wind on thin legs while pumping bullets into a cloud of fading dust.
The two of them sat silent a moment, surveying the damage. Finally, Jahns spoke.
“This trip won’t be about the election, Marnes. It won’t be for votes, either. For all I know, I’ll run again unopposed. So we won’t make a deal of it, and we’ll travel light and quiet. I want to
She turned back to the view.
“Sometimes… sometimes I just think I’ve been up here too long. The both of us. I think we’ve been
The ringing of morning footsteps on the spiral staircase gave her pause, and they both turned toward the sound of life, the sound of a waking day. And she knew it was time to start getting the images of dead things out of her mind. Or at least, to bury them a while.
“We’ll go down and get us a proper gauge of this Juliette, you and me. Because sometimes, sitting here, looking out on what the world makes us do—it needles me deep, Marnes. It needles me straight through.”
They met after breakfast in Holston’s old office. Jahns still thought of it as his, a day later. It was too early for her to think of the room as anything else. She stood beyond the twin desks and old filing cabinets and peered into the empty holding cell while Deputy Marnes gave last minute instructions to Terry, a security worker from IT who often held down the fort while Marnes and Holston were away on a case. Standing dutifully behind Terry was a teenager named Marcha, a young girl with dark hair and bright eyes who was apprenticing for work in IT. She was Terry’s shadow—just about half the silo had one. They ranged in age from twelve to twenty, these ever-present sponges absorbing the lessons and techniques for keeping the silo operational one generation more.
Deputy Marnes reminded Terry how rowdy people got after a cleaning. Once the tension was released, people tended to live it up a little. Most of them were too young to remember the last double cleaning, so they thought it couldn’t happen. They thought, for a few months at least, that anything went.
The warning hardly needed saying—the revelry in the next room could be heard through the shut door. Most residents from the top forty were already packed into the cafeteria and lounge. Hundreds more from the mids and the down deep would trickle up throughout the day, asking off work and turning in holiday chits just to see the mostly clear view. It was a pilgrimage for many. Some only came up once every few years, stood around for an hour muttering that it looked the same as they remembered, then shooing their children down the stairs ahead of them, fighting the upward surging crowds.
Terry was left with the keys and a temporary badge. Marnes checked the batteries in his wireless, made sure the volume on the office unit was up, and inspected his gun. He shook Terry’s hand and wished him luck. Jahns sensed it was almost time for them to go and turned away from the empty cell. She said goodbye to Terry, gave Marcha a nod, and followed Marnes out the door.
“You feel okay leaving right after a cleaning?” she asked as they stepped out into the cafeteria. She knew how rowdy it would get later that night, and how testy the crowd. It seemed an awful time to drag him away on a mostly selfish errand.
“Are you kidding? I need this. I need to get away.” He glanced toward the wallscreen, which was obscured by the crowds. “I still can’t figure what Holston was thinking, can’t reckon why he never talked to me about all that was going on in that head of his. Maybe by the time we get back, I won’t feel him in the office anymore, ‘cause right now I can’t hardly breathe in there.”
Jahns thought about this as they fought through the crowd. Plastic cups sloshed with a mix of fruit juices, and she smelled the sting of tub-brewed alcohol in the air, but ignored it. People were wishing her well, asking her to be careful, promising to vote. News of their trip had leaked out faster than the spiked punch, despite hardly telling anyone. Most were under the impression that it was a goodwill trip. A reelection campaign. The younger silo residents, who only remembered Holston as sheriff, were already saluting Marnes and giving him that honorific title. Anyone with wrinkles in their eyes knew better. They nodded to the duo as they passed through the cafeteria and wished them a different sort of unspoken luck.
Jahns lived under the weight of this pressure, a burden brutal on more than knees. She kept quiet as they made their way to the central stairwell. A handful called for her to make a speech, but the lone voices did not gain traction. No chant formed, much to her relief. What would she say? That she didn’t know why it all held together? That she didn’t even understand her own knitting, how if you made knots, and if you did it right, things just worked out? Would she tell them it only took one snip for it all to unravel? One cut, and you could pull and pull and turn that garment into a pile. Did they really expect her to understand, when all she did was follow the rules, and somehow it kept working out, year after year after year?
Because she didn’t understand what held it together. And she didn’t understand their mood, this celebration. Were they drinking and shouting because they were safe? Because they’d been spared by fate, passed over for cleaning? Her people cheered while a good man, her friend, her partner in keeping them alive and well, lay dead on a hill next to his wife. If she gave a speech, if it weren’t full of the forbidden, it would be this: That no two better people had ever gone to cleaning of their own free wills, and what did that say about the lot of them who remained?
Now was not the time for speeches. Or for drinking. Or for being merry. Now was the hour of quiet contemplation, which was one of the reasons Jahns knew she needed to get away. Things had changed. Not just by the day, but by the long years. She knew better than most. Maybe old lady McNeil down in Supply knew, could see it coming. One had to live a long time to be sure, but now she was. And as time marched on, carrying her world faster and faster than her feet could catch up, Mayor Jahns knew that it would soon leave her completely behind. And her great fear, unspoken but daily felt, was that this world probably wouldn’t stagger very far along without her.
2
Jahns’ walking stick made a conspicuous ring as it impacted each metal step. It soon became a metronome for their descent, timing the music of the stairwell, which was crowded and vibrating with the energy of a recent cleaning. All the traffic save for the two of them seemed to be heading upward. They jostled against the flow, elbows brushing, cries of, “Hey, Mayor!” followed by nods to Marnes. And Jahns saw it on their faces: the temptation to call him sheriff tempered by their respect for the awful nature of his assumed promotion.
“How many floors you up for?” Marnes asked.
“Why, you tired already?” Jahns glanced over her shoulder to smirk at him, saw his bushy mustache twisted up in a smile of his own.
“Going down ain’t a problem for me. It’s the going back up I can’t stand.”
Their hands briefly collided on the twisted railing of the spiral staircase, Jahns’ hand trailing behind her, Marnes’ reaching ahead. She felt like telling him she wasn’t tired at all, but she did feel a sudden weariness, an exhaustion more mental than physical. She had a childish vision of more youthful times and pictured Marnes scooping her up and carrying her down the staircase in his arms. There would be a sweet release of strength and responsibility, a sinking in to another’s power, no need to feign her own. This was not a remembrance of the past— it was a future that had never happened. And Jahns felt guilty for even thinking it. She felt her husband beside her, his ghost perturbed by her thoughts—
“Mayor? How many you thinking?”
The two of them stopped and hugged the rail as a porter trudged up the stairs. Jahns recognized the boy, Conner, still in his teens but already with a strong back and steady stride. He had an array of bundles strapped together and balanced on his shoulders. The sneer on his face was not from exhaustion or pain, but annoyance. Who were all these people suddenly on his stairwell? These tourists? Jahns thought of something encouraging to say, some small verbal reward for these people who did a job her knees never could, but he was already gone on his strong young feet, carrying food and supplies up from the down deep, slowed only by the crush of traffic attempting to worm up through the silo for a peek of the clear and wide outside.
She and Marnes caught their breath for a moment between flights. Marnes handed her his canteen, and she
