11
Juliette reported to first shift at six, the conversation with Walker playing over and over in her head. There was a sustained and embarrassing applause from the handful of techs present as she entered dispatch. Knox just glared at her from the corner, back to his gruff demeanor. He had already welcomed her back, and damned if he’d do it again.
She said hello to the people she hadn’t seen the night before and looked over the job queue. The words on the board made sense, but she had a difficult time processing them. In the back of her mind, she thought about poor Scottie, confused and struggling while someone killed him. She thought of his little body, probably riddled with evidence but soon to feed the roots of the dirt farms. She thought of a married couple lying together on a hill, never given a chance to make it any further, to see beyond the horizon.
She chose a job from the queue, one that would require little mental exertion on her part, and thought of poor Jahns and Marnes and how tragic their love—if she had been reading Marnes correctly—had been. The temptation to tell the entire room was crippling. She looked around at Megan and Ricks, at Jenkins and Marck, and thought about the small army of tight brotherhood she could form. The silo was rotten to the core; an evil man was acting Mayor; a puppet stood where a good sheriff had been; and all the good men and women were gone.
It was comical to imagine: her rallying a band of mechanics to storm the upper levels and right a wrong. And then what? Was this the uprising they had learned about as children? Is this how it begins? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?
She kept her mouth shut and made her way to the pump room, riding the flow of morning mechanics, thinking more about what she should be doing above than on what needing repairing below. She descended one of the side stairwells, stopped by the tool room to check out a kit bag, and lugged the heavy satchel to one of the deep pits where pumps ran constantly to keep the deep silo from filling halfway up with water.
Caryl, a transfer from third shift, was already working near the pit basin patching rotten cement. She waved with her trowel, and Juliette dipped her chin and forced herself to smile.
The offending pump sat idle on one wall, the backup pump beside it struggling mightily and spraying water out of dry and cracked seals. Juliette looked into the basin to gauge the height of the water. A painted number “9” was just visible above its murky surface. Juliette did some quick math, knowing the diameter of the basin and it being almost nine feet full. The good news was they had at least a day before boots were getting wet. Worst case, they replace the pump with a rebuilt one from spares and deal with Hendricks bitching at them for checking it out instead of fixing what they already had.
As she began stripping the failed pump down, pelted with spray from its smaller, leaking neighbor, Juliette considered her life with this new perspective provided by the morning’s revelations. The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story. A few years ago, she had been on the first team to drill past 10,000 feet and hit new oil reserves. She had a sense of the size and scope of the world below them. And then she had seen with her own eyes the view of the outside with its phantom-like sheets of smoke they called clouds rolling by on miraculous heights. She had even seen a star, which Lukas thought stood an inconceivable distance away. What God would make so much rock below and air above and just a measly silo between?
And then there was the rotting skyline and the images in the children’s books, both of which seemed to hold clues. The priests, of course, would say that the skyline was evidence that man wasn’t supposed to exceed his bounds. And the books with the faded color pages? The fanciful imagination of authors, a class done away with for all the trouble they inspired.
But Juliette didn’t see fanciful imagination in those books. She had spent a childhood in the nursery, reading each one over and over whenever they weren’t checked out, and things in them and in the wondrous plays performed in the bazaar made more sense to her than this crumbling cylinder in which they lived.
She wiggled the last of the water hoses free and began separating the pump from its motor. The hint of steel shavings suggested a chewed-up impeller, which meant pulling the shaft. As she worked on automatic, cruising through a job she’d performed numerous times before, she thought back on the myriad of animals that populated those books, most of which had never been seen by living eyes. The only fanciful part, she figured, was that they all talked and acted human. There were mice and chickens in several of the books that performed these stunts as well, and she knew their breeds were incapable of speech. All those other animals must exist somewhere, or used to. She felt this to the core, maybe because they weren’t imaginative at all. Each seemed to follow the same plan, just like all the silo’s pumps. You could tell one was based on the other. A particular design worked, and whoever had made one had made them all.
The silo made less sense. It hadn’t been created by a God—it was probably designed by IT. This was a new theory, but she felt more and more sure of it. They controlled all the important parts. Cleaning was the highest law and the deepest religion, and both of these were intertwined and housed within its secretive walls. And then there was the spacing from Mechanical and the spread of the deputy stations—more clues. Not to mention the clauses in the Pact, which practically granted them immunity. And now the discovery of a second supply chain, a series of parts engineered to fail, a purpose behind the lack of progress in survival time on the outside. IT had built this place and IT was keeping them there.
Juliette nearly stripped a bolt, she was so agitated. She turned to look for Caryl, but the younger woman was already gone, her repair patch a darker shade of gray as it waited to dry and blend in with the rest. Looking up, Juliette scanned the ceiling of the pump room where conduits of wire and piping traveled through the walls and mingled overhead. A run of steam pipes stood clustered to the side to keep from melting any of the wires; a ribbon of heat tape hung off one of these pipes in a loose coil. It would have to be replaced soon, she thought. That tape might be ten or twenty years old. She considered the stolen tape that had caused so much of the mess she was in, and how it would’ve been lucky to survive twenty minutes up there.
And that’s when Juliette realized what she must do. A project to pull the wool back from everyone’s eyes, a favor to the next fool who slipped up or dared to hope aloud. And it would be so easy. She wouldn’t have to build anything herself—they would do all the work for her. All it would take would be some convincing, and she was mighty good at that.
She smiled, a list of parts forming in her head as the broken impeller was removed from the faulty pump. All she would need to fix this problem was a replacement part or two. It was the perfect solution to getting everything in the silo working properly once more.
Juliette worked two full shifts, wearing her muscles to a numb ache before returning her tools and showering. She worked a stiff brush under her nails over the bathroom sink, determined to keep them up-top clean. She headed toward the mess hall, looking forward to a tall plate of high-energy food rather than the weak rabbit stew from the cafeteria on level one, when she passed through Mechanical’s entrance hall and saw Knox talking to Deputy Hank. The way they turned and stared, she knew they were talking about her. Juliette’s stomach sank. Her first thought was of her father. And then Peter. Who else could they take away from her that she might care about? They wouldn’t know to contact her about Lukas, whatever he was to her.
She made a swift turn and headed their direction, even as the two of them moved to intercept her. The looks on their faces confirmed her every fear. Something awful had happened. Juliette barely noticed Hank reaching for his cuffs.
“I’m sorry, Jules,” he said, as they got close.
“What happened?” Juliette asked. “Dad?”
Hank’s brow wrinkled in confusion. Knox was shaking his head and chewing on his beard. He studied the deputy like he might eat the man.
“Knox, what’s going on?”
“Jules, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. He seemed to want to say more but was powerless to do so. Juliette felt Hank reaching for her arm.
“You are under arrest for grave crimes against the silo.”
He recited the lines like they were from a sad poem. The steel clicked around her wrist.
“You will be judged and sentenced according to the Pact.”
Juliette looked up at Knox. “What is this?” she asked. Was she really being arrested again?
“If you are found guilty, you will be given a chance at honor.”
“What do you want me to do?” Knox whispered, his vast muscles twitching beneath his coveralls. He wrung his hands together, watching the second metal band clack around her other wrist, her two hands shackled together now. The large Head of Mechanical seemed to be contemplating violence—or worse.
“Easy, Knox,” Juliette said. She shook her head at him. The thought of more people getting hurt because of her was too much to bear.
“Should humanity banish you from this world—” Hank continued to recite, his voice cracking, his eyes wet with shame.
“Let it go,” Juliette told Knox. She looked past him to where more workers were coming off second shift, stopping to see this spectacle of their prodigal daughter being put in cuffs.
“—in that banishment, may you find your sins scrubbed, scrubbed away,” Hank concluded.
He looked up at her, one hand gripping the chain between her wrists, tears streaking down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Juliette nodded to him. She set her teeth and nodded to Knox as well.
“It’s alright,” she said. She kept bobbing her head. “It’s alright, Knox. Let it go.”
12
The climb up was to take three days. Longer than it should have, but there were protocols. A day trip up to Hank’s office, a night in his cell, Deputy Marsh coming down the next morning from the mids to escort her up another fifty levels to his office.
She felt numb during this second day of climbing, the looks from passersby sliding off her like water on grease. It was difficult to concern herself with her own life—she was too busy tallying all the others, some of them because of her.
Marsh, like Hank, tried to make small talk, and all Juliette could contemplate to say in return was that they were on the wrong side. That evil ran amuck. But she kept her mouth shut.
At the mids deputy station, she was shown to a familiar enough cell, just like the one in Hank’s. No wallscreen, just a stack of primed cinderblocks. She collapsed onto the bunk before he even had the gate locked, and lay there for what felt like hours, waiting for night to come and pass to dawn, for Peter’s new deputy to come and march her up the last leg of her journey.
She checked her wrist often, but Hank had confiscated her watch. He probably wouldn’t even know how to wind it. The thing would eventually fall into disrepair and return to being a trinket, a useless thing worn upside down for its pretty band.
This saddened her more than it should have. She rubbed her bare wrist, dying to know the time, when Marsh came back and told her she had a visitor.
Juliette sat up on the cot and swung her legs around. Who would come up to the mids from Mechanical?
When Lukas appeared on the other side of the bars, the dam that held back all her emotions nearly broke. She felt her neck constrict, her jaws ache from fighting the sobs, the emptiness in her chest nearly puncture and burst. He grabbed the bars and leaned his head against them, his temples touching the smooth steel, a sad smile on his face.
“Hey,” he said.
Juliette barely recognized him. She was used to seeing him in the dark, had been in a hurry when they’d bumped into each other on the stairs. He was a striking man, his eyes older than his face, his light brown hair slicked back with sweat from what she assumed was a hurried walk down.
“You didn’t need to come,” she said, speaking softly and slowly to keep from crying. What really saddened her was someone seeing her like this, someone she was beginning to realize she cared about. The indignity was too much.
“We’re fighting this,” he said. “Your friends are collecting signatures. Don’t give up.”
She shook her head. “It won’t work,” she told him. “Please don’t get your hopes up.” She walked to the bars and wrapped her hands a few inches below his. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know this is ratshit—”
He turned away, a tear streaking down his cheek. “Another cleaning?” he croaked. “Why?”
“It’s what they want,” Juliette said. “There’s no stopping them.”
Lukas’ hands slid down the bars and wrapped around hers. Juliette couldn’t free them to wipe at her cheeks. She tried to dip her head to use her shoulder.
“I was coming up to see you that day—” Lukas shook his head and took a deep breath. “I was coming to ask you out—”
“Don’t,” she said. “Lukas. Don’t do this.”
“I told my mom about you.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Lukas—”
“This can’t happen,” he said. He shook his head. “It can’t. You can’t go.”
When he looked back up, Juliette saw that there was more fear in his eyes than even she felt. She wiggled one hand free and peeled his other one off. She pushed them away. “You need to let this go,” she said. “I’m sorry. Just find someone. Don’t end up like me. Don’t wait—”
“I thought I had found someone,” he said plaintively.
Juliette turned to hide her face.
“Go,” she whispered.
She stood still, feeling his presence on the other side of those bars, this boy who knew about stars but nothing about her. And she waited, listening to him sob while she cried quietly to herself, until she finally heard his feet shuffle across the floor, his sad gait carrying him away.
That night, she spent another evening on a cold cot, another evening of not being told what she’d been arrested for, and evening to count the hurts she had unwittingly caused. The next day, there was a final climb up through a land of strangers, the whispers of a double cleaning chasing after her, Juliette falling into another stunned trance, one leg moving and then the other.
At the end of her climb, she was moved into a familiar cell, past Peter Billings and her old desk. Her escort collapsed into Deputy Marnes’ squeaking chair, complaining of exhaustion.
Juliette could feel the shell that had formed around her during the long three days, that hard enamel of numbness and disbelief. People didn’t talk softer, they just sounded that way. They didn’t stand further from her, they just seemed more distant.
She sat on the lone cot and listened to Peter Billings charge her with conspiracy. A data drive hung in a limp plastic bag like a pet fish that had gobbled all its water and now lay dead. Dug out of the incinerator, somehow. Its edges were blackened. A scroll was unspooled, only partly pulped. Details of her computer search were listed. She knew most of what they found was Holston’s data, not hers. She wasn’t sure what the point would be of telling them this. They already had enough for several cleanings.
A judge stood beside Peter in his black coveralls while her sins were listed, as if anyone were really there to decide her fate. Juliette knew the decision had already been made, and by someone else.
Scottie’s name was mentioned, but she didn’t catch the context. It could have been that the email on his account had been discovered. It could be that they were going to pin his death on her, just in case. Bones buried with bones, keeping the secrets held between them safe.
She tuned them out and instead watched over her shoulder as a small tornado formed on the flats and spun toward the hills. It eventually dissipated as it crashed into the gentle slope, dissolving like so many cleaners, thrown to the caustic breeze and left to waste away.
Bernard never showed himself. Too afraid or too smug, Jules would never know. She peered down at her hands, at the thin trace of grease deep under her nails, and knew that she was already dead. It didn’t matter, somehow. There was a line of bodies behind and before her. She was just the shuffling present, the cog in the machine, spinning and gnashing its metal teeth until that one gear wore down, until the slivers of her self broke loose and did more damage, until she needed to be pulled, cast off, and replaced with another.
Pam brought her oatmeal and fried potatoes from the cafeteria, her favorite. She left it steaming outside the bars. Notes were ported up from Mechanical all day and passed through to her. She was glad none of her friends visited. Their silent voices were more than enough.
Juliette’s eyes did the crying, the rest of her too numb to shake or sob. She read the sweet notes while tears dripped on her thighs. Knox’s was a simple apology. She imagined he would rather have murdered and done something—even if he were cast out for the attempt—than the impotent display his note said he would regret all his life. Others sent spiritual messages, promises to see her on the other side, quotes from memorized books. Shirly maybe knew her best and gave her an update on the generator and the new centrifuge for the refinery. She told her all would remain well and largely because of her. This elicited the faintest of sobs from Juliette. She rubbed the charcoal letters with her fingers, transferring some of her friends’ black thoughts to herself.
She was left at last with Walker’s note, the only one she couldn’t figure. As the sun set over the harsh landscape, the wind dying down for the night and allowing the dust to settle, she read his words over and over, trying to deduce what he meant.
Jules-
No fear. Now is for laughing. The truth is a joke and they’re good in Supply.
-Walk
She wasn’t sure how she fell asleep, only that she woke up and found notes like peeled chips of paint around her cot, more of them slipped between the bars overnight. Juliette turned her head and peered through the darkness, realizing someone was there. A man stood behind the bars. When she stirred, he pulled away, a wedding band singing with the sound of steel on steel. She rose hurriedly from the cot and rushed to the bars on sleepy legs. She grabbed them with trembling hands and peered through the darkness as the figure melded with the black.
“Dad—?” she called out, reaching through the grate.
But he didn’t turn. The tall figure hurried his pace, slipping into the void, a mirage now, as well as a distant childhood memory.
The following sunrise was something to behold. There was a rare break in the low, dark clouds that allowed visible rays of golden smoke to slide sideways across the hills. Juliette lay in her cot, watching the dimness fade to light, her cheek resting on her hands, the smell of cold untouched oatmeal drifting from outside the bars. She thought of the men and women in IT working through the past three nights to construct a suit tailored for her, their blasted parts ported up from Supply. The suit would be timed to last her just long enough, to get her through the cleaning but no further.
In all the ordeal of her handcuffed climb, the days and nights of numb acceptance—the thought of the actual cleaning had never occurred to her until now, on the very morning of that duty. She felt, with absolute certainty, that she would not perform the act. She knew they all said this, every cleaner, and that they all experienced some magical, perhaps spiritual, transformation on the threshold of their deaths and performed nonetheless. But she had no one up-top to clean for. She wasn’t the first cleaner from Mechanical, but she was determined to be the first to refuse.
She said as much as Peter took her from her cell and led her to that yellow door. A tech from IT was waiting inside, making last minute adjustments to her suit.
Juliette listened to his instructions with a clinical detachment. She saw all the weaknesses in the design. She realized—if she hadn’t been so busy working two shifts in Mechanical to keep the floods out, the oil in, the power humming—that she could make a better suit in her sleep. She studied washers and seals identical to the kind employed in pumps, but designed, she knew, to break down. The shiny coat of heat tape, applied in overlapping strips to form the skin of the suit, she knew to be purposefully inferior. She nearly pointed these things out to the tech as he promised her the latest and greatest. He zipped her up, tugged on her gloves, helped with her boots, and explained the numbered pockets.
Juliette repeated the mantra from Walker’s note: No fear. No fear. No fear.
Now is for laughing. The truth is a joke. And they are in good Supply.
The tech checked her gloves and the velcro seals over her zippers while Juliette puzzled over Walker’s note. Why had he capitalized “Supply?” Or was she even remembering it correctly? Now, she couldn’t remember. A strip of tape went around one boot, then the other. Juliette laughed at the spectacle of it all. It was all so utterly pointless. They should bury her in the dirt farms, where her body might actually do some good.
The helmet came last, handled with obvious care. The tech had her hold it while he adjusted the metal ring collar around her neck. She looked down at her reflection in the visor, her eyes hollow and so much older than she remembered yet so much younger than she felt. Finally, the helmet went on, the room dimmer through the dark glass. The tech reminded her of the argon blast, of the fires that would follow. She would have to get out quickly or die a far worse death inside.
He left her to consider this. The yellow door behind her clanged shut. Its wheel spun on the inside as if by a ghost.
Juliette wondered if she should simply stay and succumb to the flames, not give this spiritual awakening a chance to persuade her. What would they say in Mechanical when that tale spiraled its way through the silo? Some would be proud of her obstinacy, she knew. Some would be horrified at her having gone out that way, in a bone-charring inferno. A few might even think she’d not been brave enough to take the first step out the door, that she’d wasted the chance to see the outside with her own eyes.
Her suit crinkled as the argon was pumped into the room, creating enough pressure to temporarily hold the outside toxins at bay. She found herself shuffling toward the door, almost against her will. When it cracked, the plastic sheeting in the room flattened itself against every pipe, against the low-jutting bench, and she knew the end had come. The doors before her parted, the silo splitting like the skin of a pea, giving her a view of the outside through a haze of condensing steam.
One boot slid through that crack, followed by another. And Juliette moved out into the world, dead set on leaving it on her own terms, seeing it for the first time with her own eyes even through this limited portal, this roughly eight inch by two inch sheet of glass, she suddenly realized.
13
Bernard watched the cleaning from the cafeteria while his techs gathered their supplies in Peter’s office. It was his habit to view these things alone—his techs rarely joined him. They lugged their equipment out of the office and headed straight for the stairwell. Bernard was ashamed sometimes of the superstitions, the fears, he fostered even in his own men.
First the dome of her helmet, and then the shiny specter of Juliette Nichols, staggered aboveground. She lumbered up the ramp, her movements stiff and unsure. Bernard checked the clock on the wall and reached for his cup of juice. He settled back to see if he could gauge another cleaner’s reaction to what they were seeing: A world crisp, bright, and clean, studded with soaring life, grass wavering in a fresh breeze, a glimmering acropolis beckoning from over the hills.
He had watched nearly a dozen cleanings in his day, always enjoying that first pirouette as they took in their surroundings. He had seen men who had left families behind dance before the sensors, waving their loved ones out, trying to pantomime all the false goodness displayed on their visor screens, all to no avail, to no audience. He had seen people reaching madly for flying birds, mistaking them for insects much closer to their faces. One cleaner had even gone back down the ramp and presumably beat on the door as if to signal something, before finally getting to cleaning. What were any of these various reactions but the proud reminder of a system that worked? That no matter the individual psychology, the sight of all their false hopes eventually drove them to do what they promised they wouldn’t.
Perhaps that’s why Mayor Jahns could never stomach to watch. She had no idea what they were seeing, feeling, responding to. She would come up with her weak stomach the next morning and take in a sunrise, mourn in her own way, the rest of the silo granting her some space. But Bernard cherished this transformation, this delusion he and his predecessors had honed to perfection. He smiled and took a sip of fresh fruit juice and observed this Juliette as she staggered around, coming to her misguided senses. There was the barest coat of grime on the sensor lenses, not even worth a hard scrub, but he knew from double cleanings in the past that she would do it anyway. No one had ever not.
He took another sip and turned to the sheriff’s office to see if Peter had summoned the courage to come watch, but the door was closed all but a crack. He had high hopes for that boy. Sheriff today, and maybe one day Mayor. Bernard might hold the post for a short while, maybe an election or two, but he knew he belonged in IT, that this was not the job for him. Or rather, that his other duties were far more difficult to replace.
He turned away from Peter’s office and back to the view—and nearly dropped his paper cup of juice.
The silvery form of Juliette Nichols was already trudging up the hill. The grime on the sensors was still in place.
Bernard stood abruptly, knocking his chair over backwards. He staggered toward the wallscreen, almost as if he could chase after her.
And then he watched, dumbfounded, as she strode up that dark crease and paused for a moment over the still form of two other cleaners. Bernard checked the clock again. Any moment now. Any moment. She would collapse and fumble for her helmet. She would roll in the dusty soil, kicking up a cloud, sliding down that slope until she came to a dead rest.
But the second hand ticked along, and so did Juliette. She left the two cleaners behind, her limbs still climbing with power, her steady gait guiding her far up to the crest of the hill where she stood, taking in a view of who-knew-what, before disappearing, impossibly, out of sight.
Bernard’s hand was sticky with juice as he raced down the stairwell. He kept the crushed paper cup in his fist for three levels before catching up to his techs and hurling it at their backs. The ball of trash bounced off and went tumbling into space, destined to settle on some distant landing below. Bernard cursed the confused men and kept running, his feet dangerously close to tripping over themselves. A dozen floors down, he nearly collided with the first hopeful climbers ascending to see the second crisp sunrise in the past weeks.
He was sore and winded when he finally made it down to thirty-four, his spectacles sliding around on the sweaty bridge of his nose. He burst through the double doors and yelled for the gate to be opened. A frightened guard complied, scanning the reader with his own ID right before Bernard slammed through the stubby metal arm. He practically ran down the hallway, taking two turns before he got to the most heavily fortified door in the entire silo.
Swiping his card and punching in his security code, he hurried inside, past the thick wall of solid steel. It was hot in the room full of servers. The identical black cases rose from the tiled floor like monuments to what was possible, to the craft and engineering of human endeavor. Bernard walked among them, the sweat gathering in his eyebrows, light glittering in his vision, his upper lip wet with perspiration. He ran his hands along the faces of the machines, the flashing lights like happy eyes trying to soothe his anger, the electrical hum like whispers to their master, hoping to calm him.
None of it worked. Bernard felt a surge of fear. He went over and over what could have gone wrong. It wasn’t as if she would survive, she couldn’t possibly survive, but his mandate, second only to preserving the data on these machines, was to never let anyone out of sight. It was the highest order. He didn’t have to know why to tremble from the morning’s failure.
He cursed the heat as he reached the server on the far wall. The vents overhead carried cool air from the down deep and deposited it into the server room. Large fans in the back whisked the heat away and pumped it through more ducts down the silo, keeping the cool and dingy nastiness of the triple-digit levels humanely warm. Bernard glared at the vents, remembering the power holiday, the week of rising temperatures that had threatened his servers, all for some generator, and all because of this woman he had just let out of his sight. The memory stoked the flames under his collar. He cursed the design flaw that left the control of those vents down in Mechanical with those grease monkeys, those uncivilized tinkerers. He thought of the ugly and loud machines down there, the smell of leaking exhaust and burning oil. He had only needed to see it once—to kill a man—but even that was too much. Comparing those noisy engines with the sublime servers was enough to make him never want to leave IT. Here was where silicone chips released their tangy scent as they heated under the strain of crunching data. Here was where one could smell the rubber coating the wires, running in parallel, neatly bundled, labeled and coded, and streaming with gigabits of glorious data every second. Here was where he oversaw the refilling of their data drives with all that had been deleted from the last uprising. Here, a man could think, surrounded by machines quietly doing the same.
Somewhere down those vents, however, was the stench of the unclean. Bernard wiped the sweat from his head and rubbed it on the seat of his coveralls. The thought of that woman, first stealing from him, then rewarded by Jahns with the highest office of law, and now daring to not clean, to wander off—
It raised his temperature dangerously.
He reached the server at the end of the row and squeezed between it and the wall to the back. The key kept around his neck slid into the greased innards of the case locks. As he turned each one, he reminded himself that she couldn’t have gotten far. And how much trouble could this really cause? More importantly, what had gone wrong? The timing should always be impeccable. It always had been.
The back of the server came free, revealing the mostly empty innards behind. Bernard slipped the key back into his coveralls and set the panel of black steel aside, the metal damnably hot to the touch. There was a cloth case fastened inside the server’s belly. Bernard unloosened the flap and reached inside, extracting the plastic headset. He pulled it down over his ears, adjusted the mic, and unspooled the cord.
He could keep this under control, he thought to himself. He was head of IT. He was Mayor. Peter Billings was his man. People liked stasis, and he could maintain the illusion of it. They were afraid of change, and he could conceal it. With him in both offices, who would oppose him? Who was better qualified? He would explain this. Everything would be okay.
Still, he was mightily, uniquely afraid as he located the correct jack and plugged in the cord. There was an immediate beeping sound in the headphones, the connection automatically taking place.
He could still oversee IT from a distance, make sure this never happened again, be more on top of his reports. Everything was under control. He told himself this as his headphones clicked and the beeping stopped. He knew someone had picked up, even if they refused anything in the way of a greeting. He felt there was annoyance hanging in the silence.
Bernard dispensed with the pleasantries as well. He jumped right in to what he needed to say.
“Silo one? This is silo eighteen.” He licked the sweat off his lips and adjusted his mic. His palms suddenly felt cold and clammy, and he needed to pee.
“We, uh . . . we might have a, uh . . . slight problem over here—”
Wool 4 – The unraveling
0
“The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliette”
The walk was long, and longer still for her young mind. Though Juliette took few of the steps with her own small feet, it felt as though she and her parents had traveled for weeks. All things took forever in impatient youth, and any kind of waiting was torture.
She rode on her father’s shoulders, clutched his chin, her legs wrapped choking around his neck. Riding so high, she had to stoop her head to avoid the undersides of the steps. Clangs from strangers’ boots rang out on the treads above her, and sprinkles of rust-dust drifted into her eyes.
Juliette blinked and rubbed her face into her father’s hair. As excited as she was, the rise and fall of his shoulders made it impossible to stay awake. When he complained of a sore back, she rode a few levels on her mother’s hip, fingers interlocked around her neck, her young head lolling as she drifted off to sleep.
She enjoyed the sounds of the traveling, the footfalls and the rhythmic song of her mother and father chatting adult things, their voices drifting back and forth as she faded in and out.
The journey became a haze of foggy recollections. She awoke to the squealing of pigs through an open door, was vaguely aware of a garden they toured, woke fully to the smell of something sweet and ate a meal—lunch or dinner, she wasn’t sure. She hardly stirred that night as she slid from her father’s arms into a dark bed. She awoke the next morning beside a cousin she didn’t know in an apartment nearly identical to her own. It was a weekend. She could tell by the older kids playing loudly in the hallway instead of getting ready for school. After a cold breakfast, she returned to the stairs with her parents and the sensation that they’d been traveling all their lives instead of just one day. And then the naps returned with their gentle erasure of time.
What took two days and felt like a week or a month to young Juliette, finally brought them to the hundredth landing of the silo’s unfathomable depths. She took the last steps herself, her mom and dad holding a hand each, telling her the significance. She was now in a place called the “down deep,” they told her. The bottom third. They steadied her sleepy legs as she wobbled from the last tread of the ninety-ninth stairway to the landing of the hundredth. Her father pointed above the open and busy doors to a large painted number with an incredible third digit:
100
The two circles captivated Juliette. They were like wide open eyes peering out at the world for the first time. She told her father that she could already count that high.
“I know you can,” he said. “It’s because you’re so smart.”
She followed her mother into the bazaar while clutching one of her father’s strong and rough hands with both of her own. There were people everywhere. It was loud, but in a good way. A happy noise filled the air as people lifted their voices to be heard—just like a classroom once the teacher was gone.
Juliette felt afraid of getting lost, and so she clung to her father. They waited while her mom bartered for lunch. It required stopping at what felt like a dozen stalls to get the handful of things she needed. Her dad talked a man into letting her lean through a fence to touch a rabbit. The fur was so soft it was like it wasn’t there. Juliette snapped her hand back in fear when the animal turned its head, but it just chewed something invisible and looked at her like it was bored.
The bazaar seemed to go on forever. It wound around and out of sight, even when all the many-colored adult legs were clear enough for her to see to the end. Off to the sides, narrower passages full of more stalls and tents twisted in a maze of colors and sounds, but Juliette wasn’t allowed to go down any of these. She stuck with her parents until they arrived at the first set of square steps she’d ever seen in her young life.
“Easy now,” her mother told her, helping her up the steps.
“I can do it,” she said stubbornly, but took her mom’s hand anyway.
“Two and one child,” her father said to someone at the top of the steps. She heard the clatter of chits going into a box that sounded full of them. As her father passed through the gate, she saw the man by the box was dressed in all colors, a funny hat on his head that flopped much too big. She tried to get a better look as her mom guided her through the gates, a hand on her back and whispers in her ear to keep up with her father. The gentleman turned his head, bells jangling on his hat, and made a funny face at her, his tongue poking out to the side.
Juliette laughed, but still felt half afraid of the strange man as they found a spot to sit and eat. Her dad dug a thin bed sheet out of his pack and spread it across one of the wide benches. Juliette’s mom made her take her shoes off before she stood on the sheet. She held her father’s shoulder and looked down the slope of benches and seats toward the wide open room below. Her father told her the open room was called a “stage.” Everything in the down deep had different names.
“What’re they doing?” she asked her father. Several men on the stage, dressed as colorful as the gatesman, were throwing balls up into the air—an impossible number of them—keeping them all from hitting the ground.
Her father laughed. “They’re juggling. They’re here to entertain us until the play starts.”
Juliette wasn’t sure she wanted the play to start. This was it, the thing she wanted to see. The jugglers tossed balls and hoops between each other, and Juliette could feel her own arms windmilling as she watched. She tried counting the hoops, but they wouldn’t stay in one place long enough.
“Eat your lunch,” her mother reminded her, passing her bites of a fruit sandwich.
Juliette was mesmerized. When the jugglers put the balls and hoops away and started chasing one another, falling down and acting silly, she laughed as loudly as the other kids. She looked constantly to her mom and dad to see if they were watching. She tugged on their sleeves, but they just nodded and continued to talk, eat, and drink. When another family sat close and a boy older than her laughed at the jugglers as well, Juliette felt suddenly like she had company. She began to squeal even louder. The jugglers were the brightest things she had ever seen. She could’ve watched them forever.
But then the lights were dimmed and the play began, and it was boring by comparison. It started off nice with a rousing sword fight, but then it was a lot of strange words and a man and woman looking at each other the way her parents did, talking in some funny language.
Juliette fell asleep. She dreamed of flying through the silo with one hundred colorful balls and hoops soaring all around her, always out of reach, the hoops round like the numbers at the end of the bazaar’s level—and then she woke up to whistles and applause.
Her parents were standing and yelling while the people on the stage in the funny costumes took several bows. Juliette yawned and looked over at the boy on the bench beside her. He was sleeping with his mouth open, his head in his mom’s lap, his shoulders shaking while she clapped and clapped.
They gathered up the sheet and her father carried her down to the stage where the swordfighters and strange talkers were speaking to the audience and shaking hands. Juliette wanted to meet the jugglers. She wanted to learn how to make the hoops float in the air. But her parents waited instead until they could speak to one of the ladies, the one who had her hair braided and twisted into drooping curves.
“Juliette,” her father told her, lifting her onto the stage. “I want you to meet . . . Juliette.” He gestured to the woman in the fluffy dress with the strange hair.
“Is that your real name?” the lady asked, kneeling down and reaching for Juliette’s hand.
Juliette pulled it back like it was another rabbit about to bite her, but nodded.
“You were wonderful,” her mom told the lady. They shook hands and introduced themselves.
“Did you like the play?” the lady with the funny hair asked.
Juliette nodded. She could sense that she was supposed to and that this made it okay to lie.
“Her father and I came to this show years ago when we first started dating,” her mother said. She rubbed Juliette’s hair. “We were going to name our first child either Romeus or Juliette.”
“Well, be glad you had a girl, then,” the lady said, smiling.
Her parents laughed, and Juliette was beginning to be less afraid of this woman with the same name as her.
“Do you think we could get your autograph?” Her father let go of her shoulder and rummaged in his pack. “I have a program in here somewhere.”
“Why not a script for this young Juliette?” The lady smiled at her. “Are you learning your letters?”
“I can count to a hundred,” Juliette said proudly.
The woman paused, then smiled. Juliette watched her as she stood and crossed the stage, her dress flowing in a way that coveralls never could. The lady returned from behind a curtain with a tiny book of papers held fast with brass pins. She accepted a charcoal from Juliette’s father and wrote her name large and curly across the cover.
The woman pressed the collection of papers into her small hands. “I want you to have this, Juliette of the silo.”
Her mother protested. “Oh, we couldn’t. That’s too much paper—“
“She’s only five,” her father said.
“I have another,” the lady assured them. “We make our own. I want her to have it.”
She reached out and touched Juliette’s cheek, and this time Juliette didn’t pull away. She was too busy flipping through the papers, looking at all the curly notes handwritten along the sides beside the printed words. One word, she noticed, was circled over and over among all the others. She couldn’t make out many of them, but this one she could read. It was her name. It was at the beginning of so many sentences:
Juliette. Juliette.
This was her. She looked up at the lady, understanding at once why her parents had brought her there, why they had walked so far and for so long.
“Thank you,” she said, remembering her manners.
And then, after some consideration:
“I’m sorry I fell asleep.
1
“A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished.”
It was the morning of the worst cleaning of Lukas’s life—and for once he considered going into work, to ignore 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 to not 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 know 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 be doing right then, that very day. Anything but sitting around on a holiday, feeling like he could be physically ill over a woman he’d done little more than tell his mother about.
Lukas stood and shrugged on the same pair of coveralls 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 coveralls on. The commotion was little more than background noise for Lukas. It was a hum, like the aches in his legs from gathering signatures the days before. He stepped out onto the apartment’s landing and felt a habitual tug upwards 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 old-man 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 in unseen angles. It was hard to gauge the distance—Lukas was used to the much larger scale of stars—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 after things they’d lost. 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 in 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 caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout. Maybe the cleaning never happened. Was it possible his petition had been reconsidered? Had the weight of all those signatures gathered over a spread of a hundred levels finally worn the judges down? What if Bernard had actually come through for him, had swayed the presiding judge to lower Juliette’s offense?
Lukas recalled his appeals to Bernard, begging him as a friend, as his boss, to intervene on her behalf. He had asked him to add his own signature to the petition, which he finally had. But Bernard had warned him that her fate was out of his hands, that the judges would decide, that his authority as interim mayor made him practically powerless.
And yet, if a porter had dire news on a day of cleaning, could it be that his friend had kept at it all night and had finally come through?
That tiny seed of hope sprang roots. It grew vine-like 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 upbound 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.
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 heading upbound.
“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 around Lukas 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 to know.
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. “Plum 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 me 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 may 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.