8
Juliette arrived late at her desk the next morning exhausted, her legs and back sore from the late climb down to IT and from not getting an ounce of sleep. She had spent the entire night tossing and turning, wondering if she’d discovered a box that was better left unopened, worried she might be raising questions that promised nothing but bad answers. If she went out into the cafeteria and looked in a direction she normally avoided, she would be able to see the last two cleaners lying in the crook of a hill, almost as if in one another’s arms. Did those two lovers throw themselves into the rotting wind over the very thing Juliette was now chasing? The fear she’d seen in Scottie’s eyes made her wonder if she wasn’t being careful enough. She looked across her desk at her new deputy, greener even at this job than she, as he transcribed data from one of the folders.
“Hey Peter?”
He looked up from his keyboard. “Yeah?”
“You were in Justice before this, right? Shadowing with a judge?”
He tilted his head to the side. “No, I was a court assistant. I actually shadowed in the mids’ deputy office until a few years ago. I wanted that job, but none came up.”
“Did you grow up there? Or the up-top?”
“The mids.” His hands fell away from his keyboard to his lap. He smiled. “My dad was a plumber in the hydroponics. He passed away a few years ago. My mom, she works in the nursery.”
“Really? What’s her name?”
“Rebecca. She’s one of the—”
“I know her. She was shadowing when I was a kid. My father—”
“He works in the upper nursery, I know. I didn’t want to say anything—”
“Why not? Hey, if you’re worried about me playing favorites, I’m guilty. You’re my deputy now, and I’ll have your back—”
“No, it’s not that. I just didn’t want you to hold anything against me. I know you and your father don’t—”
Juliette waved him off. “He’s still my father. We just grew apart. Tell your mom I said hi.”
“I will.” Peter smiled and bent over his keyboard.
“Hey. I’ve got a question for you. Something I can’t figure.”
“Sure,” he said, looking up. “Go ahead.”
“Can you think of why it’s cheaper to porter a paper note to someone than it is to just wire them from a computer?”
“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “It’s a quarter chit per character to wire someone. That adds up!”
Juliette laughed. “No, I know what it costs. But paper isn’t cheap, either. And neither is porting. But it seems like sending a wire would be practically free, you know? It’s just information. It weighs nothing.”
He shrugged. “It’s been a quarter chit a character since I’ve been alive. I dunno. Besides, we’ve got a fifty chit per day allowance from here, plus unlimited emergencies. I wouldn’t stress.”
“I’m not stressed, just confused. I mean, I understand why everyone can’t have radios like we carry, because only one person can transmit at a time, so we need the air open for emergencies, but you’d think we could all send and receive as many wires as we wanted.”
Peter propped his elbows up and rested his chin on his fists. “Well, think about the cost of the servers, the electricity. That means oil to burn and all the maintenance of the wires and cooling and what-not. Especially if you have a ton of traffic. Factor that against pressing pulp on a rack, letting it dry, scratching some ink on it, and then having a person who’s already heading that way walk it up or down for you. No wonder it’s cheaper!”
Juliette nodded, but mostly for his benefit. She wasn’t so sure. She hated to voice why, but she couldn’t help herself.
“But what if it’s for a different reason? What if someone made it expensive on purpose?”
“What? To make money?” Peter snapped his fingers. “To keep the porters employed with running notes!”
Juliette shook her head. “No, what if it’s to make conversing with each other more difficult? Or at least costly. You know, separate us, make us keep our thoughts to ourselves.”
Peter frowned. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
Shrugging, Juliette looked back at her computer screen, her hand creeping to the scroll hidden in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said. “Forget about it. It’s just a silly thought.”
She pulled her keyboard toward her and was just glancing up at her screen when Peter saw the emergency icon first.
“Wow. Another alert,” he said.
She started to click on the flashing icon, heard Peter blow out his breath.
“What the hell’s going on around here?” he asked.
She pulled the message up on her screen and read it quickly, disbelieving. Surely this wasn’t the way of the job. Surely people didn’t die this often, her just not hearing about it because her nose was always in some crankcase or under an oil pan.
The blinking number code above the message was one she recognized without even needing her cheat sheet. It was becoming sadly familiar. Another suicide. They didn’t give the victim’s name, but there was an office number. And she knew the floor and address. Her legs were still sore from her trip down there.
“No—” she said, gripping the edge of her desk.
“You want me to—?” Peter reached for his radio.
“No, damnit, no.” Juliette shook her head. She pushed away from her desk, knocking over the recycling bin, which spilled out all the pardoned folders across the floor. The scroll from her lap rolled into them.
“I can—” Peter began.
“I got this,” she said, waving him away. “Damnit.” She shook her head. The office was spinning around her head, the world getting blurry. She staggered for the door, arms wide for balance, when Peter snapped back to his computer screen, dragging his mouse with its little cord behind, clicking something.
“Uh, Juliette—?”
But she was already stumbling out the door, bracing herself for the long and painful descent—
“Juliette!”
She turned to find Peter running behind her, his hand steadying the radio attached to his hip.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m sorry— It’s— I don’t know how to do this—”
“Spit it out,” she said impatiently. All she could think of was little Scottie, hanging by his neck. It was electrical ties in her imagination. That’s how her waking nightmare, her morbid thoughts, crafted the scene of his death in her head.
“It’s just that, I got a private wire and—”
“Keep up if you want, but I’ve got to get down there.” She spun toward the stairwell.
Peter grabbed her arm. Roughly. A forceful grip.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I’m supposed to take you into custody—”
She whirled on him and saw how unsure of himself he looked.
“What did you say?”
“I’m just doing my duty, Sheriff, I swear.” Peter reached for his metal cuffs. Juliette stared at him, disbelieving, as he snapped one link around her wrist and fumbled for the other.
“Peter, what’s going on? I’ve got a friend I need to see to—”
He shook his head. “The computer says you’re a suspect, Ma’am. I’m just doing what it tells me to do—”
And with that, the second link clicked around her other wrist, and Juliette looked down at her predicament, dumbfounded, the image of her young friend hanging by his neck unable to be shaken loose from her mind.
9
She was allowed a visitor, but who would Juliette want to see her like this? No one. So she sat with her back against the bars, the bleak view outside brightening with the rising of an unseen sun, the floor around her bare of folders and ghosts. She was alone, stripped of a job she wasn’t sure she ever wanted, a pile of bodies in her wake, her simple and easily understood life having come unraveled.
“I’m sure this will pass,” a voice behind her said. Juliette leaned away from the steel rods and looked around to find Bernard standing behind her, his hands wrapped around the bars.
Juliette moved away from him and sat on the cot, turning her back to the gray view.
“You know I didn’t do this,” she said. “He was my friend.”
Bernard frowned. “What do you think you’re being held for? The boy committed suicide. He seems to have been distraught from recent tragedies. This is not unheard of when people move to a new section of the silo, away from friends and family, to take a job they’re not entirely suited for—”
“Then why am I being held here?” Juliette asked. She realized suddenly that there may be no double cleaning after all. Off to the side, down the hallway, she could see Peter shuffling back and forth like some physical barrier prevented him from coming any closer.
“Unauthorized entry on the thirty-fourth,” Bernard said. “Threatening a member of the silo, tampering with IT affairs, removing IT property from secured quarters—”
“That’s ratshit,” Juliette said. “I was summoned by one of your workers. I had every right to be there!”
“We will look into that,” Bernard said. “Well, Peter here will. I’m afraid he’s had to remove your computer for evidence. My people down below are best qualified to see if—”
“Your people? Are you trying to be Mayor or IT Head? Because I looked into it, and the Pact clearly states you can’t be both—”
“That will be put to a vote soon enough. The Pact has changed before. It’s designed to change when events call for it.”
“And so you want me out of the way.” Juliette stepped closer to the bars so she could see Peter Billings, and have him see her. “I suppose you were to have this job all along? Is that right?”
Peter slunk out of sight.
“Juliette. Jules.” Bernard shook his head and clicked his tongue at her. “I don’t want you out of the way. I wouldn’t want that for any member of the silo. I want people to be in their place. Where they fit in. Scottie wasn’t cut out for IT, I see that now. And I don’t think you were meant for the up-top.”
“So, what, I’m banished back to Mechanical? Is that what’s going on? Over some ratshit charges?”
“Banished is such a horrible word. I’m sure you didn’t mean that. And don’t you want your old job back? Weren’t you happier then? There’s so much to learn up here that you’ve never shadowed for. And the people who thought you best fit for this job, who I’m sure hoped to ease you into it . . .”
He stopped right there, and it was somehow worse that he left the sentence open like that, forcing Jules to complete the image rather than just hear it. She pictured two mounds of freshly turned soil in the gardens, a few mourning rinds tossed on top of them.
“I’m going to let you gather your things, what isn’t needed for evidence, and then allow you to see yourself back down. As long as you check in with my deputies on the way and report your progress, we’ll drop these charges. Consider it an extension of my little . . . forgiveness holiday.”
Bernard smiled and straightened his glasses.
Juliette gritted her teeth. It occurred to her that she had never, in her entire life, punched someone in the face.
And it was only her fear of missing, of not doing it correctly and cracking her knuckles on one of the steel bars, that she didn’t put an end to that streak.
It was just about a week since she had arrived at the up-top, and Juliette was leaving with fewer belongings than she’d brought. A blue Mechanical coverall had been provided, one much too big for her. Peter didn’t even say goodbye. Juliette thought it was more out of shame than anger or blame. He walked her through the cafeteria to the top of the stairs, and as she turned to shake his hand, she found him staring down at his toes, his thumbs caught in his coveralls, her sheriff’s badge pinned at an angle over his left breast.
Juliette began her long walk down through the length of the silo. It would be less physically taxing than her walk up had been, but more draining in other ways. What exactly had happened to the silo, and why? She couldn’t help but feel in the middle of it all, to shoulder some of the blame. None of this would have happened had they left her in Mechanical, had they never come to see her in the first place. She would still be bitching about the alignment of the generator, not sleeping at night as she waited for the inevitable failure and a descent into chaos as they learned to survive on backup power for the decades it would take to rebuild the thing. Instead, she had been witness to a different type of failure: a throwing not of rods but of bodies. She felt most horrible for poor Scottie, a boy with so much promise, so many talents, taken before his prime.
She had been sheriff for a short time, a star appearing on her breast for but a wink, and yet she felt an incredible urge to investigate. There was something not right about Scottie killing himself. The signs were there, sure. He had been afraid to leave his office—but then, he’d also shadowed under Walker and had maybe picked up the habit of reclusiveness from the old man. Scottie had also been harboring secrets too big for his young mind, had been fearful enough to wire her to come quickly—but she knew the boy like her own shadow, and knew he didn’t have it in him. She suddenly wondered if Marnes had ever had it in him as well. If Jahns were here beside her, would the old Mayor be screaming for Jules to investigate both their deaths? Telling her that none of this fit?
“I can’t,” Juliette whispered to the ghost, causing an upbound porter to turn his head as he passed.
She kept further thoughts to herself. As she descended toward her father’s nursery, she paused at the landing, contemplating longer and harder about going in to see him than she had on her way up. Pride had prevented her the first time. And now shame set her feet into motion once again, spiraling down away from him, chastising herself for thinking on the ghosts from her past that had long ago been banished from memory.
At the thirty-fourth, the entrance to IT, she again considered stopping. There would be clues in Scottie’s office, maybe even some they hadn’t managed to scrub away. She shook her head. The conspiracies were already forming in her mind. And as hard as it was to leave the scene of the crime behind, she knew she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near his office.
She continued down the staircase and thought, as she considered IT’s location in the silo, that this couldn’t be an accident either. She had another thirty-two floors to go before she checked in with the first deputy, who was located near the center of the mids. The sheriff’s office was thirty-three floors above her head. IT, then, was as far as it could get from any deputy station in the silo.
She shook her head at this paranoid thinking. It wasn’t how diagnoses were made. Her father would have told her so.
After meeting with the first deputy around noon, and accepting a piece of bread and fruit, along with a reminder to eat, she made good time down through the mids, wondering as she passed the upper apartments which level Lukas lived on, or if he even knew of her arrest.
The weight of the past week seemed to pull her down the stairwell, gravity sucking at her boots, the pressures of being sheriff dissipating as she left that office far behind. Those pressures were slowly replaced with an eagerness to return to her friends, even in shame, as she got closer and closer to Mechanical.
She stopped to see Hank, the down deep deputy, on level one-twenty. She had known him for a long time, was becoming more and more surrounded with familiar faces, people who waved hello, their moods somber as if they knew every detail of her time away. Hank tried to get her to stay and rest a while, but she only paused long enough to be polite, to refill her canteen, and then to shuffle the remaining twenty floors to the place she truly belonged.
Knox seemed thrilled to have her back. He wrapped her up in a crippling hug, lifting her feet off the ground and roughing up her face with his beard. He smelled of grease and sweat, a mix Juliette had never fully noticed in the down deep because she had never been free from it.
The walk to her old room was punctuated by slaps on her back, well-wishes, questions about the up-top, people calling her sheriff in jest, and the sort of rude frivolities she had grown up in and grown used to. Juliette felt more saddened by it all than anything. She had set out to do something and had failed. And yet her friends were just happy to have her back.
Shirly from second shift spotted her coming down the hallway and accompanied Juliette on the rest of the walk to her room. She updated Juliette on the status of the generator and the output from the new oil well, as if Juliette had simply been on vacation for a short while. Juliette thanked her at the door to her room, stepped inside, and kicked her way through all the folded notes slipped under the door. She lifted the strap of her daypack over her head and dropped it, then collapsed onto her bed, too exhausted and upset at herself to even cry.
She awoke in the middle of the night. Her small display terminal showed the time in green blocky numbers: 2:14 AM.
Juliette sat at the edge of her old bed in coveralls that weren’t truly hers and took stock of her situation. Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt that way. Tomorrow, even if they didn’t expect her to, she would be back at work in the pits, keeping the silo humming, doing what she did best. She needed to wake up to this reality, to set other ideas and responsibilities aside. Already, they felt so far away. She doubted she would even go to Scottie’s funeral, not unless they sent his body down to be buried where it belonged.
She reached for the keyboard slotted into the wall rack. Everything was covered in a layer of grime, she saw. She had never noticed it before. The keys were filthy from the dirt she had brought back from each shift. The monitor’s glass was limned with grease. She fought the urge to wipe the screen and smear the shiny coat of oil around, but she would have to clean her place a little deeper, she decided. She was viewing things with untainted and more critical eyes.
Rather than chase pointless sleep, she keyed the monitor awake to check the work logs for the next day, anything to get her mind off the past week. But before she could open her task manager, she saw that she had over a dozen wires in her inbox. She’d never seen so many. Usually people just slid recycled notes under each other’s doors—but then, she had been a long way away when the news of her arrest had hit, and she hadn’t been able to get to a computer since.
She logged onto her email account and pulled up the most recent wire. It was from Knox. Just a semicolon and a parenthesis—a half-chit smile.
Juliette couldn’t help it, she smiled back. She could still smell Knox on her skin and realized, as far as the big brute was concerned, that all the troubles and problems percolating in whispers down the stairwell about her paled in comparison to her return. To him, the worst thing that had happened in the last week was probably the challenge of replacing her on first shift.
Jules went to the next message, one from the third shift foreman, welcoming her home. Probably because of the extra time his crew was putting in to help cover her old shift.
There was more. A day’s pay of a note from Shirly, wishing her well on her journey. These were all notes they had hoped she would receive up-top to make the trip down easier, hoping she wouldn’t loathe herself and would know she shouldn’t feel humiliated, or even a failure. Juliette felt tears well up at how considerate it all was. She had an image of her desk, Holston’s desk, with nothing but unplugged wires snaking across its surface, her computer removed. There was no way she could’ve gotten these messages when they were meant to be read. She wiped at her eyes and tried not to think of the wired notes as money wasted, but rather as extravagant tokens of her friendships in the down deep.
Reading each one, trying to hold it together, made the last message she came to doubly jarring. It was paragraphs long. Juliette assumed it was an official document, maybe a list of her offenses, a formal ruling against her. She had only seen such messages from the Mayor’s office, usually on holidays, notes that went out to every silo member. But then she saw that it was from Scottie.
Juliette sat up straight and tried to clear her head. She started from the beginning, damning her blurred vision.
J-
I lied. Couldn’t delete this stuff. Found more. That tape I got you? Your joke was truth. And the program - NOT for big screen. Pxl density not right. 32,768 X 8,192! Not sure what’s that size. 8” X 2”? So many pxls if so.
Putting more together. Don’t trust porters, so wiring this. Screw cost, wire me back. Need transfr to Mech. Not safe here.
-S
Juliette read it a second time, crying now. Here was the real voice of a ghost warning her of something, all of it too late. And it wasn’t the voice of one who was planning his death—she was sure of that. She checked the timestamp of the wire; it was sent before she had even arrived back at her office the day before, before Scottie had died.
Before he had been killed, she corrected herself. They must have found him snooping, or maybe her visit had alerted them. She wondered what IT could see, if they could break into her wire account, even. They must not have yet, or the message wouldn’t be there, waiting for her.
She leapt suddenly from her bed and grabbed one of the folded notes by the door. Digging a charcoal from her daypack, she sat back down on the bed. She copied the entire wire, every odd spelling, double-checking each number, and then deleted the message. She had chills up and down her arms by the time she finished, as if some unseen person was racing toward her, hoping to break into her computer before she dispensed with the evidence. She wondered if Scottie had been cautious enough to have deleted the note from his sent wires, and assumed, if he’d been thinking clearly, that he would.
She sat back on her bed, holding the copied note, thoughts about the work log for the next day gone. Instead, she studied the sinister mess revolving around her, spiraling through the heart of the silo. Things were bad, from top to bottom. A great set of gears had been thrown out of alignment. She could hear the noise from the past week, this thumping and clanging, this machine lumbering off its mounts and leaving bodies in its wake.
And Juliette was the only one who could hear it. She was the only one who knew. And she didn’t know who she could trust to help set things right. But she did know this: It would require a diminishing of power to align things once again. And there would be no way to call what happened next a “holiday.”
10
Juliette showed up at Walker’s electronics workshop at five, worried she might find him asleep on his cot, but smelling instead the distinctive odor of vaporized solder wafting down the hallway. She knocked on the open door as she entered, and Walker looked up from one of his many green electronics boards, corkscrews of smoke rising from the tip of his soldering iron.
“Jules!” he shouted. He lifted the magnifying lens off his gray head and set it and the soldering iron down on the steel workbench. “I heard you were back. I meant to send a note, but—” He waved around at the piles of parts with their work order tags dangling from strings. “Super busy,” he explained.
“Forget it,” she said. She gave Walker a hug, smelling the electrical fire scent on his skin that reminded her so much of him. And of Scottie.
“I’m going to feel guilty enough taking some of your time with this,” she said.
“Oh?” He stepped back and studied her, his bushy white brows and wrinkled skin furrowed with worry. “You got something for me?” He looked her up and down for a broken thing, a habit formed from a lifetime of being brought small devices that needed repairing.
“I actually just wanted to pick your brain.” She sat down on one of his workbench stools, and Walker did the same.
“Go ahead,” he said. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, and Juliette saw how old Walker had become. She remembered him without so much white in his hair, without the wrinkles and splotchy skin. She remembered him with his shadow.
“It has to do with Scottie,” she warned him.
Walker turned his head to the side and nodded. He tried to say something, tapped his fist against his chest a few times and cleared his throat. “Damn shame,” was all he could manage. He peered down at the floor for a moment.
“It can wait,” Juliette told him. “If you need time—”
“I convinced him to take that job,” Walker said, shaking his head. “I remember when the offer came, being scared he’d turn it down. Because of me, you know? That he’d be too afraid of me bein’ upset at him for leaving, that he might just stay forever, so I urged him to take it.” He looked up at her, his eyes shining. “I just wanted him to know he was free to choose. I didn’t mean to push him away.”
“You didn’t,” Juliette said. “Nobody thinks that, and neither should you.”
“I just don’t figure he was happy up there. That weren’t his home.”
“Well, he was too smart for us. Don’t forget that. We always said that.”
“He loved you,” Walker said, and wiped at his eyes. “Damn, how that boy looked up to you.”
Juliette felt her own tears welling up again. She reached into her pocket and brought out the wire she’d transcribed onto the back of the note. She had to remind herself why she was there, to hold it together.
“Just don’t seem like him to take the easy way—” Walker muttered.
“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Walker, I need to discuss some things with you that can’t leave this room.”
He laughed. Mostly, it seemed, to keep from sobbing. “Like I ever leave this room,” he said.
“Well, it can’t be discussed with anyone else. No one. Okay?”
He bobbed his head.
“I don’t think Scottie killed himself.”
Walker threw up his hands to cover his face. He bent forward and shook as he started to cry. Juliette got off her stool and went to him, put her arm around his trembling back.
“I knew it,” he sobbed into his palms. “I knew it, I knew it.”
He looked up at her, tears coursing through several days of white stubble. “Who did this? They’ll pay, won’t they? Tell me who did it, Jules.”
“Whoever it was, I don’t think they had far to travel,” she said.
“IT? Goddamn them.”
“Walker, I need your help sorting this out. Scottie sent me a wire not long before he . . . well, before I think he was killed.”
“Sent you a wire?”
“Yeah. Look, I met with him earlier that day. He asked me to come down to see him.”
“Down to IT?”
She nodded. “I’d found something in the last sheriff’s computer—”
“Holston.” He dipped his head. “The last cleaner. Yeah, Knox brought me something from you. A program, looked like. I told him Scottie would know better than anyone, so we forwarded it along.”
“Well, you were right.”
Walker wiped at his cheeks and bobbed his head. “He was smarter than any of us.”
“I know. He told me this thing, that it was a program, one that made very detailed images. Like the images we see of the outside—”
She waited a beat to see how he would respond. It was taboo to even use the word in most settings. Walker was unmoved. As she had hoped, he was old enough to be beyond childhood fears. And probably lonely and sad enough not to have cared anyway.
“But this wire he sent, it says something about P. X. L.’s being too dense.” She showed him the copy she’d made. Walker grabbed his magnifiers and slipped the band over his forehead.
“Pixels,” he said, sniffing. “He’s talking about the little dots that make up an image. Each one is a pixel.” He took the note from her and read some more. “He says it’s not safe there.” Walker rubbed his chin and shook his head. “Damn them.”
“Walker, what kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” Juliette looked around at all the boards, displays, and coils of loose wire strewn about his workshop. “Do you have anything like that?”
“Eight by two? Maybe a readout, like on the front of a server or something. Be the right size to show a few lines of text, internal temps, clock cycles—” He shook his head. “But you’d never make one with this kind of pixel density. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t make sense. Your eye couldn’t make out one pixel from its neighbor if it were right at the end of your nose.”
He rubbed his stubble and studied the note some more. “What’s this nonsense about the tape and the joke? What’s that mean?”
Juliette stood beside him and looked over the note. “I’ve been wondering about that. He must mean the heat tape he scored for me a while back.”
“I think I remember something about that.”
“Well, do you remember the problems we had with it? The exhaust we wrapped it in almost caught fire. The stuff was complete crap. I think he sent a note asking if the tape had gotten here okay, and I sorta recall writing back that it did, and thanks, but the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been engineered to.”
“That was your joke?” Walker swiveled in his stool and rested his elbows on the workbench. He kept peering over the copied charcoal letters like they were the face of Scottie, his little shadow coming back one last time to tell him something important.
“And he says my joke was truth,” Juliette said. “I’ve been up the last three hours thinking about this, dying to talk to someone.”
Walter looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised.
“I’m not a sheriff, Walk. Never born to be one. Shouldn’t have gone. But I know, as sure as everyone, that what I’m about to say should set me to cleaning—”
Walker immediately slid off his stool and walked away from her. Juliette damned herself for coming, for opening her mouth, for not just clocking into first shift and saying to hell with it all—
Walker shut the door to his workshop and locked it. He looked at her and lifted a finger, went to his air compressor and pulled out a hose. Then he flipped the unit on so the motor would start to build up pressure, which just leaked out the open nozzle in a steady, noisy hiss. He returned to the bench, the clatter from the noisy compressor engine awful, and sat down. His wide eyes begged her to continue.
“There’s a hill up there with a crook in it,” she told him, having to raise her voice a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen this hill, but there are two bodies nestled together in it, man and wife. If you look hard, you can see a dozen shapes like this all over the landscape, all the cleaners, all in various states of decay. Most are gone, of course. Rotted to dust over the long years.”
Walker shook his head at the image she was forming.
“How many years have they been improving these suits so the cleaners have a chance? Hundreds?”
He nodded.
“And yet nobody gets any further. And never once have they not had enough time to clean.”
Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”
Juliette pursed her lips. “That’s what I’m thinking. But not just the tape. Remember those seals from a few years back? The ones from IT that went into the water pumps, that were delivered to us by accident?”
“So we’ve been making fun of IT for being fools and dullards—”
“But we’re the fools,” Juliette said. And it felt so damned good to say it to another human being. So good for these new ideas of hers to swim in the air. And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.
“You think they have us down here to be near the oil?” she asked Walker. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. I think they’re keeping anyone with a lick of mechanical sense as far from them as possible. There’s two supply chains, two sets of parts being made, all in complete secrecy. And who questions them? Who would risk being put to cleaning?”
“You think they killed Scottie?” he asked.
Juliette nodded. “Walk, I think it’s worse than that.” She leaned closer, the compressor rattling, the hiss of released air filling the room. “I think they kill everybody.”