“Oh my.” His eyes widened over a limp smile. “So the rumors are true. Who would do such a thing?” The smile grew, and Juliette realized she was dealing with a man who felt himself invulnerable. It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered a dirty and outsized ego such as his. Her time as a shadow in the down deep had been spent surrounded by them.
“I believe we’ll find the party responsible was the one with the most to gain,” she said dryly. After a pause, she added: “Mayor.”
The crooked smile faded. Bernard let go of the bars and stepped back, his hands tucking into his overalls. “Well, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name. I’m aware that you haven’t spent much time out of the down deep—and to be honest I’ve stayed much too insulated in my own office—but things are changing around here. As mayor and sheriff, we will be working together a lot, you and me.” He glanced down at the files at her feet. “So I expect you to keep me posted. About everything.”
With that, Bernard turned and left, and it required a concerted effort for Juliette to relax her fists. When she finally peeled her fingers away from the star, she found its sharp edges had gouged into her palm, cutting her and drawing blood. A few drops caught the light on the edge of the brass, looking like wet rust. Juliette wiped the star clean on her new overalls, a habit born of her previous life among the sludge and grease. She cursed herself when she saw the dark spot the blood had left on her new clothes. Turning the star over, she peered at the stamped insignia on its face. There were the three triangles of the silo and the word Sheriff arched over the top of them. She turned it over again and fingered the clasp that held the sharp spike of the pin. She opened the clasp and let the pin hinge free. The stiff needle had been bent and straightened in several places over the years, giving it a hand-forged look. It wobbled on its hinge—echoing her hesitation to wear the thing.
But as Bernard’s footsteps receded, as she heard him say something indecipherable to Deputy Marnes, she felt a new resolve steel her nerves. It was like encountering a rusted bolt that refused to budge. Something about that intolerable stiffness, that reluctance to move, set Juliette’s teeth on edge. She had come to believe that there were no fasteners she couldn’t unstick, had learned to attack them with grease and with fire, with penetrating oil and with brute strength. With enough planning and persistence, they always gave. Eventually.
She forced the wavy needle through the breast of her overalls and clasped the catch on the back. Looking down at the star was a little surreal. There were a dozen folders at her feet demanding her attention, and Juliette felt, for the first time since arriving at the up top, that this was her job. Her work at Mechanical was behind her. She had left that place in far better condition than she’d found it, had stayed long enough to hear the near-silent hum of a repaired generator, to see a shaft spin in such perfect alignment that one couldn’t tell if it was moving at all. And now she had traveled to the up top to find here the rattle and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a misalignment that was eating away at the true engine of the silo, just as Jahns had forewarned.
Leaving most of the folders where they were, she picked up Holston’s, a folder she shouldn’t even have been looking at but couldn’t be without, and pulled the cell door open. Rather than turn to her office, she first walked the other way toward the yellow steel entrance to the airlock. Peering through the triple-paned glass for the dozenth time in several days, she imagined the man she had replaced standing inside, wearing one of those ridiculously bulky suits, waiting for those far doors to open. What went through a man’s thoughts as he waited there alone to be cast off? It couldn’t have been mere fear, for Juliette had tasted that well enough. It had to be something beyond that, a wholly unique sensation, the calm beyond the pain, or the numbness past the terror. Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.
It was the same as color. You could describe a new color only in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn’t create the strange out of nothing. So maybe it was only the cleaners who understood what it felt like to stand there, trembling—or perhaps not afraid one bit—as they waited for their death.
The obsession with why played out in whispers through the silo—people wanting to know why they did what they did, why they left a shiny and polished gift to those who had exiled them—but that did not interest Juliette at all. She figured they were seeing new colors, feeling the indescribable, perhaps having a religious experience that occurred only in the face of the reaper. Wasn’t it enough to know that it happened without fail? Problem solved. Take it as an axiom. Move on to a real issue, like what it must feel like to be the one going through it. That was the real shame of the taboos: not that people couldn’t pine for the outside world, but that they weren’t even allowed to commiserate with the cleaners during the weeks after, to wonder what they had suffered, to properly express their thanks or regrets.
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.