5
After filling out reports, discovering Marnes had no next of kin, speaking with the coroner at the dirt farm, and answering questions from nosy neighbors, Juliette finally took a long and lonely walk up eight flights of stairs, back to her empty office.
She spent the rest of the day getting little work done, the door to the cafeteria open, the small room much too crowded with ghosts. She tried repeatedly to lose herself in the files from Holston’s computers, but Marnes’s absence was incredibly sadder than his moping presence had been. She couldn’t believe he was gone. It almost felt like an affront, to bring her here and then leave her so suddenly. And she knew this was a horrible and selfish thing to feel and even worse to admit.
As her mind roamed, she glanced occasionally out the door, watching the clouds slide across the distant wallscreen. She debated with herself on whether they appeared light or dense, if tonight would be a good one for viewing stars. It was another guilt-ridden thought, but she felt powerfully alone, a woman who prided herself on needing no one.
She played some more with the maze of files while the light of an unseen sun diminished in the cafeteria, while two shifts of lunch and two shifts of dinner vibrated and then subsided around her, all the while watching the roiling sky and hoping, for no real logical reason, for another chance encounter with the strange star hunter from the night before.
And even sitting there, with the sounds and scents of everyone on the upper forty-eight eating, Juliette forgot to. It wasn’t until the second shift staff was leaving, the lights cut down to quarter power, that Pam came in with a bowl of soup and a biscuit. Juliette thanked her and reached into her coveralls for a few chits, but Pam refused. The young woman’s eyes—red from crying—drifted to Marnes’s empty chair, and Juliette realized the cafeteria staff had probably been as close to the deputy as anyone.
Pam left without a word, and Juliette ate with what little appetite she could manage. She eventually thought of one more search she could try on Holston’s data, a global spell-check to look for names that might offer clues, and eventually figured out how to run it. Meanwhile, her soup grew cold. While her computer began to churn through the hills of data, she took her bowl and a few folders and left her office to sit at one of the cafeteria tables near the wallscreen.
She was looking for stars on her own when Lukas appeared silently at her side. He didn’t say anything, just pulled up a chair, sat down with his board and paper, and peered up at the expansive view of the darkened outside.
Juliette couldn’t tell if he was being polite to honor her silence, or if he was being rude not to say hello. She finally settled on the former, and eventually the quiet felt normal. Shared. A peace at the end of a horrible day.
Several minutes passed. A dozen. There were no stars and nothing was said. Juliette held a folder in her lap, just to give her fingers something to do. There was a sound from the stairwell, a laughing group moving between the apartment levels below, and then a return to the quiet.
“I’m sorry about your partner,” Lukas finally said. His hands smoothed the paper on the board. He had yet to make a single mark or note.
“I appreciate that,” Juliette said. She wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was, but this seemed the least wrong.
“I’ve been looking for stars, but haven’t seen any,” she added.
“You won’t. Not tonight.” He waved his hand at the wallscreen. “These are the worst kinds of clouds.”
Juliette studied them, barely able to make them out with the last of twilight’s distant glow. They looked no different to her than any others.
Lukas turned almost imperceptibly in his seat. “I have a confession, since you’re the law and all.”
Juliette’s hand groped for the star on her chest. She was often in danger of forgetting what she was.
“Yeah?”
“I knew the clouds were gonna be bad tonight. But I came up anyway.”
Juliette trusted the darkness to conceal her smile.
“I’m not sure the Pact has much to say on such duplicity,” she told him.
Lukas laughed. It was strange how familiar it already sounded, and how badly she needed to hear it. Juliette had a sudden urge to grab him, to tuck her chin into his neck, and to cry. She could almost feel her body begin to piece the moves together—even though her skin would not budge. It could never happen. She knew this, even as the sensation vibrated within her. It was just the loneliness, the horror of holding Marnes in her arms, of feeling that lifeless heft of a body relieved of whatever animates it. She was desperate for contact, and this stranger was the only person she knew little enough to want it from.
“What happens now?” he asked, his laughter fading.
Juliette almost blurted out, inanely, Between us? but Lukas saved her:
“Do you know when the funeral will be? And where?” he asked.
She nodded in the darkness.
“Tomorrow. There’s no family to travel up, no investigation to make.” Juliette choked back the tears. “He didn’t leave a will, so they left it up to me to make arrangements. I decided to lay him to rest near the Mayor.”
Lukas looked to the wallscreen. It was dark enough that the bodies of the cleaners couldn’t be seen, a welcome relief. “As he should be,” he said.
“I think they were lovers in secret,” Juliette blurted out. “If not lovers, then just as close.”
“There’s been talk,” he agreed. “What I don’t get is why keep it a secret. Nobody would’ve cared.”
Somehow, sitting in the darkness with a complete stranger, these things were more easily aired than in the down deep among friends.
“Maybe they would have minded people knowing,” she thought out loud. “Jahns was married before. I suspect they chose to respect that.”
“Yeah?” Lukas scratched something on his paper. Juliette looked up, but was sure there hadn’t been a star. “I can’t imagine loving in secret like that,” he said.
“I can’t imagine needing someone’s permission, like the Pact or a girl’s father, to be in love in the first place,” she replied.
“No? How else would it work? Just any two people any time they liked?”
She didn’t say.
“How would anyone ever enter the lottery?” he asked, persisting in the line of thought. “I can’t imagine it not being out in the open. It’s a celebration, don’t you think? There’s this ritual, a man asks a girl’s father for permission—”
“Well, aren’t you with anyone?” Juliette asked, cutting him off. “I mean…I’m just asking because it sounds like, like you have strong opinions but maybe haven’t—”
“Not yet,” he said, rescuing her again. “I have a little strength left yet for enduring my mom’s guilt. She likes to remind me every year how many lotteries I missed out on, and what this did to her overall chances for a bevy of grandchildren. As if I don’t know my statistics. But hey, I’m only twenty-five.”
“That’s all,” Juliette said.
“What about you?”
She nearly told him straight away. Nearly blurted out her secret with almost no prompting. As if this man, this boy, a stranger to her, could be trusted.
“Never found the right one,” she lied.
Lukas laughed his youthful laugh. “No, I mean, how old are you? Or is that impolite?”
She felt a wave of relief. She thought he’d been asking her about being with anyone. “Thirty-six,” she said. “And I’m told it’s impolite to ask, but I’ve never been one for rules.”
“Says our sheriff,” Lukas said, laughing at his own joke.
Juliette smiled. “I guess I’m still getting used to that.”
She turned back to the wallscreen, and they both enjoyed the silence that formed. It was strange, sitting with this man. She felt younger and somehow more secure in his presence. Less lonely, at least. She pegged him as a loner as well, an odd-sized washer that didn’t fit any standard bolt. And here he had been, at the extreme other end of the silo searching for stars, while she’d been spending what spare time she could down in the mines, as far away as possible, hunting for pretty rocks.
“It’s not going to be a very productive night for either of us, looks like,” she eventually said, ending the silence, rubbing the unopened folder in her lap.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lukas told her. “That depends on what you came up here for.”
Juliette smiled. And across the wide room, barely audible, the computer on her desk beeped, a search routine having finally pawed through Holston’s data before spitting out its results.