Wool (15 page)

Marnes clutched the canteen in one hand, smoothed her hair back with the other. He was blubbering. So sad for some reason. So much more energy than her. She smiled at him and reached for his hand, a miraculous effort. She held his wrist and told him that she loved him. That she had for as long as she could remember. Her mind was tired, loosening its grip on her secrets, mouthing them to him as tears flowed down his face.

She saw his eyes, bright and wrinkled, peering down at her, then turning to the canteen in his hand.

The canteen that he had carried.

The water, she realized, the poison meant for him.

The generator room was unusually crowded and eerily silent. Mechanics in worn overalls stood three deep behind the railing and watched the first-shift crew work. Juliette was only dimly aware of them; she was more keenly aware of the silence.

She leaned over a device of her own making, a tall platform welded to the metal floor and arrayed with mirrors and tiny slits that bounced light across the room. This light shined on mirrors attached to the generator and its large dynamo, helping her get them in perfect alignment. It was the shaft between the two of them that she cared about, that long steel rod the size of a man’s waist where the power of combusting fuel was transformed into the spark of electricity. She was hoping to have the machines on either end of this rod aligned to within a thousandth of an inch. But everything they were doing was without precedent. The procedures had been hurriedly planned in all-night sessions while the backup generator was put online. Now she could only concentrate, could only hope the eighteen-hour shifts had been good for something and trust in plans made back when she’d had some decent rest and could think soundly.

While she guided the final placement, the chamber around her stood deathly quiet. She gave a sign, and Marck and his team tightened several of the massive bolts on the new rubber floor mounts. They were four days into the power holiday. The generator needed to be up and running by morning and at full power that next evening. With so much done to it—the new gaskets and seals, the polishing of cylinder shafts that had required young shadows to crawl down into the heart of the beast—Juliette was worried about it even starting up. The generator had never been fully powered down during her lifetime. Old Knox could remember it shutting itself down in an emergency once, back when he was a mere shadow, but for everyone else the rumble had been as constant and close as their own heartbeats. Juliette felt inordinate pressure for everything to work. She was the one who had come up with the idea to do a refit. She calmed herself with reassurances that it was the right thing to do and that the worst that could happen now was that the holiday would be extended until they sorted out all the kinks. That was much better than a catastrophic failure years from now.

Marck signaled that the bolts were secure, the lock nuts tightened down. Juliette jumped off her homemade platform and strolled over to the generator to join him. It was difficult to walk casually with so many eyes on her. She couldn’t believe this rowdy crew, this extended and dysfunctional family of hers, could be so perfectly silent. It was like they were all holding their breath, wondering if the crushing schedule of the last few days was going to be for naught.

“You ready?” she asked Marck.

He nodded, wiping his hands on a filthy rag that always seemed to be draped over his shoulder. Juliette checked her watch. The sight of its second hand ticking around in its constant path comforted her. Whenever she had doubts about something working, she looked at her wrist. Not to see the time, but to see a thing she had fixed. A repair so intricate and impossible—one that had taken years of cleaning and setting parts almost too small to see—that it made her current task, whatever it was, feel small by comparison.

“We on schedule?” Marck asked, grinning.

“We’re doing fine.” She nodded to the control room. Whispers began to stir through the crowd as they realized the restart was imminent. Dozens of them pulled sound protection from their necks and settled the muffs over their ears. Juliette and Marck joined Shirly in the control room.

“How’s it going?” Juliette asked the second-shift foreman, a young woman, small and spirited.

“Golden,” Shirly said as she continued to make adjustments, zeroing out all the corrections that had built up over the years. They were starting from the ground up, none of the patches and fixes of old to disguise any new symptoms. A fresh start. “We’re good to go,” she said.

She backed away from the controls and moved to stand near her husband. The gesture was transparent: this was Juliette’s project, perhaps the last thing she would ever try to fix in the down deep of Mechanical. She would have the honor, and the full responsibility, of firing the generator up.

Juliette stood over the control board, looking down at knobs and dials that she could locate in utter darkness. It was hard to believe that this phase of her life was over, that some new one was about to begin. The thought of traveling to the up top frightened her more than this project could. The idea of leaving her friends and family, of dealing with politics, did not taste as sweet to her as the sweat and grease on her lips. But at least she had allies up there. If people like Jahns and Marnes were able to get by, to survive, she figured she’d be okay.

With a trembling hand, more from exhaustion than nerves, Juliette engaged the starter motor. There was a loud whine as a small electrical engine tried to get the massive diesel generator moving. It seemed to be taking forever, but Juliette had no idea what normal sounded like. Marck stood by the door, propping it open so they could better hear any shouts to abort. He glanced over at Juliette as she continued to hold the ignition, creases of worry in his brow as the starter whined and groaned in the next room.

Someone outside waved both arms, trying to signal her through the glass.

“Shut it off, shut it off,” Marck said. Shirly hurried toward the control panel to help.

Juliette let go of the ignition and reached for the kill switch, but she stopped herself from pressing it. There was a noise outside. A powerful hum. She thought she could feel it through the floor, but not like the vibration of old.

“It’s already running!” someone yelled.

“It was already running,” Marck said, laughing.

The mechanics outside were cheering. Someone pulled off their ear protection and hurled the muffs up into the air. Juliette realized the starter motor was louder than the rebuilt generator, that she’d been holding the ignition even as it had already started and continued to run.

Shirly and Marck hugged one another. Juliette checked the temps and pressures on all the zeroed gauges and saw little to adjust, but she wouldn’t be sure until it warmed up. Her throat constricted with emotion, the release of so much pressure. Work crews were leaping over the railing to crowd around the rebuilt beast. Some who rarely visited the generator room were reaching out to touch it, almost with reverent awe.

Juliette left the control room to watch them, to listen to the sound of a perfectly working machine, of gears in alignment. She stood behind the railing, hands on a steel bar that used to rattle and dance while the generator labored, and watched an unlikely celebration take place in a normally avoided workspace. The hum was magnificent. Power without dread, the culmination of so much hurried labor and planning.

The success gave her a new confidence for what lay ahead, for what lay above. She was in such fine spirits and so fixated on the powerful and improved machines that she didn’t notice the young porter hurry into the room, his face ashen, his chest swelling with the deep gulps of a long and frantic run. She barely noticed the way the news traveled from mouth to mouth throughout the room, spreading among the mechanics until fear and sadness registered in their eyes. It wasn’t until the celebration died completely, the room falling into a different sort of quiet, one studded with sobs and gasps of disbelief, of grown men wailing, that Juliette knew something was amiss.

Something had happened. A great and powerful thing had fallen out of alignment.

And it had nothing to do with her generator.

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 have been 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 brightly colored pipes 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 surrounded her …

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 had 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. They were dead dreams. The people of the up top who worshipped this view had it all backward—the future was
below
. That’s where the oil that provided their power came from, 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 whom everyone had loved—but whom someone had killed.

Juliette had seen some of those notes, but only from a distance. They were written in Deputy Marnes’s 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 spattered tears that smeared occasional words and caused the paper to pucker. The writing amid those 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 resort 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 not only to 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 tub 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 dialogue, sorting lies from truth.