One of the first things she’d realized was that his activity on the work computer held no secrets. Holston had obviously become a night rat, just like her, staying up for hours in his apartment. It was yet another commonality she felt between them, further strengthening her obsession with the man. Sticking to his home computer meant she could ignore over half the data. It also became apparent that he had spent most of his time investigating his wife, just as Juliette was now prying into him. This was their deepest shared bond, Juliette’s and Holston’s. Here she was, looking into the last voluntary cleaner as he had looked into his wife, hoping to discover what torturous cause might lead a person to choose the forbidden outside.
And it was here that Juliette began to find clues almost eerie in their connection. Allison, Holston’s wife, seemed to be the one who had unlocked the mysteries of the old servers. The very method that had made Holston’s data available to Juliette had at some point brought some secret to Allison, and then to Holston. By focusing on deleted e-mails between the couple, and noting the explosion of communication around the time she had published a document detailing some undeletion method, Juliette stumbled onto what she felt was a valid trail. She became more certain that Allison had found something on the servers. The trouble was determining what it was—and whether she’d recognize it herself even if she found it.
She toyed with several ideas, even the chance that Allison had been driven to rage by infidelity, but Juliette had enough of a feel for Holston to know that this wasn’t the case. And then she noticed each trail of activity seemed to lead back to the paragraphs of gibberish, an answer Juliette kept looking for any excuse to reject because she couldn’t make sense of it. Why would Holston, and Allison especially, spend so much time looking at all that nonsense? The activity logs showed her keeping them open for hours at a time, as if the scrambled letters and symbols could be read. To Juliette, it looked like a wholly new language.
So what was it that had sent Holston and his wife to cleaning? The common assumption around the silo was that Allison had gotten the stirs, had gone crazy for the out-of-doors, and that Holston eventually succumbed to his grief. But Juliette had never bought that. She didn’t like coincidences. When she tore a machine down to repair it, and a new problem surfaced a few days later, all she usually had to do was go back through the steps from the last repair. The answer was almost always there. She saw this riddle the same way: it was a much simpler diagnosis if both of them were driven out by the same thing.
She just couldn’t see what it might be. And part of her feared that finding it could drive her crazy as well.
Juliette rubbed her eyes. When she looked at her desk again, Jahns’s folder caught her attention. On top of her folder sat the doctor’s report for Marnes. She moved the report aside and reached for the note underneath, the one Marnes had written and left on his small bedside table:
It should have been me.
So few words, Juliette thought. But then, who remained in the silo for him to speak to? She studied the handful of words, but there was little to squeeze from them. It was his canteen that had been poisoned, not Jahns’s. It actually made her death a case of manslaughter, a new term for Juliette. Marnes had explained something else about the law: the worst offense they could hope to pin on anyone was the attempted and unsuccessful murder of him, rather than the botched accident that had claimed the mayor. Which meant, if they could nail the act on a guilty party, that person could be put to cleaning for what they had failed to accomplish with Marnes, while only getting five years’ probation and silo service for what had accidentally happened to Jahns. Juliette thought it was this crooked sense of fairness as much as anything else that had worn down poor Marnes. There was never any hope for true justice, a life for a life. These strange laws, coupled with the agonizing knowledge that he had carried the poison on his own back, had gravely wounded him. He had to live with being the poison’s porter, with the hurtful knowledge that a good deed, a shared walk, had been his love’s death.
Juliette held the suicide note and cursed herself for not seeing it coming. It should have been a foreseeable breakdown, a problem solved by a little preventive maintenance. She could have said more, reached out somehow. But she had been too busy trying to stay afloat those first few days to see that the man who had brought her to the up top was slowly unraveling right before her eyes.
The flash of her inbox icon interrupted these disturbing thoughts. She reached for the mouse and cursed herself. The large chunk of data she had sent down to Mechanical some hours earlier must’ve been rejected. Maybe it was too much to send at once. But then she saw that it was a message from Scottie, her friend in IT who had supplied the data drive.
“Come now,” it read.
It was an odd request. Vague and yet dire, especially given the lateness of the hour. Juliette powered down her monitor, grabbed the drive from the computer in case she had more visitors, and briefly considered strapping Marnes’s ancient gun around her waist. She stood, went to the key locker, and ran her hand down the soft belt, feeling the indention where the buckle had, for decades, worn into the same spot on the old leather. She thought again of Marnes’s terse note and looked at his empty chair. She decided in the end to leave the gun hanging where it was. She nodded to his desk, made sure she had her keys, and hurried out the door.
24
It was thirty-three levels down to IT. Juliette skipped down the steps so swiftly, she had to keep a hand on the inner railing to keep from flying outward into the occasional up-bound traffic. She overtook a porter near six, who was startled by being passed. By the tenth floor, she was beginning to feel dizzy from the round and round. She wondered how Holston and Marnes had ever responded to trouble with any degree of urgency. The other two deputy stations, the one in the mids and the one in the down deep, were nicely situated near the dead center of their forty-eight floors, a far superior arrangement. She passed into the twenties thinking about this: that her office was not ideally positioned to respond to the far edge of her precinct. Instead, it had been located by the airlock and the holding cell, close to the highest form of the silo’s capital punishment. She cursed this decision as she considered the long slog back up.
In the high twenties, she practically bowled a man over who wasn’t watching where he was going. She wrapped one arm around him and gripped the railing, keeping them both from a nasty tumble. He apologized while she swallowed a curse. And then she saw it was Lukas, his lapboard strapped to his back, nubs of charcoal sticking out of his overalls.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”
He smiled at seeing her, but his lips drooped into a frown when he realized she’d been hurrying in the opposite direction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
“Of course.”
He stood out of the way, and Juliette finally took her hand off his ribs. She nodded, not sure what to say, her thoughts only on Scottie, and then she continued her run down, moving too fast to chance a glance back.
When she finally got to thirty-four, she paused on the landing to catch her breath and let the dizziness fade. Checking her overalls—that her star was in place and the flash drive still in her pocket—she pulled open the main doors to IT and tried to stroll in as if she belonged there.