Rather than abuse her station or Marnes’s power, they waited in line while the workers checked through the gate. As these tired men and women signed back in and logged their travel and hours, Jahns thought of the time she had wasted ruminating about her own life during the long descent, time she should’ve spent polishing her appeal to this Juliette. Rare nerves twisted her gut as the line shuffled forward. The worker ahead of them showed his ID, the card colored blue for Mechanical. He scratched his information on a dusty slate. When it was their turn, they pushed through the outer gate and showed their golden IDs. The station guard raised his eyebrows, then seemed to recognize the mayor.
“Your Honor,” he said, and Jahns didn’t correct him. “Weren’t expecting you this shift.” He waved their IDs away and reached for a nub of chalk. “Let me.”
Jahns watched as he spun the board around and wrote their names in neat print, the side of his palm collecting dust from the old film of chalk below. For Marnes, he simply wrote “Sheriff,” and again, Jahns didn’t correct him.
“I know she wasn’t expecting us until later,” Jahns said, “but I wonder if we could meet with Juliette Nichols now.”
The station guard turned and looked behind him at the digital clock that recorded the proper time. “She won’t be off the generator for another hour. Maybe two, knowing her. You could hit the mess hall and wait.”
Jahns looked at Marnes, who shrugged. “Not entirely hungry yet,” he said.
“What about seeing her at work? It would be nice to see what she does. We’d try our best to stay out of the way.”
The guard lifted his shoulders. “You’re the mayor. I can’t say no.” He jabbed the nub of chalk down the hall, the people lined up outside the gate shifting impatiently as they waited. “See Knox. He’ll get someone to run you down.”
The head of Mechanical was a man hard to miss. Knox amply filled the largest set of overalls Jahns had ever seen. She wondered if the extra denim cost him more chits and how a man managed to keep such a belly full. A thick beard added to his scope. If he smiled or frowned at their approach, it was impossible to know. He was as unmoved as a wall of concrete.
Jahns explained what they were after. Marnes said hello, and she realized they must’ve met the last time he was down. Knox listened, nodded, and then bellowed in a voice so gruff, the words were indistinguishable from one another. But they meant something to someone, as a young boy materialized from behind him, a waif of a kid with unusually bright orange hair.
“Gitemoffandowntojules,” Knox growled, the space between the words as slender as the gap in his beard where a mouth should have been.
The young boy, young even for a shadow, waved his hand and darted away. Marnes thanked Knox, who didn’t budge, and they followed after the boy.
The corridors in Mechanical, Jahns saw, were even tighter than elsewhere in the silo. They squeezed through the end-of-shift traffic, the concrete blocks on either side primed but not painted, and rough where they brushed against her shoulder. Overhead, parallel and twisting runs of pipe and wire conduit hung exposed. Jahns felt the urge to duck, despite the half foot of clearance; she noticed many of the taller workers walking with a stoop. The lights overhead were dim and spaced well apart, making the sensation of tunneling deeper and deeper into the earth overwhelming.
The young shadow with the orange hair led them around several turns, his confidence in the route seemingly habitual. They came to a flight of stairs, the square kind that made right turns, and went down two more levels. Jahns heard a rumbling grow louder as they descended. When they left the stairwell on one-forty-two, they passed an odd contraption in a wide open room just off the hallway. A steel arm the size of several people end to end was moving up and down, driving a piston through the concrete floor. Jahns slowed to watch its rhythmic gyrations. The air smelled of something chemical, something rotten. She couldn’t place it.
“Is this the generator?”
Marnes laughed in a patronizing, uniquely manly way.
“That’s a pump,” he said. “Oil well. It’s how you read at night.”
He squeezed her shoulder as he walked past, and Jahns forgave him instantly for laughing at her. She hurried after him and Knox’s young shadow.
“The generator is that thrumming you hear,” Marnes said. “The pump brings up oil, they do something to it in a plant a few floors down, and then it’s ready to burn.”
Jahns vaguely knew some of this, possibly from a committee meeting. She was amazed, once again, at how much of the silo was alien to even her, she who was supposed to be—nominally at least—running things.
The persistent grumbling in the walls grew louder as they neared the end of the hall. When the boy with the orange hair pulled open the doors, the sound was deafening. Jahns felt wary about approaching further, and even Marnes seemed to stall. The kid waved them forward with frantic gestures, and Jahns found herself willing her feet to carry her toward the noise. She wondered, suddenly, if they were being led outside. It was an illogical, senseless idea, born of imagining the most dangerous threat she could possibly summon.
As she broke the plane of the door, cowering behind Marnes, the boy let the door slam shut, trapping them inside with the onslaught. He pulled headphones—no wires dangling from them—from a rack by the wall. Jahns followed his lead and put a pair over her own ears. The noise was deadened, remaining only in her chest and nerve endings. She wondered why, for what cause, this rack of ear protection would be located inside the room rather than outside.
The boy waved and said something, but it was just moving lips. They followed him along a narrow passageway of steel grating, a floor much like the landings on each silo floor. When the hallway turned, one wall fell away and was replaced with a railing of three horizontal bars. A machine beyond reckoning loomed on the other side. It was the size of her entire apartment and office put together. Nothing seemed to be moving at first, nothing to justify the pounding she could feel in her chest and across her skin. It wasn’t until they fully rounded the machine that she saw the steel rod sticking out of the back of the unit, spinning ferociously and disappearing into another massive metal machine that had cables as thick as a man’s waist rising up toward the ceiling.
The power and energy in the room were palpable. As they reached the end of the second machine, Jahns finally saw a solitary figure working beside it. A young-looking woman in overalls, a hard hat on, brown braided hair hanging out the back, was leaning into a wrench nearly as long as she was tall. Her presence gave the machines a terrifying sense of scale, but she didn’t seem to fear them. She threw herself into her wrench, her body frightfully close to the roaring unit, reminding Jahns of an old children’s tale where a mouse pulled a barb out of an imaginary beast called an elephant. The idea of a woman this size fixing a machine of such ferocity seemed absurd. But she watched the woman work while the young shadow slipped through a gate and ran up to tug on her overalls.
The woman turned, not startled, and squinted at Jahns and Marnes. She wiped her forehead with the back of one hand, her other hand swinging the wrench around to rest on her shoulder. She patted the young shadow on the head and walked out to meet them. Jahns saw that the woman’s arms were lean and well defined with muscle. She wore no undershirt, just blue overalls cut high up over her chest, exposing a bit of olive skin that gleamed with sweat. She had the same dark complexion as the farmers who worked under grow lights, but it could have been as much from the grease and grime if her denims were any indication.