She stopped short of Jahns and Marnes, and nodded at them. She smiled at Marnes with a hint of recognition. She didn’t offer a hand, for which Jahns was grateful. Instead, she pointed toward a door by a glass partition and then headed that way herself.
Marnes followed on her heels like a puppy, Jahns close behind. She turned to make sure the shadow wasn’t underfoot, only to see him scurrying off the way he had come, his hair glowing in the wan overhead lights of the generator room. His duty, as far as he was concerned, was done.
Inside the small control room, the noise lessened. It dropped almost to nothing as the thick door was shut tight. Juliette pulled off her hard hat and earmuffs and dropped them on a shelf. Jahns took hers away from her head tentatively, heard the noise reduced to a distant hum, and removed them all the way. The room was tight and crowded with metal surfaces and winking lights unlike anything she had ever seen. It was strange to her that she was mayor of this room as well, a thing she hardly knew existed and certainly couldn’t operate.
While the ringing in Jahns’s ears subsided, Juliette adjusted some spinning knobs, watching little arms waver under glass shields. “I thought we were doing this tomorrow morning,” she said, concentrating intently on her work.
“We made better time than I’d hoped.”
Jahns looked to Marnes, who was holding his ear protection in both hands, shifting uncomfortably.
“Good to see you again, Jules,” he said.
She nodded and leaned down to peer through the thick glass window at the gargantuan machines outside, her hands darting over the large control board without needing to look, adjusting large black dials with faded white markings.
“Sorry about your partner,” she said, glancing down at a bank of readouts. She turned and studied Marnes, and Jahns saw that this woman, beneath the sweat and grime, was beautiful. Her face was hard and lean, her eyes bright. She had a fierce intelligence you could measure from a distance. And she peered at Marnes with utmost sympathy, visible in the furrow of her brows. “Really,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. He seemed like a good man.”
“The best,” Marnes sputtered, his voice cracking.
Juliette nodded as if that was all that needed saying. She turned to Jahns.
“That vibration you feel in the floor, Mayor? That’s a coupling when it’s barely two millimeters off. If you think it feels bad in here, you should go put your hands on the casing. It’ll jiggle your fingers numb immediately. Hold it long enough, and your bones will rattle like you’re coming apart.”
She turned and reached between Jahns and Marnes to throw a massive switch, then turned back to the control board. “Now imagine what that generator is going through, shaking itself to pieces like that. Teeth start grinding together in the transmission, small bits of metal shavings cycle through the oil like sandpaper grit. Next thing you know, there’s an explosion of steel and we’ve got no power but whatever the backup can spit out.”
Jahns held her breath.
“You need us to get someone?” Marnes asked.
Juliette laughed. “None of this is news or different from any other shift. If the backup unit wasn’t being torn down for new gaskets, and we could go to half power for a week, I could pull that coupler, adjust the mounts, and have her spinning like a top.” She shot a look at Jahns. “But since we have a mandate for full power, no interruptions, that’s not happening. So I’m going to keep tightening bolts while they keep trying to shake loose, and try to find the right revolutions in here to keep her fairly singing.”
“I had no idea, when I signed that mandate—”
“And here I thought I’d dumbed down my report enough to make it clear,” Juliette said.
“How long before this failure happens?”
Jahns suddenly realized she wasn’t here interviewing this woman. The demands were heading in the opposite direction.
“How long?” Juliette laughed and shook her head. She finished a final adjustment and turned to face them with her arms crossed. “It could happen right now. It could happen a hundred years from now. The point is: it’s going to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. The goal shouldn’t be to keep this place humming along for our lifetimes”—she looked pointedly at Jahns—“or our current term. If the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.”
Jahns saw Marnes stiffen at this. She felt her own body react, a chill coursing across her skin. This last line was dangerously close to treason. The metaphor only half saved it.
“I could declare a power holiday,” Jahns suggested. “We could stage it in memory of those who clean.” She thought more about this. “It could be an excuse to service more than your machine here. We could—”
“Good luck getting IT to power down shit,” Juliette said. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, then wiped this on her overalls. She looked down at the grease transferred to the denim. “Pardon my language, Mayor.”
Jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her too much of a former self that she could just barely recall. A younger woman who dispensed with niceties and got what she wanted. She found herself glancing over at Marnes. “Why do you single out their department? For the power, I mean.”
Juliette laughed and uncrossed her arms. She tossed her hands toward the ceiling. “Why? Because IT has, what, three floors out of one-forty-four? And yet they use up over a quarter of all the power we produce. I can do the math for you—”
“That’s quite all right.”
“And I don’t remember a server ever feeding someone or saving someone’s life or stitching up a hole in their britches.”
Jahns smiled. She suddenly saw what Marnes liked about this woman. She also saw what he had once seen in her younger self, before she married his best friend.
“What if we had IT ratchet down for some maintenance of their own for a week? Would that work?”
“I thought we came down here to recruit her away from all this,” Marnes grumbled.
Juliette shot him a look. “And I thought I told you—or your secretary—not to bother. Not that I’ve got anything against what you do, but I’m needed down here.” She raised her arm and checked something dangling from her wrist. It was a timepiece. But she was studying it as if it still worked.
“Look, I’d love to chat more.” She looked up at Jahns. “Especially if you can guarantee a holiday from the juice, but I’ve got a few more adjustments to make and I’m already into my overtime. Knox gets pissed if I push into too many extra shifts.”
“We’ll get out of your hair,” Jahns said. “We haven’t had dinner yet, so maybe we can see you after? Once you punch out and get cleaned up?”
Juliette looked down at herself, as if to confirm she even needed cleaning. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “They’ve got you in the bunkhouse?”
Marnes nodded.
“All right. I’ll find you later. And don’t forget your muffs.” She pointed to her ears, looked Marnes in the eye, nodded, then returned to her work, letting them know the conversation, for now, was over.
13
Marnes and Jahns were guided to the mess hall by Marck, a mechanic just getting off second shift. Marnes seemed to take umbrage at needing a tour guide. The deputy possessed that distinctly male quality of pretending to know where he was, even when he didn’t. Walking slightly ahead in an attempt to prove this, he would pause at some intersection, point questioningly in one direction, only to have Marck laugh and correct him.