Wool-Omnibus Edition

Wool 3 – Casting Off
1
Casting Off
There were numbers on each of the pockets. Juliette could look down at her chest and read them, and so it occurred to her that they must be printed upside down. They were there for her to read, and for no one else. She numbly stared at them through her helmet visor while the door behind her was sealed. There was another door, a forbidden one, looming in front of her. It stood silently as it waited to be opened.
Juliette felt lost in this void between the two doors, trapped in this airlock full of its brightly colored pipes all jutting from the walls and ceiling, everything shimmering behind plastic-wrapped shrouds.
The hiss of Argon being pumped into the room sounded distant through her helmet. It let her know the end was near. Pressure built against the plastic, crinkling it across the bench and walls, wrapping it tightly around the pipes. She could feel the pressure against her suit, like an invisible hand gently squeezing.
She knew what was to happen next. And part of her wondered how she had gotten here, a girl from Mechanical who had never cared one whit about the outside, who had only ever broken minor laws, and who would’ve been content for the rest of her life to live in the deepest bowels of the earth, covered in grease and fixing the broken things, little concern for the wider world of the dead that surrounds her—


2
Days Earlier
Juliette sat on the floor of the holding cell, her back against the tall rows of steel bars, a mean world displayed on the wallscreen before her. For the past three days, while she attempted to teach herself how to be silo sheriff, she had studied this view of the outside and wondered what the fuss was all about.
All she saw out there were dull slopes of ground, these gray hills rising up toward grayer clouds, dappled sunlight straining to illuminate the land with little success. Across it all were the terrible winds, the frenzied gusts that whipped small clouds of soil into curls and whorls that chased one another across a landscape meant only for them.
For Juliette, there was nothing inspiring about the view, nothing that aroused her curiosity. It was an uninhabitable wasteland devoid of anything useful. There were no resources beyond the tainted steel of crumbling towers visible over the hills, steel it would no doubt cost more to reclaim, transport, smelt, and purify than it would to simply pull new ore from the mines beneath the silo.
The forbidden dreams of the outside world, she saw, were sad and empty dreams. Dead dreams. The people of the up-top who worshipped this view had it all backwards—the future was below. That’s where the oil came from that provided their power, the minerals that became anything useful, the nitrogen that renewed the soil in the farms. Any who shadowed in the footsteps of chemistry and metallurgy knew this. Those who read children’s books, those who tried to piece together the mystery of a forgotten and unknowable past, remained deluded.
The only sense she could make of their obsession was the open space itself, a feature of the landscape that frankly terrified her. Perhaps it was something wrong with her that she loved the walls of the silo, loved the dark confines of the down deep. Was everyone else crazy to harbor thoughts of escape? Or was it something about her?
Juliette looked from the dry hills and the fog of soil to the scattered folders around her. It was her predecessor’s unfinished work. A shiny star sat balanced on one of her knees, not yet worn. There was a canteen sitting on one of the folders, safe inside a plastic reusable evidence bag. It looked innocent enough lying there, having already done its deadly deed. Several numbers written with black ink on the bag had been crossed out, cases long since solved or abandoned. A new number stood to one side, a case number matching a folder not present, a folder filled with page after page of testimony and notes dealing with the death of a mayor that everyone had loved—but that someone had killed.
Juliette had seen some of those notes, but only from a distance. They were written in Deputy Marnes’ hand, hands that would not relinquish the folder, hands that clutched it madly. She had taken peeks at the folder from across his desk and had seen the splatters that faded occasional words and caused the paper to pucker. The writing amid these drying tears was a scrawl, not as neat as his notes in the other folders. What she could see seemed to crawl angrily across the page, words slashed out violently and replaced. It was the same ferocity Deputy Marnes displayed all the time now, the boiling anger that had driven Juliette away from her desk and into the holding cell to work. She had found it impossible to sit across from such a broken soul and be expected to think. The view of the outside world that loomed before her, however sad, cast a far less depressing shadow.
It was in the holding cell that she killed time between the static-filled calls on her radio and the jaunts down to some disturbance. Often, she would simply sit and sort and re-sort her folders according to perceived severity. She was sheriff of all the silo. A job she had not shadowed for, but one she was beginning to understand. One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could imagine: People were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was to not only figure out why this happened, and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.
The folders scattered on the floor were sad cases of the latter. Complaints between neighbors that got out of hand. Reported thefts. The source of a poisonous batch of amateur shower gin. Several more cases stemming from the trouble this gin had caused. Each folder awaited more findings, more legwork, more hikes down the twisting stairs to engage in twisted dialog, sorting lies from truth.
Juliette had read the Law portion of the Pact twice in preparation for the job. Lying in her bed in the down deep, her body exhausted from the work of aligning the primary generator, she had studied the proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogous to some part of her old job as mechanic. Approaching the scene of a crime or an active dispute was no different than walking into a pump room where something was broken. Someone or some thing was always at fault. She knew to listen, to observe, to ask questions of anyone who could have had anything to do with the faulty equipment or the tools that had served the equipment, following a chain of events all the way down to the bedrock itself. There were always confounding variables—you couldn’t adjust one dial without sending something else a-kilter—but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knowing what was important and what could be ignored.
She assumed it was this talent that Deputy Marnes had originally seen in her, this patience and skepticism she employed to ask one more stupid question and stumble eventually onto the answer. It was a boost to her confidence that she had helped solve a case before. She hadn’t known it then, had been more concerned with simple justice and her private grief, but that case had been job training and an interview all in one.
She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading “Closed” in bold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped through the notes. Many of them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward-slanting print she recognized from just about everything on and inside her desk, a desk that had once been his. She read his notes about her, re-familiarized herself with a case that had seemed an obvious murder but had actually been a series of unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, resurfaced old pains. And yet—she could also recall how comforting it had been to distract herself with the clues. She could remember the rush of a problem solved, the satisfaction of having answers to offset the hollowness left by her lover’s death. The process had been similar to fixing a machine on extra shifts. There was the pain in her body from the effort and exhaustion, offset slightly by the knowledge that a rattle had been wrenched away.
She set the folder aside, not yet ready to relive it all. She picked up another and placed it in her lap, one hand falling to the brass star on her knee—
A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall of dirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot seemed to shiver in the wind as it travelled toward sensors she had been trained to think of as important, sensors that gave her a view of the outside world she had been frightened as a child into believing was dear.
But she wasn’t so sure, now that she was old enough to think for herself and near enough to observe it firsthand. This up-top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled its way to the down deep where true cleaning kept the silo humming and everyone alive. But even down there, her friends in Mechanical had been told since birth not to speak of the outside. It was an easy enough task when you never saw it, but now, walking by it to work, sitting before this view of a vastness one’s brain could not comprehend, she saw how the inevitable questions must surface. She saw why it might be important to squelch certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questions foamed on people’s mad lips and brought an end to them all.
Rather than ponder this further, she flipped opened Holston’s folder. Behind the bio tab was a thick stack of notes about his last days as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of the piece of paper blank and wasted. A single paragraph simply explained that he had reported to the up-top holding cell and had expressed an interest in the outside. That was it. A few lines to spell a man’s doom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping the page over.
Underneath was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service to the silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone who was also recently deceased. It was strange to think of people she knew that she could never see again. Part of the reason she avoided her father all these years was because he was, simply put, still there. There was never the threat of her not being able to change her mind. But it was different with Holston and Jahns; they were gone forever. And Juliette was so used to rebuilding devices thought beyond repair that she felt if she concentrated enough, or performed the correct series of tasks in the right order, that she should be able to bring the deceased back, be able to recreate their wasted forms. But she knew that wasn’t the case.
She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very first time. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks could asphyxiate and broken flood pumps could drown everyone she knew, now loomed large before her. What was it all about, this life they lived in underground confines? What was out there, over those hills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in the distance? What for? And most vexing of all: What had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife for that matter—been thinking to want to leave?
Two folders to keep her company, both marked “Closed.” Both belonging in the Mayor’s office, where they should be sealed up and filed away. But Juliette kept finding herself returning to them rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a man she had loved, whose death she had helped unravel in the down deep. In the other lived a man she had respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed over the two folders, especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studying the details of Mayor Jahns’ death, going over the depositions, convinced he had a killer but with no evidence to corner the man—
Someone knocked on the bars above Juliette’s head. She looked up, expecting to find Deputy Marnes telling her it was time to call it a day, but saw a strange man peering down at her instead.
“Sheriff?” he asked.
Juliette set the folders aside and palmed the star off her knee. She stood up and turned around, facing this small man with a protruding gut, glasses perched at the end of his nose, his silver IT coveralls snugly tailored and freshly pressed.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
The man stuck his hand between the bars. Juliette moved the star from one palm to the other and reached out to accept it.
“Sorry I’m late getting up here,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on, what with the ceremonies, that generator nonsense, and all the legal wrangling. I’m Bernard, Bernard Holland.”
Juliette felt her blood run cold. The man’s hand was so small around, it felt like it was missing a finger. Despite this, his grip was solid. She tried to pull back, but he refused to let go.
“As sheriff, I’m sure you already know the Pact inside and out, so you know that I’ll be acting Mayor, at least until we can arrange a vote.”
“I’d heard,” Juliette said cooly. She wondered how this man had gotten past Marnes’ desk without some sort of violence. Here was their prime suspect in Jahns’ death—only he was on the wrong side of the bars. And Juliette realized the same was true of her.
“Doing some filing, are you?” He relinquished his grip, and Juliette pulled her hand away. He peered down at the paperwork strewn across the floor, his eyes seeming to settle on the canteen in its plastic bag, but Juliette couldn’t be sure.
“Just familiarizing myself with our ongoing cases,” she said. “There’s a little more room in here to . . . well, think.”
“Oh, I’m sure a lot of deep thought has taken place in this room.” Bernard smiled, and Juliette noticed his front teeth were crooked, one of them overlapping the other. It made him look like the stray mice she used to trap in the pump rooms.
“Yes, well, I’ve found the space conducive to sorting my thoughts out, so maybe there’s something to that. And besides,” she leveled her eyes at him, “I don’t expect it to remain empty for long. And once it’s occupied, I’ll be able to take leave of all this deep thought for a day or two while someone is put to cleaning—”
“I wouldn’t count too much on that,” Bernard said. He flashed his crooked teeth again. “The word down below is that the poor Mayor, rest her soul, plum wore herself out with this crazy climb of hers. I believe she was hiking down to see you, isn’t that right?”
Juliette felt a sharp sting in her palm. She loosened her grip on the brass star, the knuckles on both hands white from making fists.
Bernard adjusted his glasses. “But now I hear you’re investigating for foul play?”
Juliette leveled her eyes at him, trying not to be distracted by the reflection of the dull hills visible in his spectacles. “I suppose you should know, as acting Mayor, that we’re treating this very much as a murder,” she said.
“Oh my.” His eyes widened over a limp smile. “So the rumors are true. Who would do such a thing?” The smile grew, and Juliette realized she was dealing with a man who felt himself invulnerable. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered a dirty and outsized ego such as his. Her time as a shadow in the down deep had been spent surrounded by them.
“I believe we’ll find the party responsible was the one with the most to gain,” she said dryly. After a pause, she added: “Mayor.”
The crooked smile faded. Bernard let go of the bars and stepped back, his hands tucking into his coveralls. “Well, it’s nice to finally put a face with the name. I’m aware that you haven’t spent much time out of the down deep—and to be honest I’ve stayed much too insulated in my own office—but things are changing around here. As mayor and sheriff, we will be working together a lot, you and me.” He glanced down at the files at her feet. “So I expect you to keep me posted. About everything.”
With that, Bernard turned and left, and it required a concerted effort for Juliette to relax her fists. When she finally peeled her fingers away from the star, she found its sharp edges had gouged into her palm, cutting her and causing her to bleed. A few drops caught the light on the edge of the brass, looking like wet rust. Juliette wiped the star clean on her new coveralls, a habit borne of her previous life among the sludge and grease. She cursed herself when she saw the dark spot the blood left on her new clothes. Turning the star over, she peered at the stamped insignia on its face. There were the three triangles of the silo and the word “Sheriff” arched over top of them. She turned it over again and fingered the clasp that held the sharp spike of a pin. She opened the clasp and let the pin hinge free. The stiff needle had been bent and straightened in several places over the years, giving it a hand-forged look. It wobbled on its hinge—much like her hesitation to wear the thing.
But as Bernard’s footsteps receded, as she heard him say something indecipherable to Deputy Marnes, she felt a new resolve steel her nerves. It was like encountering a rusted bolt that refused to budge. Something about that intolerable stiffness, that reluctance to move, set Juliette’s teeth on edge. She had come to believe that there was no fastener she couldn’t unstick, had learned to attack them with grease and with fire, with penetrating oil and with brute strength. With enough planning and persistence, they always gave. Eventually.
She forced the wavy needle through the breast of her coveralls and clasped the catch on the back. Looking down at the star was a little surreal. There were a dozen folders at her feet demanding her attention, and Juliette felt, for the first time since arriving at the up-top, that this was her job. Her work at Mechanical was behind her. She had left that place in far better condition than she’d found it, had stayed long enough to hear the near-silent hum of a repaired generator, to see a shaft spin in such perfect alignment that one couldn’t tell if it was moving at all. And now she had traveled to the up-top to find here the rattle and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a misalignment that was eating away at the true engine of the silo, just as Jahns had forewarned.
Leaving most of the folders where they were, she picked up Holston’s, a folder she shouldn’t even be looking at but couldn’t be without, and pulled the cell door open. Rather than turn to her office, she first walked the other way toward the yellow steel entrance to the airlock. Peering through the triple paned glass for the dozenth time in several days, she imagined the man she had replaced standing inside, wearing one of those ridiculously bulky suits, waiting for those far doors to open. What goes through a man’s thoughts as he waits there alone to be cast off? It couldn’t be mere fear, for Juliette had tasted that well enough. It had to be something beyond that, a wholly unique sensation, the calm beyond the pain or the numbness past the terror. Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.
It was the same as color. You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn’t create the strange out of nothing. So maybe it was only the cleaners who understood what it felt like to stand there, trembling—or perhaps not afraid one bit—as they waited for their death.
The obsession with why played out in whispers through the silo—people wanting to know why they did what they did, why they left a shiny and polished gift to those who had exiled them—but that did not interest Juliette at all. She figured they were seeing new colors, feeling the indescribable, perhaps having a religious experience that only occurred in the face of the reaper. Wasn’t it enough to know that it happened without fail? Problem solved. Take it as an axiom. Move on to a real issue, like what it must feel like to be the one going through it. That was the real shame of the taboos: not that people couldn’t pine for the outside world, but that they weren’t even allowed to commiserate with the cleaners during the weeks after, to wonder what they had suffered, to properly express their thanks or regrets.
Juliette tapped the yellow door with the corner of Holston’s folder, remembering the man in better times, back when he was in love, a lottery winner, telling her about his wife. She nodded to his ghost and stepped away from the imposing metal door with its small panes of thick glass. There was a kinship she felt from working in his post, now wearing his star, even sitting in his cell. She had loved a man once, and knew what that felt like. She had loved in secret, not involving the silo in their relationship, ignoring the Pact. And so she also knew what it meant to lose something so precious. She could imagine, if her old lover was out there on that hill—wasting away in plain sight rather than feeding the roots—that she could be driven to cleaning, to wanting to see those new colors for herself.
She opened Holston’s file again as she wandered back toward her desk. His desk. Here was one man who knew of her secret love. She had told him, once the case was settled in the down deep, that the man who had died, whose case she had helped solve, had been her lover. Maybe it was how he had gone on and on about his wife the days before. Maybe it was his trustworthy smile that made him such a good sheriff, engendering this baffling urge to divulge secrets. Whatever the cause, she had admitted something to a man of the law that could have gotten her in trouble, an affair completely off the books, a wanton disregard for the Pact, and all he had said, this man entrusted with upholding those laws, was: “I’m sorry.”
Sorry for her loss. And he had hugged her. Like he knew what she was holding inside, this secret grief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay.
And she had respected him for that.
Now she sat at his desk, in his chair, across from his old deputy, who held his head in his hands and peered down, unmoving, at an open folder dotted with tears. All it took was a glance for Juliette to suspect that some forbidden love lay between him and the contents of that folder as well.
“It’s five o’clock,” Juliette said as quietly and gently as she could.
Marnes lifted his face out of his hands. His forehead was red from resting it there so long. His eyes were bloodshot, his gray mustache caked with tears and snot. He looked so much older than he had a week ago in the down deep, when he had come to recruit her. Swiveling in his old wooden chair, the legs squeaking as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and surveyed the time imprisoned behind its yellowed and crazed plastic dome. He nodded silently at the ticking of the hand, stood up, his back stooped for a moment as he fought to straighten it. He ran his hands down his coveralls, reached to the folder, closed it tenderly, and tucked it under his arm.
“Tomorrow,” he whispered, nodding to Juliette.
“See you in the morning,” she said, as he staggered out toward the cafeteria.
Juliette watched him go, feeling the sorriest for him. She recognized the love behind his loss. It was painful to imagine him back in his small apartment, sitting on a cot wide enough for one, sobbing over that folder until he finally collapsed into his fitful dreams.
Once alone, she placed Holston’s folder on her desk and slid her keyboard closer. The keys had been worn bare long ago, but someone in recent years had neatly reprinted the letters in black ink. Now even these handwritten faces were fading and would soon need another coat. Juliette would have to see to that—she couldn’t type without looking at her keyboard like all these office people could.
She slowly pecked out a request to wire down to Mechanical. After another day of getting little done, of being distracted by the mystery of Holston’s decision, she had come to a realization: there was no way she could perform this man’s job until she first understood why he had turned his back on it, and on the silo itself. It was a nagging rattle keeping her from other problems. So instead of kidding herself, she was going to embrace the challenge. Which meant that she needed to know more than his folder contained.
She wasn’t sure how to get the things she needed, how to even access them, but she knew people who might. This was what she missed most about the down deep. They were family there, all with useful skills that overlapped and covered one another. Anything she could do for any of them, she would. And she knew they would do the same, even be an army for her. This was a comfort she sorely missed, a safety net that felt all too far away.
After sending the request, she sat back with Holston’s folder. Here was a man, a good man, who had known her deepest secrets. He was the only one who ever had. And soon, God willing, Juliette would uncover his.