Jahns’s breath caught in her chest. Her hand groped for a wrist as it clutched her sheets. She slid over on the small convertible bed to make room and pulled him down beside her.
Marnes wrapped his arms around her back, wiggled beneath her until she was lying on his side, a leg draped over his, her hands on his neck. She felt his mustache brush against her cheek, heard his lips purse and peck the corner of hers.
Jahns held his cheeks and burrowed her face into his shoulder. She cried, like a schoolchild, like a new shadow who felt lost and afraid in the wilderness of a strange and terrifying job. She cried with fear, but that soon drained away. It drained like the soreness in her back as his hands rubbed her there. It drained until numbness found its place, and then, after what felt like a forever of shuddering sobs, sensation took over.
Jahns felt alive in her skin. She felt the tingle of flesh touching flesh, of just her forearm against his hard ribs, her hands on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. And then the tears were some joyous release, some mourning of the lost time, some welcomed sadness of a moment long delayed and finally there, arms wrapped around it and holding tight.
She fell asleep like that, exhausted from far more than the climb, nothing more than a few trembling kisses, hands interlocking, a whispered word of tenderness and appreciation, and then the depths of sleep pulling her down, the weariness in her joints and bones succumbing to a slumber she didn’t want but sorely needed. She slept with a man in her arms for the first time in decades, and woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.
In the middle of their fourth and final day of climbing, they approached the midthirties of IT. Jahns had found herself taking more breaks for water and to rub her muscles along the way, not for the exhaustion she feigned but the dread of this stopover and seeing Bernard, the fear of their trip ever coming to an end.
The dark and deep shadows cast by the power holiday followed them up, the traffic sparse as most merchants had closed for the silo-wide brownout. Juliette, who had stayed behind to oversee the repairs, had warned Jahns of the flickering lights from the backup generator. Still, the effect of the shimmering illumination had worn on her nerves during the long climb. The steady pulsing reminded her of a bad lightbulb she’d unhappily endured for the better part of her first term. Two different techs from Electrical had come to inspect the bulb. Both had deemed it too operational to replace. It had taken an appeal to McLain, the head of Supply even back then, to score her a replacement.
Jahns remembered McLain delivering the bulb herself. She hadn’t been head of Supply for long and had fairly smuggled the thing up those many flights of stairs. Even then, Jahns had looked up to her, this woman with so much power and responsibility. She remembered McLain asking her why Jahns didn’t just do what everyone else did—simply break the bulb the rest of the way.
The fact that this had never occurred to Jahns used to bother her—until she began to take pride in this failing; until she got to know McLain well enough to understand the question was a compliment, the hand-delivery her reward.
When they reached the thirty-fourth, Jahns felt like they were, in a sense, home again: back in the realm of the familiar, at the main landing for IT. She waited by the railing, leaning on it and her walking stick, while Marnes got the door. As it was cracked open, the pale glow of diminished power was swept off the stairwell by the bright lights blooming inside. It hadn’t been widely publicized, but the reason for the severe power restrictions on other levels was largely the exemptions IT possessed. Bernard had been quick to point out various clauses in the Pact to support this. Juliette had bitched that servers shouldn’t get priority over grow lights but resigned herself to getting the main generator realigned and taking what she could. Jahns told Juliette to view this as her first lesson in political compromise. Juliette said she saw it as a display of weakness.
Inside, Jahns found Bernard waiting for them, a look on his face like he’d swallowed sour fruit juice. A conversation between several IT workers standing off to the side was quickly silenced with their entry, leaving Jahns little doubt that they’d been spotted on the way up and expected.
“Bernard,” she said, trying to keep her breathing steady. She didn’t want him to know how tired she was. Let him think she was strolling by on her way up from the down deep, like it was no big deal.
“Marie.”
It was a deliberate slight. He didn’t even look Marnes’s way or acknowledge that the deputy was in the room.
“Would you like to sign these here? Or in the conference room?” She dug into her bag for the contract with Juliette’s name on it.
“What games are you playing at, Marie?”
Jahns felt her temperature rise. The cluster of workers in silver IT jumpsuits were following the exchange. “Playing at?” she asked.
“You think this power holiday of yours is cute? Your way of getting back at me?”
“Getting back—?”
“I’ve got servers, Marie—”
“Your servers have their full allocation of power,” Jahns reminded him, her voice rising.
“But their cooling comes ducted from Mechanical, and if temps get any higher, we’ll be ramping down, which we’ve never had to do!”
Marnes stepped between the two of them, his hands raised. “Easy,” he said coolly, his gaze on Bernard.
“Call off your little shadow here,” Bernard said.
Jahns placed a hand on Marnes’s arm.
“The Pact is clear, Bernard. It’s my choice. My nomination. You and I have a nice history of signing off on each others’—”
“And I told you this girl from the pits will not do—”
“She’s got the job,” Marnes said, interrupting. Jahns noticed his hand had fallen to the butt of his gun. She wasn’t sure if Bernard had noticed or not, but he fell silent. His eyes, however, did not leave Jahns’s.
“I won’t sign it.”
“Then next time, I won’t ask.”
Bernard smiled. “You think you’ll outlive another sheriff?” He turned toward the workers in the corner and waved one of them over. “Why do I somehow doubt that?”
One of the technicians removed himself from the whispering group and approached. Jahns recognized the young man from the cafeteria, had seen him up top on nights she worked late. Lukas, if she remembered correctly. He shook her hand and smiled an awkward hello.
Bernard twirled his own hand, stirring the air with his impatience. “Sign whatever she needs. I refuse to. Make copies. Take care of the rest.” He waved dismissively, turned and looked Marnes and Jahns up and down one final time as if disgusted with their condition, their age, their positions, something. “Oh, and have Sims top up their canteens. See that they have food enough to stagger to their homes. Whatever it takes to power their decrepit legs out of here and back to wherever it is they belong.”
And with that, Bernard strode off toward the barred gates that led into the heart of IT, back to his brightly lit offices, where servers hummed happily, the temperature rising in the slow-moving air like the heat of angered flesh as capillaries squeezed, the blood in them rising to a boil.
16
The floors flew by faster as they approached home. In the darkest sections of the staircase, between quiet floors of people hunkered down and awaiting a return to normalcy, old hands wrapped around each other and swung between two climbers, brazenly and openly, grasping each other while their other hands slid up the cool steel of the rails.