“IT? Goddamn them.”
“Walker, I need your help sorting this out. Scottie sent me a wire not long before he . . . well, before I think he was killed.”
“Sent you a wire?”
“Yeah. Look, I met with him earlier that day. He asked me to come down to see him.”
“Down to IT?”
She nodded. “I’d found something in the last sheriff’s computer—”
“Holston.” He dipped his head. “The last cleaner. Yeah, Knox brought me something from you. A program, looked like. I told him Scottie would know better than anyone, so we forwarded it along.”
“Well, you were right.”
Walker wiped his cheeks and bobbed his head. “He was smarter than any of us.”
“I know. He told me this thing, that it was a program, one that made very detailed images. Like the images we see of the outside—”
She waited a beat to see how he would respond. It was taboo even to use the word in most settings. Walker was unmoved. As she had hoped, he was old enough to be beyond childhood fears—and probably lonely and sad enough not to care anyway.
“But this wire he sent, it says something about p-x-l’s being too dense.” She showed him the copy she’d made. Walker grabbed his magnifiers and slipped the band over his forehead.
“Pixels,” he said, sniffing. “He’s talking about the little dots that make up an image. Each one is a pixel.” He took the note from her and read some more. “He says it’s not safe there.” Walker rubbed his chin and shook his head. “Damn them.”
“Walker, what kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” Juliette looked around at all the boards, displays, and coils of loose wire strewn about his workshop. “Do you have anything like that?”
“Eight by two? Maybe a readout, like on the front of a server or something. Be the right size to show a few lines of text, internal temps, clock cycles . . .” He shook his head. “But you’d never make one with this kind of pixel density. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t make sense. Your eye couldn’t make out one pixel from its neighbor if it were right at the end of your nose.”
He rubbed his stubble and studied the note some more. “What’s this nonsense about the tape and the joke? What’s that mean?”
Juliette stood beside him and looked over the note. “I’ve been wondering about that. He must mean the heat tape he scored for me a while back.”
“I think I remember something about that.”
“Well, do you remember the problems we had with it? The exhaust we wrapped in it almost caught fire. The stuff was complete crap. I think he sent a note asking if the tape had gotten here okay, and I sorta recall writing back that it did, and thanks, but the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been engineered to.”
“That was your joke?” Walker swiveled in his stool and rested his elbows on the workbench. He kept peering over the copied charcoal letters like they were the face of Scottie, his little shadow coming back one last time to tell him something important.
“And he says my joke was truth,” Juliette said. “I’ve been up the last three hours thinking about this, dying to talk to someone.”
Walter looked back over his shoulder at her, his eyebrows raised.
“I’m not a sheriff, Walk. Never born to be one. Shouldn’t have gone. But I know, as sure as everyone, that what I’m about to say should send me to cleaning . . .”
Walker immediately slid off his stool and walked away from her. Juliette damned herself for coming, for opening her mouth, for not just clocking into first shift and saying to hell with it all—
Walker shut the door to his workshop and locked it. He looked at her and lifted a finger, went to his air compressor and pulled out a hose. Then he flipped the unit on so the motor would start to build up pressure, which just leaked out the open nozzle in a steady, noisy hiss. He returned to the bench, the clatter from the noisy compressor engine awful, and sat down. His wide eyes begged her to continue.
“There’s a hill up there with a crook in it,” she told him, having to raise her voice a little. “I don’t know how long it’s been since you’ve seen this hill, but there are two bodies nestled together in it, man and wife. If you look hard, you can see a dozen shapes like this all over the landscape, all the cleaners, all in various states of decay. Most are gone, of course. Rotted to dust over the long years.”
Walker shook his head at the image she was forming.
“How many years have they been improving these suits so the cleaners have a chance? Hundreds?”
He nodded.
“And yet nobody gets any further. And never once have they not had enough time to clean.”
Walker looked up and met her gaze. “Your joke is truth,” he said. “The heat tape. It’s engineered to fail.”
Juliette pursed her lips. “That’s what I’m thinking. But not just the tape. Remember those seals from a few years back? The ones from IT that went into the water pumps, that were delivered to us by accident?”
“So we’ve been making fun of IT for being fools and dullards—”
“But we’re the fools,” Juliette said. And it felt so damned good to say it to another human being. So good for these new ideas of hers to swim in the air. And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.
“You think they have us down here to be near the oil?” she asked Walker. “I don’t think so. Not anymore. I think they’re keeping anyone with a lick of mechanical sense as far from them as possible. There’re two supply chains, two sets of parts being made, all in complete secrecy. And who questions them? Who would risk being put to cleaning?”
“You think they killed Scottie?” he asked.
Juliette nodded. “Walk, I think it’s worse than that.” She leaned closer, the compressor rattling, the hiss of released air filling the room. “I think they kill everybody.”
28
Juliette reported to first shift at six, the conversation with Walker playing over and over in her head. There was a sustained and embarrassing applause from the handful of techs present as she entered dispatch. Knox just glared at her from the corner, back to his gruff demeanor. He had already welcomed her home and would be damned if he’d do it again.
She said hello to the people she hadn’t seen the night before and looked over the job queue. The words on the board made sense, but she had a difficult time processing them. In the back of her mind, she thought about poor Scottie, confused and struggling while someone much larger than him—or several someones—choked him to death. She thought of his little body, probably riddled with evidence but soon to feed the roots of the dirt farms. She thought of a married couple lying together on a hill, never given a chance to make it any further, to see beyond the horizon.
She chose a job from the queue, one that would require little mental exertion on her part, and thought of poor Jahns and Marnes and how tragic their love—if she had been reading Marnes correctly—had been. The temptation to tell the entire room was crippling. She looked around at Megan and Ricks, at Jenkins and Marck, and thought about the small army of tight brotherhood she could form. The silo was rotten to the core, an evil man was acting mayor, a puppet stood where a good sheriff had been, and all the good men and women were gone.
It was comical to imagine: her rallying a band of mechanics to storm the upper levels and right a wrong. And then what? Was this the uprising they had learned about as children? Was this how it began? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?