6
The next morning, instead of climbing to her office, Juliette descended five flights to the upper dirt farm for Marnes’s funeral. There would be no folder for her deputy, no investigation, just the lowering of his old and tired body into the deep soil where it would decompose and feed the roots. It was a strange thought, to stand in that crowd and think of him as a folder or not. Less than a week on the job, and she already saw the manila jackets as places where ghosts reside. Names and case numbers. Lives distilled onto twenty or so sheets of recycled pulp paper, bits of string and darts of random color woven beneath the black ink that jotted their sad tale.
The ceremony was long, but didn’t feel so. The earth nearby was still mounded where Jahns had been buried. Soon, the two of them would intermingle inside the plants, and these plants would nourish the occupants of the silo.
Juliette accepted a ripe tomato as the priest and his shadow cycled among the thick crowd. The two of them, draped in red fabric, chanted as they went, their voices sonorous and complementing one another. Juliette bit into her fruit, allowing a polite amount of juice to spatter her coveralls, chewed and swallowed. She could tell the tomato was delicious, but only in a mechanical way. It was hard to truly enjoy it.
When it became time for the soil to be shoveled back into the hole, Juliette watched the crowd. Two people dead from the up-top in less than a week. There had been four deaths total in that time, a very bad week for the silo.
Or good, depending on who you were. She noticed childless couples biting vigorously into their fruit, their hands intertwined, silently doing the math. Lotteries followed too closely after deaths for Juliette’s tastes. She always thought they should fall on the same dates of the year, just to look as though they were going to happen anyway, whether anyone died or not.
But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meant to hammer this home: The cycle of life is here. It is inescapable. It is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.
Before the hole was completely filled, members of the feast stepped up to the edge of the farm’s soil and tossed what remained of their fruit into the hole. Juliette stepped forward and added the rest of her tomato to the colorful hail of rind and pulp. An acolyte leaned on his too-large shovel and watched the last of the fruit fly. Those that missed, he knocked in with scoops of dark, rich soil, leaving a mound that would, in time and with a few waterings, settle.
After the funeral, Juliette began the climb back to her office. She could feel the flights of stairs in her legs, even though she prided herself as being in shape. But walking and climbing were different sorts of exercise. It wasn’t turning wrenches or loosening stubborn bolts, and the endurance was of a different kind than merely staying up and alert for an extra shift. She decided it was unnatural, this climbing. Humans weren’t meant for it. She doubted they were engineered to travel much beyond a single level of a silo. But then another porter flew down the steps past her, a smile of quick greeting on his non-winded face, his feet dancing across steel treads, and she wondered if perhaps it was something that just took practice.
When she finally made it back to the cafeteria, it was lunchtime, and the room was buzzing with noisy chatter and the clinking of metal forks on metal plates. The pile of folded notes outside her office door had grown. There was a plant in a plastic bucket, a pair of shoes, a small sculpture made of colorful wire. Juliette paused over the collection. Without any family, she supposed it would be up to her to go through it all, to make sure the items went to those who would use them best. She bent down and picked up one of the cards. The writing was in unsure print, scrawled with crayon. She imagined the upper grade school had spent craft time that day making cards for Deputy Marnes. This saddened Juliette more than any of the ceremonies. She wiped tears out of her eyes and damned the teachers who thought to get the kids involved in the nastiness of it all.
“Leave them out of it,” she whispered to herself.
She replaced the card and composed herself. Deputy Marnes would have liked to have seen this, she decided. He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.
Inside her office, she was surprised to find she had company. A stranger sat at Deputy Marnes’s desk. He looked up from the computer and smiled at her. She was about to ask who he was when Bernard—she refused to think of him as even interim Mayor—stepped out of the holding cell, a folder in hand, smiling at Juliette.
“How were the services?” he asked.
Juliette crossed the office and snatched the folder out of his hand. “Please don’t tamper with anything,” she said.
“Tamper?” Bernard laughed and adjusted his glasses. “That’s a closed case. I was going to take it back to my offices and re-file it.”
Juliette checked the folder and saw that it was Holston’s.
“You do know that you report to me, right? You were supposed to have at least glanced over the Pact before Jahns swore you in.”
“I’ll hold onto this, thanks.”
Juliette left him by the open cell and went to her desk. She shoved the folder in the top drawer, checked that the data drive was still jutting out from her computer, and looked up at the guy across from her.
“And you are?”
He stood, and Deputy Marnes’s chair let out its customary squeak. Juliette tried to force herself not to think of it as his anymore.
“Peter Billings, ma’am.” He held out his hand. Juliette accepted it. “I was just sworn in myself.” He pinched the corner of his star and held it away from his coveralls for her to see.
“Peter here was actually up for your job,” Bernard said.
Juliette wondered what he meant by that, or what the point was to even mention it. “Did you need something?” she asked Bernard. She waved at her desk, which had piled up the day before as she had spent most of her time managing Marnes’s affairs. “Because anything you need doing, I can add it to the bottom of one of these piles, here.”
“Anything I give you goes on top,” Bernard said. He slapped his hand down on the folder with Jahns’ name on it. “And I’m doing you a favor by coming up and having this meeting here rather than have you come down to my office.”
“What meeting is this?” Juliette asked. She didn’t look up at him, but busied herself sorting papers. Hopefully he would see how busy she was and leave, and she could start getting Peter up to speed on what little she herself had figured out.
“As you know, there’s been quite a bit of…turnover these past weeks. Unprecedented, really, at least since the uprising. And that’s the danger, I’m afraid, if we aren’t all on the same page.” He pressed his finger onto the folder Juliette was trying to move, pinning it in place. She glanced up at him.
“People want continuity. They want to know tomorrow will be a lot like yesterday. They want reassurances. Now, we’ve just had a cleaning, and we’ve suffered some losses, so the mood is naturally a bit raucous.” He waved at the folders and piles of pulp paper spilling from Juliette’s desk to Peter’s. The young man across from her seemed to eye the mound warily, like more of the pile could shift toward him, giving him more of it to do. “Which is why I am going to announce a forgiveness moratorium. Not only to strengthen the spirits of the entire silo, but to help you two clear the slate so you don’t get overwhelmed while you’re getting up to speed on your duties.”
“Clear the slate?” Juliette asked.
“That’s right. All these drunken misdemeanors. What’s this one for?” He picked up a folder and studied the name on the label. “Oh, now what’s Pickens done this time?”
“He ate a neighbor’s rat,” Juliette said. “Family pet.”
Peter Billings chuckled. Juliette squinted at him, wondering why his name seemed familiar. Then she placed it, recalling a memo he had written in one of the folders. This kid, practically a boy, had been shadowing a silo judge, she thought. She had a difficult time imagining that, looking at him. He seemed more the IT type.
“I thought owning rats as pets was illegal,” Bernard said.
“It is. He’s the claimant. It’s a counter suit in retaliation—” She sorted through her folders. “For this one right here.”
“Let’s see,” Bernard said. He grabbed the other folder, held the two of them together, and then dropped them both into her recycle bin, all the carefully organized papers and notes spilling out and intermingling in a jumbled pile on top of other scraps of paper to be re-pulped.
“Forgive and forget,” he said, wiping his palms together. “That’s going to be my election motto. The people need this. This is about new beginnings, forgetting the past during these tumultuous times, looking to the future!” He slapped her on the back, hard, nodded to Peter, and headed for the door.
“Election motto?” she asked before he could get away. And it occurred to her that one of the folders he was suggesting could be forgiven was the one wherein he was the prime suspect.
“Oh yes,” Bernard called over his shoulder. He grabbed the jamb and looked back at her. “I’ve decided, after much deliberation, that there is no one better qualified for this job than me. I don’t see any problem with continuing my duties in IT while performing the role as mayor. In fact, I already am!” He winked. “Continuity, you know.” And then he was gone.
• • • •
Juliette spent the rest of that afternoon, well past what Peter Billings considered “sensible working hours,” getting him up to speed. What she needed most of all was someone to field complaints and to respond to the radio. This was Holston’s old job, ranging the top forty-eight and calling on any disturbance. Deputy Marnes had hoped to see Juliette fill that role with her younger, fresher legs. He also had said that a pretty female might “do the public will some good.” Juliette had other ideas about his intentions. She suspected Marnes had wanted her away so he could spend time alone with his folder and its ghost. And she well understood that urge. So as she sent Peter Billings home with a list of apartments and merchants to call on the next day, she finally had time to sit down to her computer and see the results from the previous night’s search.
The spell-checker had turned up interesting results. Not so much the names she had hoped for, but rather these large blocks of what looked like coded text—gibberish with strange punctuation, indentation, and embedded words she recognized but that seemed out of place. These massive paragraphs were spread throughout Holston’s home computer, first showing up just over three years ago. That made it fit the timeline, but what really caught Juliette’s eye was how often the data appeared in nested directories, sometimes a dozen or more folders deep. It was as if someone had taken pains to keep them hidden, but had wanted multiple copies stashed away, terrified of losing them.
She assumed it was encoded, whatever it was, and important. She tore off bites of a small loaf of bread and dipped these in cornspread while she gathered a full copy of this gibberish to send down to Mechanical. There were a few guys perhaps smart enough to make some sense of the code, starting with Walker. She chewed her food and spent the next hours going back over the trail she had managed to tease out of Holston’s final years on the job. It had been difficult to narrow his activities down, to figure out what was important and what was noise, but she had approached it as logically as any other breakdown. Because that’s what she was dealing with, she decided. A breakdown. Gradual and interminable. Almost inevitable. Losing his wife had been like a seal or a gasket cracking. Everything that had rattled out of control for Holston could be traced back, almost mechanically, to that.
One of the first things she’d realized was that his activity on the work computer held no secrets. Holston had obviously become a night rat, just like her, staying up for hours in his apartment. It was yet another commonality she felt between them, further strengthening her obsession with the man. Sticking to his home computer meant she could ignore over half the data. It also became apparent that he had spent most of his time investigating his wife, just as Juliette was now prying into him. This was their deepest shared bond, Juliette’s and Holston’s. Here she was, looking into the last voluntary cleaner as he had looked into his wife, hoping to discover what torturous cause might lead a person to choose the forbidden outside.
And it was here that Juliette began to find clues almost eerie in their connection. Allison, Holston’s wife, seemed to be the one who had unlocked the mysteries of the old servers. The very method that had made Holston’s data available to Juliette had at some point brought some secret to Allison, and then to Holston. By focusing on deleted emails between the couple, and noting the explosion of communication around the time she had published a document detailing some un-deletion method, Juliette stumbled onto what she felt was a valid trail. She became more certain that Allison had found something on the servers. The trouble was determining what it was—and whether she’d recognize it herself even if she found it.
She toyed with several ideas, even the chance that Allison had been driven to rage by infidelity, but Juliette had enough of a feel for Holston to know that this wasn’t the case. And then she noticed each trail of activity seemed to lead back to the paragraphs of gibberish, an answer Juliette kept looking for any excuse to reject because she couldn’t make sense of it. Why would Holston, and Allison especially, spend so much time looking at all that nonsense? The activity logs showed her keeping them open for hours at a time, as if the scrambled letters and symbols could be read. To Juliette, it looked like a wholly new language.
So what was it that sent Holston and his wife to cleaning? The common assumption around the silo was that Allison had gotten the stirs, had gone crazy for the out-of-doors, and that Holston eventually succumbed to his grief. But Juliette never bought that. She didn’t like coincidences. When she tore a machine down to repair it, and a new problem surfaced a few days later, all she usually had to do was go back through the steps from the last repair. The answer was always there. She saw this riddle the same way: It was a much simpler diagnosis if both of them were driven out by the same thing.
She just couldn’t see what it might be. And part of her feared that finding it could drive her crazy as well.
Juliette rubbed her eyes. When she looked at her desk again, Jahns’ folder caught her attention. On top of her folder sat the doctor’s report for Marnes. She moved the report aside and reached for the note underneath, the one Marnes had written and left on his small bedside table:
It should have been me.
So few words, Juliette thought. But then, who remained in the silo for him to speak to? She studied the handful of words, but there was little to squeeze from them. It was his canteen that had been poisoned, not Jahns’. It actually made her death a case of manslaughter, a new term for Juliette. Marnes had explained something else about the law: the worst offense they could hope to pin on anyone was the attempted and unsuccessful murder on him rather than the botched accident that had claimed the Mayor. Which meant, if they could nail the act on a guilty party, that person could be put to cleaning for what they had failed to accomplish with Marnes, while only getting five years probation and silo service for what had accidentally happened to Jahns. Juliette thought it was this crooked sense of fairness as much as anything else that had worn down poor Marnes. There was never any hope for true justice, a life for a life. These strange laws, coupled with the agonizing knowledge that he had carried the poison on his own body, had gravely wounded him. He had to live with being the poison’s porter, with the hurtful knowledge that a good deed, a shared walk, had been his love’s death.
Juliette held the suicide note and cursed herself for not seeing it coming. It should have been a foreseeable breakdown, a problem solved by a little preventative maintenance. She could have said more, reached out somehow. But she had been too busy trying to stay afloat those first few days to see that the man who had brought her to the up-top was slowly unraveling right before her eyes.
The flash of her inbox icon interrupted these disturbing thoughts. She reached for the mouse and cursed herself. The large chunk of data she had sent down to Mechanical some hours earlier must’ve been rejected. Maybe it was too much to send at once. But then she saw that it was a message from Scottie, her friend in IT who had supplied the data drive.
“Come now,” it read.
It was an odd request. Vague and yet dire, especially for the late hour. Juliette powered down her monitor, grabbed the drive from the computer in case she had more visitors, and briefly considered strapping Marnes’s ancient gun around her waist. She stood, went to the key locker, and ran her hand down the soft belt, feeling the indention where the buckle had, for decades, worn into the same spot on the old leather. She thought again of Marnes’s terse note and looked to his empty chair. She decided in the end to leave the gun hanging where it was. She nodded to his desk, made sure she had her keys, and hurried out the door.