Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

1

There were numbers on each of the pockets. Juliette could look down at her chest and read them, and so it occurred to her that they must be printed upside down. They were there for her to read, and for no one else. She numbly stared at them through her helmet visor while the door behind her was sealed. There was another door, a forbidden one, looming in front of her. It stood silently as it waited to be opened.

Juliette felt lost in this void between the two doors, trapped in this airlock full of its brightly colored pipes all jutting from the walls and ceiling, everything shimmering behind plastic-wrapped shrouds.

The hiss of Argon being pumped into the room sounded distant through her helmet. It let her know the end was near. Pressure built against the plastic, crinkling it across the bench and walls, wrapping it tightly around the pipes. She could feel the pressure against her suit, like an invisible hand gently squeezing.

She knew what was to happen next. And part of her wondered how she had gotten here, a girl from Mechanical who had never cared one whit about the outside, who had only ever broken minor laws, and who would’ve been content for the rest of her life to live in the deepest bowels of the earth, covered in grease and fixing the broken things, little concern for the wider world of the dead that surrounds her—

2

Juliette sat on the floor of the holding cell, her back against the tall rows of steel bars, a mean world displayed on the wallscreen before her. For the past three days, while she attempted to teach herself how to be silo sheriff, she had studied this view of the outside and wondered what the fuss was all about.

All she saw out there were dull slopes of ground, these gray hills rising up toward grayer clouds, dappled sunlight straining to illuminate the land with little success. Across it all were the terrible winds, the frenzied gusts that whipped small clouds of soil into curls and whorls that chased one another across a landscape meant only for them.

For Juliette, there was nothing inspiring about the view, nothing that aroused her curiosity. It was an uninhabitable wasteland devoid of anything useful. There were no resources beyond the tainted steel of crumbling towers visible over the hills, steel it would no doubt cost more to reclaim, transport, smelt, and purify than it would to simply pull new ore from the mines beneath the silo.

The forbidden dreams of the outside world, she saw, were sad and empty dreams. Dead dreams. The people of the up-top who worshipped this view had it all backwards—the future was below. That’s where the oil came from that provided their power, the minerals that became anything useful, the nitrogen that renewed the soil in the farms. Any who shadowed in the footsteps of chemistry and metallurgy knew this. Those who read children’s books, those who tried to piece together the mystery of a forgotten and unknowable past, remained deluded.

The only sense she could make of their obsession was the open space itself, a feature of the landscape that frankly terrified her. Perhaps it was something wrong with her that she loved the walls of the silo, loved the dark confines of the down deep. Was everyone else crazy to harbor thoughts of escape? Or was it something about her?

Juliette looked from the dry hills and the fog of soil to the scattered folders around her. It was her predecessor’s unfinished work. A shiny star sat balanced on one of her knees, not yet worn. There was a canteen sitting on one of the folders, safe inside a plastic reusable evidence bag. It looked innocent enough lying there, having already done its deadly deed. Several numbers written with black ink on the bag had been crossed out, cases long since solved or abandoned. A new number stood to one side, a case number matching a folder not present, a folder filled with page after page of testimony and notes dealing with the death of a mayor that everyone had loved—but that someone had killed.

Juliette had seen some of those notes, but only from a distance. They were written in Deputy Marnes’ hand, hands that would not relinquish the folder, hands that clutched it madly. She had taken peeks at the folder from across his desk and had seen the splatters that faded occasional words and caused the paper to pucker. The writing amid these drying tears was a scrawl, not as neat as his notes in the other folders. What she could see seemed to crawl angrily across the page, words slashed out violently and replaced. It was the same ferocity Deputy Marnes displayed all the time now, the boiling anger that had driven Juliette away from her desk and into the holding cell to work. She had found it impossible to sit across from such a broken soul and be expected to think. The view of the outside world that loomed before her, however sad, cast a far less depressing shadow.

It was in the holding cell that she killed time between the static-filled calls on her radio and the jaunts down to some disturbance. Often, she would simply sit and sort and re-sort her folders according to perceived severity. She was sheriff of all the silo. A job she had not shadowed for, but one she was beginning to understand. One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could imagine: People were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was to not only figure out why this happened, and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.

The folders scattered on the floor were sad cases of the latter. Complaints between neighbors that got out of hand. Reported thefts. The source of a poisonous batch of amateur shower gin. Several more cases stemming from the trouble this gin had caused. Each folder awaited more findings, more legwork, more hikes down the twisting stairs to engage in twisted dialog, sorting lies from truth.

Juliette had read the Law portion of the Pact twice in preparation for the job. Lying in her bed in the down deep, her body exhausted from the work of aligning the primary generator, she had studied the proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogous to some part of her old job as mechanic. Approaching the scene of a crime or an active dispute was no different than walking into a pump room where something was broken. Someone or some thing was always at fault. She knew to listen, to observe, to ask questions of anyone who could have had anything to do with the faulty equipment or the tools that had served the equipment, following a chain of events all the way down to the bedrock itself. There were always confounding variables—you couldn’t adjust one dial without sending something else a-kilter—but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knowing what was important and what could be ignored.

She assumed it was this talent that Deputy Marnes had originally seen in her, this patience and skepticism she employed to ask one more stupid question and stumble eventually onto the answer. It was a boost to her confidence that she had helped solve a case before. She hadn’t known it then, had been more concerned with simple justice and her private grief, but that case had been job training and an interview all in one.

She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading “Closed” in bold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped through the notes. Many of them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward-slanting print she recognized from just about everything on and inside her desk, a desk that had once been his. She read his notes about her, re-familiarized herself with a case that had seemed an obvious murder but had actually been a series of unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, resurfaced old pains. And yet—she could also recall how comforting it had been to distract herself with the clues. She could remember the rush of a problem solved, the satisfaction of having answers to offset the hollowness left by her lover’s death. The process had been similar to fixing a machine on extra shifts. There was the pain in her body from the effort and exhaustion, offset slightly by the knowledge that a rattle had been wrenched away.

She set the folder aside, not yet ready to relive it all. She picked up another and placed it in her lap, one hand falling to the brass star on her knee—

A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall of dirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot seemed to shiver in the wind as it travelled toward sensors she had been trained to think of as important, sensors that gave her a view of the outside world she had been frightened as a child into believing was dear.

But she wasn’t so sure, now that she was old enough to think for herself and near enough to observe it firsthand. This up-top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled its way to the down deep where true cleaning kept the silo humming and everyone alive. But even down there, her friends in Mechanical had been told since birth not to speak of the outside. It was an easy enough task when you never saw it, but now, walking by it to work, sitting before this view of a vastness one’s brain could not comprehend, she saw how the inevitable questions must surface. She saw why it might be important to squelch certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questions foamed on people’s mad lips and brought an end to them all.

Rather than ponder this further, she flipped opened Holston’s folder. Behind the bio tab was a thick stack of notes about his last days as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of the piece of paper blank and wasted. A single paragraph simply explained that he had reported to the up-top holding cell and had expressed an interest in the outside. That was it. A few lines to spell a man’s doom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping the page over.

Underneath was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service to the silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone who was also recently deceased. It was strange to think of people she knew that she could never see again. Part of the reason she avoided her father all these years was because he was, simply put, still there. There was never the threat of her not being able to change her mind. But it was different with Holston and Jahns; they were gone forever. And Juliette was so used to rebuilding devices thought beyond repair that she felt if she concentrated enough, or performed the correct series of tasks in the right order, that she should be able to bring the deceased back, be able to recreate their wasted forms. But she knew that wasn’t the case.

She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very first time. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks could asphyxiate and broken flood pumps could drown everyone she knew, now loomed large before her. What was it all about, this life they lived in underground confines? What was out there, over those hills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in the distance? What for? And most vexing of all: What had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife for that matter—been thinking to want to leave?

Two folders to keep her company, both marked “Closed.” Both belonging in the Mayor’s office, where they should be sealed up and filed away. But Juliette kept finding herself returning to them rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a man she had loved, whose death she had helped unravel in the down deep. In the other lived a man she had respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed over the two folders, especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studying the details of Mayor Jahns’ death, going over the depositions, convinced he had a killer but with no evidence to corner the man—

Someone knocked on the bars above Juliette’s head. She looked up, expecting to find Deputy Marnes telling her it was time to call it a day, but saw a strange man peering down at her instead.

“Sheriff?” he asked.

Juliette set the folders aside and palmed the star off her knee. She stood up and turned around, facing this small man with a protruding gut, glasses perched at the end of his nose, his silver IT coveralls snugly tailored and freshly pressed.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

The man stuck his hand between the bars. Juliette moved the star from one palm to the other and reached out to accept it.

“Sorry I’m late getting up here,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on, what with the ceremonies, that generator nonsense, and all the legal wrangling. I’m Bernard, Bernard Holland.”

Juliette felt her blood run cold. The man’s hand was so small around, it felt like it was missing a finger. Despite this, his grip was solid. She tried to pull back, but he refused to let go.

“As sheriff, I’m sure you already know the Pact inside and out, so you know that I’ll be acting Mayor, at least until we can arrange a vote.”

“I’d heard,” Juliette said cooly. She wondered how this man had gotten past Marnes’ desk without some sort of violence. Here was their prime suspect in Jahns’ death—only he was on the wrong side of the bars. And Juliette realized the same was true of her.

“Doing some filing, are you?” He relinquished his grip, and Juliette pulled her hand away. He peered down at the paperwork strewn across the floor, his eyes seeming to settle on the canteen in its plastic bag, but Juliette couldn’t be sure.

“Just familiarizing myself with our ongoing cases,” she said. “There’s a little more room in here to… well, think.”

“Oh, I’m sure a lot of deep thought has taken place in this room.” Bernard smiled, and Juliette noticed his front teeth were crooked, one of them overlapping the other. It made him look like the stray mice she used to trap in the pump rooms.

“Yes, well, I’ve found the space conducive to sorting my thoughts out, so maybe there’s something to that. And besides,” she leveled her eyes at him, “I don’t expect it to remain empty for long. And once it’s occupied, I’ll be able to take leave of all this deep thought for a day or two while someone is put to cleaning—”

“I wouldn’t count too much on that,” Bernard said. He flashed his crooked teeth again. “The word down below is that the poor Mayor, rest her soul, plum wore herself out with this crazy climb of hers. I believe she was hiking down to see you, isn’t that right?”

Juliette felt a sharp sting in her palm. She loosened her grip on the brass star, the knuckles on both hands white from making fists.

Bernard adjusted his glasses. “But now I hear you’re investigating for foul play?”

Juliette leveled her eyes at him, trying not to be distracted by the reflection of the dull hills visible in his spectacles. “I suppose you should know, as acting Mayor, that we’re treating this very much as a murder,” she said.

“Oh my.” His eyes widened over a limp smile. “So the rumors are true. Who would do such a thing?” The smile grew, and Juliette realized she was dealing with a man who felt himself invulnerable. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered a dirty and outsized ego such as his. Her time as a shadow in the down deep had been spent surrounded by them.

“I believe we’ll find the party responsible was the one with the most to gain,” she said dryly. After a pause, she added: “Mayor.”

The crooked smile faded. Bernard let go of the bars and stepped back, his hands tucking into his coveralls. “Well, it’s nice to finally put a face with the name. I’m aware that you haven’t spent much time out of the down deep—and to be honest I’ve stayed much too insulated in my own office—but things are changing around here. As mayor and sheriff, we will be working together a lot, you and me.” He glanced down at the files at her feet. “So I expect you to keep me posted. About everything.”

With that, Bernard turned and left, and it required a concerted effort for Juliette to relax her fists. When she finally peeled her fingers away from the star, she found its sharp edges had gouged into her palm, cutting her and causing her to bleed. A few drops caught the light on the edge of the brass, looking like wet rust. Juliette wiped the star clean on her new coveralls, a habit borne of her previous life among the sludge and grease. She cursed herself when she saw the dark spot the blood left on her new clothes. Turning the star over, she peered at the stamped insignia on its face. There were the three triangles of the silo and the word “Sheriff” arched over top of them. She turned it over again and fingered the clasp that held the sharp spike of a pin. She opened the clasp and let the pin hinge free. The stiff needle had been bent and straightened in several places over the years, giving it a hand-forged look. It wobbled on its hinge—much like her hesitation to wear the thing.

But as Bernard’s footsteps receded, as she heard him say something indecipherable to Deputy Marnes, she felt a new resolve steel her nerves. It was like encountering a rusted bolt that refused to budge. Something about that intolerable stiffness, that reluctance to move, set Juliette’s teeth on edge. She had come to believe that there was no fastener she couldn’t unstick, had learned to attack them with grease and with fire, with penetrating oil and with brute strength. With enough planning and persistence, they always gave. Eventually.

She forced the wavy needle through the breast of her coveralls and clasped the catch on the back. Looking down at the star was a little surreal. There were a dozen folders at her feet demanding her attention, and Juliette felt, for the first time since arriving at the up-top, that this was her job. Her work at Mechanical was behind her. She had left that place in far better condition than she’d found it, had stayed long enough to hear the near-silent hum of a repaired generator, to see a shaft spin in such perfect alignment that one couldn’t tell if it was moving at all. And now she had traveled to the up-top to find here the rattle and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a misalignment that was eating away at the true engine of the silo, just as Jahns had forewarned.

Leaving most of the folders where they were, she picked up Holston’s, a folder she shouldn’t even be looking at but couldn’t be without, and pulled the cell door open. Rather than turn to her office, she first walked the other way toward the yellow steel entrance to the airlock. Peering through the triple paned glass for the dozenth time in several days, she imagined the man she had replaced standing inside, wearing one of those ridiculously bulky suits, waiting for those far doors to open. What goes through a man’s thoughts as he waits there alone to be cast off? It couldn’t be mere fear, for Juliette had tasted that well enough. It had to be something beyond that, a wholly unique sensation, the calm beyond the pain or the numbness past the terror. Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.

It was the same as color. You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn’t create the strange out of nothing. So maybe it was only the cleaners who understood what it felt like to stand there, trembling—or perhaps not afraid one bit—as they waited for their death.

The obsession with why played out in whispers through the silo—people wanting to know why they did what they did, why they left a shiny and polished gift to those who had exiled them—but that did not interest Juliette at all. She figured they were seeing new colors, feeling the indescribable, perhaps having a religious experience that only occurred in the face of the reaper. Wasn’t it enough to know that it happened without fail? Problem solved. Take it as an axiom. Move on to a real issue, like what it must feel like to be the one going through it. That was the real shame of the taboos: not that people couldn’t pine for the outside world, but that they weren’t even allowed to commiserate with the cleaners during the weeks after, to wonder what they had suffered, to properly express their thanks or regrets.

Juliette tapped the yellow door with the corner of Holston’s folder, remembering the man in better times, back when he was in love, a lottery winner, telling her about his wife. She nodded to his ghost and stepped away from the imposing metal door with its small panes of thick glass. There was a kinship she felt from working in his post, now wearing his star, even sitting in his cell. She had loved a man once, and knew what that felt like. She had loved in secret, not involving the silo in their relationship, ignoring the Pact. And so she also knew what it meant to lose something so precious. She could imagine, if her old lover was out there on that hill—wasting away in plain sight rather than feeding the roots—that she could be driven to cleaning, to wanting to see those new colors for herself.

She opened Holston’s file again as she wandered back toward her desk. His desk. Here was one man who knew of her secret love. She had told him, once the case was settled in the down deep, that the man who had died, whose case she had helped solve, had been her lover. Maybe it was how he had gone on and on about his wife the days before. Maybe it was his trustworthy smile that made him such a good sheriff, engendering this baffling urge to divulge secrets. Whatever the cause, she had admitted something to a man of the law that could have gotten her in trouble, an affair completely off the books, a wanton disregard for the Pact, and all he had said, this man entrusted with upholding those laws, was: “I’m sorry.”

Sorry for her loss. And he had hugged her. Like he knew what she was holding inside, this secret grief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay.

And she had respected him for that.

Now she sat at his desk, in his chair, across from his old deputy, who held his head in his hands and peered down, unmoving, at an open folder dotted with tears. All it took was a glance for Juliette to suspect that some forbidden love lay between him and the contents of that folder as well.

“It’s five o’clock,” Juliette said as quietly and gently as she could.

Marnes lifted his face out of his hands. His forehead was red from resting it there so long. His eyes were bloodshot, his gray mustache caked with tears and snot. He looked so much older than he had a week ago in the down deep, when he had come to recruit her. Swiveling in his old wooden chair, the legs squeaking as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and surveyed the time imprisoned behind its yellowed and crazed plastic dome. He nodded silently at the ticking of the hand, stood up, his back stooped for a moment as he fought to straighten it. He ran his hands down his coveralls, reached to the folder, closed it tenderly, and tucked it under his arm.

“Tomorrow,” he whispered, nodding to Juliette.

“See you in the morning,” she said, as he staggered out toward the cafeteria.

Juliette watched him go, feeling the sorriest for him. She recognized the love behind his loss. It was painful to imagine him back in his small apartment, sitting on a cot wide enough for one, sobbing over that folder until he finally collapsed into his fitful dreams.

Once alone, she placed Holston’s folder on her desk and slid her keyboard closer. The keys had been worn bare long ago, but someone in recent years had neatly reprinted the letters in black ink. Now even these handwritten faces were fading and would soon need another coat. Juliette would have to see to that—she couldn’t type without looking at her keyboard like all these office people could.

She slowly pecked out a request to wire down to Mechanical. After another day of getting little done, of being distracted by the mystery of Holston’s decision, she had come to a realization: there was no way she could perform this man’s job until she first understood why he had turned his back on it, and on the silo itself. It was a nagging rattle keeping her from other problems. So instead of kidding herself, she was going to embrace the challenge. Which meant that she needed to know more than his folder contained.

She wasn’t sure how to get the things she needed, how to even access them, but she knew people who might. This was what she missed most about the down deep. They were family there, all with useful skills that overlapped and covered one another. Anything she could do for any of them, she would. And she knew they would do the same, even be an army for her. This was a comfort she sorely missed, a safety net that felt all too far away.

After sending the request, she sat back with Holston’s folder. Here was a man, a good man, who had known her deepest secrets. He was the only one who ever had. And soon, God willing, Juliette would uncover his.

3

It was well after ten by the time Juliette pushed away from her desk. Her eyes had become too sore to stare at her monitor any longer, too tired to read one more case note. She powered down her computer, filed the folders away, killed the overhead lights, and locked the office door from the outside.

As she pocketed her keys, her stomach grumbled, and the fading odor of a rabbit stew reminded her that she’d missed yet another dinner. That made it three nights in a row. Three nights of focusing so hard on a job she barely knew how to perform, a job she had no one to guide her through, that she’d neglected to eat. If her office didn’t abut a noisy, aroma-filled cafeteria, she might be able to forgive herself.

She pulled her keys back out and crossed the dimly lit room, weaving around nearly invisible chairs left scattered between the tables. A teenage couple was just leaving, having stolen a few dark moments in the wallscreen’s twilight before curfew. Juliette called out for them to descend safely, mostly because it felt like the sheriff thing to do, and they giggled at her as they disappeared into the stairwell. She imagined they were already holding hands and would steal a few kisses before they got to their apartments. Adults knew of these illicit things but let them slide, a gift each generation bestowed on the next. For Juliette, however, it was different. She had made the same choices as an adult, to love without sanction, and so her hypocrisy was more keenly felt.

As she approached the kitchen, she noticed the cafeteria wasn’t quite empty. A lone figure sat in the deep shadows by the wallscreen, staring at the inky blackness of nighttime clouds hanging over darkened hills.

It appeared to be the same figure as the night before, the one who had watched the sunlight gradually fade while Juliette worked alone in her office. She adjusted her route to the kitchen in order to pass behind the man. Staring all day at folders full of bad intentions had made her a budding paranoid. She used to admire people who stood out, but now she could feel herself wary of them.

She moved between the wallscreen and the nearest table, pausing to push chairs back into place, their metal feet scraping on the tile. She kept an eye on the seated man, but he never once turned toward the noise. He just stared up at the clouds, something in his lap, a hand held up by his chin.

Juliette walked right behind him, passing between the table and his chair, which had been moved strangely close to the wallscreen. She fought the urge to clear her throat or ask him a question. Instead, she passed on by, jangling her master key from the crowded ring that had come with her new job.

Twice, she glanced back over her shoulder before she reached the kitchen door. The man did not move.

She let herself inside the kitchen and hit one of the light switches. After a genial flicker, the overhead bulbs popped on and shattered her night vision. She pulled a gallon of juice from one of the walk-in refrigerators and grabbed a clean glass from the drying rack. Back in the walk-in, she found the stew—covered and already cold—and brought it out as well. She ladled two scoops into a bowl and rattled around in a drawer for a spoon. She only briefly considered heating up the stew as she returned the large pot to its frosted shelf.

With her juice and bowl in hand, she returned to the cafeteria, knocking the lights off with her elbow and pushing the door shut with her foot. She sat down in the darkness at the end of one of the long tables and slurped on her late meal, keeping an eye on this strange man who seemed to peer into the darkness as if something could be seen out there.

Her spoon eventually scraped the bottom of her empty bowl, she finished the last of her juice, and not once had the man turned away from the wallscreen. She pushed the dishes away from herself, insanely curious. The figure reacted to this, unless it was mere coincidence. He leaned forward and held his outstretched hand out at the screen. Juliette thought she could make out a rod or stick in his grasp—but it was too dark to tell. After a moment, he leaned over his lap, and Juliette heard the squeak of charcoal on expensive-sounding paper. She got up, taking this movement as an opening, and strolled closer to where he was sitting.

“Raiding the larder, are we?” he asked.

His voice startled her.

“Worked through dinner,” she stammered, as if she needed to explain herself.

“Must be nice to have the keys.”

He still didn’t turn away from the screen, and Juliette reminded herself to lock the kitchen door before she left.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

The man reached behind himself and grabbed a nearby chair, slid it around to face the screen. “You wanna see?”

Juliette approached warily, grabbed the backrest, and deliberately slid the chair a few inches further from the man. It was too dark in the room to make out his features, but his voice sounded young. She chastised herself for not committing him to memory the night before when there’d been more light. She would need to become more observant if she was going to be any good at her job.

“What’re we looking at, exactly?” she asked. She stole a glance at his lap, where a large piece of white paper faintly glowed in the wan light leaking from the stairwell. It was spread flat across his thighs as if a board or something hard rested beneath it.

“I think those two are going to part. Look there.”

The man pointed at the wallscreen and into a mix of blacks so rich and so deep as to appear as one. The contours and shadowy hues Juliette could make out almost seemed to be a trick played by her eyes—as real as ghosts. But she followed his finger, wondering if he were mad or drunk, and tolerated the exhausting silence that followed.

“There,” he whispered, excitement on his breath.

Juliette saw a flash. A spot of light. Like someone flicking on a torch far across a dark generator room. And then it was gone.

She bolted out of her chair and stood near to the wallscreen, wondering what was out there.

The man’s charcoal squeaked on his paper.

“What the hell was that?” Juliette asked.

The man laughed. “A star,” he said. “If you wait, you might see it again. We’ve got thin clouds tonight and high winds. That one there is getting ready to pass.”

Juliette turned to find her chair and saw that he was holding his charcoal at arm’s length, staring up at the spot where the light had flashed, one eye winked shut.

“How can you see anything out there?” she asked, settling back into her plastic chair.

“The longer you do this, the better you see at night.” He leaned over his paper and scribbled some more. “And I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“Doing what, exactly? Just staring at the clouds?”

He laughed. “Mostly, yeah. Unfortunately. But what I’m trying to do is see past them. Watch, we might get another glance.”

She peered up in the general area of the last flash. Suddenly, it popped back into view, a pinprick of light like a signal from high over the hill.

“How many did you see?” he asked.

“One,” she told him. She was almost breathless from the newness of the sight. She knew what stars were—they were a part of her vocabulary—but she’d never seen one before.

“There was a faint one just to the side of it as well. Let me show you.”

There was a soft click, and a red glow spilled over the man’s lap. Juliette saw that he had a flashlight hanging around his neck, a film of red plastic wrapped around the end. It made the lens look like it was on fire, but it emanated a gentle glow that didn’t barrage her eyes the way the kitchen lights had.

Spread across his lap, she saw a large piece of paper covered with dots. They were arranged haphazardly, a few perfectly straight lines running in a grid around them. Tiny notes were scattered everywhere.

“The problem is that they move,” he told her. “If I see that one here tonight—” He tapped one of the dots with his finger. There was a smaller dot beside it. “—at the same exact time tomorrow, it’ll be a little over here.” Turning to Juliette, she saw that the man was young, probably in his late twenties. He smiled, was quite handsome, and added: “It took me a long time to figure that out.”

Juliette wanted to tell him that he hadn’t been alive a long time, but remembered what it had felt like as a shadow when people dismissed her the same way.

“What’s the point?” she asked, and saw his smile fade.

“What’s the point of anything?” He returned his gaze to the wall and doused the flashlight. Juliette realized she’d asked the wrong question, had upset him. And then she wondered if there was anything illicit in this activity of his, anything that defied the taboos. Was collecting data on the outside any different than the people who sat and stared at the hills? She made a mental note to ask Marnes about this, when the man turned to her again in the darkness.

“My name’s Lukas,” he said. Her eyes had adjusted well enough to see his hand stretched out toward her.

“Juliette,” she replied, grabbing and squeezing his palm.

“The new sheriff.”

It wasn’t a question, and of course he knew who she was. Everyone up top seemed to.

“What do you do when you’re not up here?” she asked. She was pretty sure this wasn’t his job. Nobody should get chits for staring up at the clouds.

“I live in the upper mids,” Lukas said. “I work on computers during the day. I only come up when the viewing’s good.” He switched the light back on and turned toward her in a way that suggested the stars weren’t the most important thing on his mind anymore. “There’s a guy on my hall who works up here on dinner shift. When he gets home, he lets me know what the clouds were like during the day. If he gives me the thumbs up, I come take my chances.”

“And so you’re making a schematic of them?” Juliette gestured toward the large sheet of paper.

“Trying to. It’ll probably take a few lifetimes.” He tucked his charcoal behind his ear, pulled a rag from his coveralls, and wiped his fingers clean of black residue.

“And then what?” Juliette asked.

“Well, hopefully I’ll infect some shadow with my sickness and they’ll pick up wherever I leave off.”

“So literally, like, several lifetimes.”

He laughed, and Juliette realized it was a pleasant one. “At least,” he said.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she said, suddenly feeling guilty for talking to him. She stood and reached out her hand, and he took it warmly. He pressed his other palm to the back of her hand and held it a moment longer than she would have expected.

“Pleasure to meet you, Sheriff.”

He smiled up at her. And Juliette didn’t understand a word of what she muttered in return.

4

The next morning, Juliette arrived early at her desk having stolen little more than four hours of sleep. Beside her computer, she saw a package waiting on her—a small bundle wrapped in recycled pulp paper and encircled with white electrical ties. She smiled at this last touch and reached into her coveralls for her multi-tool. Pulling out the smallest pick from the tool, she stuck it into the clasp of one of the electrical ties and slowly pulled the ratcheting device apart, keeping it intact for future use. She remembered the trouble she’d gotten into as a mechanic’s shadow the day she’d been caught cutting a plastic tie from an electrical board. Walker, already an old crank those decades ago, had yelled at her for the waste and then had shown her how to tease the little clasp loose to preserve the tie for later use.

Years had passed, and when she was much older, she had found herself passing this lesson on to another shadow named Scottie. He had been a young lad at the time, but she had lit into him when he had made the same careless mistake she once had. She remembered frightening the poor boy white as a cinder block, and he had remained nervous around her for months after. Maybe because of that outburst, she had paid him more attention as he continued his training, and eventually, the two had grown close. He quickly grew up to become a capable young man, a whiz with electronics, able to program a pump’s timing chip in less time than it took her to break one down and put it back together.

She loosened the other tie crossing the package, and knew the bundle was from him. Several years ago, Scottie had been recruited by IT and had moved up to the thirties. He had become “too smart for Mechanical,” as Knox had put it. Juliette set the two electrical straps aside and pictured the young man preparing this package for her. The request she’d wired down to Mechanical the night before must’ve bounced back up to him, and he had spent the night dutifully doing this favor for her.

She pried the paper apart carefully. Both it and the plastic ties would need to be returned; they were both too dear for her to keep and light enough to porter on the cheap. As the package came apart, she noticed that Scottie had crimped the edges and had folded these tabs under each other, a trick children learned so they could wrap notes without the expense of glue or tape. She disassembled his meticulous work with care, and the paper finally came loose. Inside, she found a plastic box like the kind used to sort nuts and bolts for small projects down in Mechanical.

She opened the lid and saw that the package wasn’t just from Scottie—it must’ve been hurried up to him along with a copy of her request. Tears came to her eyes as the smell of Mama Jean’s oatmeal and cornflour cookies drifted out. She plucked one, held it to her nose, and breathed deeply. Maybe she imagined it, but she swore she noted a hint of oil or grease emanating from the old box—the smells of home.

Juliette folded the wrapping paper carefully and placed the cookies on top. She thought of the people she would have to share them with. Marnes, of course, but also Pam in the cafeteria, who had been so nice in helping her settle into her new apartment. And Alice, Jahns young secretary, whose eyes had been red with grief for over a week. She pulled the last cookie out and finally spotted the small data drive rattling around in the bottom of the container, a little morsel baked special by Scottie and hidden among the crumbs.

Juliette grabbed it and set the plastic case aside. She blew into the little metal end of the drive, getting any debris out, before slotting it into the front of her computer. She wasn’t great with computers, but she could get around them. You couldn’t do anything in Mechanical without submitting a claim, a report, a request, or some other piece of nonsense. And they were handy for logging into pumps and relays remotely to shut them on or off, see their diagnostics, all of that.

Once the light on the drive winked on, she navigated to it on her screen. Inside, she found a host of folders and files; the little drive must’ve been stuffed to the brim with them. She wondered if Scottie had gotten any sleep at all the night before.

At the top of a list of primary folders was a file named “Jules.” She clicked this one, and up popped a short text file obviously from Scottie, but noticeably unsigned:

Juliette smiled. She felt like reaching out and brushing her fingers across the words, but it wasn’t paper and wouldn’t be the same. She closed the note and deleted it, then cleared out her trash. Even the first letter of her name up there felt like too much information.

She leaned away from her desk and peered into the cafeteria, which appeared dark and empty. It was not yet five in the morning, and she would have the upper floor to herself for a while. She first took a moment to browse through the directory structure to see what kind of data she was dealing with. Each folder was neatly labeled. It appeared she had an operating history of Holston’s two computers, every keystroke, every day, going back a little more than five years, all organized by date and time. Juliette felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information—it was far more than she could hope to weed through in a lifetime.

But at least she had it. The answers she needed were in there, somewhere, among all those files. And somehow it felt better, she felt better, just knowing the solution to this riddle, to Holston’s decision to go to cleaning, could now fit in the palm of her hand.

She was several hours into sifting through the data when the cafeteria crew staggered in to clean up last night’s mess and prepare for breakfast. One of the most difficult things to get used to about the up-top was the exacting schedule everyone kept. There was no third shift. There was barely a second shift, except for the dinner staff. In the down deep, the machines didn’t sleep, and so the workers barely did either. Work crews often stayed on into extra shifts, and so Juliette had gotten used to surviving on a handful of hours of rest a night. The trick was to pass out now and then from sheer exhaustion, to just rest against a wall with one’s eyes closed for fifteen minutes, long enough to hold the tiredness at bay.

But what had once been survival was now luxury. The ability to forego sleep gave her time in the morning and at night to herself, time to invest in frivolous pursuits on top of the cases she was supposed to be working. It also gave her the opportunity to teach herself how to do the blasted job, since Marnes had become too depressed to help get her up to speed.

Marnes—

She looked at the clock over his desk. It was ten minutes after eight, and the vats of warm oatmeal and corn grits were already filling the cafeteria with the smells of breakfast. Marnes was late. She’d been around him less than a week, but she had yet to see him late to anything, ever. This break in the routine was like a timing belt stretching out of shape, a piston developing a knock. Juliette turned her monitor off and pushed away from her desk. Outside, first shift breakfast was beginning to file in, food tokens clinking in the large bucket by the old turnstiles. She left her office and passed through the traffic spilling from the stairwell. In the line, a young girl tugged on her mother’s coveralls and pointed to Juliette as she passed. Juliette heard the mother scolding her child for being rude.

There had been quite a bit of chatter the past few days over her appointment, this woman who had disappeared into Mechanical as a child and who had suddenly re-emerged to take over for one of the more popular sheriffs in memory. Juliette cringed from the attention and hurried into the stairwell. She wound her way down the steps as fast as a lightly loaded porter, her feet bouncing off each tread, faster and faster in what felt like an unsafe pace. Four flights down, after squeezing around a slow couple and between a family heading up for breakfast, she hit the apartment landing just below her own and passed through the double doors.

The hallway beyond was busy with morning sights and sounds: a squealing teapot, the shrill voices of children, the thunder of feet overhead, shadows hurrying to meet their casters before trailing them off to work. Younger children were lumbering reluctantly off to school; husbands and wives kissed in doorways while toddlers tugged at their coveralls and dropped toys and plastic cups.

Juliette took several turns, winding through the hallways and around the central staircase to the other side of the level. The Deputy’s apartment was on the far side, way in the back. She surmised that Marnes had qualified for several upgrades over the years, but had passed on them. The one time she had asked Alice, Mayor Jahns’ old secretary about Marnes, she had shrugged and told Juliette that he had never wanted or expected anything more than second fiddle. Juliette assumed she meant that he never wanted to be sheriff, but she had begun to wonder in how many other areas of his life that philosophy applied.

As she reached his hall, two kids ran by holding hands, late for school. They giggled and squealed around the corner, leaving Juliette alone in the hallway. She wondered what she would say to Marnes to justify coming down, to explain her worry. Maybe now was a good time to ask for the folder that he couldn’t seem to be without. She could tell him to take the day off, let her handle the office while he got some rest, or maybe fib a little and say she was already in the area for a case.

She stopped outside his door and lifted her hand to knock. Hopefully he wouldn’t see this as her projecting authority, right? She was just concerned for him. That was all.

She rapped on the steel door and waited for him to call her inside—and maybe he did. His voice over the last few days had eroded into a dull and thin rasp. She knocked again, louder this time.

“Deputy?” she called. “Everything okay in there?”

A woman popped her head out of a door down the hallway. Juliette recognized her from school recess time in the cafeteria, was pretty sure her name was Gloria.

“Hey, Sheriff.”

“Hey, Gloria, you haven’t seen Deputy Marnes this morning, have you?”

She shook her head, placed a metal rod in her mouth and started wrapping her long locks into a bun. “I haben’t,” she mumbled. She shrugged her shoulders and jabbed the rod through her bun, locking her hair into place. “He was on the landing last night, looking as whipped as ever.” She frowned. “He not show up for work?”

Juliette turned back to the door and tried the handle. It clicked open with the feel of a well maintained lock. She pushed the door in. “Deputy? It’s Jules. Just checkin’ in on ya.”

The door swung open into the darkness. The only light spilling in was from the hallway, but it was enough.

Juliette turned to Gloria. “Call Doc Hicks— No, shit—” She was still thinking down deep. “Who’s the closest doctor up here? Call him!”

She ran into the room, not waiting for a reply. There wasn’t much space to hang oneself in the small apartment, but Marnes had figured out how. His belt was cinched around his neck, the buckle lodged into the top of the bathroom door. His feet were on the bed, but at a right angle, not enough to support his weight. His butt drooped below his feet, his face no longer red, the belt biting deep into his neck.

Juliette hugged Marnes’ waist and lifted him up. He was heavier than he looked. She kicked his feet off the bed, and they flopped to the floor, making it easier to hold him. There was a curse at the door. Gloria’s husband ran in and helped Juliette support the Deputies’ weight. The both of them fumbled for the belt, trying to dislodge it from the door. Juliette finally tugged the door open, freeing him.

“On the bed,” she huffed.

They lifted him to the bed and laid him out flat.

Gloria’s husband rested his hands on his knees and took deep breaths. “Gloria ran for Doctor O’Neil.”

Juliette nodded and loosened the belt from around Marnes’ neck. The flesh was purple beneath it. She felt for a pulse, remembering Roger looking just like this when she’d found him down in Mechanical, completely still and unresponsive. It took her a moment to be sure that she was looking at the second dead body she had ever seen.

And then she wondered, as she sat back, sweating, waiting for the doctor to arrive, whether this job she had taken would ensure it wasn’t the last.

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’ 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’ 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 spellcheck 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 removed 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.”

Lucas 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 four,” 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.

6

The next morning, instead of climbing to her office, Juliette descended five flights to the upper dirt farm for Marnes’ 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 complimenting 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’ 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’ 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’ 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 spellchecker 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:

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’ 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’ 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.

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.

8

Juliette arrived late at her desk the next morning exhausted, her legs and back sore from the late climb down to IT and from not getting an ounce of sleep. She had spent the entire night tossing and turning, wondering if she’d discovered a box that was better left unopened, worried she might be raising questions that promised nothing but bad answers. If she went out into the cafeteria and looked in a direction she normally avoided, she would be able to see the last two cleaners lying in the crook of a hill, almost as if in one another’s arms. Did those two lovers throw themselves into the rotting wind over the very thing Juliette was now chasing? The fear she’d seen in Scottie’s eyes made her wonder if she wasn’t being careful enough. She looked across her desk at her new deputy, greener even at this job than she, as he transcribed data from one of the folders.

“Hey Peter?”

He looked up from his keyboard. “Yeah?”

“You were in Justice before this, right? Shadowing with a judge?”

He tilted his head to the side. “No, I was a court assistant. I actually shadowed in the mids’ deputy office until a few years ago. I wanted that job, but none came up.”

“Did you grow up there? Or the up-top?”

“The mids.” His hands fell away from his keyboard to his lap. He smiled. “My dad was a plumber in the hydroponics. He passed away a few years ago. My mom, she works in the nursery.”

“Really? What’s her name?”

“Rebecca. She’s one of the—”

“I know her. She was shadowing when I was a kid. My father—”

“He works in the upper nursery, I know. I didn’t want to say anything—”

“Why not? Hey, if you’re worried about me playing favorites, I’m guilty. You’re my deputy now, and I’ll have your back—”

“No, it’s not that. I just didn’t want you to hold anything against me. I know you and your father don’t—”

Juliette waved him off. “He’s still my father. We just grew apart. Tell your mom I said hi.”

“I will.” Peter smiled and bent over his keyboard.

“Hey. I’ve got a question for you. Something I can’t figure.”

“Sure,” he said, looking up. “Go ahead.”

“Can you think of why it’s cheaper to porter a paper note to someone than it is to just wire them from a computer?”

“Oh, sure.” He nodded. “It’s a quarter chit per character to wire someone. That adds up!”

Juliette laughed. “No, I know what it costs. But paper isn’t cheap, either. And neither is porting. But it seems like sending a wire would be practically free, you know? It’s just information. It weighs nothing.”

He shrugged. “It’s been a quarter chit a character since I’ve been alive. I dunno. Besides, we’ve got a fifty chit per day allowance from here, plus unlimited emergencies. I wouldn’t stress.”

“I’m not stressed, just confused. I mean, I understand why everyone can’t have radios like we carry, because only one person can transmit at a time, so we need the air open for emergencies, but you’d think we could all send and receive as many wires as we wanted.”

Peter propped his elbows up and rested his chin on his fists. “Well, think about the cost of the servers, the electricity. That means oil to burn and all the maintenance of the wires and cooling and what-not. Especially if you have a ton of traffic. Factor that against pressing pulp on a rack, letting it dry, scratching some ink on it, and then having a person who’s already heading that way walk it up or down for you. No wonder it’s cheaper!”

Juliette nodded, but mostly for his benefit. She wasn’t so sure. She hated to voice why, but she couldn’t help herself.

“But what if it’s for a different reason? What if someone made it expensive on purpose?”

“What? To make money?” Peter snapped his fingers. “To keep the porters employed with running notes!”

Juliette shook her head. “No, what if it’s to make conversing with each other more difficult? Or at least costly. You know, separate us, make us keep our thoughts to ourselves.”

Peter frowned. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Shrugging, Juliette looked back at her computer screen, her hand creeping to the scroll hidden in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said. “Forget about it. It’s just a silly thought.”

She pulled her keyboard toward her and was just glancing up at her screen when Peter saw the emergency icon first.

“Wow. Another alert,” he said.

She started to click on the flashing icon, heard Peter blow out his breath.

“What the hell’s going on around here?” he asked.

She pulled the message up on her screen and read it quickly, disbelieving. Surely this wasn’t the way of the job. Surely people didn’t die this often, her just not hearing about it because her nose was always in some crankcase or under an oil pan.

The blinking number code above the message was one she recognized without even needing her cheat sheet. It was becoming sadly familiar. Another suicide. They didn’t give the victim’s name, but there was an office number. And she knew the floor and address. Her legs were still sore from her trip down there.

“No—” she said, gripping the edge of her desk.

“You want me to—?” Peter reached for his radio.

“No, damnit, no.” Juliette shook her head. She pushed away from her desk, knocking over the recycling bin, which spilled out all the pardoned folders across the floor. The scroll from her lap rolled into them.

“I can—” Peter began.

“I got this,” she said, waving him away. “Damnit.” She shook her head. The office was spinning around her head, the world getting blurry. She staggered for the door, arms wide for balance, when Peter snapped back to his computer screen, dragging his mouse with its little cord behind, clicking something.

“Uh, Juliette—?”

But she was already stumbling out the door, bracing herself for the long and painful descent—

“Juliette!”

She turned to find Peter running behind her, his hand steadying the radio attached to his hip.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m sorry— It’s— I don’t know how to do this—”

“Spit it out,” she said impatiently. All she could think of was little Scottie, hanging by his neck. It was electrical ties in her imagination. That’s how her waking nightmare, her morbid thoughts, crafted the scene of his death in her head.

“It’s just that, I got a private wire and—”

“Keep up if you want, but I’ve got to get down there.” She spun toward the stairwell.

Peter grabbed her arm. Roughly. A forceful grip.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I’m supposed to take you into custody—”

She whirled on him and saw how unsure of himself he looked.

“What did you say?”

“I’m just doing my duty, Sheriff, I swear.” Peter reached for his metal cuffs. Juliette stared at him, disbelieving, as he snapped one link around her wrist and fumbled for the other.

“Peter, what’s going on? I’ve got a friend I need to see to—”

He shook his head. “The computer says you’re a suspect, Ma’am. I’m just doing what it tells me to do—”

And with that, the second link clicked around her other wrist, and Juliette looked down at her predicament, dumbfounded, the image of her young friend hanging by his neck unable to be shaken loose from her mind.

9

She was allowed a visitor, but who would Juliette want to see her like this? No one. So she sat with her back against the bars, the bleak view outside brightening with the rising of an unseen sun, the floor around her bare of folders and ghosts. She was alone, stripped of a job she wasn’t sure she ever wanted, a pile of bodies in her wake, her simple and easily understood life having come unraveled.

“I’m sure this will pass,” a voice behind her said. Juliette leaned away from the steel rods and looked around to find Bernard standing behind her, his hands wrapped around the bars.

Juliette moved away from him and sat on the cot, turning her back to the gray view.

“You know I didn’t do this,” she said. “He was my friend.”

Bernard frowned. “What do you think you’re being held for? The boy committed suicide. He seems to have been distraught from recent tragedies. This is not unheard of when people move to a new section of the silo, away from friends and family, to take a job they’re not entirely suited for—”

“Then why am I being held here?” Juliette asked. She realized suddenly that there may be no double cleaning after all. Off to the side, down the hallway, she could see Peter shuffling back and forth like some physical barrier prevented him from coming any closer.

“Unauthorized entry on the thirty-fourth,” Bernard said. “Threatening a member of the silo, tampering with IT affairs, removing IT property from secured quarters—”

“That’s ratshit,” Juliette said. “I was summoned by one of your workers. I had every right to be there!”

“We will look into that,” Bernard said. “Well, Peter here will. I’m afraid he’s had to remove your computer for evidence. My people down below are best qualified to see if—”

“Your people? Are you trying to be Mayor or IT Head? Because I looked into it, and the Pact clearly states you can’t be both—”

“That will be put to a vote soon enough. The Pact has changed before. It’s designed to change when events call for it.”

“And so you want me out of the way.” Juliette stepped closer to the bars so she could see Peter Billings, and have him see her. “I suppose you were to have this job all along? Is that right?”

Peter slunk out of sight.

“Juliette. Jules.” Bernard shook his head and clicked his tongue at her. “I don’t want you out of the way. I wouldn’t want that for any member of the silo. I want people to be in their place. Where they fit in. Scottie wasn’t cut out for IT, I see that now. And I don’t think you were meant for the up-top.”

“So, what, I’m banished back to Mechanical? Is that what’s going on? Over some ratshit charges?”

“Banished is such a horrible word. I’m sure you didn’t mean that. And don’t you want your old job back? Weren’t you happier then? There’s so much to learn up here that you’ve never shadowed for. And the people who thought you best fit for this job, who I’m sure hoped to ease you into it…”

He stopped right there, and it was somehow worse that he left the sentence open like that, forcing Jules to complete the image rather than just hear it. She pictured two mounds of freshly turned soil in the gardens, a few mourning rinds tossed on top of them.

“I’m going to let you gather your things, what isn’t needed for evidence, and then allow you to see yourself back down. As long as you check in with my deputies on the way and report your progress, we’ll drop these charges. Consider it an extension of my little… forgiveness holiday.”

Bernard smiled and straightened his glasses.

Juliette gritted her teeth. It occurred to her that she had never, in her entire life, punched someone in the face.

And it was only her fear of missing, of not doing it correctly and cracking her knuckles on one of the steel bars, that she didn’t put an end to that streak.

It was just about a week since she had arrived at the up-top, and Juliette was leaving with fewer belongings than she’d brought. A blue Mechanical coverall had been provided, one much too big for her. Peter didn’t even say goodbye. Juliette thought it was more out of shame than anger or blame. He walked her through the cafeteria to the top of the stairs, and as she turned to shake his hand, she found him staring down at his toes, his thumbs caught in his coveralls, her sheriff’s badge pinned at an angle over his left breast.

Juliette began her long walk down through the length of the silo. It would be less physically taxing than her walk up had been, but more draining in other ways. What exactly had happened to the silo, and why? She couldn’t help but feel in the middle of it all, to shoulder some of the blame. None of this would have happened had they left her in Mechanical, had they never come to see her in the first place. She would still be bitching about the alignment of the generator, not sleeping at night as she waited for the inevitable failure and a descent into chaos as they learned to survive on backup power for the decades it would take to rebuild the thing. Instead, she had been witness to a different type of failure: a throwing not of rods but of bodies. She felt most horrible for poor Scottie, a boy with so much promise, so many talents, taken before his prime.

She had been sheriff for a short time, a star appearing on her breast for but a wink, and yet she felt an incredible urge to investigate. There was something not right about Scottie killing himself. The signs were there, sure. He had been afraid to leave his office—but then, he’d also shadowed under Walker and had maybe picked up the habit of reclusiveness from the old man. Scottie had also been harboring secrets too big for his young mind, had been fearful enough to wire her to come quickly—but she knew the boy like her own shadow, and knew he didn’t have it in him. She suddenly wondered if Marnes had ever had it in him as well. If Jahns were here beside her, would the old Mayor be screaming for Jules to investigate both their deaths? Telling her that none of this fit?

“I can’t,” Juliette whispered to the ghost, causing an upbound porter to turn his head as he passed.

She kept further thoughts to herself. As she descended toward her father’s nursery, she paused at the landing, contemplating longer and harder about going in to see him than she had on her way up. Pride had prevented her the first time. And now shame set her feet into motion once again, spiraling down away from him, chastising herself for thinking on the ghosts from her past that had long ago been banished from memory.

At the thirty-fourth, the entrance to IT, she again considered stopping. There would be clues in Scottie’s office, maybe even some they hadn’t managed to scrub away. She shook her head. The conspiracies were already forming in her mind. And as hard as it was to leave the scene of the crime behind, she knew she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near his office.

She continued down the staircase and thought, as she considered IT’s location in the silo, that this couldn’t be an accident either. She had another thirty-two floors to go before she checked in with the first deputy, who was located near the center of the mids. The sheriff’s office was thirty-three floors above her head. IT, then, was as far as it could get from any deputy station in the silo.

She shook her head at this paranoid thinking. It wasn’t how diagnoses were made. Her father would have told her so.

After meeting with the first deputy around noon, and accepting a piece of bread and fruit, along with a reminder to eat, she made good time down through the mids, wondering as she passed the upper apartments which level Lukas lived on, or if he even knew of her arrest.

The weight of the past week seemed to pull her down the stairwell, gravity sucking at her boots, the pressures of being sheriff dissipating as she left that office far behind. Those pressures were slowly replaced with an eagerness to return to her friends, even in shame, as she got closer and closer to Mechanical.

She stopped to see Hank, the down deep deputy, on level one-twenty. She had known him for a long time, was becoming more and more surrounded with familiar faces, people who waved hello, their moods somber as if they knew every detail of her time away. Hank tried to get her to stay and rest a while, but she only paused long enough to be polite, to refill her canteen, and then to shuffle the remaining twenty floors to the place she truly belonged.

Knox seemed thrilled to have her back. He wrapped her up in a crippling hug, lifting her feet off the ground and roughing up her face with his beard. He smelled of grease and sweat, a mix Juliette had never fully noticed in the down deep because she had never been free from it.

The walk to her old room was punctuated by slaps on her back, well-wishes, questions about the up-top, people calling her sheriff in jest, and the sort of rude frivolities she had grown up in and grown used to. Juliette felt more saddened by it all than anything. She had set out to do something and had failed. And yet her friends were just happy to have her back.

Shirly from second shift spotted her coming down the hallway and accompanied Juliette on the rest of the walk to her room. She updated Juliette on the status of the generator and the output from the new oil well, as if Juliette had simply been on vacation for a short while. Juliette thanked her at the door to her room, stepped inside, and kicked her way through all the folded notes slipped under the door. She lifted the strap of her daypack over her head and dropped it, then collapsed onto her bed, too exhausted and upset at herself to even cry.

She awoke in the middle of the night. Her small display terminal showed the time in green blocky numbers: 2:14 AM.

Juliette sat at the edge of her old bed in coveralls that weren’t truly hers and took stock of her situation. Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt that way. Tomorrow, even if they didn’t expect her to, she would be back at work in the pits, keeping the silo humming, doing what she did best. She needed to wake up to this reality, to set other ideas and responsibilities aside. Already, they felt so far away. She doubted she would even go to Scottie’s funeral, not unless they sent his body down to be buried where it belonged.

She reached for the keyboard slotted into the wall rack. Everything was covered in a layer of grime, she saw. She had never noticed it before. The keys were filthy from the dirt she had brought back from each shift. The monitor’s glass was limned with grease. She fought the urge to wipe the screen and smear the shiny coat of oil around, but she would have to clean her place a little deeper, she decided. She was viewing things with untainted and more critical eyes.

Rather than chase pointless sleep, she keyed the monitor awake to check the work logs for the next day, anything to get her mind off the past week. But before she could open her task manager, she saw that she had over a dozen wires in her inbox. She’d never seen so many. Usually people just slid recycled notes under each other’s doors—but then, she had been a long way away when the news of her arrest had hit, and she hadn’t been able to get to a computer since.

She logged onto her email account and pulled up the most recent wire. It was from Knox. Just a semicolon and a parenthesis—a half-chit smile.

Juliette couldn’t help it, she smiled back. She could still smell Knox on her skin and realized, as far as the big brute was concerned, that all the troubles and problems percolating in whispers down the stairwell about her paled in comparison to her return. To him, the worst thing that had happened in the last week was probably the challenge of replacing her on first shift.

Jules went to the next message, one from the third shift foreman, welcoming her home. Probably because of the extra time his crew was putting in to help cover her old shift.

There was more. A day’s pay of a note from Shirly, wishing her well on her journey. These were all notes they had hoped she would receive up-top to make the trip down easier, hoping she wouldn’t loathe herself and would know she shouldn’t feel humiliated, or even a failure. Juliette felt tears well up at how considerate it all was. She had an image of her desk, Holston’s desk, with nothing but unplugged wires snaking across its surface, her computer removed. There was no way she could’ve gotten these messages when they were meant to be read. She wiped at her eyes and tried not to think of the wired notes as money wasted, but rather as extravagant tokens of her friendships in the down deep.

Reading each one, trying to hold it together, made the last message she came to doubly jarring. It was paragraphs long. Juliette assumed it was an official document, maybe a list of her offenses, a formal ruling against her. She had only seen such messages from the Mayor’s office, usually on holidays, notes that went out to every silo member. But then she saw that it was from Scottie.

Juliette sat up straight and tried to clear her head. She started from the beginning, damning her blurred vision.

Juliette read it a second time, crying now. Here was the real voice of a ghost warning her of something, all of it too late. And it wasn’t the voice of one who was planning his death—she was sure of that. She checked the timestamp of the wire; it was sent before she had even arrived back at her office the day before, before Scottie had died.

Before he had been killed, she corrected herself. They must have found him snooping, or maybe her visit had alerted them. She wondered what IT could see, if they could break into her wire account, even. They must not have yet, or the message wouldn’t be there, waiting for her.

She leapt suddenly from her bed and grabbed one of the folded notes by the door. Digging a charcoal from her daypack, she sat back down on the bed. She copied the entire wire, every odd spelling, double-checking each number, and then deleted the message. She had chills up and down her arms by the time she finished, as if some unseen person was racing toward her, hoping to break into her computer before she dispensed with the evidence. She wondered if Scottie had been cautious enough to have deleted the note from his sent wires, and assumed, if he’d been thinking clearly, that he would.

She sat back on her bed, holding the copied note, thoughts about the work log for the next day gone. Instead, she studied the sinister mess revolving around her, spiraling through the heart of the silo. Things were bad, from top to bottom. A great set of gears had been thrown out of alignment. She could hear the noise from the past week, this thumping and clanging, this machine lumbering off its mounts and leaving bodies in its wake.

And Juliette was the only one who could hear it. She was the only one who knew. And she didn’t know who she could trust to help set things right. But she did know this: It would require a diminishing of power to align things once again. And there would be no way to call what happened next a “holiday.”

10

Juliette showed up at Walker’s electronics workshop at five, worried she might find him asleep on his cot, but smelling instead the distinctive odor of vaporized solder wafting down the hallway. She knocked on the open door as she entered, and Walker looked up from one of his many green electronics boards, corkscrews of smoke rising from the tip of his soldering iron.

“Jules!” he shouted. He lifted the magnifying lens off his gray head and set it and the soldering iron down on the steel workbench. “I heard you were back. I meant to send a note, but—” He waved around at the piles of parts with their work order tags dangling from strings. “Super busy,” he explained.

“Forget it,” she said. She gave Walker a hug, smelling the electrical fire scent on his skin that reminded her so much of him. And of Scottie.

“I’m going to feel guilty enough taking some of your time with this,” she said.

“Oh?” He stepped back and studied her, his bushy white brows and wrinkled skin furrowed with worry. “You got something for me?” He looked her up and down for a broken thing, a habit formed from a lifetime of being brought small devices that needed repairing.

“I actually just wanted to pick your brain.” She sat down on one of his workbench stools, and Walker did the same.

“Go ahead,” he said. He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, and Juliette saw how old Walker had become. She remembered him without so much white in his hair, without the wrinkles and splotchy skin. She remembered him with his shadow.

“It has to do with Scottie,” she warned him.

Walker turned his head to the side and nodded. He tried to say something, tapped his fist against his chest a few times and cleared his throat. “Damn shame,” was all he could manage. He peered down at the floor for a moment.

“It can wait,” Juliette told him. “If you need time—”

“I convinced him to take that job,” Walker said, shaking his head. “I remember when the offer came, being scared he’d turn it down. Because of me, you know? That he’d be too afraid of me bein’ upset at him for leaving, that he might just stay forever, so I urged him to take it.” He looked up at her, his eyes shining. “I just wanted him to know he was free to choose. I didn’t mean to push him away.”

“You didn’t,” Juliette said. “Nobody thinks that, and neither should you.”

“I just don’t figure he was happy up there. That weren’t his home.”

“Well, he was too smart for us. Don’t forget that. We always said that.”

“He loved you,” Walker said, and wiped at his eyes. “Damn, how that boy looked up to you.”

Juliette felt her own tears welling up again. She reached into her pocket and brought out the wire she’d transcribed onto the back of the note. She had to remind herself why she was there, to hold it together.

“Just don’t seem like him to take the easy way—” Walker muttered.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Walker, I need to discuss some things with you that can’t leave this room.”

He laughed. Mostly, it seemed, to keep from sobbing. “Like I ever leave this room,” he said.

“Well, it can’t be discussed with anyone else. No one. Okay?”

He bobbed his head.

“I don’t think Scottie killed himself.”

Walker threw up his hands to cover his face. He bent forward and shook as he started to cry. Juliette got off her stool and went to him, put her arm around his trembling back.

“I knew it,” he sobbed into his palms. “I knew it, I knew it.”

He looked up at her, tears coursing through several days of white stubble. “Who did this? They’ll pay, won’t they? Tell me who did it, Jules.”

“Whoever it was, I don’t think they had far to travel,” she said.

“IT? Goddamn them.”

“Walker, I need your help sorting this out. Scottie sent me a wire not long before he… well, before I think he was killed.”

“Sent you a wire?”

“Yeah. Look, I met with him earlier that day. He asked me to come down to see him.”

“Down to IT?”

She nodded. “I’d found something in the last sheriff’s computer—”

“Holston.” He dipped his head. “The last cleaner. Yeah, Knox brought me something from you. A program, looked like. I told him Scottie would know better than anyone, so we forwarded it along.”

“Well, you were right.”

Walker wiped at his cheeks and bobbed his head. “He was smarter than any of us.”

“I know. He told me this thing, that it was a program, one that made very detailed images. Like the images we see of the outside—”

She waited a beat to see how he would respond. It was taboo to even use the word in most settings. Walker was unmoved. As she had hoped, he was old enough to be beyond childhood fears. And probably lonely and sad enough not to have cared anyway.

“But this wire he sent, it says something about P. X. L.’s being too dense.” She showed him the copy she’d made. Walker grabbed his magnifiers and slipped the band over his forehead.

“Pixels,” he said, sniffing. “He’s talking about the little dots that make up an image. Each one is a pixel.” He took the note from her and read some more. “He says it’s not safe there.” Walker rubbed his chin and shook his head. “Damn them.”

“Walker, what kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” Juliette looked around at all the boards, displays, and coils of loose wire strewn about his workshop. “Do you have anything like that?”

“Eight by two? Maybe a readout, like on the front of a server or something. Be the right size to show a few lines of text, internal temps, clock cycles—” He shook his head. “But you’d never make one with this kind of pixel density. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t make sense. Your eye couldn’t make out one pixel from its neighbor if it were right at the end of your nose.”

He rubbed his stubble and studied the note some more. “What’s this nonsense about the tape and the joke? What’s that mean?”

Juliette stood beside him and looked over the note. “I’ve been wondering about that. He must mean the heat tape he scored for me a while back.”

“I think I remember something about that.”

“Well, do you remember the problems we had with it? The exhaust we wrapped it in almost caught fire. The stuff was complete crap. I think he sent a note asking if the tape had gotten here okay, and I sorta recall writing back that it did, and thanks, but the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been engineered to.”

“That was your joke?” Walker swiveled in his stool and rested his elbows on the workbench. He kept peering over the copied charcoal letters like they were the face of Scottie, his little shadow coming back one last time to tell him something important.

“And he says my joke was truth,” Juliette said. “I’ve been up the last three hours thinking about this, dying to talk to someone.”

Walter looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised.

“I’m not a sheriff, Walk. Never born to be one. Shouldn’t have gone. But I know, as sure as everyone, that what I’m about to say should set me to cleaning—”

Walker immediately slid off his stool and walked away from her. Juliette damned herself for coming, for opening her mouth, for not just clocking into first shift and saying to hell with it all—

Walker shut the door to his workshop and locked it. He looked at her and lifted a finger, went to his air compressor and pulled out a hose. Then he flipped the unit on so the motor would start to build up pressure, which just leaked out the open nozzle in a steady, noisy hiss. He returned to the bench, the clatter from the noisy compressor engine awful, and sat down. His wide eyes begged her to continue.

“There’s a hill up there with a crook in it,” she told him, having to raise her voice a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen this hill, but there are two bodies nestled together in it, man and wife. If you look hard, you can see a dozen shapes like this all over the landscape, all the cleaners, all in various states of decay. Most are gone, of course. Rotted to dust over the long years.”

Walker shook his head at the image she was forming.

“How many years have they been improving these suits so the cleaners have a chance? Hundreds?”

He nodded.

“And yet nobody gets any further. And never once have they not had enough time to clean.”

Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”

Juliette pursed her lips. “That’s what I’m thinking. But not just the tape. Remember those seals from a few years back? The ones from IT that went into the water pumps, that were delivered to us by accident?”

“So we’ve been making fun of IT for being fools and dullards—”

“But we’re the fools,” Juliette said. And it felt so damned good to say it to another human being. So good for these new ideas of hers to swim in the air. And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.

“You think they have us down here to be near the oil?” she asked Walker. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. I think they’re keeping anyone with a lick of mechanical sense as far from them as possible. There’s two supply chains, two sets of parts being made, all in complete secrecy. And who questions them? Who would risk being put to cleaning?”

“You think they killed Scottie?” he asked.

Juliette nodded. “Walk, I think it’s worse than that.” She leaned closer, the compressor rattling, the hiss of released air filling the room. “I think they kill everybody.”

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.

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—”