“I’m sorry not to have wired ahead, but I was hoping to see Doctor Nichols? And possibly use your restroom?”
“Of course.” She buzzed the door and waved them through. “We’ve had two deliveries since you last stopped by. Things have been crazy with this generator mess—”
“Power holiday,” Marnes corrected, his voice gruff and louder than theirs.
The nurse shot him a look, but nodded as if duly noted. She took two robes from the racks and held them out, told them to leave their stuff by her desk.
In the waiting room, she waved toward the benches and said she would find the doctor. “The bathrooms are through there.” She pointed at a door, the old sign painted on its surface nearly eroded clean away.
“I’ll be right back,” Jahns told Marnes. She fought the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand, as normal as that dark and hidden habit had lately become.
The bathroom was almost completely devoid of light. Jahns fumbled with an unfamiliar lock on the stall door, cursed under her breath as her stomach churned noisily, then finally threw the stall open and hurried to sit down. Her stomach felt like it was on fire as she relieved herself. The mixture of welcomed release and the burn of having held it too long left her unable to breathe. She went for what felt like forever, remained sitting as her legs shook uncontrollably, and realized she had pushed herself too hard on the climb up. The thought of another twenty levels mortified her, made her insides feel hollow with dread. She finished and moved over to the adjoining toilet to splash herself clean, then dried herself with one of the towels. She flushed both units to cycle the water. It all required fumbling in the darkness, unable to see and unfamiliar with the spacing and location that were second nature in her apartment and office.
She staggered out of the bathroom on weak legs, wondering if she might need to stay one more night, sleep in a delivery bed, wait until the morning to make the climb to her office. She could barely feel her legs as she pulled open the door and returned to Marnes in the waiting room.
“Better?” he asked. He sat on one of the family benches, a space left conspicuously beside him. Jahns nodded and sat heavily. She was breathing in shallow pants and wondered if he’d find her weak to admit she couldn’t go any further that day.
“Jahns? You okay?”
Marnes leaned forward. He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking toward the ground. “Jahns. What the hell happened?”
“Lower your voice,” she whispered.
He screamed, instead.
“Doctor!” he yelled. “Nurse!”
A form moved beyond the dusky glass of the nursery. Jahns laid her head back against the seat cushion, trying to form the words on her lips, to tell him to keep it down.
“Jahns, sweetheart, what did you do?”
He was holding her hand, patting the back of it. He shook her arm. Jahns just wanted to sleep. There was the slapping of footsteps running their way. Lights turned up forbiddingly bright. A nurse yelled something. There was the familiar voice of Juliette’s father, a doctor. He would give her a bed. He would understand this exhaustion —
There was talk of blood. Someone was examining her legs. Marnes was crying, tears falling into his white mustache, peppered with black. He was shaking her shoulders, looking her in the eye.
“I’m okay,” Jahns tried to say.
She licked her lips. So dry. Mouth, so damned dry. She asked for water. Marnes fumbled for his canteen, brought it to her lips, splashing water against and into her mouth.
She tried to swallow, but couldn’t. They were stretching her out on the bench, the doctor touching her ribs, shining a light in her eyes. But things were getting darker anyway.
Marnes clutched the canteen in one hand, rubbed her hair back with the other. He was blubbering. So sad for some reason. So much more energy than her. She smiled at him and reached for his hand, a miraculous effort. She held his wrist and told him that she loved him. That she had for as long as she could remember. Her mind was tired, loosing its grip on her secrets, mouthing them to him as his eyes flowed with tears.
His eyes, bright and wrinkled, peering down at her, then turning to the canteen in his hand.
The canteen that he had carried.
The water, and poison, meant for him.
9
The generator room was unusually crowded and eerily silent. Mechanics in worn coveralls stood three deep behind the railing and watched the first shift crew work. Juliette was only dimly aware of them; she was more keenly aware of the silence.
She leaned over a device of her own making, a tall platform welded to the metal floor and arrayed with mirrors and tiny slits that bounced light across the room. This light shined on mirrors attached to the generator and its large dynamo, helping her get them in perfect alignment. It was the shaft between the two of them that she cared about, that long steel rod the size of a man’s waist where the power of combusting fuel was transformed into the spark of electricity. She was hoping to have the machines on either end of this rod aligned to within a thousandth of an inch. But everything they were doing was without precedent. The procedures had been hurriedly planned in all-night sessions while the backup generator was put online. Now, she could only concentrate, could only hope the eighteen hour shifts had been good for something, and trust in plans made back when she’d had some decent rest and could soundly think.
While she guided the final placement, the chamber around her stood deathly quiet. She gave a sign, and Marck and his team tightened several of the massive bolts on the new rubber floor mounts. They were four days into the power holiday. The generator needed to be up and running by morning and at full power that next evening. With so much done to it—the new gaskets and seals, the polishing of cylinder shafts that had required young shadows to crawl down into the heart of the beast—Juliette was worried about it even starting up. The generator had never been fully powered down during her lifetime. Old Knox could remember it shutting itself down in an emergency once, back when he was a mere shadow, but for everyone else the rumble was as constant and close as their own heartbeats. Juliette felt inordinate pressure for everything to work. She was the one who had come up with the idea to do a refit. She calmed herself with reassurances that it was the right thing to do, and that the worst that could happen now was that the holiday would get extended until they sorted out all the kinks. That was much better than a catastrophic failure years from now.
Marck signaled that the bolts were secure, the lock nuts tightened down. Juliette jumped off her homemade platform and strolled over to the generator to join him. It was difficult to walk casually with so many eyes on her. She couldn’t believe this rowdy crew, this extended and dysfunctional family of hers, could be so perfectly silent. It was like they were all holding their breath, wondering if the crushing schedule of the last few days was going to be for naught.
“You ready?” she asked Marck.
He nodded, wiping his hands on a filthy rag that always seemed to be draped over his shoulder. Juliette checked her watch. The sight of its second hand ticking around in its constant path comforted her. Whenever she had doubts about something working, she looked at her wrist. Not to see the time, but to see a thing she had fixed. A repair so intricate and impossible—one that had taken years of cleaning and setting parts almost too small to see—that it made her current task, whatever it was, feel small by comparison.
“We on schedule?” Marck asked, grinning.
“We’re doing fine.” She nodded to the control room. Whispers began to stir through the crowd as they realized the restart was imminent. Dozens of them pulled sound protection from their necks and settled the muffs over their ears. Juliette and Marck joined Shirly in the control room.
“How’s it going?” Juliette asked the second shift foreman, a young woman, small but fiery.
“Golden,” Shirly said as she continued to make adjustments, zeroing out all the corrections that had built up over the years. They were starting from the ground up, none of the patches and fixes of old to disguise any new
