7
It was thirty four levels down to IT. Juliette skipped across the steps so swiftly, she had to keep a hand on the inner railing to keep from flying outward into the occasional upbound traffic. She overtook a porter near six, who was startled from being passed. By the tenth floor, she was beginning to feel dizzy from the round and round. She wondered how Holston and Marnes had ever responded to trouble with any degree of urgency. The other two deputy stations, the one in the mids and the one in the down-deep, were nicely situated near the dead center of their forty-eight floors, a far superior arrangement. She passed into the twenties thinking about this: that her office was not ideally positioned to respond to the far edge of her precinct. Instead, it had been located by the airlock and the holding cell, close to the highest form of the silo’s capital punishment. Her legs cursed this decision as she considered the long slog back up.
In the high twenties, she practically bowled a man over who wasn’t watching where he was going. She wrapped one arm around him and gripped the railing, keeping them both from a nasty tumble. He apologized while she swallowed a curse. And then she saw it was Lukas, his lapboard strapped to his back, nubs of charcoal sticking out of his coveralls.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”
He smiled at seeing her, but his lips drooped into a frown when he realized she’d been hurrying the opposite direction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
“Of course.”
He stood out of the way, and Juliette finally took her hand off his ribs. She nodded, not sure what to say, her thoughts only on Scottie, and then she continued her run down, moving too fast to chance a glance back.
When she finally got to thirty-four, she paused on the landing to catch her breath and let the dizziness fade. Checking her coveralls—that her star was in place and the flash drive still in her pocket—she pulled open the main doors to IT and tried to stroll in as if she belonged there.
She sized up the entrance room quickly. To her right, a glass window looked into a conference room. The light was on, even though it was now the middle of the night. A handful of heads were visible through the glass, a meeting taking place. She thought she heard Bernard’s voice, loud and nasally, leeching through the door.
Ahead of her stood the low security gates leading back to IT’s labyrinth of apartments, offices, and workshops. Juliette could imagine the floor plan; she’d heard the three levels shared much in common with Mechanical, only without the fun.
“Can I help you?” a young man in silver coveralls asked from behind the gates.
She approached.
“Sheriff Nichols,” she said. She waved her ID at him, then passed it under the gate’s laser scanner. The light turned red and the gate let out an angry buzz. It did not open. “I’m here to see Scottie, one of your techs.” She tried the card again, with the same result.
“Do you have an appointment?” the man asked.
Juliette narrowed her eyes at the man.
“I’m the sheriff. Since when do I need appointments?” Again with the card, and again the gate buzzed at her. The young man did not move to help.
“Please do not do that,” he said.
“Look, son, I’m in the middle of an investigation here. And you’re impeding my progress.”
He smiled at her. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the unique position we maintain here and that your powers are—”
Juliette put her ID away and reached over the gate to grab the straps of his coveralls with both hands. She pulled him almost clear over the gates, her arms bulging with the sinewy muscles that had freed countless bolts.
“Listen here you blasted runt, I’m coming through these gates or I’m coming over them and then through you. I’ll have you know that I report directly to Bernard Holland, acting Mayor, and your goddamned boss. Do I make myself clear?”
The kid’s eyes were wide and all-pupil. He jerked his chin up and down.
“Then move it,” she said, letting go of his coveralls with a shove.
He fumbled for his ID—swiped it through the scanner.
Juliette pushed through the spinning arms of the turnstile and past him. Then stopped.
“Uh, which way, exactly?”
The boy was still trying to get his ID back into his chest pocket, his hand trembling. “Th-thataway, ma’am.” He pointed to the right. “Second hall, take a left. Last office.”
“Good man,” she said. She turned and smiled to herself. It seemed that the same tone that got bickering mechanics to snap-to back home worked here as well. And she laughed to herself to think of the argument she had used: Your boss is also my boss, so open up. But then, with eyes that wide and that much fear in his veins, she could’ve read him Mama Jean’s bread recipe with the same tone and gotten through the gates. This was a skill to remember.
She took the second hallway, passing by a man and woman in IT silver as they walked the other way. They turned to watch her pass. At the end of the hall, she found offices on both sides and didn’t know which one was Scottie’s. She peeked first into the one with the open door, but the lights were off. She turned to the other one and knocked.
There was no answer at first, but the light at the bottom of the door dimmed, as if someone had walked across it.
“Who’s there?” a familiar voice whispered through the door.
“Open this damn thing,” Juliette said. “You know who this is.”
The lever dipped, the door clicking open. Juliette pushed her way inside, and Scottie shoved the door closed behind her, engaging the lock.
“Were you seen?” he asked.
She looked at him incredulously. “Was I seen? Of course I was seen. How do you think I got in? There’re people everywhere.”
“But did they see you come in here?” he whispered.
“Scottie, what the hell is going on?” Juliette was beginning to suspect she had hurried all this way for nothing. “You sent me a wire, which already seemed desperate enough, but you told me to come now. So here I am.”
“Where did you get this stuff?” he asked. Scottie grabbed a spool of printout from his desk and held it in trembling hands.
Juliette stepped beside him. She placed a hand on his arm and looked at the paper. “Just calm down,” she said quietly. She tried to read a few lines and immediately recognized the gibberish she had sent to Mechanical earlier that day. “How did you get this?” she asked. “I just wired this to Knox a few hours ago.”
Scottie nodded. “And he wired it to me. But he shouldn’t have. I can get into a lot of trouble for this.”
Juliette laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
She saw that he wasn’t.
“Scottie, you’re the one who pulled all this stuff for me in the first place.” She stepped back and looked hard at him. “Wait, you know what this nonsense is, right? You can read it?”
He bobbed his head. “Jules, I didn’t know what I was grabbing for you at the time. It was gigs of crap. I didn’t look at it. I just grabbed it and passed it on—”
“Why is this so dangerous?” she asked.
“I can’t even talk about it,” Scottie said. “I’m not cleaning material, Jules. I’m not.” He held out the scroll. “Here. I shouldn’t have even printed it, but I wanted to delete the wire. You’ve got to take it. Get it out of here. I can’t be caught with it.”
Juliette took the scroll, but just to calm him down. “Scottie, sit down. Please. Look, I know you’re scared, but I need you to sit and talk to me about this. It’s very important.”
He shook his head.
“Scottie, sit the hell down right now.” She pointed at the chair, and Scottie numbly obeyed. Juliette sat on the corner of his desk and noted that the cot at the back of the room had been recently slept on, and felt pity for the young man.
“Whatever this is—” She shook the roll of paper. “—it’s what caused the last two cleanings.”
She told him this like it was more than a rapidly forming theory, like it was something she knew. Maybe it was the fear in his eyes that cemented the idea, or the need to act strong and sure to help calm him. “Scottie, I need to know what it is. Look at me.”
He did.
“Do you see this star?” She flicked it with her finger, causing a dull ring.
He nodded.
“I’m not your shift foreman anymore, lad. I’m the law, and this is very important. Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you can’t get into any trouble for answering my questions. In fact, you’re obligated to answer them.”
He looked up at her with a twinge of hope. He obviously didn’t know that she was making this up. Not lying—she would never turn Scottie in for all the silo—but she was pretty sure there was no such thing as immunity, not for anyone.
“What am I holding?” she asked, waving the scroll of printout.
“It’s a program,” he whispered.
“You mean like a timing circuit? Like a—?”
“No, for a computer. A programming language. It’s a—” He looked away. “I don’t want to say. Oh, Jules, I just want to go back to Mechanical. I want none of this to have happened.”
These words were like a splash of cold water. Scottie was more than frightened—he was terrified. For his life. Juliette got off the desk and crouched beside him, placed her hand on the back of his hand, which rested on his anxiously bouncing knee.
“What does the program do?” she asked.
He bit his lip and shook his head.
“It’s okay. We’re safe here. Tell me what it does.”
“It’s for a display,” he finally said. “But not for like a readout, or an LED, or a dot matrix. There are algorithms in here I recognize. Anyone would…“
He paused.
“Sixty-four bit color,” he whispered, staring at her. “Sixty-four bit. Why would anyone need that much color?”
“Dumb it down for me,” Juliette said. Scottie seemed on the verge of going mad.
“You’ve seen it, right? The view up top?”
She dipped her head. “You know where I work.”
“Well, I’ve seen it too, back before I started eating every meal in here, working my fingers to the bone.” He rubbed his hands up through his shaggy, sandy-brown hair. “This program, Jules—what you’ve got, it could make something like that wallscreen look real.”
Juliette digested this. Then laughed. “But wait, isn’t that what it does? Scottie, there are sensors out there. They just take the images they see, and then the screen has to display the view, right? I mean, you’ve got me confused, here.” She shook the printed scroll of gibberish. “Doesn’t this just do what I think it does? Put that image on the display?”
Scottie wrung his hands together. “You wouldn’t need anything like this. You’re talking about passing an image through. I could write a dozen lines of code to do that. No, this, this is about making images. It’s more complex.”
He grabbed Juliette’s arm.
“Jules, this thing can make brand new views. It can show you anything you like.”
He sucked in his breath, and a slice of time hung in the air between them, a pause where hearts did not beat and eyes did not blink.
Juliette sat back on her haunches, balancing on the toes of her old boots. She finally settled her butt to the floor and leaned back against the metal paneling of his office wall.
“So now you see—” Scottie started to say, but Juliette held up her hand, hushing him. It never occurred to her that the view could be fabricated. But why not? And what would be the point?
She imagined Holston’s wife discovering this. She must’ve been at least as smart as Scottie—she was the one who came up with the technique he had used to find this in the first place, right? What would she have done with this discovery? Say something out loud and cause a riot? Tell her husband, the sheriff? What?
Juliette could only know what she herself would do in that position, if she were almost convinced. She was by nature too curious a person to doubt what she might do. It would gnaw at her, like the rattling innards of a sealed machine, or the secret workings of an unopened device. She would have to grab a screwdriver and a wrench and have a peek—
“Jules—”
She waved him off. Details from Holston’s folder flooded back. Notes about Allison, how she suddenly went crazy, almost out of nowhere. Her curiosity must have driven her there. Unless—unless Holston didn’t know. Unless it was all an act. Unless Allison had been shielding her husband from some horror with a mock veil of insanity.
But would it have taken Holston three years to piece together what she had figured out in a week? Or did he already know and it just took three years to summon the courage to go after her? Or did Juliette have an advantage he didn’t? She had Scottie. And she was, after all, following the breadcrumbs of someone else following more breadcrumbs, a much easier and more obvious trail.
She looked up at her young friend, who was peering worriedly down at her.
“You have to get those out of here,” he said, glancing at the printouts.
Juliette nodded. She pushed up from the floor and tucked the scroll into the breast of her coveralls. It would have to be destroyed, she just wasn’t sure how.
“I deleted my copies of everything I got for you,” he said. “I’m done looking at them. And you should do the same.”
Juliette tapped her chest pocket, felt the hard bulge of the flash drive there.
“And Jules, can you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“See if there’s any way I can transfer back to Mechanical, will you? I don’t want to be up here anymore.”
She nodded and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promised, feeling a knot in her gut for getting the poor kid involved at all.