“You can leave your bags with me.”
There was no refusing Margaret. Jahns felt at once that she was in this much younger woman’s world, that she had become her inferior when she passed through that softly buzzing door. She leaned her walking stick against the wall, took her pack off and lowered it to the ground, and then shrugged on the robe. Marnes struggled with his until Margaret helped, holding the sleeve in place. He wrestled the robe over his denim shirt and held the loose ends of the long fabric waist tie as if its working was beyond his abilities. He watched Jahns knot hers, and finally made enough of a mess of it for the robe to hold fairly together.
“What?” he asked, noticing the way Jahns was watching him. “This is what I’ve got cuffs for. So I never learned to tie a knot, so what?”
“In sixty years,” Jahns said.
Margaret pressed another button on her desk and pointed down the hall. “Doctor Nichols is in the nursery. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”
Jahns led the way. Marnes followed, asking her: “Why is that so hard to believe?”
“I think it’s cute, actually.”
Marnes snorted. “That’s an awful word to use on a man my age.”
Jahns smiled to herself. At the end of the hall, she paused before a set of double doors before pushing them open a crack. The light in the room beyond was dim. She opened the door further, and they entered a sparse but clean waiting room. She remembered a similar one from the mid levels where she had waited with a friend to be reunited with her child. A glass wall looked into a room that held a handful of cribs and bassinets. It was too dark inside to see if any of the small beds stirred with newborns. Jahns, of course, was notified of every birth, signed a letter of congratulations and a birth certificate for each one, but the names ran together with the days. She could rarely remember what level the parents lived on, if it was their first or second. It made her sad to admit it, but those certificates had just become more paper for her to sign.
The shadowy outline of an adult moved among the small cribs, the shiny clamp of a clipboard and the flash of a metal pen winking from the light of the observation room. The dark shape was obviously tall, with the gait and build of a man. He took his time, noting something as he hovered over a crib, the two shimmers of metal uniting to jot a note. When he was done, he crossed the room and passed through a wide door to join Marnes and Jahns in the waiting room.
Peter Nichols was an imposing man, Jahns saw. Tall and lean, but not like Marnes, who seemed to fold and unfold unsure limbs to move about. Peter was lean like a habitual exerciser, like a few porters Jahns knew who could take the stairs two at a time and make it look like they’d been expressly designed for such a gait. It was height that lent confidence. Jahns could feel it as she took Peter’s outstretched hand and let him pump it firmly.
“You came,” Doctor Nichols said simply. It was a cold observation. There was only a hint of surprise. He shook Marnes’ hand, but his eyes returned to Jahns. “I explained to your secretary that I wouldn’t be much help. I’m afraid I haven’t seen Juliette since she became a shadow twenty years ago.”
“Well, that’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.” Jahns glanced at the cushioned benches where she imagined anxious grandparents, aunts, and uncles waited while parents were united with their newborns. “Could we sit?”
Doctor Nichols nodded and waved them over.
“I take each of my appointments for office very seriously,” Jahns explained, sitting across from the doctor. “At my age, I expect most judges and lawmen I install to outlive me, so I choose carefully.”
“But they don’t always, do they?” Doctor Nichols tilted his head, no expression on his lean and carefully shaven face. “Outlive you, I mean.”
Jahns swallowed. Marnes stirred on the bench beside her.
“You must value family,” Jahns said, changing the subject, realizing this was just another observation, no harm meant. “To have shadowed so long and to choose such a demanding line of work.”
Nichols nodded.
“Why do you and Juliette never visit? I mean, not once in almost twenty years. She’s your only child.”
Nichols turned his head slightly, his eyes drifting to the wall. Jahns was momentarily distracted by the sight of another form moving behind the glass, a nurse making the rounds. Another set of doors led off to what she assumed were the delivery rooms, where a convalescing new mother right now was probably waiting to be handed her most precious possession.
“I had a son as well,” Doctor Nichols said.
Jahns felt herself reaching for her bag to procure the folders within, but it wasn’t by her side. This was a detail she had missed, a brother.
“You couldn’t have known,” Nichols said, correctly reading the shock on Mayor Jahns’ face. “He didn’t survive. Technically, he wasn’t born. The lottery moved on.”
“I’m sorry—”
She fought the urge to reach over and hold Marnes’ hand. It had been decades since the two of them had purposefully touched, even innocently, but the sudden sadness in the room punctured that intervening time.
“His name was going to be Nicholas, my father’s father’s name. He was born prematurely. One pound eight ounces.”
The clinical precision in his voice was somehow sadder than his processing any feelings might have been.
“They intubated, moved him into an incubator, but there were… complications.” Doctor Nichols looked down at the backs of his hands. “Juliette was twelve at the time. She was as excited as we were, if you can imagine, to have a baby brother on the way. She was one year out from shadowing her mother, who was a delivery nurse.” Nichols glanced up. “Not here in this nursery, mind you, but in the old mid-level nursery. Where we both worked. I was still an intern then.”
“And Juliette?” Mayor Jahns still didn’t understand the connection.
“There was a failure with the incubator. When Nicholas—” the doctor turned his head to the side and reached halfway to his eyes, but was able to compose himself. “I’m sorry. I still call him that.”
“It’s okay.”
Mayor Jahns was holding Deputy Marnes’ hand. She wasn’t sure when or how that had happened. The doctor didn’t seem to notice, or more likely, care.
“Poor Juliette.” He shook his head. “She was distraught. She blamed Rhoda at first, this experienced delivery nurse who had done nothing but work a miracle to give our boy the slim chance he had. I explained this. I think Juliette knew. She just needed someone to hate.” He nodded to Jahns. “Girls that age, you know?”
“Believe it or not, I remember.” Jahns forced a smile and Doctor Nichols returned it. She felt Marnes squeeze her hand.
“It wasn’t until her mother died that she took to blaming the incubator that had failed. Well, not the incubator, but the poor condition it was in. The general state of rot all things become.”
“Your wife died from the complications?” It was another detail Jahns felt she must have missed from the file.
“My wife killed herself a week later.”
Again, the clinical detachment. Jahns wondered if this was a survival mechanism that had kicked in after these events, or a personality trait already in place.
“Seems like I would remember that,” Deputy Marnes said, the first words he’d uttered since introducing himself to the doctor.
“Well, I wrote the certificate myself. So I could put whatever cause I wanted—”
“And you admit to this?” Marnes seemed ready to leap off the bench. To do what, Jahns could hardly guess. She held his arm to keep him in place.
“Beyond the statute of limitations? Of course. I admit it. It was a worthless lie, anyway. Juliette was smart, even at that age. She knew. And this is what drove her—”
He stopped himself.
“Drove her what?” Mayor Jahns asked. “Crazy?”
“No.” Doctor Nichols shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say that. It’s what drove her away. She applied for a change in casters. Demanded to move down to Mechanical, to enter the Shop as a shadow. She was a year young
