“Here,” Jahns said. She took the canteen from him and slid it into the webbed pouch on the rear of his pack. “And let me do the talking in here,” she reminded him.
Marnes lifted his arms and showed his palms, as if no other thought had ever crossed his mind. He stepped past her and pulled one of the heavy metal doors open, the customary squeal of rusted hinges not coming as expected. The silence startled Jahns. She was used to hearing the chirp of old doors all up and down the staircase as they opened and closed. They were the stairwell’s version of the wildlife found in the farms, ever present and always singing. But these hinges were coated in oil, rigorously maintained. The signs on the walls of the waiting room reinforced the observation. They demanded silence in bold letters, accompanied by pictures of fingers over lips and circles with slashes through open mouths. The nursery evidently took their quietude seriously.
“Don’t remember so many signs last time I was here,” Marnes whispered.
“Maybe you were too busy yapping to notice,” Jahns replied.
A nurse glared at them through a glass window, and Jahns elbowed Marnes.
“Mayor Jahns to see Peter Nichols,” she told the woman.
The nurse behind the window didn’t blink. “I know who you are. I voted for you.”
“Oh, of course. Well, thank you.”
“If you’ll come around.” The woman hit a button on her desk and the door beside her buzzed faintly. Marnes pushed on the door, and Jahns followed him through.
“If you’ll don these.”
The nurse—Margaret, according to the hand-drawn tag on her collar—held out two neatly folded white cloth robes. Jahns accepted them both and handed one to Marnes.
“You can leave your bags with me.”
There was no refusing Margaret. Jahns felt at once that she was in this much younger woman’s world, that she had become her inferior when she passed through that softly buzzing door. She leaned her walking stick against the wall, took her pack off and lowered it to the ground, and then shrugged on the robe. Marnes struggled with his until Margaret helped, holding the sleeve in place. He wrestled the robe over his denim shirt and held the loose ends of the long fabric waist tie as if its working was beyond his abilities. He watched Jahns knot hers, and finally made enough of a mess of it for the robe to hold fairly together.
“What?” he asked, noticing the way Jahns was watching him. “This is what I’ve got cuffs for. So I never learned to tie a knot, so what?”
“In sixty years,” Jahns said.
Margaret pressed another button on her desk and pointed down the hall. “Doctor Nichols is in the nursery. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”
Jahns led the way. Marnes followed, asking her: “Why is that so hard to believe?”
“I think it’s cute, actually.”
Marnes snorted. “That’s an awful word to use on a man my age.”
Jahns smiled to herself. At the end of the hall, she paused before a set of double doors before pushing them open a crack. The light in the room beyond was dim. She opened the door further, and they entered a sparse but clean waiting room. She remembered a similar one from the mid levels where she had waited with a friend to be reunited with her child. A glass wall looked into a room that held a handful of cribs and bassinets. It was too dark inside to see if any of the small beds stirred with newborns. Jahns, of course, was notified of every birth, signed a letter of congratulations and a birth certificate for each one, but the names ran together with the days. She could rarely remember what level the parents lived on, if it was their first or second. It made her sad to admit it, but those certificates had just become more paper for her to sign.
The shadowy outline of an adult moved among the small cribs, the shiny clamp of a clipboard and the flash of a metal pen winking from the light of the observation room. The dark shape was obviously tall, with the gait and build of a man. He took his time, noting something as he hovered over a crib, the two shimmers of metal uniting to jot a note. When he was done, he crossed the room and passed through a wide door to join Marnes and Jahns in the waiting room.
Peter Nichols was an imposing man, Jahns saw. Tall and lean, but not like Marnes, who seemed to fold and unfold unsure limbs to move about. Peter was lean like a habitual exerciser, like a few porters Jahns knew who could take the stairs two at a time and make it look like they’d been expressly designed for such a gait. It was height that lent confidence. Jahns could feel it as she took Peter’s outstretched hand and let him pump it firmly.
“You came,” Doctor Nichols said simply. It was a cold observation. There was only a hint of surprise. He shook Marnes’ hand, but his eyes returned to Jahns. “I explained to your secretary that I wouldn’t be much help. I’m afraid I haven’t seen Juliette since she became a shadow twenty years ago.”
“Well, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.” Jahns glanced at the cushioned benches where she imagined anxious grandparents, aunts, and uncles waited while parents were united with their newborns. “Could we sit?”
Doctor Nichols nodded and waved them over.
“I take each of my appointments for office very seriously,” Jahns explained, sitting across from the doctor. “At my age, I expect most judges and lawmen I install to outlive me, so I choose carefully.”
“But they don’t always, do they?” Doctor Nichols tilted his head, no expression on his lean and carefully shaven face. “Outlive you, I mean.”
Jahns swallowed. Marnes stirred on the bench beside her.
“You must value family,” Jahns said, changing the subject, realizing this was just another observation, no harm meant. “To have shadowed so long and to choose such a demanding line of work.”
Nichols nodded.
“Why do you and Juliette never visit? I mean, not once in almost twenty years. She’s your only child.”
Nichols turned his head slightly, his eyes drifting to the wall. Jahns was momentarily distracted by the sight of another form moving behind the glass, a nurse making the rounds. Another set of doors led off to what she assumed were the delivery rooms, where a convalescing new mother right now was probably waiting to be handed her most precious possession.
“I had a son as well,” Doctor Nichols said.
Jahns felt herself reaching for her bag to procure the folders within, but it wasn’t by her side. This was a detail she had missed, a brother.
“You couldn’t have known,” Nichols said, correctly reading the shock on Mayor Jahns’ face. “He didn’t survive. Technically, he wasn’t born. The lottery moved on.”
“I’m sorry—”
She fought the urge to reach over and hold Marnes’ hand. It had been decades since the two of them had purposefully touched, even innocently, but the sudden sadness in the room punctured that intervening time.
“His name was going to be Nicholas, my father’s father’s name. He was born prematurely. One pound eight ounces.”
The clinical precision in his voice was somehow sadder than his processing any feelings might have been.
“They intubated, moved him into an incubator, but there were… complications.” Doctor Nichols looked down at the backs of his hands. “Juliette was twelve at the time. She was as excited as we were, if you can imagine, to have a baby brother on the way. She was one year out from shadowing her mother, who was a delivery nurse.” Nichols glanced up. “Not here in this nursery, mind you, but in the old mid-level nursery. Where we both worked. I was still an intern then.”
“And Juliette?” Mayor Jahns still didn’t understand the connection.
“There was a failure with the incubator. When Nicholas—” the doctor turned his head to the side and reached halfway to his eyes, but was able to compose himself. “I’m sorry. I still call him that.”
“It’s okay.”
Mayor Jahns was holding Deputy Marnes’ hand. She wasn’t sure when or how that had happened. The doctor didn’t seem to notice, or more likely, care.
“Po
or Juliette.” He shook his head. “She was distraught. She blamed Rhoda at first, this experienced delivery nurse who had done nothing but work a miracle to give our boy the slim chance he had. I explained this. I think Juliette knew. She just needed someone to hate.” He nodded to Jahns. “Girls that age, you know?”
“Believe it or not, I remember.” Jahns forced a smile and Doctor Nichols returned it. She felt Marnes squeeze her hand.
“It wasn’t until her mother died that she took to blaming the incubator that had failed. Well, not the incubator, but the poor condition it was in. The general state of rot all things become.”
“Your wife died from the complications?” It was another detail Jahns felt she must have missed from the file.
“My wife killed herself a week later.”
Again, the clinical detachment. Jahns wondered if this was a survival mechanism that had kicked in after these events, or a personality trait already in place.
“Seems like I would remember that,” Deputy Marnes said, the first words he’d uttered since introducing himself to the doctor.
“Well, I wrote the certificate myself. So I could put whatever cause I wanted—”
“And you admit to this?” Marnes seemed ready to leap off the bench. To do what, Jahns could hardly guess. She held his arm to keep him in place.
“Beyond the statute of limitations? Of course. I admit it. It was a worthless lie, anyway. Juliette was smart, even at that age. She knew. And this is what drove her—”
He stopped himself.
“Drove her what?” Mayor Jahns asked. “Crazy?”
“No.” Doctor Nichols shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say that. It’s what drove her away. She applied for a change in casters. Demanded to move down to Mechanical, to enter the Shop as a shadow. She was a year young for that sort of placement, but I agreed. I signed off on it. I thought she’d go, get some deep air, come back. I was naive. I thought the freedom would be good for her.”
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
“Once. For her mother’s funeral, just a few days later. She marched up on her own, attended the burial, gave me a hug, then marched back down. All without rest, from what I’ve heard. I try to keep up with her. I have a colleague in the deep nursery who will wire now and then with a bit of news. It’s all focus, focus, focus with her.”
Nichols paused and laughed.
“You know, when she was young, all I saw was her mother in her. But she grew up to be more like me.”
“Is there anything you know that would preclude her from or make her ill suited for the job of silo sheriff? You do understand what’s involved with the job, right?”
“I understand.” Nichols looked over at Marnes, his eye drifting to the copper badge visible through the open, shoddily tied robe, down to the bulge of a pistol at his side. “All the little lawmen throughout the silo have to have someone up top, giving commands, is that it?”
“More or less,” Jahns said.
“Why her?”
Marnes cleared his throat. “She helped us with an investigation once—”
“Jules? She was up here?”
“No. We were down there.”
“She has no training.”
“None of us have,” Marnes said. “It’s more of a… political office. A citizen’s post.”
“She won’t agree to it.”
“Why not?” Jahns asked.
Nichols shrugged. “You’ll see for yourself, I suppose.” He stood. “I wish I could give you more time, but I really should get back.” He glanced at the set of double doors. “We’ll be bringing a family in soon—”
“I understand.” Jahns rose and shook his hand. “I appreciate you seeing us.”
He laughed. “Did I have a choice?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I wish I would’ve known that sooner.”
He smiled, and Jahns saw that he was joking. Or attempting to. As they parted company and walked back down the hallway to collect their things and return the robes, Jahns found herself more and more intrigued by this nomination of Marnes’. It wasn’t his style, a woman from the down deep. A person with baggage. She wondered if his judgment was perhaps clouded by other factors. And as he held the door for her, leading out to the main waiting room, Mayor Jahns wondered if she was going along with him because her judgment was clouded as well.
3
It was lunchtime, but neither of them were powerfully hungry. Jahns nibbled on a cornbar while she walked, priding herself on “eating on the climb” like a porter. They continued to pass these tradesmen, and Jahns’ esteem of their profession grew and grew. There was a strange pang of guilt to be heading down under such a light load while these men and women trudged up carrying so much. And they moved so fast. She and Marnes pressed themselves against the rail as a downward porter apologetically stomped past. His shadow, a girl of fifteen or sixteen, was right behind him, loaded down with what looked to be sacks of garbage for the recycling center. Jahns watched the young girl spiral out of sight, sinewy and smooth legs hanging miles out of her shorts, and felt suddenly very old and very tired.
The two of them fell into a rhythmic pace, the reach of each foot hovering over the next tread, a sort of collapsing of the bones, a resignation to gravity, falling to that foot, sliding the hand, reaching the walking stick forward, repeat. Doubt crept into Jahns around the thirtieth floor. What seemed a fine adventure at sunrise now seemed a mighty undertaking. Each step was performed reluctantly, knowing how grueling it would be to win that elevation back.
They passed the upper water treatment plant on thirty two, and Jahns realized she was seeing portions of the silo that were practically new to her. It had been a lifetime ago that she’d been this deep, a shameful thing to admit. And in that time, changes had been made. Construction and repair were ongoing. Walls were a different color than she remembered. But then, it was hard to trust one’s memory.
The traffic on the stairs lightened as they neared the IT floors. Here were the most sparsely populated levels of the silo, where less than two dozen men and women—but mostly men—operated within their own little kingdom. The silo servers took up almost an entire floor, the machines slowly rebuilding with recent history, having been wiped completely during the uprising. Access to them was now severely restricted, and as Jahns passed the landing on the thirty third, she swore she could hear the mighty thrumming of all the electricity they consumed. Whatever the silo had been, or had been designed for, she knew without asking or being told that these strange machines were some organ of primacy. Their power draw was a constant source of contention during budget meetings. But the necessity of the cleaning, the fear of even talking about the outside and all the dangerous taboos that went with it, gave IT incredible leeway. They housed the labs that made the suits, each one tailored to the person waiting in the holding cell, and this alone set them apart from all else.
No, Jahns told herself, it wasn’t simply the taboo of the cleaning, the fear of the outside. It was the hope. There was this unspoken, deadly hope in every member of the silo. A ridiculous, fantastical hope. That maybe not for them, but perhaps for their children, or their children’s children, that life on the outside would be possible once again, and that it would be the work of IT and the bulky suits that emerged from their labs that would make it all possible.
Jahns felt a shiver even to think it. Living outside. The childhood conditioning was that strong. Maybe God would hear her thoughts and rat her out. She imagined herself in a cleaning suit, a far too common visual, placing herself into the flexible coffin into which she had condemned so many—
On the thirty-fourth, she slipped off onto the landing. Marnes joined her, his canteen in hand. Jahns realized she’d been drinking out of his all day while hers stayed strapped to her back. There was something childlike and romantic about this, but also something practical. It was more difficult to reach one’s own water than it was to grab that of the other from their pack.
“You need a break?” He passed the canteen, which had but two swallows left in it. Jahns took one of them.
“This is our next stop,” she said.
Marnes looked up at the faded number stenciled over the doorway. He had to know what floor they were on, but it was as if he needed to double check.
Jahns returned his canteen. “In the past, I’ve always wired them to get the okay on my nominations. It was something Mayor Humphries did before me, and Mayor Jeffers before him.” She shrugged. “Way of the world.”
“I didn’t know they had to approve.” He took the last swallow and patted Jahns on the back, twirled his finger for her to turn around.
“Well, they’ve never rejected any of my nominations—” Jahns felt her canteen tugged out of her pouch, Marnes’ canteen shoved in its place. Her pack felt a smidgen lighter. She realized Marnes wanted to carry her water and share it until it too was empty. “I think the unwritten rule is there just so we’ll carefully consider every judge and lawman, knowing there’s some informal oversight.”
“So this time you’re doing it in person.”
She turned back around to face her deputy. “I figured we were passing this way—” She paused while a young couple hurried up the stairs behind Marnes, holding hands and taking the treads two at a time. “And that it might feel even more conspicuous to not stop and check in.”
“Check in,” Marnes said. Jahns half expected him to spit over the railing—the tone seemed to require such punctuation. She suddenly felt another of her weaknesses exposed.
“Think of it as a goodwill mission,” she said, turning toward the door.
“I’m gonna think of it as a fact-finding raid,” Marnes muttered, following her.
••••
Unlike at the nursery, Jahns could tell that they would not be buzzed through and sent back into the mysterious depths of IT. While they waited to be seen, she watched as even a member of the staff, identifiable from their red coveralls, was patted down and searched just to leave the wing and exit toward the stairs. A man with a wand—like Terry, a member of IT’s own internal security detail—seemed to have the job of checking everyone who passed through the metal gates. The receptionist on the outside of the gates was deferent enough and seemed pleased to have the Mayor for a visit. She expressed her condolences for the recent cleaning, an odd thing to say but something Jahns wished she heard more often. They were shown to a small conference room attached to the main foyer, a place, she supposed, for meeting with various departments without putting them through the hassle of passing through security.
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