew—the wide angle of the lens distorting it into a monster much larger and more fierce than she knew it to actually be—and then it blew over the sensor array, the entire cafeteria descending into a brief darkness until the zephyr caromed past, retreating across the screen in the lounge and leaving behind it a view of the world now tainted with a slight, dingy film.

“Damn those things,” Deputy Marnes said through gritted teeth. The aged leather of his holster squeaked as he rested his hand on the butt of his gun, and Jahns imagined the old deputy out on that landscape, chasing the wind on thin legs while pumping bullets into a cloud of fading dust.

The two of them sat silent a moment, surveying the damage. Finally, Jahns spoke.

“This trip won’t be about the election, Marnes. It won’t be for votes, either. For all I know, I’ll run again unopposed. So we won’t make a deal of it, and we’ll travel light and quiet. I want to
see
my people, not be seen by them.” She looked over at him, found that he was watching her. “It’ll be for me, Marnes. A getaway.”

She turned back to the view.

“Sometimes … sometimes I just think I’ve been up here too long. The both of us. I think we’ve been
anywhere
too long …”

The ringing of morning footsteps on the spiral staircase gave her pause, and they both turned toward the sound of life, the sound of a waking day. And she knew it was time to start getting the images of dead things out of her mind. Or at least to bury them for a while.

“We’ll go down and get us a proper gauge of this Juliette, you and me. Because sometimes, sitting here, looking out on what the world makes us do—it needles me deep, Marnes. It needles me straight through.”

They met after breakfast in Holston’s old office. Jahns still thought of it as his, a day later. It was too early for her to think of the room as anything else. She stood beyond the twin desks and old filing cabinets and peered into the empty holding cell while Deputy Marnes gave last-minute instructions to Terry, a burly security worker from IT who often held down the fort while Marnes and Holston were away on a case. Standing dutifully behind Terry was a teenager named Marcha, a young girl with dark hair and bright eyes who was apprenticing for work in IT. She was Terry’s shadow; just about half of the workers in the silo had one. They ranged in age from twelve to twenty, these ever-present sponges absorbing the lessons and techniques for keeping the silo operational for at least one generation more.

Deputy Marnes reminded Terry how rowdy people got after a cleaning. Once the tension was released, people tended to live it up a little. They thought, for a few months at least, that anything went.

The warning hardly needed saying—the revelry in the next room could be heard through the shut door. Most residents from the top forty were already packed into the cafeteria and lounge. Hundreds more from the mids and the down deep would trickle up throughout the day, asking for time off work and turning in holiday chits just to see the mostly clear view of the world outside. It was a pilgrimage for many. Some came up only once every few years, stood around for an hour muttering that it looked the same as they remembered, then shooed their children down the stairs ahead of them, fighting the upward-surging crowds.

Terry was left with the keys and a temporary badge. Marnes checked the batteries in his wireless, made sure the volume on the office unit was up, and inspected his gun. He shook Terry’s hand and wished him luck. Jahns sensed it was almost time for them to go and turned away from the empty cell. She said good-bye to Terry, gave Marcha a nod, and followed Marnes out the door.

“You feel okay leaving right after a cleaning?” she asked as they stepped out into the cafeteria. She knew how rowdy it would get later that night, and how testy the crowd would become. It seemed an awful time to drag him away on a mostly selfish errand.

“Are you kidding? I need this. I need to get away.” He glanced toward the wallscreen, which was obscured by the crowds. “I still can’t figure what Holston was thinking, can’t reckon why he never talked to me about all that was going on in that head of his. Maybe by the time we get back, I won’t feel him in the office anymore, ’cause right now I can’t hardly breathe in there.”

Jahns thought about this as they fought through the crowded cafeteria. Plastic cups sloshed with a mix of fruit juices, and she smelled the sting of tub-brewed alcohol in the air but ignored it. People were wishing her well, asking her to be careful, promising to vote. News of their trip had leaked out faster than the spiked punch, despite their hardly telling anyone. Most were under the impression that it was a goodwill trip. A reelection campaign. The younger silo residents, who only remembered Holston as sheriff, were already saluting Marnes and giving him that honorific title. Anyone with wrinkles around their eyes knew better. They nodded to the duo as they passed through the cafeteria and wished them a different sort of unspoken luck.
Keep us going,
their eyes said.
Make it so my kids live as long as me. Don’t let it unravel, not just yet.

Jahns lived under the weight of this pressure, a burden brutal on more than knees. She kept quiet as they made their way to the central stairwell. A handful called for her to make a speech, but the lone voices did not gain traction. No chant formed, much to her relief. What would she say? That she didn’t know why it all held together? That she didn’t even understand her own knitting, how if you made knots, and if you did it right, things just worked out? Would she tell them it took only one snip for it all to unravel? One cut, and you could pull and pull and turn that garment into a pile. Did they really expect her to understand, when all she did was follow the rules, and somehow it kept working out, year after year after year?

Because she didn’t understand what held it together. And she didn’t understand their mood, this celebration. Were they drinking and shouting because they were safe? Because they’d been spared by fate, passed over for cleaning? Her people cheered while a good man, her friend, her partner in keeping them alive and well, lay dead on a hill next to his wife. If she gave a speech, if it weren’t full of the forbidden, it would be this: that no two better people had ever gone to cleaning of their own free will, and what did that say about the lot of them who remained?

Now was not the time for speeches. Or for drinking. Or for being merry. Now was the hour of quiet contemplation, which was one of the reasons Jahns knew she needed to get away. Things had changed. Not just by the day, but by the long years. She knew better than most. Maybe old lady McNeil down in Supply knew, could see it coming. One had to live a long time to be sure, but now she was. And as time marched on, carrying her world faster than her feet could catch up, Mayor Jahns knew that it would soon leave her completely behind. And her great fear, unspoken but daily felt, was that this world of theirs probably wouldn’t stagger very far along without her.

Jahns’s walking stick made a conspicuous ring as it impacted each metal step. It soon became a metronome for their descent, timing the music of the stairwell, which was crowded and vibrating with the energy of a recent cleaning. All the traffic seemed to be heading upward, save for the two of them. They jostled against the flow, elbows brushing, cries of “Hey, Mayor!” followed by nods to Marnes. And Jahns saw it on their faces: the temptation to call him sheriff tempered by their respect for the awful nature of his assumed promotion.

“How many floors you up for?” Marnes asked.

“Why, you tired already?” Jahns glanced over her shoulder to smirk at him, saw his bushy mustache twisted up in a smile of his own.

“Going down ain’t a problem for me. It’s the going back up I can’t stand.”

Their hands briefly collided on the twisted railing of the spiral staircase, Jahns’s hand trailing behind her, Marnes’s reaching ahead. She felt like telling him she wasn’t tired at all, but she did feel a sudden weariness, an exhaustion more mental than physical. She had a childish vision of more youthful times and pictured Marnes scooping her up and carrying her down the staircase in his arms. There would be a sweet release of strength and responsibility, a sinking into another’s power, no need to feign her own. This was not a remembrance of the past—it was a future that had never happened. And Jahns felt guilty for even thinking it. She felt her husband beside her, his ghost perturbed by her thoughts—

“Mayor? How many you thinking?”

The two of them stopped and hugged the rail as a porter trudged up the stairs. Jahns recognized the boy, Connor, still in his teens but already with a strong back and steady stride. He had an array of bundles strapped together and balanced on his shoulders. The sneer on his face was not from exhaustion or pain, but annoyance. Who were all these people suddenly on his stairwell? These tourists? Jahns thought of something encouraging to say, some small verbal reward for these people who did a job her knees never could, but he was already gone on his strong young feet, carrying food and supplies up from the down deep, slowed only by the crush of traffic attempting to worm up through the silo for a peek of the clear and wide outside.

She and Marnes caught their breath for a moment between flights. Marnes handed her his canteen, and she took a polite sip before passing it back.

“I’d like to do half today,” she finally answered. “But I want to make a few stops on the way.”

Marnes took a swig of water and began twisting the cap back on. “House calls?”

“Something like that. I want to stop at the nursery on twenty.”

Marnes laughed. “Kissin’ babies? Mayor, ain’t nobody gonna vote you out. Not at your age.”

Jahns didn’t laugh. “Thanks,” she said with a mask of false pain. “But no, not to kiss babies.” She turned her back and resumed walking; Marnes followed. “It’s not that I don’t trust your professional opinion about this Jules lady. You haven’t picked anything but a winner since I’ve been mayor.”

“Even … ?” Marnes interrupted.

“Especially him,” Jahns said, knowing what he was thinking. “He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That’ll take even the best of them down.”