Wool (17 page)

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 shimmering with fresh tears. 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 aged plastic dome. He nodded silently at the ticking of the hand, stood up, his back stooping for a moment as he fought to straighten it. He ran his hands down his overalls, 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 sorry 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 workers 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.

It was well after ten by the time Juliette pushed herself 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 hadn’t abutted a noisy, aroma-filled cafeteria, she might have been 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 found 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, stepping 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 shadows at the end of one of the long tables and slurped on her 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, and she finished the last of her juice. Not once through the meal 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.

“W-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 glowed faintly 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.” As he turned to Juliette, she saw that the man was young, probably in his late twenties, and quite handsome in that clean, officelike way. He smiled 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 from the people who sat and stared at the hills? She had just 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 that she could 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 level 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.”