by Hugh Howey
“I’m—I thought we discussed this. I have no interest in being—”
“They make the best ones,” Marnes said. “The ones who have no interest in it.” He stood across from Juliette, this thumbs tucked into his coveralls, leaning against one of the small apartment’s walls.
“I’m sorry, but there’s no one down here who can just slip into my boots,” Juliette said, shaking her head. “I don’t think you two understand all that we do—”
“I don’t think you understand what we do up top,” Jahns said. “Or why we need you.”
Juliette tossed her head and laughed. “Look, I’ve got machines down here that you can’t possibly—”
“And what good are they?” Jahns asked. “What do these machines do?”
“They keep this whole goddamned place running!” Juliette declared. “The oxygen you breathe? We recycled that down here. The toxins you exhale? We pump them back into the earth. You want me to write up a list of everything oil makes? Every piece of plastic, every ounce of rubber, all the solvents and cleaners, and I’m not talking about the power it generates, but everything else!”
“And yet it was all here before you were born,” Jahns pointed out.
“Well it wouldn’t have lasted my lifetime, I’ll tell you that. Not in the state it was in.” She crossed her arms again and leaned back against the wall. “I don’t think you get what mess we’d be in without these machines.”
“And I don’t think you get how pointless these machines are going to become without all these people.”
Juliette looked away. It was the first time Jahns had seen her flinch.
“Why don’t you ever visit your father?”
Juliette snapped her head around and looked at the other wall. She wiped loose hair back on her forehead. “Go look at my work log,” she said. “Tell me when I’d fit it in.”
Before Jahns could reply, could say that it was family, that there’s always time, Juliette turned to face her. “Do you think I don’t care about people? Is that it? Because you’d be wrong. I care about every person in this silo. And the men and women down here, the forgotten eight floors of Mechanical, this is my family. I visit with them every day. I break bread with them several times a day. We work, live, and die alongside one another.” She looked to Marnes. “Isn’t that right? You’ve seen it.”
Marnes didn’t say anything. Jahns wondered if she was referring specifically to the “dying” part.
“Did you ask him why he never comes to see me? Because he has all the time in the world. He has nothing up there.”
“Yes, we met with him. Your father seemed like a very busy man. As determined as you.”
Juliette looked away.
“And as stubborn.” Jahns left the paperwork on the bed and went to stand by the door, just a pace away from Juliette. She could smell the soap in the younger woman’s hair. Could see her nostrils flare with her rapid, heavy breathing.
“The days pile up and weigh small decisions down, don’t they? That decision to not visit. The first few days slide by easy enough, anger and youth powers them along. But then they pile up like unrecycled trash. Isn’t that right?”
Juliette waved her hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about days becoming weeks becoming months becoming years—” She almost said that she’d been through the same exact thing, was still piling them up, but Marnes was in the room, listening. “After a while, you’re staying mad just to justify an old mistake. Then it’s just a game. Two people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that chance—”
“It wasn’t like that,” Juliette said. “I don’t want your job. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of others who do.”
“If it’s not you, it’s someone I’m not sure I can trust. Not anymore.”
“Then give it to the next girl.” She smiled.
“It’s you or him. And I think he’ll be getting more guidance from the thirties than he will from me, or from the Pact.”
Juliette seemed to react to this. Her arms loosened across her chest. She turned and met Jahns’ gaze. Marnes was studying all of this from across the room.
“The last sheriff, Holston, what happened to him?”
“He went to cleaning,” Jahns said.
“He volunteered,” Marnes added gruffly.
“I know, but why?” She frowned. “I heard it was his wife.”
“There’s all kinds of speculation—”
“I remember him talking about her, when you two came down to look into Rick’s death. I thought, at first, that he was flirting with me, but all he could talk about was this wife of his.”
“They were in the lottery while we were down here,” Marnes reminded her.
“Yeah. That’s right.” She studied the bed for a while. Paperwork was spread across it.
“I wouldn’t know how to do this job. I only know how to fix things.”
“It’s the same thing,” Marnes told her. “You were a big help with our case down here. You see how things work. How they fit together. Little clues that other people miss.”
“You’re talking about machines,” she said.
“People aren’t much different,” Marnes told her.
“I think you already know this,” Jahns said. “I think you have the right attitude, actually. The right disposition. This is only slightly a political office. Distance is good.”
Juliette shook her head and looked back to Marnes. “So you nominated me for this, is that it? I wondered how this came up. Seemed like something right out of the ground.”
“You’d be good at it,” Marnes told her. “I think you’d be damned good at anything you set your mind to. And this is more important work than you think.”
“And I’d live up top?”
“Your office is on level one. Near the airlock.”
Juliette seemed to mull this over. Jahns was excited to have her even asking questions.
“The pay is more than you’re making now, even with the extra shifts.”
“You checked?”
Jahns nodded. “I took some liberties before we came down.”
“Like talking to my father.”
“That’s right. He would love to see you, you know. If you come with us.”
Juliette looked down at her boots. “Not sure about that.”
“There’s one other thing,” Marnes said, catching Jahns’ eye. He glanced at the paperwork on the bed. The crisply folded contract for Peter Billings was on top. “IT,” he reminded her.
Jahns caught his drift.
“There’s one matter to clear up, before you accept.”
“I’m not sure I’m accepting. I’d want to hear more about this power holiday, organize the work shifts down here—”
“According to tradition, IT signs off on all nominated positions—”
Juliette rolled her eyes and blew out her breath. “IT.”
“Yes, and we checked in with them on the way down as well, just to smooth things over.”
“I’m sure,” Juliette said.
“It’s about these requisitions,” Marnes interjected.
Juliette turned to him.
“We know it probably ain’t nothing, but it’s gonna come up—”
“Wait, is this about the heat tape?”
“Heat tape?”
“Yeah.” Juliette frowned and shook her head. “Those bastards.”
Jahns pinched two inches of air. “They had a folder on you this thick. Said you were skimming supplies meant for them.”
“No they didn’t. Are you kidding?” She pointed toward the door. “We can’t get any of the supplies we need because of them. When I needed heat tape—we had a leak in a heat exchanger a few months back—we couldn’t get any because Supply tells us the backing material for the tape is all spoken for. Now, we had that order in a while back, and then I find out from one of our porters that the tape is going to IT, that th
ey’ve got miles of the stuff for the skins of all their test suits.”
Juliette took a deep breath.
“So I had some intercepted.” She looked to Marnes as she admitted this. “Look, I’m keeping the power on so they can do whatever it is they do up there, and I can’t get basic supplies. And even when I do, the quality is complete crap, probably because of unrealistic quotas, rushing the manufacturing chain—”
“If these are items you really needed,” Jahns interrupted, “then I understand.”
She looked to Marnes, who smiled and dipped his chin as if to say he told her this was the right woman for the job.
Jahns ignored him. “I’m actually glad to hear your side of this,” she told Juliette. “And I wish I had made this trip more often, as sore as my legs are. There are things we take for granted up top, mostly because they aren’t well understood. I can see now that our offices need to be in better communication, have more of the constant contact I have with IT.”
“I’ve been saying that for just about twenty years,” Juliette said. “Down here, we joke that this place was laid out to keep us well out of the way. And that’s how it feels, sometimes.”
“Well, if you come up top, if you take this job, people will hear you. You could be the first link in that chain of command.”
“Where would IT fall?”
“There will be resistance, but that’s normal with them. I’ve handled it before. I’ll wire my office for some emergency waivers. We’ll make them retroactive, get these acquisitions above board.” Jahns studied the younger woman. “As long as I have your assurance that every one of these diverted supplies were absolutely necessary.”
Juliette did not flinch away from the challenge. “They were,” she said. “Not that it mattered. The stuff we got from them was crap. Couldn’t have fallen apart better if it’d been designed to. I’ll tell you what, we finally got our shipment from Supply and have extra tape. I’d love to drop off a peace offering on our way up. Our design is so much better—”
“Our way up?” Jahns asked, making sure she understood what she was saying, what she was agreeing to.
Juliette looked them both over. She nodded. “You’ll have to give me a week to sort out the generator. I’m holding you to that power holiday. And just so you understand, I’ll always consider myself Mechanical, and I’ll be doing this partly because I see what happens when problems are ignored. My big push down here has been preventive maintenance. No more waiting for things to break before we fix them, but to go around and make them hum while they’re still working. Too many issues have been ignored, let degrade. And I think, if the silo can be thought of as one big engine, we are like the dirty oil pan down here that needs some people’s attention.” She reached her hand out to Jahns. “Get me that power holiday, and I’m your man.”
Jahns smiled and took her hand, admired the warmth and power in her confident handshake.
“I’ll get on it first thing in the morning,” she said. “And thank you. Welcome aboard.”
Marnes crossed the room to shake Juliette’s hand as well. “Nice to have you on, Boss.”
Juliette smirked as she took his hand. “Well, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think I’ll have a lot to learn before you go calling me that.”
7
It felt appropriate that their climb back to the up-top would occur during a power holiday. Jahns could feel her own energy complying with the new decree, draining away with each laborious step. The agony of the descent had been a tease, the discomfort of constant movement disguising itself as the fatigue of exercise. But now her frail muscles were really put to work. Each step was something to be conquered. She would lift a boot to the next tread, place a hand on her knee, and push herself another ten inches up what felt like a million feet of spiral staircase.
The landing to her right displayed the number “58.” Each landing seemed to be in view forever. Not like the trip down, where she could daydream and skip right past several floors. Now they loomed in sight gradually beyond the outer railing, and held there, taunting in the dim green glow of the emergency lights, as she struggled up one plodding and wavering step at a time.
Marnes walked beside her, his hand on the inner rail, hers on the outer, the walking stick clanging on the lonely treads between them. Occasionally, their arms brushed against one another. It felt as though they’d been away for months, away from their offices, their duties, their cold familiarity. The adventure down to wrangle a new sheriff had played out differently than Jahns had imagined it would. She had dreamed of a return to her youth and had instead found herself haunted by old ghosts. She had hoped to find a renewed vigor and instead felt the years of wear in her knees and back. What was to be a grand tour of her silo was instead trudged in relative anonymity, and now she wondered if its operation and upkeep even needed her.
The world around her was stratified. She saw that ever more clearly. The up-top concerned itself with a blurring view, taking for granted the squeezed juice enjoyed with breakfast. The people who lived below and worked the gardens or cleaned animal cages orbited their own world of soil, greenery, and fertilizer. To them, the outside view was peripheral, ignored until there was a cleaning. And then there was the down deep, the machine shops and chemistry labs, the pumping oil and grinding gears, the hands-on world of grease limned fingernails and the musk of toil. To these people, the outside world and the food that trickled down were mere rumors and bodily sustenance. The point of the silo was for the people to keep the machines running, when Jahns had always, her entire long life, seen it the other way around.
Landing fifty-seven appeared through the fog of darkness. A young girl sat on the steel grate, her feet tucked up against herself, arms wrapped around her knees, a children’s book in its protective plastic cover held out into the feeble light spilling from an overhead bulb. Jahns watched the girl, who was unmoved save her eyes as they darted over the colorful pages. The girl never looked up to see who was passing the apartment’s landing. They left her behind, and she gradually faded in the darkness as Jahns and Marnes struggled ever upward, exhausted from their third day of climbing, no vibrations or ringing footsteps above or below them, the silo quiet and eerily devoid of life, room enough for two old friends, two comrades, to walk side by side on the crumbling steps of chipping paint, their arms swinging and every now and then, and very occasionally, brushing together.
••••
They stayed that night at the mid-level deputy station, the officer of the mids insisting they take his hospitality and Jahns eager to buttress support for yet another sheriff nominated from outside the profession. After a cold dinner in near darkness and enough idle banter to satisfy their host and his wife, Jahns retired to the main office where a convertible couch had been made as comfortable as possible, the linens borrowed from a nicer elsewhere and smelling of two-chit soap. Marnes had been set up on a cot in the holding cell, which still smelled of tub-gin and a drunk who had gotten too carried away after the cleaning.
It was impossible to notice when the lights went out, they were so dim already. Jahns rested on the cot in the darkness, her muscles throbbing and luxuriating in her body’s stillness, her feet cramped and feeling like solid bone, her back tender and in need of stretching. Her mind, however, continued to move. It drifted back to the weary conversations that had passed the time on their most recent day of climbing.
She and Marnes seemed to be spiraling around one another, testing the memory of old attractions, probing the tenderness of ancient scars, looking for some soft spot that remained among brittle and broken bodies, across wrinkled and dried-paper skin, and within hearts calloused by law and politics.
Donald’s name came up often and tentatively, like a child sneaking into the adult bed, forcing wary lovers to make room in the middle. Jahns grieved anew for her long lost husband. She grieved for the first time in her life for the subsequent decades of solitude. What she had forever seen as her calling—this living apart and serv
ing the greater good—now felt more a curse. Her life had been taken from her. Squeezed into pulp. The juice of her efforts and sacrificed years had dripped down through a silo that, just forty levels below her, hardly knew and barely cared.
The saddest part of this journey had been this understanding she’d come to with Holston’s ghost. She could admit it now: A great reason for her hike, perhaps even the reason for wanting Juliette as sheriff, was to fall all the way to the down deep, away from the sad sight of two lovers nestled together in the crook of a hill as the wind etched away all their wasted youth. She had set out to escape Holston, and had instead found him. Now she knew, if not the mystery of why all sent out to clean actually did so, why a sad few would dare volunteer for the duty. Better to join a ghost than be haunted by them, Jahns now knew. Better no life than an empty one—
