5
On the second and final day of their descent into the down deep, the novel gradually became the habitual. The clank and thrum of the great spiral staircase found a rhythm. Jahns was able to lose herself in her thoughts, daydreaming so serenely that she would glance up at the floor number, seventy-two, eighty-four, and wonder where a dozen landings went. The kink in her left knee was even soothed away, whether by the numbness of fatigue or an actual return to health, she didn’t know. She took to using the walking stick less, finding it only held up her pace as it often slipped between the treads and got caught there. With it tucked under her arm, it felt more useful. Like another bone in her skeleton, holding her together.
When they passed the ninetieth floor, with the stench of fertilizer and the pigs and other animals that produced this useful waste, Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.
Technically, they were already in the down deep when they reached ninety-seven. The bottom third. But even though the silo was mathematically divided into three sections of forty-eight floors each, her brain didn’t work that way. Floor one hundred was a better demarcation. It was a milestone. She counted the floors down until they reached the first landing with three digits, and stopped for a break.
Marnes was breathing deeply, she noticed. But she felt great. Alive and renewed in the way she had hoped the trip would make her. The futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were gone. All that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.
They split a small loaf of bread between them, sitting on the metal grating of the wide landing with their elbows propped up on the railings, their feet swinging over empty space, like two kids cutting class. Level one hundred teemed with people coming and going. The entire floor was a bazaar, a place for exchanging goods, for cashing in work chits for whatever was needed or merely coveted. Workers with their trailing shadows came and went, families yelled for one another among the dizzying crowds, merchants barked their best deals. The doors remained propped open for the traffic, letting the smells and sounds drift out onto the double-wide landing, the grating shivering with excitement.
Jahns reveled in the anonymity of the passing crowd. She bit into her half of the loaf, savoring the fresh yeastiness of bread baked that morning, and felt like just another person. A younger person. Marnes cut her a piece of cheese and a slice of apple and sandwiched them together. His hand touched hers as he passed it to her. Even the breadcrumbs in his mustache were part of the moment’s perfection.
“We’re way ahead of schedule,” Marnes said before taking a bite of fruit. It was just a pleasant observation. A pat on their elderly backs. “I figure we’ll hit one-forty by dinner.”
“Right now, I’m not even dreading the climb out,” Jahns said. She finished the cheese and apple and chewed contentedly. Everything tasted better while climbing, she decided. Or in pleasant company, or amid the music leaking out of the bazaar, some beggar strumming his uke over the noise of the crowd.
“Why don’t we come down here more often?” she asked.
Marnes grunted. “Because it’s a hundred flights down? Besides, we’ve got the view, the lounge, the bar at Kipper’s. How many of these people come up to any of that more than once every few years?”
Jahns chewed on that and on her last bite of bread.
“Do you think it’s natural? Not wandering too far from where we live?”
“Don’t follow,” Marnes said around a bite of food.
“Pretend, just as a hypothetical mind you, that people lived in those ancient aboveground silos poking up over the hillside. You don’t think they would move around so little, do you? Like stay in the same silo? Never wander over here or up and down a hundred flights of stairs?”
“I don’t think on those things,” Marnes said. Jahns took it as a hint that she shouldn’t, either. It was impossible sometimes to know what could and couldn’t be said about the outside. Those were discussions for spouses, and maybe the walk and the day together yesterday had gotten to her. Or maybe she was as susceptible to the post-cleaning high as anyone else: that sense that rules could be relaxed, temptations courted, the lack of pressure and the waste of a double cleaning giving excuse for a month of jubilant wiggling in one’s own skin.
“Should we get going?” Jahns asked, as Marnes finished his bread.
He nodded, and they stood and collected their things. A woman walking by turned and stared, a flash of recognition on her face, gone as she hurried to catch up to her children.
It was like another world down here, Jahns thought to herself. She had gone too long without a visit. And even as she promised herself to not let that happen again, some part of her knew, like a rusting machine that could feel its age, that this journey would be her last.
• • • •
Floors passed without care. The lower gardens, the larger farm on the one-thirties, the pungent water treatment plant below that. Jahns found herself lost in thought, thinking on her conversation with Marnes the night before, the idea of Donald living with her more in memory than reality, when she came to the gate at one-forty.
She hadn’t even noticed the change in the traffic, the preponderance of blue denim coveralls, the porters with more satchels of parts and tools than clothes, food, or personal deliveries. But the crowd at the gate showed her that she’d arrived at the upper levels of Mechanical. Gathered at the entrance were workers in loose blue coveralls spotted with age-old stains. Jahns could nearly peg their professions by the tools they carried. It was late in the day, and she assumed most were returning home from repairs made throughout the silo. The thought of climbing so many flights of stairs and then having to work boggled her mind. And then she remembered she was about to do that very thing.
Rather than abuse her station or Marnes’s power, they waited in line while the workers checked through the gate. As these tired men and women signed back in and logged their travel and hours, Jahns realized the time she had wasted ruminating about her own life during the long descent, time she should’ve spent polishing her appeal to this Juliette. Rare nerves twisted her gut as the line shuffled forward. The worker ahead of them showed his ID, the card colored blue for Mechanical. He scratched his information on a dusty slate. When it was their turn, they pushed through the outer gate and showed their golden IDs. The station guard raised his eyebrows, then seemed to recognize the mayor.
“Your honor,” he said, and Jahns didn’t correct him. “Weren’t expecting you this shift.” He waved their IDs away and reached for a nub of chalk. “Let me.”
Jahns watched as he spun the board around and wrote their names in neat print, the side of his palm collecting dust from the old film of chalk below. For Marnes, he simply wrote “Sheriff,” and again, Jahns didn’t correct him.
“I know she wasn’t expecting us until later,” Jahns said, “but I wonder if we could meet with Juliette Nichols now.”
The station guard turned and looked behind him at the digital clock that recorded the proper time. “She won’t be off the generator for another hour. Maybe two, knowing her. You could hit the mess hall and wait.”
Jahns looked to Marnes, who shrugged. “Not entirely hungry yet,” he said.
“What about seeing her at work? It would be nice to see what she does. We’d try our best to stay out of the way.”
The guard lifted his shoulders. “You’re the mayor. I can’t say no.” He jabbed the nub of chalk down the hall, the people lined up outside the gate shifting impatiently as they waited. “See Knox. He’ll get someone to run you down.”
Knox was a man hard to miss. He amply filled the largest set of coveralls Jahns had ever seen. She wondered if the extra denim cost him more chits, and how a man managed to keep such a belly full. A thick beard added to his scope. If he smiled or frowned at their approach, it was impossible to know. He was as unmoved as a wall of concrete.
Jahns explained what they were after. Marnes said hello, and she realized they must’ve met the last time he was down. Knox listened, nodded, and then bellowed in a voice so gruff, the words were indistinguishable from one another. But they meant something to someone, as a young boy materialized from behind him, a waif of a kid with unusually bright orange hair.
“Gitemoffandowntojules,” Knox growled, the space between the words as slender as the gap in his beard where a mouth should have been.
The young boy, young even for a shadow, waved his hand and darted away. Marnes thanked Knox, who didn’t budge, and they followed after the boy.
The corridors in Mechanical, Jahns saw, were even tighter than elsewhere in the silo. They squeezed through the end-of-shift traffic, the concrete blocks on either side primed but not painted, and rough where they brushed against her shoulder. Overhead, parallel and twisting runs of pipe and wire conduit hung exposed. Jahns felt the urge to duck, despite the half foot of clearance. She did notice many of the taller workers walking with a stoop. The lights overhead were dim and spaced well apart, making the sensation of tunneling deeper and deeper into the earth overwhelming.
The young shadow with the orange hair led them around several turns, his confidence in the route seemingly habitual. They came to a flight of stairs, the square kind that made right turns, and went down two more levels. Jahns heard a rumbling grow louder as they descended. When they left the stairwell on one-forty-two, they passed an odd contraption in a wide open room just off the hallway. A steel arm the size of several people end to end was lifting up and down, driving a piston through the concrete floor. Jahns slowed to watch its rhythmic gyrations. The air smelled of something chemical, something rotten. She couldn’t place it.
“Is this the generator?”
Marnes laughed in a patronizing, uniquely manly way.
“That’s a pump,” he said. “Oil well. It’s how you read at night.”
He squeezed her shoulder as he walked past, and Jahns forgave him instantly for laughing at her. She hurried after him and Knox’s young shadow.
“The generator is that thrumming you hear,” Marnes said. “The pump brings up oil, they do something to it in a plant a few floors down, and then it’s ready to burn.”
Jahns vaguely knew some of this, possibly from a committee meeting. She was amazed, once again, at how much of the silo was alien to even her, she who was supposed to be—nominally at least—running things.
The persistent grumbling in the walls grew louder as they neared the end of the hall. When the boy with the orange hair pulled open the doors, the sonic blast was immediate. Jahns felt wary about approaching further, and even Marnes seemed to stall. The kid waved them forward with frantic gestures, and Jahns found herself willing her feet to carry her toward the noise. She wondered, suddenly, if they were being led outside. It was an illogical, senseless idea, borne of imagining the most dangerous threat she could possibly summon.
As she broke the plane of the door, cowering behind Marnes, the boy let the door slam shut, trapping them inside with the onslaught. He pulled headphones—no wires dangling from them—from a rack by the wall. Jahns followed his lead and put a pair over her own ears. The noise deadened, remaining only in her chest and nerve endings. She wondered why, for what cause, this rack of ear protection would be located inside the room rather than outside.
The boy waved and said something, but it was just moving lips. They followed along a narrow passageway of steel grating, a floor much like the landings on each silo floor. When the hallway turned, one wall fell away and was replaced with a railing of three horizontal bars. Beyond, a machine beyond reckoning loomed. It was the size of her entire apartment and office put together, in a room larger than many in the gardens. Nothing seemed to be moving at first, nothing to justify the pounding she could feel in her chest and across her skin. It wasn’t until they fully rounded the machine that she saw the steel rod sticking out of the back of the unit, spinning ferociously, and disappearing into another massive metal machine which had cables as thick as a man’s waist rising up toward the ceiling.
The power and energy in the room were palpable. As they reached the end of the second machine, Jahns finally saw a solitary figure working beside it. A young looking woman in coveralls, a hardhat on, brown braided hair hanging out the back, was leaning into a wrench nearly as long as she was tall. Her presence gave the machines a terrifying sense of scale, but she didn’t seem to fear them. She threw herself into her wrench, her body frightfully close to the roaring unit, reminding Jahns of an old children’s tale where a mouse pulled a barb out of an imaginary beast called an elephant. The idea of a woman this size fixing a machine of such ferocity seemed absurd. But she watched the woman work while the young shadow slipped through a gate and ran up to tug on her coveralls.
The woman turned, not startled, and squinted at Jahns and Marnes. She wiped her forehead with the back of one hand, her other hand swinging the wrench around to rest on her shoulder. She patted the young shadow on the head and walked out to meet them. Jahns saw that the woman’s arms were lean and defined with muscle. She wore no undershirt, just blue coveralls cut high up over her chest, exposing a bit of olive skin that gleamed with sweat. She had the same dark complexion as the farmers who worked under grow lights, but it could have been as much from the grease and grime if her denims were any indication.
She stopped short of Jahns and Marnes and nodded at them. She smiled at Marnes with a hint of recognition. She didn’t offer a hand, for which Jahns was grateful. Instead, she pointed toward a door by a glass partition, and then headed that way herself.
Marnes followed on her heels like a puppy, Jahns close behind. She turned to make sure the shadow wasn’t underfoot, only to see him scurrying off the way he had come, his hair glowing in the wan overhead lights of the generator room. His duty, as far as he was concerned, was done.
Inside the small control room, the noise lessened. It dropped almost to nothing as the thick door was shut tight. Juliette pulled off her hardhat and earmuffs and dropped them on a shelf. Jahns took hers away from her head tentatively, heard the noise reduced to a distant hum, and removed them all the way. The room was tight and crowded with metal surfaces and winking lights unlike anything she had ever seen. It was strange to her that she was Mayor of this room as well, a thing she hardly knew existed and certainly couldn’t operate.
While the ringing in Jahns’ ears subsided, Juliette adjusted some spinning knobs, watching little arms waver under glass shields. “I thought we were doing this tomorrow morning,” she said. She concentrated intently on her work.
“We made better time than I’d hoped.”
Jahns looked to Marnes, who was holding his ear protection in both hands, shifting uncomfortably.
“Good to see you again, Jules,” he said.
She nodded and leaned down to peer through the thick glass window at the gargantuan machines outside, her hands darting over the large control board without needing to look, adjusting large black dials with faded white markings.
“Sorry about your partner,” she said, glancing down at a bank of readouts. She turned and studied Marnes, and Jahns saw that this woman, beneath the sweat and grime, was beautiful. Her face was hard and lean, her eyes bright. She had a fierce intelligence you could measure from a distance. And she peered at Marnes with utmost sympathy, visible in the furrow of her brows. “Really,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. He seemed like a good man.”
“The best,” Marnes sputtered, his voice cracking.
Juliette nodded as if that was all that needed saying. She turned to Jahns.
“That vibration you feel in the floor, Mayor? That’s a coupling when it’s barely two millimeters off. If you think it feels bad in here, you should go put your hands on the casing. It’ll jiggle your fingers numb immediately. Hold it long enough, and your bones will rattle like you’re coming apart.”
She turned and reached between Jahns and Marnes to throw a massive switch, then turned back to the control board. “Now imagine what that generator is going through, shaking itself to pieces like that. Teeth start grinding together in the transmission, small bits of metal shavings cycle through the oil like sandpaper grit. Next thing you know, there’s an explosion of steel and we’ve got no power but whatever the backup can spit out.”
Jahns held her breath.
“You need us to get someone?” Marnes asked.
Juliette laughed. “None of this is news or different from any other shift. If the backup unit wasn’t being torn down for new gaskets, and we could go to half power for a week, I could pull that coupler, adjust the mounts, and have her spinning like a top.” She shot a look at Jahns. “But since we have a mandate for full power, no interruptions, that’s not happening. So I’m going to keep tightening bolts while they keep trying to shake loose, and try and find the right revolutions in here to keep her fairly singing.”
“I had no idea, when I signed that mandate—”
“And here I thought I dumbed down my report enough to make it clear,” Juliette said.
“How long before this failure happens?”
Jahns suddenly realized she wasn’t here interviewing this woman. The demands were heading the opposite direction.
“How long?” Juliette laughed and shook her head. She finished a final adjustment and turned to face them with her arms crossed. “It could happen right now. It could happen a hundred years from now. The point is: it’s going to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. The goal shouldn’t be to keep this place humming along for our lifetimes—” She looked pointedly at Jahns. “—or our current term. If the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.”
Jahns saw Marnes stiffen at this. She felt her own body react, a chill coursing across her skin. This last line was dangerously close to treason. The metaphor only half saved it.
“I could declare a power holiday,” Jahns suggested. “We could stage it in memory of those who clean.” She thought more about this. “It could be an excuse to service more than your machine here. We could—”
“Good luck getting IT to power down shit,” Juliette said. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, then wiped this on her coveralls. She looked down at the grease transferred to the denim. “Pardon my language, Mayor.”
Jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her too much of a former self that she could just barely recall. A younger woman who dispensed with niceties and got what she wanted. She found herself glancing over at Marnes. “Why do you single out their department? For the power, I mean.”
Juliette laughed and uncrossed her arms. She tossed her hands toward the ceiling. “Why? Because IT has, what, three floors out of one forty-four? And yet they use up over a quarter of all the power we produce. I can do the math for you—”
“That’s quite all right.”
“And I don’t remember a server ever feeding someone or saving someone’s life or stitching up a hole in their britches.”
Jahns smiled. She suddenly saw what Marnes liked about this woman. She also saw what he had once seen in her younger self, before she married his best friend.
“What if we had IT ratchet down for some maintenance of their own for a week? Would that work?”
“I thought we came down here to recruit her away from all this,” Marnes grumbled.
Juliette shot him a look. “And I thought I told your—or your secretary—not to bother. Not that I’ve got anything against what you do, but I’m needed down here.” She raised her arm and checked something dangling from her wrist. It was a timepiece. But she was studying it as if it still worked.
“Look, I’d love to chat more.” She looked up at Jahns. “Especially if you can guarantee a holiday from the juice, but I’ve got a few more adjustments to make and I’m already into my overtime. Knox gets pissed if I push into too many extra shifts.”
“We’ll get out of your hair,” Jahns said. “We haven’t had dinner yet, so maybe we can see you after? Once you punch out and get cleaned up?”
Juliette looked down at herself, as if to confirm she even needed cleaning. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “They’ve got you in the bunkhouse?”
Marnes nodded.
“All right. I’ll find you later. And don’t forget your muffs.” She pointed to her ears, looked Marnes in the eye, nodded, then returned to her work, letting them know the conversation, for now, was over.